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ON THE RECORD
The bond between journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein is nothing short of legendary. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Watergate scandal, Woodstein reveal all.
By ARTIE KLEIN
June 8, 1997
It just might be every reporter’s dream to meet Bob Woodward.
That’s why, on a late-spring morning, just weeks before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Watergate break-in—the investigation of which propelled Mr. Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein to the top of the journalistic pantheon—I can’t believe I’m knocking on his door.
When he answers, he greets me with a full, genuine smile and a hearty handshake, and welcomes me into his home. At fifty-five, Woodward still projects a youthful energy, and he looks almost exactly as I remember him in all the photos I’d seen of him in his heyday. His mousey brown hair, combed neatly back and curling up just a bit at the neck, is just beginning to gray at the temples. He wears a polo shirt and tan chinos. There’s a distinguished air about him, but he’s surprisingly unintimidating.
Woodward leads me through the foyer of his modest house toward the kitchen, and I’m startled to see another figure standing there, pouring himself coffee. I immediately recognize him as Mr. Bernstein. He welcomes me in and offers me a cup.
My heart races. I’ve died, I think, and I’ve gone to journalist heaven.
Bernstein is shorter in stature than Woodward. His short-sleeve shirt is unbuttoned over a tee that bears the cover art for Nirvana’s In Utero. He still wears his hair long. And despite the fact that he’s gone almost completely gray, and that he wears thick-rimmed spectacles, he also looks much younger than his fifty-four years.
I was not told I was going to interview both halves of the Woodward and Bernstein duo. And on top of that, I’m not entirely sure why I’m here. Why did Woodward contact my editor to schedule an interview? What could these men have to tell me, a young reporter from a local gay magazine, that wasn’t already common knowledge? Unless—
I push the idea aside. It’s not my place to speculate.
We settle in at the kitchen table, and Woodward and Bernstein, possibly sensing my nerves, engage me in a little bit of small talk. Bernstein tells me he’s a Nirvana fan. His favorite album? Nevermind. What about In Utero? He prefers the follow-up, Post Mortem, but the former’s cover art makes for a better shirt. He’s less impressed with their new album. It’s too quiet for him. Woodward agrees.
Finally, the interview begins. But the first to ask a question isn’t me; it’s Woodward. He leans forward with his elbows on the table, looks me right in the eye, and asks me if I know why I’m here.
I do not.
Bernstein chuckles. “Think, kid,” he says.
I bristle a little at being referred to as a child, but I let it slide.
“Why else would you, a reporter from the Washington Gay Review, be here to interview these two old bachelors?”
When it sinks in, Bernstein snorts and elbows Woodward in the side.
“I knew he would pick up on it eventually,” says Woodward to Bernstein.
He means—are they really—?
They sure are.
I don’t need to tell you much about how Bob Woodward met Carl Bernstein. That story is chronicled much better elsewhere, notably in the 1974 book All the President’s Men, written by Woodward and Bernstein themselves, and the 1976 movie of the same name.
The main draw of All the President’s Men was not the Watergate scandal itself, the whodunnit; we all knew whodunnit. Nor was it necessarily the process by which the mystery was solved, or the howdunnit, however riveting. What really made All the President’s Men a bestseller and Oscar-winner was the odd-couple dynamic between the two leads: Woodward, a Yale-educated, ex-Navy, WASPish rookie, and Bernstein, a street-savvy college dropout and liberal Jew with a decade-long background in the paper business.
Robert Redford, the film’s producer and the man cast (possibly by himself) to play Woodward, has gone on record saying that Woodward and Bernstein’s relationship was the reason he bought the film rights to their book in 1975. According to Redford, All the President’s Men was intended from the outset to be a character study: a sort of romance featuring these unlikely bedfellows.
What the book, and by extension the movie, leave out, is the quite literal romance that blossomed not long after Woodward and Bernstein began investigating the Watergate mystery.
Perhaps it was because they shared most of their waking hours in each other’s company, or because of the intense stress placed on them by the demands of their investigation, but by the fall of 1972, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were more than just a byline.
Woodward places their origin as a couple sometime in the month before Nixon’s reelection in November of ‘72. Although the pair experienced a somewhat gradual shift from colleagues to friends to lovers, Bernstein is more confident in placing the beginning of their relationship on the calendar: September thirtieth.
“It was our first real date,” Bernstein says.
Bernstein speaks candidly when he says that the early days of his and Woodward’s affair may have had more to do with letting off steam than any deep connection. But neither man denies the real attraction they had toward each other, nor the fact that the relationship quickly developed beyond its function as a pressure release valve.
And that passion definitely translated to their working lives. As partners in the professional sense as well as the romantic, they were motivated to work tirelessly on the Watergate case, spending their long working days in each other’s company. As a plus, Woodward points out, he didn’t need to spend any time driving home after those evenings tracking down leads at Bernstein’s apartment.
Bernstein laughs at that. “Oh,” he says to Woodward, “was that the only reason you stayed over at my place?”
It’s not a stretch to say that the pair went everywhere together. Collectively they became known as “Woodstein,” a portmanteau that follows them to this day.
