Bradlee:
Deep Throat
‘is a great hero’

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Andrea Mitchell

Chief foreign affairs correspondent

Mitchell: You know, you mentioned, and other people have mentioned, that Judge Sirica really broke things wide open. But do you think there would have been Watergate hearings if the Post had not kept up on this story?

Bradlee: I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I think. It took the hearings to get them going, but once they got going they were unstoppable too, and the forces of good were pretty strong at the end.

Mitchell: But for a while, you were out there all alone.

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Bradlee: Yeah. Don't overestimate the — I mean, I love to hear all about the Post, but the others — Sy Hersh and the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe — they had some good stories in there that advanced the ball game.

Mitchell: How did this change investigative reporting?

Bradlee: Well, I think it reinvigorates it. I think, you know, so much of reporting is investigative. It's almost, in my mind, repetitive, the phrase, investigative reporting. You can't report without investigating.

Mitchell: But did Watergate and what Bernstein and Woodward and you did, here, at the Washington Post, did that change the dynamic for the rest of the Washington press corps, and in what way?

Bradlee: Well, I think it changed it among editors and owners. I think they thought, “My God, if the Post has gotten a lot of kudos out of this, maybe we ought to open our eyes to it.” I think there was a danger while — and I think one that I succumbed to a little bit — that after Nixon left there was a feeling that, you know, let's just take it easy for a while.

That's a very high level of responsibility and you don't want to be known as somebody who brings down governments, not that the Post brought Nixon down. Nixon brought Nixon down. But I think — I remember Scotty Reston once said that he thought the press eased off after Watergate for a little, and I think he was right, and he was urging the press not to. It's just now the time to go on, and I think they did after a while, maybe we wasted a little time; but it seems to me that the press has been nose to that grindstone pretty well.

CONTINUED : Who came up with the Deep Throat nickname?

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