2022.06.09 "水门事件三人组 "

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Why ‘The Watergate Three’ Are Remembered as a Duo
Doing great journalism requires an infrastructure, including a lot of talented people who don’t get bylines. Barry Sussman—the Watergate journalist named neither “Woodward” nor “Bernstein”—was one.

By Joshua Benton
A scribbled out portrait of Sussman
John Sunderland / The Denver Post / Getty; The Atlantic
JUNE 9, 2022
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The headline in Time magazine—May 7, 1973—was quite clear, numerically speaking: “The Watergate Three.” Not two—three.

When the Pulitzer Prizes are announced next week, the citation for public service by a newspaper — barring a last-minute reversal — will go to the Washington Post for its continuous digging into the Watergate case and related campaign scandals.

Certainly the Post deserves credit for its tenacity. But the trade knows that personal honors belong to an unlikely trio of relatively junior newsmen, the Post’s District of Columbia editor, Barry Sussman, 38, and reporters Carl Bernstein, 29, and Bob Woodward, 30.

Three. An unlikely trio. For generations of young reporters, the men who brought down Richard Nixon, who exposed Watergate, were two in number: Woodward and Bernstein. Woodstein, if you wanted people to know you’d mastered the lingo. Who’s this third guy—the one listed first?


Barry Sussman died a few days ago at the age of 87, and while his passing earned some notice, it wasn’t commensurate with the impact of his work. In the half century since the Watergate break-in, the Watergate Three have become, in the popular imagination, the Watergate Two.

Part of that is just what it means to be an editor in a newsroom. No matter how much you shape, rewrite, or co-create the work, your name isn’t the one at the top of the story—or the bottom, for that matter. Becoming an editor means giving up the authorial glory that comes with being a reporter. Your work will be valued internally, but the world won’t see your fingerprints on any of it.

But Sussman was also uniquely shortchanged by the transformation of the Post’s Watergate coverage from news story into cultural artifact. The real history got processed into something more easily digestible, and Barry wasn’t in it.

These days, talk about the future of journalism often circles around reporters’ individual brands—the sort of word journalists take a strange pride in hating. Build up a reputation with an audience? Quit your job, lose the constraints (however real or mythical) muzzling your voice, and start a Substack!


There are journalists for whom that model makes a lot of sense. But the story of Barry Sussman reminds us that many of the world’s most important journalists don’t get bylines at all. Their brand is invisibility. And whatever models, whatever systems of support inspire journalism’s next forms, they need to find a way to make sure they can do their work, too.

Read: What did Atlantic readers think of Watergate?

Barry Sussman was the city editor of The Washington Post on Saturday, June 17, 1972, when five men were arrested for breaking into and bugging the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate complex. A few hours later, after a tip from an attorney, the Post managing editor Howard Simons called Sussman, still in bed, to tell him about the break-in. Sussman decided to assign two reporters to the story: the longtime police reporter Alfred E. Lewis and a Post newbie named Bob Woodward.

Hanging around the newsroom that Saturday—because he still hadn’t filed a story that’d been due the day before—was another relative newcomer, Carl Bernstein. Lewis got the byline on the first-day story, with Woodward and Bernstein among the eight reporters getting “contributing to this story” credits. Sussman had to pick who would come in the next day, Sunday, to work on a follow-up; he picked Woodward and Bernstein. Not long after, Sussman took on the new job of full-time Watergate editor and again chose the two of them to work on it full-time—fighting real opposition from higher-ups in order to put Bernstein on the story.

To give you an idea of the role Sussman played in the months that followed, I want to share a few excerpts from the many, many books written about Watergate in the years since. First, here’s how Woodward and Bernstein themselves described Sussman in All the President’s Men (1974):

Sussman was 38, gentle in his manner, slightly overweight, curly-haired, scholarly in demeanor. He had been a desk man on a small-town newspaper near the Virginia-Tennessee line, a speed-reading instructor at New York University, a society editor, and then suburban editor for the Post — a vagabond journalist who had left Brooklyn odd-jobbing his way to Washington.

Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instant recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman’s mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.

At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell’s secretary? Why won’t anybody say when Liddy went to the White House or who worked with him there? Mitchell and Stans both ran the budget committee, right? What does that tell you? Then Sussman would puff on his pipe, a satisfied grin on his face …

Since the break-in at Democratic headquarters, Sussman had been studying the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. He had a theory about Watergate that Bernstein and Woodward did not quite understand — it had to do with historic inevitability, post-war American ethics, merchandising and Richard Nixon.

Here’s David Halberstam, writing in his classic The Powers That Be (1979):

[Sussman] was, the young reporters on the Post generally agreed, by far the best of the young editors at the paper. He liked softer leads and did not insist, if the substance of a good story was there, that a reporter had to fall back on the traditional and mechanical “who, what, when, where.” When a reporter came back to the office with the outline of a story, Sussman was often very valuable, not only fulfilling the editor’s function but also running the assembled facts through his mind as a reporter would, sometimes making better sense of them than the reporter was. He was a dreamer in the best way, and when he had flashes of insight they were seldom pedestrian. He was the first of a new generation of editors to deal with the new generation of reporters. He could ask the larger questions.

Thus almost from the start, before anyone else at the Post, Sussman saw Watergate as a larger story, saw that the individual events were part of a larger pattern, the result of hidden decisions from somewhere in the top of government which sent smaller men to run dirty errands. He did not smell Nixon on the very first day, but he sensed the President’s role earlier than almost anyone else, and he brought to the story a combination of suspicion and logic that allowed him to see the whole matter in perspective sooner than anyone else …

From the start, the Post was thus unusually lucky. It had the perfect working editor at exactly the right level. Sussman was not simply encouraging, he brainstormed the story, trying to put the pieces together, fitting them and refitting them until finally, slowly, there was the beginning of a pattern. More, he believed in the story, he was sure there was something there. Simons from the start had been good because, in the best old-style newspaper sense, he had thought that it sounded promising. Sussman, working at the foot-soldier level, was even better; where other editors on a story so difficult might have cast doubt upon the fragments the young reporters were bringing in, Sussman offered only constant encouragement. Sussman always believed there was more, and given Richard Nixon and Watergate, there always was.

This is the future Washington Post executive editor Len Downie in 1976’s The New Muckrakers: An Inside Look at America’s Investigative Reporters:

More than anyone else in the newsroom that day, city editor Barry Sussman … journeyman from Brooklyn by way of Tennessee, recognized the Watergate burglary immediately as an event of potentially great significance. Sussman, who had a sometimes wildly imaginative analytic mind, was not much interested in the predictable, if sometimes sensational events that consume so much of the average newspaper’s editorial resources and newsprint. He was fascinated by the unexpected-human actions and societal trends — and left supervision of much of the day-to-day coverage of the District of Columbia news to subordinates, so that he could concentrate on the longer range, in-depth projects of a few especially resourceful journalists …

It was Woodward’s and Bernstein’s ability to work flat out, with little rest, and in uncanny coordination under Sussman’s imaginative, constantly theorizing direction that put them well in front of everyone else.

From Adrian Havill’s Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (1993):

Sussman was becoming the chief appendage to “Woodstein” — the term by which the team was known in the newsroom. It could be argued that the team was often a troika in 1972-73, with Sussman as the head. “Woodsteinman” would have been more accurate.

Max Holland, the author of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (2012), described Sussman as “the sturdiest leg of what was a triumvirate, not a duo.”

As the story of Watergate swarmed across American politics, attention turned to the Post. The first major award it won for its Watergate reporting was the Drew Pearson Foundation award for investigative reporting, which at the time had the highest cash prize in journalism ($6,000, equal to roughly $40,000 today). The award (and the money) went to the Watergate Three: Sussman, Woodward, and Bernstein.

Then came the Time story.

The Post men came to share an obsession with the story that had raised them from professional obscurity. Otherwise, they have little in common other than youth. Woodward, an enrolled Republican, is a graduate of Yale and the Navy officer corps … He is considered a smooth interviewer but a mediocre writer.