Woodward is surprisingly animated when he speaks, but Bernstein even moreso. When he’s not gesticulating at me or Woodward, Bernstein seems to have trouble keeping his hands to himself. When he isn’t speaking, he has an arm around the back of Woodward’s chair. And as they become more comfortable with my presence, I notice that Bernstein often touches Woodward directly. Woodward seems unbothered by Bernstein’s handsiness.
Woodstein indeed.
But as Woodstein’s star rose, so did their profile in the scope of American politics. By the spring of 1973, all eyes were on the Woodstein byline just as much as the Senate Watergate Committee. Wary that any hint of their relationship, and therefore homosexuality, would find its way into the ever-churning gears of the Washington rumor mill, Woodward and Bernstein decided to call it quits on the affair. After all, the nature of their relationship becoming public knowledge might tarnish not only their reputations, but place in jeopardy their credibility and objectivity, and by extension that of the Washington Post.
In hindsight, Bernstein says, the reason for the end of their tryst was “ridiculous,” driven more by paranoia than by any kind of logic. “You don’t need to be a homosexual to be opposed to the systematic dismantling of American democracy.”
Woodward agrees with Bernstein’s assessment, but adds that at the time, “it seemed like the right thing to do,” not just to protect the Post, but also each other.
Woodstein’s Watergate reporting continued through at least 1976, when Simon and Schuster published the follow-up to All the President’s Men, titled The Final Days.
So even after their mutually-decided breakup, Woodstein continued working together for at least three years. How did they do it? What was it like to work together so closely with a person you loved, and who loved you, but who was simultaneously untouchable?
“I won’t lie,” says Woodward. “It wasn’t easy.”
As if to prove to themselves that they could get over the breakup, both men frantically pursued more socially-acceptable relationships: those with the opposite sex. This came naturally to Bernstein, who even now has a reputation as a ladykiller (to put it politely). After a spate of short-lived flings, Bernstein met Hollywood screenwriter Nora Ephron, with whom he seemed to connect.
Woodward found less success on this front. A partnership with another Post journalist ended abruptly when she pulled out of their brief engagement; from that point on, Woodward was the “eligible bachelor” of the Woodstein duo, but one who seemed (at least in the eyes of the public) to be entirely uninterested in love or marriage.
Instead, Woodward poured himself into his writing. It was an outlet for everything that was wrong, he says. “I missed Carl.” And at the same time, Woodward resented his former partner for his proximity to the glamor of Hollywood, which Woodward perceived to be “real” fame—unlike the comparatively pedestrian field of journalism.
During this period, according to Bernstein, they frequently fought, and bitterly at that. He attributes this to their mutual feelings for each other, which they kept bottled up out of perceived necessity. And those feelings needed a way out somehow.
What did Woodstein fight about? Woodward says it was mostly the work. Bernstein says it was almost everything else as well.
While writing The Final Days, Woodward says, Bernstein didn’t contribute his fair share of the workload. Bernstein agrees. He was distracted. Between his high-profile fling with Ephron and the weekly travel between Washington and New York City that the relationship entailed, Bernstein didn’t seem to find much time for writing. And being without Woodward didn’t help matters at all.
I ask Woodward and Bernstein if they always knew they were gay.
“I’m not really fond of that label,” says Bernstein. After all, he enjoyed quite a reputation as a—
A womanizer?
“I prefer the term ‘playboy.”
Woodward snickers.
So maybe Bernstein prefers “bisexual?”
He’s not fond of that label either.
The first time Bernstein knew there was something different about him was when he was seventeen years old and working for the Washington Evening Star. For a few weeks, as part of learning the ropes at the crime desk, Bernstein shadowed a squad of police officers whose duty it was to round up—and arrest—gay men for “public solicitation.”
How else, Bernstein thought, were men supposed to find other people like them? Certainly not out in the open. What the young Bernstein felt for these men as he rode along with the officers was something beyond sympathy, and he was reluctant to participate in what the officers treated as “some sort of sick game.”
“Those bastards got on my case for being ‘one of those fags.’” Bernstein never worked for the crime desk again, not even at the Post.
It wasn’t until he met Woodward that Bernstein connected the rest of the dots.
Woodward also, but more vehemently, denies that he’s gay. “I wouldn’t use that term for myself, no,” he says.
I ask him if he’d ever been interested in men besides Bernstein, or noticed any other sign that he may not have been entirely straight. He doesn’t answer the question.
Bernstein shoots him a look I can’t really interpret.
Woodward and Bernstein worked independently from the Washington Post, and from each other, following the publication of The Final Days in 1976. But Woodward couldn’t stay away from the newsroom for long, and he returned to the Post two years later.
He stayed mostly on the inside-the-Beltway political beat, but occasionally dipped his toe into other topics, including civil rights. He’s particularly proud of the Post’s three-part investigation into the Reagan administration’s mismanagement of the AIDS epidemic from 1981 through 1983, to which Woodward contributed. That series of features won the Post and Woodward a Pulitzer Prize. Though not as sensational as Watergate, the story generated public outrage and helped spur a robust public health response to the disease.
