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MR. RYAN: Well, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to The Washington Post for this very special event. Fifty years ago today, a break‑in took place at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building, just two miles from here.

The White House press secretary at the time referred to the incident as nothing more than, quote, "a third‑rate burglary," and that may have been how history would have recorded it but for the reporting of two men who are about to take the stage.

A former publisher of The Washington Post, Phil Graham, once said, "Journalism is the first rough draft of history." Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote their first draft of this story and then a second, and under the guidance of legendary editor, Ben Bradlee, whose wife, Sally, is here with us today, and the support of publisher Katharine Graham, whose son, Don, is here with us today, they exposed a tale of cover‑up and corruption at the highest levels of government. The totality of their work changed journalism and politics, earned recognition from around the world, and led The Washington Post to be honored with the Pulitzer Prize for public service.

But the significance of their work extends well beyond Hollywood tributes and prize committee accolades. Through their relentless, painstaking efforts to bring the truth about the Nixon administration to light, Bob and Carl epitomized the Founding Fathers' vision of a free press. There could be no such thing as self‑government, the Founders understood, if there were no independent scrutiny of government officials and no way for the Americans to hold those in power to account. That is precisely what the Watergate story was about: men in power who thought they were beyond accountability. Bob and Carl's journalism proved them wrong.

Their reporting fueled a massive Senate investigation that led to 48 criminal prosecutions and Richard Nixon's resignation, showing the world that our democracy, even the most powerful person in the land, the president of the United States, is not above the law.

Here at The Washington Post, we are incredibly proud of the reporters who worked every day to uphold this legacy and to provide the transparency and accountability that democracy requires.

It is now my pleasure to introduce you to three journalists who represent the very best of The Washington Post: Dan Balz, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein.

MR. BALZ: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I'm Dan Balz, chief correspondent here at the Post.

Before we get right into the program, I just want to say how nice it is to see real live human beings at a Washington Post Live event. Our live team has done spectacular work over the course of the pandemic to provide remotely an amazing array of programming, and they will continue to do that. But to see everybody here in the seats for this moment is incredibly gratifying, and I can think of no better day and no better guests to have than we have here today.

This is the third of three sessions that we have done marking the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break‑in, and today we have the two reporters whose names are synonymous with that story, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They obviously need no introduction. They've been rather well exposed recently to go over the history, but we're thrilled to have them here today. And I just want to say both are longtime friends of mine, and so for me, it's a double pleasure to have both of you. So, gentlemen, welcome, and thank you.

MR. BALZ: One other note, remember that you can‑‑we want to hear from those of you in the audience. You can tweet to @WashingtonPostLive, and if we can, we'll try to get to some of the questions.

So I want to start by reading something and then get you to respond to it. "Bernstein looked across the newsroom. He thought Woodward was a prima donna."

MR. BALZ: "Yale, a veteran of the Navy officer corps, lawns, greensward, staterooms, and grass tennis courts, Bernstein guessed, but probably not enough pavement for him to be good at investigative reporting. Bernstein thought that Woodward's rise, rapid rise at The Post, had less to do with his ability than his establishment credentials. Woodward knew that Bernstein occasionally wrote about rock music. That figured. Bernstein looked like one of those countercultural journalists that Woodward despised."

MR. BALZ: All right. So this was obviously taken from the pages of the book, "All the President's Men," that you wrote. Carl, let's start with you. What made this journalistic marriage work?

MR. BERNSTEIN: Almost immediately, I think each of us came to recognize that the other brought to the story experience in different areas of life. I had worked for 12 years in the newspaper business. I started when I was 16 across town at The Washington Star, but Woodward also brought with that a lot of journalistic experience, a kind of drive. That I thought I had drive, I'd never seen anything quite like it.

And almost immediately‑‑and I think, incidentally, the skepticism we had of each other, I think, helped motivate us, certainly early in the coverage of this story. But then we both came to realize‑‑and you tell me if you think I'm wrong.

MR. BERNSTEIN: That's right. I rest my case.

MR. WOODWARD: I'm kidding you.

MR. BERNSTEIN: But we both came to realize that we would flip roles, the expected role. I was supposed to be the better writer. Often, he could write amazing paragraphs. You know, I'm supposed to be the guy who's running and persevering all the time, but we know what kind of perseverance Woodward has. So it worked.

Today there's that overused word, "seamlessness." I think that was a kind of seamlessness, and yet there was that tension, always an element. Even now, when we wrote the 50th anniversary foreword for the book, there's a little bit of the old stuff going on.

MR. BALZ: Bob, let me ask you this. You guys were covering a story where the stakes were enormous, not just for you personally but for The Washington Post. How in those early days did you two learn to trust one another, trust each other's reporting? You'd never worked together, and this story had such great consequence.

