North Haven - In 1787 Thomas Jefferson stated, "The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

In recent memory, it can be suggested that the most potent example of the fourth estate serving as a defender of the Constitution and the peoples' rights was never better played out than in 1972, when two young newspaper reporters from the Washington Post doggedly pursued a story that would eventually lead to the resignation of the President of the United States. Richard Nixon and his White House staff were eventually accused of high crimes and misdemeanors, which included burglary, destruction of evidence, illegal wiretapping, political espionage and misappropriation of campaign funds.

On the topic of investigative writing Bernstein said, "you have got to have some idea of why an idea resounds in your mind."

The president resisted with all means at his disposal the unveiling of the truth associated with the Watergate break-in at the Democratic Party Headquarters in Washington, DC, going so far as to orchestrate the firing of the very same special prosecutor his own attorney general had appointed and refusing to release his presidential tapes, which a Supreme Court decision later forced him to surrender.

As the house of cards fell, Nixon staffers resigned either voluntarily or at the request of the president, with several eventually indicted and prosecuted for their parts in the conspiracy. Facing imminent impeachment and possible incarceration, on Aug. 9, 1974 Richard Nixon became the only president in the history of the United States to resign from office.

For this, the 4th of July edition of Hamptons.com, we celebrate the independence of the nation and the individuals that personify it. To that end, we sat down with one of those independent reporters, who in 1972 used classic investigative techniques, dogged determination and a journalist's toolbox to preserve and defend that right Jefferson so eloquently spoke of three centuries ago. At his home on the East End, Pulitzer Prize-winning newsman Carl Bernstein talked about Watergate, the state of American journalism and the new electronic media age.

Born In Wasington, DC
Born in Washington, DC in 1944, Bernstein grew up in a self-admitted "very political, left-wing home." His parents had indeed been brought up before the House Committee On Un-American Activities when he was a child, a time he eloquently chronicles in his 1989 book, "Loyalties: A Son's Memoir." At 16-years of age he went to work for the Washington Star as a copy boy, eventually working his way up through the ranks to reporter, when at 19 he was let go because he had dropped out of the University of Maryland. Writers needed a degree to work at the Star and Bernstein had no intention of returning to school. "Everything I learned about reporting I learned at the Star. It played it politically straight. There was the separation of church and state, being that this was a paper with a late 19th century conservative editorial view, but the newsroom was sacrosanct. We put out the news everyday. It was a great place to learn the basic concepts, by people that revered them and their profession."

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward still in their Washington, DC dys, April 1, 1976. Image courtesy of the Washington Post archives.

After an unhappy, yet press awards rich year writing for a newspaper in New Jersey, Bernstein landed a job at the Washington Post in 1966, as they had monitored his work at the Star. In 1972 the now historic collaboration with Bob Woodward, investigating and reporting on the Watergate break-in, led to winning the Pulitzer Prize and "All The President's Men," and a blockbuster film which starred Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Robert Redford as Woodward. The writing duo was catapulted into the limelight and quickly became internationally recognized journalism icons.

Recounting the events of those heady years, we asked Bernstein if he left the Post in 1977 because he wanted to leave the constraints of objective, newsroom journalism behind in order to do commentary. "I left the Post because Bob and I couldn't agree on a project to do together, it was a time when our relationship was strained, I had just gotten married and I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do the book on my family. That really was the reason."

"Loyalties," Bernstein's first solo book was a memoir of his parent's political leanings.

After working on "Loyalties" for two years, Bernstein decided "to put it away for a while" and was going to return to the Washington Post as the style editor in 1980 when he ran into his friend Roone Arledge who was the head of ABC News. What transpired from that serendipitous meeting in the Hamptons was an offer to try some television pieces in the six months prior to returning to the Post. Bernstein recalled he thought he should, "Learn something about this other medium," while Arledge had a different idea and made Bernstein ABC's Washington Bureau Chief. Although he remained bureau chief for only a year and half ("I certainly was not cut out to be a television executive"). He did continue working in television for six years collaborating on features and special reporting assignments.

His first on-air story, in 1981 for "20/20," was about the U.S., Egypt, China and Pakistan arming the Afghan Mujahideen in their war against the Soviets. "It sunk like a stone. I thought that it was a really important piece so I did it as cover story for the New Republic and it still didn't get much attention. But now we know where that story has led," he said. Ironically, 25 years later the US covert operations became the subject of Mike Nichol's popular film that starred Tom Hanks, "Charlie Wilson's War."

