Watergate provides a model case study of the interaction and powers of each of the branches of government. It also is a morality play with a sad and dramatic ending.
BOB WOODWARDMany people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.
More Bob Woodward Quotes
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There is a garbage culture out there, where we pour garbage on people. Then the pollsters run around and take a poll and say, do you smell anything?
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[Clinton] believes that the Washington press corps is so out of touch that it is absolutely inconceivable that reporters will understand the issues that people are really dealing with in their lives.
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If information is true, if it can be verified, and if it’s really important, the newspaper needs to be willing to take the risk associated with using unidentified sources.
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I recently read some of the transcripts of Nixon’s Watergate tapes, and they spent hours trying to figure out who was leaking and providing information to Carl and myself.
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I think the problem in the Republican Party is really not money. I think they’ve got lots of it. I think it is theory of the case – why are we here, what is our message, how to connect to the real world.
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Nixon had some large achievements in foreign affairs. They will be remembered. But a president probably gets remembered for one thing, and Watergate will head the Nixon list, I suspect.
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Reporters may believe they control the story, but the story always controls the reporters.
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After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon’s tapes.
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Newspapers that are truly independent, like The Washington Post, can still aggressively investigate anyone or anything with no holds barred.
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When you hear in the tape recordings Nixon’s own voice saying, We have to stonewall, We have to lie to the Grand Jury, We have to pay burglars a million dollars, it’s all too clear the horror of what went on.
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The source known as Deep Throat provided a kind of road map through the scandal. His one consistent message was that the Watergate burglary was just the tip of the iceberg.
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I’m not going to name some of my colleagues who are very well-known for their television presentation, but they wouldn’t know new information or how to report a story if it came up and bit them.
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I recently did the David Letterman Show about my book. He was very serious and made no jokes and it caught me off guard a little bit. He was much more serious than some of the joke shows that journalists get on.
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When you practice reporting for as long as I have, you keep yourself at a distance from True Believers. Either conservatives or liberals or Democrats or Republicans.
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The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views.
BOB WOODWARD