MR. WOODWARD: Well, first of all, you've got to establish the environment that we worked in. It was crucial. Katharine Graham was the owner‑publisher of this Post, of this newspaper, and she was a large presence in everyone's life, even if you didn't have much interaction with her. It turned out that we did.

But I think it's best illustrated by her candor and her willingness to push. For instance, after Nixon resigned and we got a personal letter from Katharine‑‑I think you have the original.

MR. BERNSTEIN: I have the original on a yellow legal pad.

MR. WOODWARD: And it was on yellow legal papers. You know, she has more stationery than any 500 people in Washington, but she chose to write on it, because I think it was a spontaneous thought that said Dear Carl and Bob, now that Nixon has resigned, you did some of the stories. Fine. And then I'm going to quote her. She said, "Don't start thinking of yourself too highly."

MR. WOODWARD: "And let me give you some advice," and the advice is beware of the demon pomposity. Beware the demon pomposity. And at lunch earlier, we were just talking about that, and her son, the great publisher, Don Graham, said to me, he said, "You know, she was talking to herself also."

MR. BERNSTEIN: Yeah. I want to add one thing since we're talking about Katharine Graham and the legacy, which goes on here at the newspaper, but the best example I think of during all of our reporting of Katharine was there had been a day when a subpoena server‑‑the guard at the desk downstairs on 15th Street called up to me and said, "There's a subpoena server here with a subpoena for all your notes," and I said, "Well, keep him downstairs. Don't let him up to the newsroom."

MR. BERNSTEIN: And I went to Ben Bradlee, and I said, "Look, I got a call from the guard. They got a subpoena for our notes. He's downstairs. The subpoena is from the Nixon reelection committee. What do we do?" Bradlee says, "Be sure that he stays down there. I'm going to go see Katharine."

So he goes upstairs to Katharine Graham's office, and he comes back to me five minutes later, and he says, "Katharine says they're not your notes. They're her notes, and if anybody is going to go to jail, it's going to be her." And to me, it's one of the historic moments in American journalism history, and it told you everything about her and the institution that we worked for and the kind of backing that we had, the running room that we had throughout the two years we worked on it in the office.

MR. WOODWARD: And after that happened, of course, Ben had a natural sense for the theatrics of the moment, and he said, "Wow. Katharine is going to go to jail."

MR. WOODWARD: And so he thought visually. He said, "Can you just see that picture of her limousine pulling up to the women's detention center, and out our gal gets to protect, to go to jail to protect the First Amendment?" And Ben who never thought small said, "That will be a picture that will run on the front page of every newspaper in the United States and the world."

MR. WOODWARD: Of course, the subpoena people backed down because they didn't want to really confront Katharine Graham, and the people who didn't get subpoenas, Bradlee again would refer to this as "subpoena envy."

MR. BALZ: I want to show everybody another clip from the movie, "All the President's Men." There's a seen in which Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing you guys give us a sense of the tension in the relationship. Let's take a look at that.

MR. BALZ: Is that accurate?

MR. BERNSTEIN: I'm glad you gave me the chance to answer this question as opposed to him, but go ahead.

MR. WOODWARD: I think it's love at first sight.

MR. BALZ: I wondered about that.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Go to the next question.

MR. WOODWARD: No, no. I mean, I think that literally happened.

MR. WOODWARD: I mean, over a period of time, but, you know, you're‑‑

MR. BALZ: And it sounds like it happened when you did the new foreword to the book.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Well, a little bit, but the collaboration goes on with the same dynamic, except 50 years of doing things together.

MR. BALZ: But here's a question.

MR. WOODWARD: And a lot more love right now.

MR. BALZ: How did that actually improve what you were doing? I mean, if you're working in a tense environment, how did that improve it?

MR. BERNSTEIN: Well, you're working, not‑‑first of all, you know that somebody is checking everything you do, and is it right? Have we tried hard enough? Have you thought of something that I haven't thought of? You know, at the time, team reporting was not anything standard like it is today, and I think we discovered very fast that the idea of two of us working together, it really was two added up to three, that it gave a solidity and a confidence, I think, that each of us had in where the story was going, how it was being reported.

I said earlier when we were at lunch, you know, one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, a reporter or an editor does is to decide what is news, and even that was a question we asked each other every day. So what you see there is this tense beginning. Then it relaxes some, and yet there always is an element, "Well, maybe you ought to take another look at what I'm doing here," et cetera.

MR. WOODWARD: But a theme here is you asked the question of what can you bring to a partnership, but you also have to ask the question, what is it you can't bring to the partnership? What is your weakness? And you've got to understand that, and I‑‑nine months at The Washington Post. Carl had been here since 1817, actually.

