Book #39: All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

I put this book on my to-reads list on Goodreads three years ago, mostly because it was written by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward themselves, and I remember reading about them and their coverage of Watergate in my US history textbooks in middle school and high school. Since they were at the forefront of uncovering what happened at the time, it seems really appropriate to read their accounting of it and how it happened. This book was pretty much a blow-by-blow account of Bernstein's and Woodward's reporting, and how they put together what other activities were behind Watergate. They detail all of their calling of sources and trailing around behind people and many conversations they had to put two and two together. They started out with there just being one small break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters at Watergate and digging to find that there was more and more and more actually going on behind the scenes, eventually incriminating even the President himself.

This book really reminded me of The Pelican Brief by John Grisham--Grisham must have used this as a model for his investigative reporter. Of course, it wasn't so easy to follow as Grisham, because this was actually real life and it was much more complicated than one small fictional investigation. The thing that made this book a little hard to read is that it was published in 1974, almost concurrently with what was happening at the time, so there isn't very much explanation or background to bring you up to date with who each character is or why they are important, especially for someone reading this 40 years after the fact. It was really weird to get to the end of the book and to find out that it ended before Nixon resigned--this was published before the investigation even ended (which seems a little premature). They apparently wrote a sequel to it explaining the end of Nixon's presidency, although I'm not sure I'm going to read it. The thing that I really enjoyed about this book was how we get a behind-the-scenes look at how journalists piece together their work and make executive decisions about what sorts of stories they are planning to write. They get their information and then have to decide what lead and what story and what angle they are planning to write from. I obviously knew this, but it was great to see this process firsthand and to get a greater appreciation for the importance of the press.