Carl Bernstein to Reexamine Watergate 30 Years Later at University of Richmond
October 10, 2002
Carl Bernstein, who broke the Watergate story with Bob Woodward for The Washington Post, will speak Oct. 24 at the University of Richmond.
His talk, "Watergate Revisited: 30 Years of Change in Politics and in the Presidency," will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Jepson Alumni Center. Bernstein's appearance is sponsored by the Richmond Quest and the Jepson Leadership Forum and is a 10th anniversary event of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies.
All the tickets, which are free, have been distributed. A limited number of standby and return tickets will be available the night of the performance on a first come, first served basis. Doors open at 7 p.m.
Woodward and Bernstein's investigations of the scandal brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon and was recounted in their bestsellers "All the President's Men" and "The Final Days." The former was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.
Bernstein's latest book, his 1996 biography "John Paul II and the History of Our Time," also was a bestseller. Knopf will publish his biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton next year. He is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and a frequent political commentator on network television.
After winning virtually every prize in journalism, including (with Woodward) the Pulitzer awarded to the Post for its Watergate coverage, Bernstein left the paper in 1977 and spent the next year investigating the CIA's secret relationship with the American press during the Cold War. The resulting 25,000-word article for Rolling Stone magazine was the first to examine a subject long suppressed by both American newspapers and the intelligence community.
From 1980-84, he worked for ABC News as Washington Bureau chief and senior correspondent specializing in national security matters for ABC News.
After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1989, he went to Iraq for Time magazine. His special report-several weeks before the start of the Gulf War-disclosed seething discontent and hatred for Saddam throughout Iraq, and caused Bernstein to be immediately expelled from the country.
In 1992, he wrote a cover story for The New Republic entitled "The Idiot Culture"-an indictment of the sensationalism overtaking American journalism. Bernstein argued that the journalistic legacy of Watergate is at odds with an increasingly irresponsible media culture dominated by conglomerates more interested in profits than truth.