MR. WOODWARD: But 12 years, you know, and your wonderful book, "Chasing History," about working at the Star and learning and becoming who you are as somebody who never once took the surface. We were answering some question earlier today digitally with The Washington Post readers and so forth, and we're going through it. And I'm saying that's fine, that's fine. Carl said, "Whoa. Wait a minute. I'm going to be myself here."

MR. WOODWARD: And himself is let's read it, let's check it, let's be careful.

MR. BALZ: I want to show one more clip from the movie which, in my mind, it's cinematically a brilliant shot, but journalistically, it's utterly prosaic. Let's look at this, and I want to ask you about it.

MR. BALZ: So Robert Caro in his book called "Working" said that one of the first lessons he learned as an investigative reporter was to turn every page, and what you guys were doing here was turning literally every page, every slip of paper, looking for evidence that the White House had requested information about Ted Kennedy, as I recall.

But it seems to me that this so well describes the tedium of investigative reporting, I mean, the degree to which you can drill and drill and drill and wait a long time until you get a gusher. Talk a little bit about how you learned those techniques, how you applied them to Watergate, when they began to pay off. Bob?

MR. WOODWARD: Well, I mean, my answer is, again, the environment, which you know well, Dan, that you have Bradlee, "What have you got for me tomorrow? What goes next?" Howard Simons, the managing editor, calling a meeting on Watergate, "Where are we on it?" Barry Sussman, the city editor, who was the most hands‑on editor, a brilliant conceptualizer and agitator, and you know what? I mean, it is such an important lesson, one, he taught us. We'd work all day. We'd work, you know, sometimes till nine or ten o'clock on a story, and then Sussman would say, "Let's meet," and we'd say, "What? You want to meet?" He said, "We have to meet and think about the next day. We just don't go blindly into the next day. Where are you going? What are the leads? What's the story?" And that ability to kind of get a tenth wind and say let's meet was really important to the story and the sense of pacing the story and making sure he was involved in directing us but also we were self‑directing in many ways‑‑

MR. BALZ: Carl, can I‑‑

MR. WOODWARD: ‑‑particularly you. You were the most self‑directed person I ever met.

MR. BALZ: Carl, let me ask you this, and that is, of all the stories you did in that early stretch when you guys were basically out alone on this story, are there a couple that stand out in your mind, either for the significance of the revelation or the sheer shoe leather that went into producing it?

MR. BERNSTEIN: Sure. There are two stories. We had discovered early on by going to the person. You know, we knocked on doors at night. That was the basic methodology, and it's what I had learned at the Star. You don't get to people in their offices where they're under pressure. You go see them in their homes. You get them to go to a restaurant, but no, don't go to their offices.

And so we started knocking on doors at night, and I found the "bookkeeper," as she's called in the book. She knew where the money was dispensed. I didn't know that when I got there, but I managed to get in the door and start talking to her, and it all started to become apparent.

And from that introduction to the‑‑you know, it is the basis of follow the money, and she started telling us that there were five people that controlled the secret fund that paid for Watergate, and she wouldn't name them. And it took us a while to get it, but we quickly learned that John Mitchell, the former Attorney General of the United States, Nixon's campaign manager, former law partner, had been among the five people who controlled that fund.

And so we got ready to report the story, and we told Bradlee, and he said, "Are you sure you're right? You know, you're going to call the Attorney General of the United States a crook, and there's never been a story like this." And so we put it in the paper. So that's the first‑‑that took it and put Watergate in a whole other realm.

And then on October 10th, we did a story that said that the Watergate break‑in was just part of a vast campaign of political espionage and sabotage aimed by the White House at Nixon's Democratic opponent.

MR. WOODWARD: But, you know, again, it's method, if I may‑‑

MR. WOODWARD: ‑‑of what happened before. On October 9th, I had gone to see Deep Throat, Mark Felt, in the underground parking garage, and he was agitated, and he was pushing me. And he said, "You've got to look at the overall"‑‑and it was kind of "Don't you understand what you have here? This is not just the Watergate burglary. It's dirty tricks." Carl had tracked down Donald Segretti who is the dirty trickster, and Mark Felt kind of laid it out and said, "No. This is a much bigger thing. Are you dumb? Don't you understand what you have?"

MR. WOODWARD: And I typed up my notes, and I had been up all night on this, and we came into the office on that day. And you looked at the typed notes, I remember, and this is one of these‑‑sometimes there are epiphanies in journalism, and you had one. And you said‑‑because no one knew except us that Mark Felt was the deputy director of the FBI, and so you just typed on and said, "FBI files show that there was this massive campaign of sabotage and espionage," and people for 35 years wondered, you know, who was Deep Throat? And there it was in the headline of The Washington Post, the FBI.

