Carl Bernstein attends a special screening of “Everything Is Copy” at the Museum of Modern Art on March 14, 2016, in New York.
Charles Sykes / Invision / AP
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Charles Sykes / Invision / AP
Carl Bernstein attends a special screening of “Everything Is Copy” at the Museum of Modern Art on March 14, 2016, in New York.
Charles Sykes / Invision / AP
With the country rattled by the COVID-19 pandemic and still rattled by intractable political divisions, there has never been a more tempting – or more dangerous – time to bask in the nostalgia. Compared with the horrors of the past few years, it is natural to see everything before in sepia tones: simpler times when common courtesy reigned.
Pursuit history, by Carl Bernstein
Henry Holt & Co.
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Henry Holt & Co.
Pursuit history, by Carl Bernstein
Henry Holt & Co.
But nostalgia is of course lies and misrepresentation, and journalists in particular are frequently warned to stay away from it. (Sure, that doesn’t mean we always follow that advice.) Legendary reporter Carl Bernstein will easily fall into the nostalgia trap with his new book, memoir. Pursuit history, chronicling his early years in the newspaper business. Happily, he doesn’t. While it’s a primarily look at the past, he cleverly avoids all the “Things are definitely better back then” pitfalls.
Bernstein’s memoir begins with him hiring him as a copyboy — an errand runner, basically — at one of his hometown newspapers, which is now defunct. Lucifer of Washington, D.C. His father arranged an interview for his high school student son at the newspaper: “He was really scared for my future – a concern based on facts. difficult events, most of them involving the pool lobby, reports my school and the Montgomery County Juvenile Court.”
Copyboy wasn’t (well, it wasn’t – the job didn’t really exist anymore) a flashy position, but Bernstein was intrigued from the moment he stepped foot in the newsroom. “In all my life, I have never heard of glorious chaos or witnessed a purposeful uproar like I am witnessing now in that newsroom,” he wrote. “By the time I was going from one end to the other, I knew I wanted to be a journalist.”
Bernstein allowed his talent, up until that point, to seem limited to the game of marbles and get into little trouble with school authorities and law enforcement agencies, but he thrived. live Star, and had the opportunity to assist reporters with coverage of some of the hottest stories of the era, including President Kennedy’s 1960 inauguration. (This is good news for his fledgling journalism career, but not so much for his academic career: “Now that I’ve come to the inauguration of the president of the United States, chemistry class Adelman’s makes me care less,” he allows, grimacing.)
Academic woes aside, he has risen StarRise with impressive speed, rise to dictatorship, and then, at the age of 19, become a city office worker. He was given the opportunity to write an obituary, and even co-write a fake one, which he and two of his colleagues phoned. Washington Post, the Starhis publications were large (much to the surprise of his editor, Sid Epstein, who was not taken advantage of by the hoax).
Bernstein’s memoir ends with his departure from Star, he sometimes realizes that without a college degree, he would never have been hired as a reporter for the newspaper. “I love Star, but it didn’t quite love me back,” he reflected. Of course, he ended well – not long after he left, he was hired at Washington Post, where he would become one of the nation’s most famous reporters, thanks to his work, along with Bob Woodward, uncovering the Watergate scandal.
Bernstein makes no mention of his later fame in Pursuit history – this is a memoir that is limited to a certain period of time, and he does not want to look ahead. This gives the book strength: it doesn’t aggravate itself; it is what it is, the story of a few years in the life of a young man who has gained a foothold in journalism. The book is marked by a fascinating humility; while others may regard Bernstein as a living legend, his own opinion of himself seems far more measured. (Though you feel he’s still proud of every “Well done, kid” he got from an editor during his time as a teen reporter.)
Bernstein wisely declined to turn the book into a compendium of advice for young reporters; he doesn’t see himself as a role model (or, for that matter, as a cautionary tale). The closest he came to was an observation he made as a cub reporter reviewing his senior colleagues: “[T]This has not been fooled by conventional wisdom. I’ve known enough from talking with them – and from my own limited experience – that they are constantly amazed by where the truth has taken them. After making a report, rarely does a story match their first assumptions about where it will lead. “
And then there’s nostalgia – or lack of them. Bernstein refused to portray the past as a journalistic utopia; he noted the various bigotry that pervaded the industry and the nation at large (and, unfortunately, still do). Older reporters in the 1960s could be forgiven for rolling their eyes when the press turned late to clickbait; Bernstein, however, was more interested in leaving a portrait of his experience in mid-century America than in teaching.
That’s what makes Pursuit history It doesn’t try to be anything more than that: a story about a young man’s early career in an era many Americans wouldn’t recognize. Bernstein writes: “I realized that all good reports are the same: the best version of the truth you can think of. And that’s exactly what this memoir is about.