The Best Obtainable Version Of The Truth
We asked Bernstein if broadcast journalism was significantly different than print journalism, "Yes, they are very different mediums, but I have this belief that all good reporting is the same thing - the best obtainable version of the truth." He went on to eloquently give me his primer on reporting, based on a lifetime of accumulated experience, "It is about nuance. A lot of reporting is about context, a lot of what is important that we do as reporters has to do with context. The first thing is deciding what is news, what we choose to put on page one, what we decide is a story. It is not an 'objective' decision, it is a very subjective act. After you have made that determination, it is all about context. Facts stacked up by themselves are not necessarily the truth, context reflects the truth."

In 1972 the uncompromising duo of Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story that toppled the presidency. Image courtesy of the Washington Post archives

In 1977, the same year Bernstein left the Post, he wrote a groundbreaking 25,000 word piece for Rolling Stone magazine revealing that some 400 American journalists, both willing and unwilling, were used as "assets" by the CIA during the Cold War. A vocal critic of the Bush presidency and the Iraq war, I asked Bernstein if he thought the press had been manipulated by the administration.

Defending Today's Press
"There is always manipulation of the news. It is the job of the press to not let itself be manipulated. Every presidency has tried to manipulate the news. It doesn't bother me," he countered. "The problem is when the press capitulates without doing its basic job, which is the best obtainable version of the truth. In the run up to the war, very few news organizations in their reporting were skeptical enough about the claims of weapons of mass destruction, and again, back to context. It was well known at the time, if you had done enough of the reporting, that this president, and the people around him, wanted to go to war with Iraq. That was the underlying context of the story that wasn't there. It was not prominent enough. At the same time reporters do not have the same access to intelligence reports as government officials. Most intelligence agencies in the west did believe he [Saddam Hussein] was working to get weapons of mass destruction. But the reporting was not skeptical enough, with the exception of some institutions."

In the movie version of "All The President's Men," Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford play the famed journalists Bernstein and Woodward.

According to Bernstein the press eventually more than righted the ship. "By and large, once the war started to run into problems, I think the reporting of the American press on the Bush presidency after that point was in many respects brilliant," he figured. "Almost everything we know about the presidency of George Bush, everything of significance, and we know enough about that presidency to know that it was a disaster - that it was audacious, that it was incompetent and that we had a president that was disengaged in an egregious way. Those facts are known and they are known because of what the American press did. Not every news organization by any means, but certainly the Washington Post, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal to some extent.

"The broadcast news was slow, cable news has its own problems, but that is another story. Everything we know about this president, we know because of the American press. We know how he fooled the American people, how he fooled the Congress, a congress that wanted to be fooled. We know these things because of reporting. I think some of the best reporting was done on the Bush presidency. However, at the beginning of the war, with the exception of those news establishments I mentioned, yes, the press faltered to some degree."

So can the press can be influenced by the opinion of the country? "The press is reflective of the country, the press is not a monolith. When you use the term the press you are talking about everything from The Hamptonian to the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Fox. It is a very diverse aggregation of players, politically left and right, financially from no assets to huge assets, so you can't just set it out there like is one big ball, you have to get to the strands within it," he contended. "You have to look at how various assets within that entity functions. Of course, reporters are human beings and part of this culture like everyone else. They reflect the diversity of the culture. The press doesn't lend itself to simple generalizations."

On Thursday, May 21, the Independent Film Channel invited the country's top investigative reporters to discuss the future of journalism. The panel included legendary investigative reporter Carl Bernstein, Chicago Sun Times Editor-In-Cheif Donald Hayner, Chicago Tribune Editor-In-Chief Gerould Kern, NBC Political Correspondent Carol Marin, WBBM-TV CBS News Director & Vice-President Jeff A. Kiernan, Chicagoist.com Editor Marcus Gilmer, RedEye and TheMash Editor Tran Ha. Photo courtesy of IFC

Reporting Verses Entertaining
We asked Bernstein to elaborate on his perception of the cable news problem he referred to earlier in our conversation. "I think the problem with cable news is that it is too much manufactured controversy, too much of it is people on the right screaming at people on the left and vice-versa. In the process, real reporting has become secondary. Real reporting has become secondary in many journalistic institutions."

As early as 1990 Bernstein was writing about the road news media was taking in the direction of gossip, sensationalism and celebrity news coverage at the sacrifice of real reporting. He went on to say, "Look, Maureen Dowd herself said about the New York Times, 'Where can you have so much fun for $1.50?' Even the New York Times is entertaining, most news has those aspects, but it is when the balance tips is when real reporting is sacrificed."