MR. WOODWARD: It was‑‑it was‑‑but the amalgam of the information and your sense of let's not hide the FBI in‑‑

MR. BERNSTEIN: But was not only that, though. It was the picking the words, "political espionage" and "sabotage" raised this thing to a new level. The White House kept talking about a third‑rate burglary. Both the contents of the story and the language of the lead and including the FBI, but this notion of a vast conspiracy took it to a whole other level.

MR. BALZ: So every reporter likes to be ahead of the pack, which you guys were. Every news organization likes to say, okay, we're setting the pace on the story, but it can be lonely. And when nobody else is following up on it, it can be especially lonely and a little bit nerve‑racking, and we know from her memoirs, Mrs. Graham was wondering if this is such a great story, why aren't other people reporting it?

There was a moment in October, I think just after you published this story, where there was an enormous boost that The Post got, and that was when Water Cronkite devoted a significant part of two broadcasts to the Watergate story. Bob, talk about what the significance of that was to the reporting that you were doing and to The Post.

MR. WOODWARD: Well, I mean, what Cronkite did, it was utterly amazing. They did a 15‑minute segment. It was going to be a‑‑and essentially put our stories in the front page of The Washington Post up, and it was the whole basis for the 15‑minute part. And then he had a second 15‑minute part prepared. It was cut down to seven minutes, because what Bill Paley‑‑

MR. BERNSTEIN: Had been approached by Colson, actually.

MR. WOODWARD: Yeah. And an approach by Colson means a hammer and a screwdriver.

MR. WOODWARD: And he folded a little bit but not completely, and Sally Quinn was saying Ben was just ecstatic about that story, and Katharine Graham in her memoirs says at that point, The Washington Post was the local paper. Walter put us on the map.

MR. WOODWARD: And she's right. It was the local paper. You couldn't buy The Washington Post in New York or L.A. Only in Washington. You could get it in Rockville. You could get hundreds of copies in Rockville.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Still sitting there.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Piled up at the newsstand.

MR. WOODWARD: None in New York. And so that sense of that CBS validated‑‑and Sally again was telling the story about the CBS people were saying, "Well, where are the documents?" and Ben said, "Documents? We don't have any documents. There are no documents. We are counting on the trust of our sources and reporters.

MR. BALZ: And our two young reporters.

So that's October. You know, a month later, Nixon wins in a landslide, and the story kind of‑‑you know, the trail kind of goes cold for you guys. I mean, for not just a few days but for a couple of months. You guys are scraping, and you're under a lot of pressure. Talk about this aspect of it, which is you've had this story. You've kept it alive, and suddenly, there's nothing there to keep it moving forward. What's the pressure you're feeling, and overall, what were the pressures you felt about, you know, the need for absolute accuracy whenever possible and to keep the story moving to demonstrate that this wasn't going to go away? Carl?

MR. BERNSTEIN: Well, it was really difficult. Nixon had just won this enormous victory. Part of what the Nixon strategy was, to make the conduct of the press the issue in Watergate, particularly ours at The Washington Post. Ben Bradley, Katharine Graham, Woodward, myself, that added to the pressure because almost daily out of the White House would come these attacks on us.

And one of the things that, again, it's so good to have two of us doing this is the danger of trying to overreach and desperately thinking, "I got to get something in the paper." And we didn't do that. We waited. But I would take two scenes together. That first scene that you played of we go to Bradlee's house in the middle of the night and we tell Bradlee he's got to come outside, that we're under surveillance, Deep Throat has said we're under surveillance, come on outside at 3:00 in the morning in your bathrobe. And then in that clip, Bradlee, a little bit of hyperbole in the movie, but Bradlee outlines the stakes, and then at the end, he says, "Nobody gives a damn. You saw what happened in the election."

I want to go to today. I want to go to the most important story, perhaps since Watergate, about a seditious criminal president of the United States, who also almost won reelection, who won election to the presidency, who continues to attempt to cover up, who staged an attempted coup such as you would see in a junta, in a banana republic or somewhere in the Middle East, the president of the United States refusing to allow the orderly transition of a free election, the most important thing we do in a democracy. And so we have a situation today where something similar has happened to what Bradlee is describing on that lawn.

MR. BALZ: I want to come back to this in a few minutes, but finish your thought.

MR. BERNSTEIN: But let me just say, so what do we as reporters do in this situation? The people of the country, by and large, the Republican Party, which really the heroes in Watergate to some extent or a large extent were Republicans on the House committee, in the Senate, who insisted that Nixon be held accountable, and at the same time, we have this situation today. Keep doing the reporting. The fact that the country, half the country doesn't give a damn, perhaps, doesn't matter. The lesson in there, you keep doing the reporting to get the facts and get the facts out.

MR. WOODWARD: Your next question.

MR. WOODWARD: Just in case there's mystery, Carl is talking about Trump.

