Photo credit: Janet Donovan
Woodward and Bernstein – the journalistic team who uncovered the Watergate scandal in the seventies – celebrated yet another anniversary. Just when you thought there was nothing more to say about the resignation of President Richard Milhous Nixon, The Washington Post hosted a panel discussion last night with a look at declassified White House tapes.
The event was hosted by reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward; Elizabeth Drew, author of “Washington Journal;” Ken Hughes, author of “Chasing Shadows;” and columnist Ruth Marcus as moderator. Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, provided the opening remarks. The occasion marked the 40th Anniversary of that resignation, the only one in the history of the Presidency.
The Watergate – Photo credit: Gannett
Two years ago Hollywood on the Potomac attended a Watergate symposium on the anniversary of the break in……in the very garage where Woodward held his clandestine meetings with Mark Felt a.k.a. ‘deep throat.’ It’s about to be demolished, although the new developers plan to place a commemorative marker on the site. At least there’s that.
The 2012 event opened with remarks by The Newshour’s Jim Lehrer:
“So here we are and the question is what was Watergate? What is it now? What will it be tomorrow and all the tomorrows still to come? At the beginning, it was in fact just a piece of real estate. And unless somebody demolishes it – and it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon – it may always be the Watergate as a building.” In the end, Watergate will be just a piece of real estate.
Then last April, Hollywood on the Potomac attended Discovery Channel’s ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN REVISITED with Robert Redford in tow at The Newseum where the actor who played Woodward said there was no future Watergate flicks for him.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Ken Hughes, author of Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate, reveals in his just published book that “in all the thousands of hours of declassified White House tapes, the president orders a single break-in–and it is not at the Watergate complex. Hughes’s examination of this earlier break-in, plans for which the White House ultimately scrapped, provides a shocking new perspective on a long history of illegal activity that prolonged the Vietnam War and was only partly exposed by the Watergate scandal.” University of Virginia – Publisher’s notes.
“YOU’D think that 22 years after the Watergate break-in we would have run out of Watergate mysteries,” then NPR’s senior news analyst Daniel Schorr said in a piece in The Christian Science Monitor. That article was written in 1994.