Bernstein speculates: who knows where we’d be as a nation had Reagan’s “malicious incompetence” been allowed to further sway domestic and international public health policy?
“It would have been nothing short of a war crime against gay men,” Woodward confidently, but soberly, answers.
Bernstein is strangely silent about his whereabouts in the years following his work with Woodward, but after some probing, he tells me that it was “a rough time.”
In 1976, Bernstein and Ephron married, but they separated a year later; the divorce was finalized in 1980 following a string of public affairs with other women. “I don’t think Woodward and I spoke much while I was married to Nora,” says Bernstein.
“He never answered my calls,” Woodward says.
Professionally, too, Bernstein struggled on his own. He dabbled in independent investigative journalism with Rolling Stone, but received little public attention for his work. Following that, he tried out broadcast journalism. Initially, NBC jumped at the opportunity to count Bernstein amongst their top-ranking editorial staff, but Bernstein’s distractibility and his laxity regarding deadlines made him a poor manager.
The five years after his separation from Ephron were very much a low point for Bernstein. Instead of accolades for his journalism, Bernstein was rewarded with regular mentions in the gossip columns for his dating life and financial recklessness. “But Bob never gave up on me,” Bernstein says, “even though I probably deserved it.”
Woodward kept reaching out, inviting Bernstein back to the Washington Post several times. Finally, in 1984, his finances and personal relationships in tatters, Bernstein accepted Woodward’s offer—not to move back into the newsroom, but into Woodward’s home.
For the first few weeks, Bernstein slept on Woodward’s couch, until Woodward insisted that he use the little upstairs office as a bedroom. Being in such close proximity again quickly reignited the Woodstein romance. “Let’s just say I didn’t use that office for very long. At least not for sleeping,” Bernstein says. Woodward laughs and blushes bright red.
Using the little Georgetown rowhouse as a base, and with Woodward’s encouragement and companionship, Bernstein kept his head low and cleaned up his act. He began writing full-time again, and over the next year, published a memoir, two biographies, and even a novel (under a pen name Bernstein won’t reveal to me).
So it’s true: Woodward and Bernstein were, and are, lovers.
How did they keep the secret so long?
“We had a lot of help from other people,” Woodward says. It didn’t take long for Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post’s esteemed executive editor, to sniff out the relationship. He was a master of distraction; whenever the White House or the tabloids got too close to anything that could reveal the true nature of Woodstein’s relationship, Bradlee made sure something more interesting got their attention first. “It was like he was a magician,” says Bernstein. “It was the best sleight-of-hand I’ve ever seen.”
Outside of Bradlee, very few others knew. Since neither Woodward nor Bernstein had much time outside of work at the height of their Watergate reporting, even their closest friends remained unaware until after the men decided to separate in 1973. Neither Woodward nor Bernstein ever told their parents.
What about Deep Throat?
“Even if he did, I don’t think Bob would tell you,” says Bernstein.
“Nice try,” says Woodward.
There were two other people in on the secret, Bernstein adds: Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, who played Woodward and Bernstein, respectively, in All the President’s Men. Their real-life counterparts kept them in the loop both so they could realistically capture the dynamic between the two journalists, and so they could downplay the romantic aspect of that same dynamic. It seems to have worked.
Bernstein’s highly public reputation as a lady’s man also helped them keep everything under wraps, Woodward posits. “Because God knows that chasing after women is mutually exclusive with also chasing after men,” he says, showing a glimpse of his wry sense of humor.
Bernstein laughs. “When did you ever see me chasing after men?”
Woodward seems as if he’s going to answer that, but after exchanging a glance with Bernstein, he doesn’t answer the question.
Did people ever catch onto Woodward’s romantic alignment? Bernstein suggests that just as his own reputation sheltered him, so did Woodward’s: he was always too much of the all-American, country club boy to be anything other than one-hundred percent heterosexual to most people’s (untrained) eyes. There were a few that speculated when Woodward remained single while Bernstein had multiple affairs, but the rumor never gained much traction.
After Bernstein moved into Woodward’s home in 1984, the men also made sure that anyone digging into public records wouldn’t find anything untoward. Bernstein never sold the apartment in Brooklyn he’d shared with Ephron, and Woodward bought their current home in cash, under his own name.
But Woodstein are done keeping secrets.
So why come out of the closet now?
“If Ellen can do it, so can we,” says Bernstein, referring to Ellen DeGeneres, who in April revealed she was a lesbian on the cover of Time magazine and shortly thereafter on the set of Oprah. Bernstein grins and echoes the infamous headline: “Yep, we’re gay.”
Woodward says, more seriously, that twenty-five years after Watergate, all eyes are on him and Bernstein again. And they don’t want to hide who they are anymore. “People deserve to know the truth. We’ve dedicated our lives to that mission, so it’s only fair that we go on the record,” Woodward says.
Bernstein adds that he hopes to inspire young people (“people like us,” he says) to become journalists.
And now is as good of a time as any to make their relationship public. Last month, President Clinton signed the Recognition of Marriage Act, and Washington, D.C. is set to be the first jurisdiction in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage.
I notice a gold band with a single, flat-set stone on Woodward’s left hand.
The wedding is set for October.