MR. BALZ: I have to say I was a little‑‑

MR. WOODWARD: He didn't name him.

MR. WOODWARD: He didn't name him.

MR. BALZ: I was a little confused about what‑‑

MR. WOODWARD: Yes, I know.

MR. BALZ: ‑‑Carl was talking about.

MR. WOODWARD: I saw confusion in the audience.

MR. BALZ: Carl is‑‑I mean, sometimes Carl is a little opaque and a little oblique.

MR. BALZ: And has been for as long as I've known you, Carl.

MR. BALZ: So the next question is unanswered questions. We have a question that a viewer sent in, Andy Barr from Washington, D.C., and he says, what is the one question about Watergate you still want the answer to? Bob?

MR. WOODWARD: Well, the unanswered question that pulses through all of this is why. Why would Nixon, who was president, who‑‑you know, he worked to attain‑‑he lost to John Kennedy in '60. He lost the run for governor of California, and then he rehabilitated himself, reengineered himself, and won in 1968. And he had, you know, the brass ring. He found it, and so what is the psychology, which I think we never cracked really, of somebody who's attained their goal and fails to ask the question, which I think is the question presidents need to ask is what do the people need? What's the next stage of good for a majority of people in the country?

It's not hard to get an answer to that, but for Nixon, it really didn't come up. It was always‑‑I mean, can I read my thing from the‑‑

MR. BALZ: Yeah, go ahead.

MR. WOODWARD: You know, he loves it when I get paper out to read.

MR. WOODWARD: But this‑‑but this is so relevant. This is from Nixon's tapes after‑‑six weeks after he's won that reelection, and, you know, he stuck it to everyone, to the Democrats, to The Washington Post, to the press, and so he's in the Oval Office with his aides. "Remember we're going to be around and outlive our enemies," Nixon said, "And also never forget the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard a hundred times and never forget it." That's somebody who can't let go of his grievances, who can't‑‑who has‑‑I mean, here the press‑‑we were on the Colbert Show, and I was tempted to read that and then ask Stephen Colbert, you know, "You weren't there at the time in '73, but are the late-night television hosts upset that they didn't make the cut?"

MR. WOODWARD: The people who are enemies. But, you know, this‑‑wow. It's‑‑

MR. BERNSTEIN: Well, the enemies list.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Nixon maintained‑‑the White House had an enemies list of people, as there are on the tapes, the word, to be "screwed," to have their tax returns audited, et cetera, et cetera.

MR. BALZ: So the story turned in the summer of '73 when Sam Ervin and the Watergate Committee started their hearings. We have a clip of the opening of those hearings, and then I'll follow up after that. Let's take a listen to that.

MR. BALZ: Carl, did it become harder or easier for you to report this story once the Watergate hearings were underway? How did that affect what you guys were doing?

MR. BERNSTEIN: I don't know that it was a question of harder or easier. I think that in some ways, it became possible for us to be a little more interpretive in what we were doing because they were now getting through subpoena power and through witnesses and through the great witness, John Dean. A picture was coming together, such as had never existed before, and we were able to expand on that.

We also were able to get to John Dean's lawyers, and so we knew that Dean was going to implicate the president before it happened, and so that knowledge, again, what was being developed by the committee was almost as if there was a source out in the open that enabled us to perhaps go to the next step.

MR. WOODWARD: Also, I think it got harder, not because of what we had to do, but I think a little bit, we were exhausted. We were going to write a book about this.

MR. WOODWARD: It wasn't clear, and so we knocked on fewer doors than we used to, and I think the lesson always is never stop knocking on doors.

MR. BALZ: Yeah. You mentioned Dean. We have a clip of his testimony that I want to show and then talk about his role in all of this. Let's watch that, and then I'll turn to you, Bob.

MR. BALZ: How should we think about John Dean in history, the role he played, the, you know, pros and cons of what he did long before he got to that moment and then that moment?

MR. WOODWARD: Well, he was the orchestrator. Nixon really was the orchestrator of the coverup, but he was playing many instruments in the orchestra, Dean was. And he‑‑as Carl said, we got to his lawyers, and we had the story the day before his testimony saying that he would implicate the president in the coverup and from, I think, 20 or 25 meetings and discussions. And the only thing that broke our heart that day is that Seymour Hersh and The New York Times had the exact same story.

MR. WOODWARD: But Dean was critical here. But the real break was the Nixon tapes and Alexander Butterfield disclosing that.

MR. BALZ: Right. And, Carl, if Butterfield had never been asked and answered the question of was there a White House taping system, if those tapes were buried to history throughout the administration, would Nixon have served out his full term? Were they the factor that drove him out of office?

MR. BERNSTEIN: We don't know. It's "if history," and at the same time, you have to think that without those tapes, it's the tapes that ultimately made it impossible for Richard Nixon not to be held accountable.

