Bradlee:
Deep Throat
‘is a great hero’

Mitchell: Let's try to recreate what the stakes were at the time.  How big was the pressure on Katharine Graham, the Graham family, the Washington Post?  How tough was it?

Bradlee: Well, you never know how tough it was, cause you don't know — you know, you don't know what the Gordon Liddys of this world are up to, and you don't know what the president — in our case, we didn't know what President Nixon and the people closest to him were up to.

But once, I mean, once it got going, it was very important that we be right, obviously, if they were to keep the momentum in this story.  You know enough about this business to know that stories have a life span, and if they disappear they disappear and it's hard to revive them, and we almost lost Watergate.

It seems to me, toward the end of 1972, the election result when Nixon was returned with this fantastic majority, and it wasn't until Judge Sirica showed up and, you know, in the early weeks of '73, that it began to move a little.

Mitchell: Is it hard for a newspaper to go up against a popular reelected president?

Bradlee: It's my kind of hard.  I like that.  If you're right, it isn't hard.

Mitchell: And —

Bradlee: And you have a good onus.

Mitchell: It really mattered that the Graham family stuck with Woodward, Bernstein and you, and the rest?

Bradlee: Vital.  Vital.  Not only stuck with us but was so supportive and so interested.

Mitchell: In terms of Mark Felt and his motivation, do you have any sense of why he decided to pick on the White House, the leadership at the FBI, and go to the Washington Post?

Bradlee: Well, I don't know why he chose the Post.  I mean, I think it was a very good choice, but I don't know why he took it.  I've never met him, but he plainly felt that the stakes were incredibly high, and that it was up to him to act.  I think he's a great hero of this story.

Mitchell: It's interesting to read that Woodward had cultivated the source back when he was covering D.C. police corruption and the FBI were investigating, when he was a Metro reporter, a local reporter, way down in the hierarchy here at the Washington Post, and again, when Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace, a month before Watergate, he used him as a source.

Bradlee: But you've got to understand, you know Bob, you've got to understand that he never stops working, and that he has a sixth sense for who can be useful to him some time, and he  cultivates people.

Mitchell: How important was it that Woodward's source was so well-placed and had access to so much information?

Bradlee: Well, it was obviously important.  It wasn't as important as his being accurate was important.  I don't know if he was bulletproof.  I mean, Hoover — he worked for Hoover for quite a while in this time and you have this feeling that Hoover, if he had displeased Hoover, Hoover could have done something about it.

I think the important thing was that he was right.  That he did it, not how powerful he was.  He plainly had access to that information.  It wasn't the height of it, but it was how right he was.

Mitchell: The information just kept checking out?

Bradlee: Just kept checking out.

Mitchell: Did it take a while for Woodward to convince you that his source was so good?

Bradlee: It took him about 20 minutes.  It took one story.  And then, you know, once we went with — I've forgotten what it even was.  But then we very seldom went with them alone, toward the end, because the stakes kept getting higher and higher.

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