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Jeff Stimpson

Dig Deeper

I'm finally reading All the President's Men. I found the paperback in the laundry room and have always meant to read it.

I was struck first by the photos: the exact ones my father once looked at every day as he rattled his newspaper. Twenty-nine earnest political men, many at microphones, many lying even as the flashbulbs went off, all with hairstyles that take me back. For those too young to remember, the book tells the story of how Washington Post reporters Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (played by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward) cracked the story of the Watergate break-in and eventually forced President Nixon to resign. Photos aside, the book is a meticulously-assembled history of how you pin a President to the mat.

My father flew into Watergate. He thought Sam Ervin was a homespun god, and he despised such personages as John and Martha Mitchell, John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, and Bebe Rebozo. I was twelve. My journalistic interests extended only to grabbing "Peanuts" after my father was done with the B section. I thought Bebe Rebozo was a cartoon character; I also kept confusing Ehrlichman and Haldeman with Huntley and Brinkley. The senate hearings were on every afternoon that spring of 1974, pre-empting "Star Trek," and my father and I watched.

I think my father would have love to have seen Nixon crushed. My father died that July. Nixon resigned in August.

Now with a semi-professional's viewpoint, I can look at what Woodward and Bernstein (both were younger during Watergate than I am now) went through. I could never have done what they did. I like to sleep too much.

I remember in the movie Jason Robards, who played the gruff but brilliant editor Ben Bradlee, stood in front of Redford and Hoffman during a slow moment and teased them about being able to go home and take a shower. Turns out that Redford and Hoffman had it easy compared with Woodward and Bernstein.

A normal round of phone calls for the two investigators took hours. They judged success with a source on how many steps they could take into the person's apartment. They got calls at home and got tailed on lunches. They kept every sheet of paper and every note. They took no days off. They tricked their way into hotel rooms; an irony, considering what they were investigating, that I'm sure they were too weary to notice. Though often anonymous, their sources were triple-checked. This process has been documented so long that it's the kind of history you find in a dog-eared paperback in a laundry room, but still I can't figure out how they did it.

Not that I've never been exhausted in the line of duty. My first month on a daily in Ithaca, N.Y., for example, I helped cover a fire that killed five children. Later the paper sent me to interview the aunt of an arrested murderer, and I felt like Hoffman/Bernstein as I sat on her couch, my notebook tucked away, as she rose again and again to answer reporters' phone calls. I offered to go to the store for her so she wouldn't have to face her neighbors.

Eventually, I lost even that edge. When I covered cops in Baltimore, a woman got her throat cut and everyone started whispering "Russian mob." I guess I could have spent all night in some place full of triple-checkable, anonymous Russians, and maybe cracked the case. Instead I just digested the police press releases. (They never caught the killer.) When a depressed man shot his wife and then himself a year later, I again was motivated to visit the relatives' house. I never got as far as their couch, however, and they sure didn't want me to go to any store for them.

My pinnacle as a reporter of human catastrophe did come in Baltimore, when a 14-year-old boy swiped his mother's Chevrolet one spring night and killed himself by driving into a tree. I was re-typing police reports when my editor egged me to dig deeper.

I went to the crash site and studied the skid marks and the gouged bark; I knelt in the roadside gravel. Later, I sat down with the kid's mom and his friends. The mom got us all together; she was looking to sue the boy's one-time mental hospital, and wanted coverage. I played the sensitive reporter while they replayed the boy's life. Turned out his father had also died when the boy was little.

I wrote the story and put the family's old snapshots in the paper, and I won an award and a gift certificate to a restaurant. "And see, you didn't want to do the story, did you?" my editor said.

No, much as my father would have been pleased, much as I wanted Redford to play me in the movie.