And one of the things, I think one of the awful legacies of Watergate‑‑and there aren't too many awful legacies, though‑‑it is the notion of the smoking gun, the idea that it was necessary to have a smoking gun when, in fact, there was so much evidence without that tape, that last tape, from John Dean's testimony, from some of the stuff we had reported, from what the Watergate Committee was able to do from the "Saturday night massacre," it was called. You didn't need the smoking gun.

And that also goes to today, and so I think this idea that you've raised about did you, you know, really need‑‑or would he‑‑he might have escaped. He might well have escaped, and yet the Supreme Court of the United States in a unanimous decision said the president of the United States must turn these tapes over.

Let's look at today's situation with the Supreme Court of the United States. In this really‑‑and Bob will probably talk about this investigation of January 6th. It is a really magnificent investigation in which this committee has gotten the goods, and we're going to see a lot more. But one of the things that's developing that's very different that happened in Watergate is that the wife of a Supreme Court justice is now part of the story, and it looks very much like‑‑and certainly, it is the opinion of a number of people on that committee‑‑that she is caught up in the conspiracy and very likely is a coconspirator.

So it's raised all kinds of questions about the justice himself and what has she told Justice Thomas.

MR. BERNSTEIN: I mean, if I may, I mean, there's the possibility of that. This is Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginni Thomas, and there are, indeed, questions. And Bob Costa and I did a story in The Post and CBS about those 29 emails‑‑or I'm sorry‑‑text messages, which were stunning because Mark Meadows, Trump's chief of staff, texts back and says, "You know, we are in a war. It is good versus evil." That is a stunning point in all of this.

But I think we just don't know‑‑

MR. BERNSTEIN: No, we don't.

MR. WOODWARD: ‑‑about this, and we need to keep an open mind. She said she's happy to cooperate or will answer questions and so forth, and so there are big questions marks there. And that's tender territory, you know, somebody's wife who's on the Supreme Court and so forth, and The New York Times has a story about the letter the committee wrote to her and saying, "We'd be happy to talk to you. How about January‑‑or July 6th, 7th, or 8th? But if that isn't convenient"‑‑so they're treading very carefully and I think wisely.

MR. BALZ: Can you pick up on what Carl was alluding to, which is your kind of analysis of the January 6th Committee investigation and the degree to which‑‑I mean, how you analyze the work that they have done and what they might produce.

MR. WOODWARD: Well, I think in terms of material, it's amazing, and at the same time, as has been pointed out, Nixon, what he did was concealed, and it's open from his secret tape recordings. But a lot of what Trump does‑‑has done is out in the open. He said the election was stolen. It turns out‑‑and we've all spent a lot of time looking for the evidence to suggest that this was a stolen election.

And I've spent a lot of time with Robert Costa looking at is there evidence, and it turns out two of Trump's biggest supporters‑‑Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina, Mike Lee from Utah‑‑both conducted independent investigations and went to the Senate floor. And as Lindsey Graham said, "Count me out. There's no evidence. There is no evidence," and so the real marker here is what are they going to be able to show, and they have demonstrated a lot. It is a crime to subvert a legitimate function of government according to 18 USC 371, Supreme Court decisions going back a hundred years. This is a clear, lay‑down case of obstructing an essential and necessary function of government, and what's more necessary than certifying who is the next president?

This is a‑‑I mean, the diabolical genius of Trump and his associates in this, they found the weak point in the system. January 6th, there's just the votes are presented and counted, and then a thousand people violently descended on the Capitol.

MR. BALZ: So we learned during the Trump administration that the main instrument for holding a president accountable, which is impeachment, no longer seems to work because it is now a purely political enterprise with party‑line votes. The constitutional system worked during Watergate. The press played its role. The investigators played their role. The Senate Watergate Committee played its role. The House Judiciary Committee played its role. The Republican elders went to Nixon and said, "You don't have any support up here." He ultimately resigned. Impeachment doesn't work.

Both of you have said in recent days that this is not‑‑that the Trump presidency is not just a criminal presidency but a seditious presidency. So what is the solution to a seditious president? Is it through strictly the legal system? Carl, I want you to answer this first. Is it through the political system, i.e., the ballot box in which the public will render an ultimate judgment?

MR. BERNSTEIN: Well, first of all, Bob has just pointed out about Title 18 and the section of the law in which Trump clearly, as Bob has said, has committed a crime.

But the next level up, as you suggest, is sedition. What is sedition? It is to encourage, foment an insurrection against the government of the United States. We have the first president in history who has attempted to engage and produce an insurrection, and so what do you do with that? One would hope that, yes, there had been‑‑you know, we failed in impeachment before. There ought to be, I think‑‑Merrick Garland, the Attorney General of the United States, now has a huge decision to make. Is Donald Trump going to be prosecuted as the leader of this conspiracy? And, indeed, the question of sedition comes into it.