Staying on the point of celebrity coverage, we asked Bernstein his opinion of the coverage of the death of Michael Jackson -- was it excessive? To the contrary he said. "Absolutely not, I happened to be on the air when the first report came over. I was doing "The Chris Matthews Show." I said to myself, 'Jesus Christ, this is some story, this is going to go somewhere.' With his influence on the culture, of course you are going to give it coverage like that. This is a huge event in our time. This is a huge figure in terms of American culture, which, by the way, is our greatest export. Now, in terms of the Jackson trial, and I have written about this, I think it was despicable in terms of coverage - it was a circus sideshow." Bernstein said he felt the same way about the coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial. "This is the problem, when celebrity culture overwhelms culture, at the expensive of more important aspects of our culture: aesthetics, economic culture, etc."

He admitted that print media finds itself in a tenuous position with the onset of electronic media. "There is no question that the printed newspaper as we have known it is going to diminish. One, because you have a generation that has grown up getting its news from the Internet - my concern is how do the great news institutions, the mainstream news institutions, continue to do what they do best, which is to report? I am not too concerned with how it is delivered - the platform it is delivered on. What I am concerned about is that the great news standards and traditions survive, such as those I first learned when I went to work in 1960 for the Washington Star."

As for the future of newspapers, Bernstein has this to say, "It may come down to three or four national newspapers, but they will have a bigger audience than they ever had." Image courtesy of Google

He went on to say, "The Internet has changed the way we get information in every regard, particularly in regards to the press. Look what you can do! Look what the New York Times and the Washington Post can do, running documents, running texts." He went on to elaborate that anyone of us can read almost any newspaper in the world, most now translated into English. "My feeling is that certain print newspapers will continue to thrive, but in a secondary role. It may comedown to three or four national newspapers, but they will have a bigger audience than they ever had.

"The web, as I see it configured now, will never have the credibility of a great 20th century institution like the New York Times or the Washington Post, because it doesn't invest in the reporting, it aggregates," he asserted. " It doesn't have the standards that were developed over the centuries of the best obtainable version of the truth. One of the reasons the Watergate reporting worked was because our newspaper was behind us and people knew that newspaper was not going to take a flier and start making stuff up, taking short cuts."

All that too may change as news outlets on the web mature.

Bernstein did makes several references during our conversation to writing commentary and how that has added a dimension to his work. "The commentary I have done throughout my career is always reportorially based," he assessed. "Look at the pieces like the ones I have done for Vanity Fair, where I am a contributing editor, they have been hard news pieces, like the first profile of John McCain in 1991. I have done 'opinion' pieces, particularly looking at the Bush presidency. They are reportorially based, but they do venture into taking a point of view of some kind. Almost always there is new information in them, particularly the ones about the Bush presidency. If you are going to do commentary, it has to be based on talking to people and having new information."

Bernstein's uncanny timing hit the mark again as his book on Hillary Clinton was published just as she embarked on her race for the presidency.

Timing And Instinct
With the publication of his book, "A Woman In Charge: The Life Of Hillary Rodham Clinton," Bernstein elaborated on his thinking at the time. "I started the book right after the impeachment hearings. I thought the great story here is not Bill Clinton, but Hillary Clinton. I had discovered that while he was being judged in the Senate, the moment that the roll was being called, she was meeting with Harold Ickes, looking at a political map of New York and deciding whether to run. It was about redemption, about her redemption and his redemption and the Clinton White House, and she did it. All of my books are about the use or abuse of power. Again, I was lucky, I knew I was on to something."

So how much of uncovering a great story is instinct and how much is luck? Or is it seeing something in the initial facts that no one else sees? "I think it is what reporters do. Some of it is instinctive, sure," he added, "and you are wrong some of the time too. Probably wrong most of the time, but you are always thinking that way, always thinking what does this mean, what are the possibilities, what are the repercussions of this? The facts are always different than your preconceived notion, but nonetheless you have got to have some idea of why an idea resounds in you mind."

So how did this lifetime member of B'nai B'rith come to write a biography of Pope John Paul II? "There was a cover story in Time Magazine that said Ronald Reagan and the Pope had collaborated secretly to keep the Solidarity movement in Poland alive. In response to that piece Mikhail Gorbachev wrote, thinking, 'Yes, without this Pope most of the events of the late 20th century would not have happened.' I said to myself that this Pope would be a great story. I had no idea just how great a story it would be. I had never been a Christian, I had no knowledge of the Vatican and my Italian was without verbs." Bernstein found a collaborator in Marco Politi and the finished product, "His Holiness: John Paul II And The History Of Our Times," proved to be one of the finest biographies of one of the most influential popes in history. "If you read this book you will see that Pope John Paul was one of the five most influential figures of the 20th century," Bernstein surmised.

Whether through pure instinct or an eye for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary, Carl Bernstein has weathered the seminal changes in traditional journalism and the evolution of the new media to remain one of America's great reporters. For all of our sakes, lets hope he continues to search for his "best obtainable version of the truth."