This essay was first published at the Conversation news siteon June 14, 2022, and appears here slightly edited.
In their dogged reporting of the Watergate scandal, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernsteinuncovered the crimes that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974.
That version of Watergate has long dominated popular understanding of the scandal, which unfolded over 26 months, beginning June 17, 1972.
It is, however, a simplistic trope that not even Watergate-era principals at the Post embraced. The newspaper’s publisher during Watergate, Katharine Graham, pointedly rejected that interpretation during a program 25 years ago at the now-defunct Newseum (the “museum of news“) in suburban Virginia.
“Sometimes, people accuse us of ‘bringing down a president,’ which of course we didn’t do, and
Nixon quits: Not the Post’s doing
shouldn’t have done,” Graham said. “The processes that caused [Nixon’s]…
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