But I think we need to look at what has happened in the Trump presidency, just as we looked at in the Nixon presidency. This isn't just about the press. It's not just about the president. It's not just about the Senate and the House. It's about the people in the country.

And one of the things that happened in Watergate was by the time of Nixon's impeachment, his approval rating, the number of people, the percentage of people who wanted to see Nixon either convicted in the Senate or resign from office had gone from 19 percent a few months earlier to 57 percent, if we believe the polls, and it's somewhere in that. And we don't have that situation today. It's about not just the politicians, not just media. It's about the people of the country.

We have a media situation in which, unlike at the time of Watergate, so many more people today are not open to the best obtainable version of the truth, which is what Woodward and I said for 50 years have really called the objective of reporting. People in this country today are looking for information, in the media, particularly, to reinforce what they already believe and to buttress their prejudices, their religious beliefs, their political beliefs. So we have a different country today.

And the question in my mind is, is the country, people of this country, are they willing in sufficient numbers to say, look, we do not want an authoritarian presidency, et cetera, et cetera, we do not want to see this past president given kid gloves?

MR. BERNSTEIN: Okay. But, Dan, your beat, if I can describe your beat, is really leadership, isn't it, in the Congress and the executive branch in the political party?

MR. BALZ: Yeah. That's a good way to describe it.

MR. WOODWARD: And the leadership beat is a bit one now, and the question is going to be‑‑it has to be put in context. I remember for the series of 10 hours of interviews with Trump in 2020. I mean, he would call any hour, or I could call him at any hour. And my wife, Elsa, would‑‑the first time picked up the phone, and there's a voice says, "Is Bob there?" "Well, may I ask who's calling?" "Donald Trump." Nobody from the switchboard, nothing. I think no one in the White House‑‑he spent 10 hours on the phone with me or in meetings.

Now, I remember sitting in the Oval Office interviewing him for this, and we were talking about this, you know. What happened to the country in 2016? What was going on? And my summary of it was that, you know, President Trump‑‑the old order was dying in the Republican Party and in the Democratic Party, and I think 2016, that's exactly right. The old order, the old way of doing things was dying or being phased out, and there's a big grandfather clock in the Oval Office. I point and said, "You seized history's clock," and Trump‑‑I wish I had a video of it only, and he said, "Yes. That's exactly right." And, you know, he doesn't‑‑you know, historians talk about history's clock. He doesn't think that way.

But it stunned me, and he said, "I'll do it in 2020." Of course, he didn't. 47,000 votes change in three states, as you well know, and he's elected. But somehow a leader or group of leaders or a redefinition of leadership has got to emerge to fix this problem because it is a giant problem, and the divisions in this country are such‑‑I made this list of 13 problems in the country, and Carl added one, race. But if I get out the card and read it, I mean, we‑‑this place is a mess.

MR. BALZ: If you read the written testimony from J. Michael Luttig yesterday before the January 6th Committee, it is a clarion call about the risks for democracy, and this is a very conservative, distinguished jurist. And that written statement is stark in its warning.

We have a Twitter question from Emma Hadden in Minneapolis that I want to ask you, Carl. If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice in 1972, what would it be?

MR. BERNSTEIN: Be a good listener.

MR. BERNSTEIN: I think there's a big problem with too many reporters that they're not good listeners, and that too often, what we do as reporters, particularly in the age of electronic media, of other configurations that weren't there, is that we see our jobs sometimes as manufactured controversy. So you'll very often get a reporter with a microphone or without who goes to someone who is the subject of the story and says, "What about this? Why did you do that?" then goes to somebody on the opposing end and says, "What do you think about what he said? Why did you do this? Why did you do that?" Doesn't go deeper. The idea is to produce a story that may get on the front page or lead the news rather than finding out and listening. Look at the movie of "All the President's Men." Read the book. We listen. We see that we've got somebody who knows somebody, and then we listen. I think it's a terrible failure, and it goes way back, but I think today, especially in the age of social media‑‑and you can't look at social media in isolation from methodology. You've got to listen.

MR. WOODWARD: Good, patient listening. Write it on the blackboard a hundred times and never forget it.

MR. BALZ: I'll make one reference to a project that Bob and I worked on after the attacks on 9/11, and it's the closest that I've ever worked with Bob. And one of the things‑‑I learned two things during that. One is that Bob has ultimate patience. If you go into an interview with Bob, it doesn't matter how many handlers are there saying last question, last question. Bob will continue to ask more and more questions. He won't get up. He has an iron rear end.

MR. BALZ: And the second is he always asks for documents, "Do you have memos? Do you have journals? Do you have files?" That's the technique.

I want to close on a couple of questions about Watergate characters. One, start with you, Bob, the obviously question about Mark Felt as Deep Throat. How essential was he in the reporting that you did? In other words, in the way the question of would Nixon have survived without the tapes being revealed, what would have happened if there was no Mark Felt or Deep Throat? And was he as maddeningly cryptic in real life as he was on the screen?

MR. WOODWARD: Oh, oh, yes. Definitely. I mean, Carl and I went to see him after, and he was elderly, and he was in a red sports jacket, remember? And we‑‑but, you know, one of the things Carl and I learned about this partnership‑‑and we only framed it this way recently‑‑each of us did 60 percent of the work.

MR. WOODWARD: It's like a good marriage. You have to both give 60 percent, and Felt was‑‑some people say he was the key. Some people say he was irrelevant. He was another source, but what was important, as I had mentioned, if you read Katharine Graham's memoirs or Ben Bradlee's, they knew--they did not ask for that identity. They knew we had a secret source in the government in a sensitive position in the executive branch, and that gave them great comfort. And I think it's quite possible some of these stories wouldn't have got in the paper or wouldn't have got in the paper as soon as they did.

So it was 60‑60, wasn't it?

MR. BERNSTEIN: Yeah, it was. And the instance of Deep Throat, I think‑‑tell me if you agree‑‑that more often than not, his importance was not in giving us original information but confirming things, maybe taking them a little bit farther, than we had already learned from other sources. But we knew where he worked and what information he had access to. So, if we‑‑if he said that's right, it gave the story a kind of solidity.

MR. WOODWARD: But it wasn't specifics. It was‑‑

MR. WOODWARD: ‑‑you know, that it was the overall‑‑

MR. WOODWARD: Well, but it's kind of everyone's involved. Everyone's involved.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Well, that's‑‑yeah, right.

MR. WOODWARD: Your lives are in danger. You know, you can't‑‑so, you know, it happened the way it happened, and sometimes I look back on it‑‑I think Carl looks back on it‑‑as I wish we had been smarter and realized and that where it was going because we didn't know where it was going. Carl did early on. I mean, you had an instinct for this is going‑‑going the whole way. I didn't. I was more reluctant to reach that conclusion, but that conclusion was‑‑whether right or wrong, it's a great structure for doing the reporting.

In other words, we're not here to‑‑when I went on vacation during the summer of '72, Mr. Elbows here called me and said, "What the hell are you doing on vacation? There's a story to work on here." It's true. It's true.

MR. BALZ: Carl, who was Frank Wills, and what is this doorknob doing here on the stage?

MR. BERNSTEIN: None of us would be on the stage were it not for Frank Wills. Frank Wills was the security guard at the Watergate the night of the break‑in, and he noticed something, that the door in the Watergate office building had been left ajar. And there was a piece of tape on that lock. That is the real lock.

And he is an unsung hero of Watergate because he then realized that there had been something amiss because of that piece of tape on that lock.

MR. WOODWARD: But what happened is he took it off.

MR. BERNSTEIN: That's right. He took the tape off.

MR. WOODWARD: And then he came back again, and the tape was‑‑

MR. WOODWARD: ‑‑there again, and he said, "Wait a minute."

MR. WOODWARD: "Something is off here."

MR. BERNSTEIN: And so what's happened is we were just at a little ceremony at lunch with Fred Ryan, publisher of The Washington Post, and he had this, had a sheet over this thing and didn't know what the hell it was, if there was going to be some kind of unveiling. And I just hoped nobody was dead.

MR. BERNSTEIN: And he very ceremoniously went "whoof," like that, and that is the lock from the night of the burglary that Frank Wills put tape‑‑took the piece of tape off of.

MR. WOODWARD: And Jeff Bezos bought it at an auction.

MR. BERNSTEIN: At an auction. Right, right.

MR. WOODWARD: And we're trying to find out how much Bezos paid.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Come back next week, and we'll have the answer.

MR. WOODWARD: And Fred Ryan is taking the Fifth and saying he doesn't know.

MR. BALZ: This is the last great unanswered question from Watergate.

MR. BERNSTEIN: We're going to get it. We are going to get the answer.

MR. BALZ: We're going to have to leave it there. Sadly, we are out of time. We could go on for a long time.

I want to thank both Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for a fabulous conversation. Thank you very much.

MR. BERNSTEIN: I don't think they can hear you.

MR. BALZ: And I just want to say thank you to all of you for being here. Thank you everybody who was watching either on the Washington Post site or on C‑SPAN.

For those of you who want to know more about what we have coming up, you can go to WashingtonPostLive.com. You’ll see all the future programs. We have a lot more in the works, but this concludes our trio of Watergate stories. Thanks again.

MR. WOODWARD: Thanks, Dan. Thank you.