Bernstein, long of hair and sloppy of dress, a college dropout, is something out of The Front Page. Despite his prose flair, he had a reputation for spotty performance, dating partly from the time a superior caught him apparently asleep in the city-hall press room …

Despite their differences in style and the fact that they see little of each other socially, the men work well together under Sussman’s avuncular guidance … The trio’s work has already won six major reporting prizes …

As Time had predicted, The Washington Post did in fact win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service that year. Unlike other Pulitzers, the Public Service prize is given to a news organization as a whole, not to individual journalists. That didn’t sit well with Woodward and Bernstein initially, as the Post editor Ben Bradlee recounted years later in his memoir, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures:

Woodward and Bernstein were pleased, of course, when I saw them next morning [after the Pulitzer announcement], but not overjoyed. They sidled into my office “to talk,” and it was quickly obvious that they had more on their minds than a mutual back-scratching session. They didn’t dare get to their point right away, but pretty soon it spilled out.

How come the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to the newspaper, rather than to them, Woodward and Bernstein, who had done by so much the lion’s share of the reporting?

The supply of credit to go around is always limited.

Read: How my grandfather helped bring down the Nixon presidency

As the Watergate scandal spiraled (but still more than a year before Nixon resigned), there was demand for a book on the Post’s reporting — the first step in its broader life beyond newsprint.

Initial talk was for the Watergate Three to write it together; that was how it was first pitched to the agent David Obst. But Woodward and Bernstein later decided to cut Sussman out. Here’s Alicia C. Shepard writing about it in her book Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate:

They didn’t want to hurt Sussman’s feelings, keenly aware of all he had done for them and how he had often improved their stories. They thought he was a brilliant editor, but they didn’t need an editor now. They would get that from Simon & Schuster.

“I feel sorry,” Woodward would say years later. “You know, it was a reporter’s story to tell. Not an editor’s.”

Before Watergate, Sussman and Woodward had been close friends—hanging out at Sussman’s house, setting up weekend touch-football games, talking for hours about journalism. Sussman had been Woodward’s mentor at the Post. But cutting him out of the book broke the relationship. By the time All the President’s Men hit bookstores, they were no longer talking to each other.

Sussman took time off from the Post to write his Watergate book, which became The Great Cover-up: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate. It was highly anticipated; shortly after All the President’s Men came out, one writer said, “Barry Sussman, the District of Columbia Editor, is said to be writing the lasting book that will stand apart from all the others in the flood of Watergate books.” And after it was published in December, it was lauded by critics and historians alike. (“Sussman has done the best job yet of putting Watergate into the perspective of this country.” “The best and most lucid unraveling of Watergate.” “The best book to read on Watergate.”)


But it was no match for All the President’s Men in sales or cultural impact. (Deep Throat gets only a brief, secondhand mention.) The breakup of the Watergate Three is coded directly into its text: Woodward is absent from the book’s last 115 pages.

The real dagger came when Hollywood called. All the President’s Men, the book, of course became All the President’s Men, the movie.

In the spring of 1976, the Post’s Watergate team gathered for a private screening of a nearly finished cut. The men in the room saw themselves reshaped on-screen into big-name stars. Robert Redford played Woodward; Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein. Three Post editors were portrayed by award-winning character actors: Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, Martin Balsam as Howard Simons, and Jack Warden as Harry Rosenfeld.

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Most of them were happy with their portrayals. (Robards won an Oscar for playing Bradlee, despite barely 10 minutes of screen time.) But Simons was hurt deeply by the way the film made him seem like a mere functionary under Bradlee; in reality, Bradlee was only lightly involved in the story until months after the break-in. One critic noted that Simons “is made to sound like a fool who wanted them taken off the story,” when in reality he was “the reporters’ strongest defender.” (Simons was later curator of the Nieman Foundation until his death from pancreatic cancer in 1989. At his memorial service, Woodward apologized for how Simons was portrayed in the movie.)

But Sussman, the leader of the Watergate Three, wasn’t portrayed inaccurately—he just wasn’t portrayed at all. He’d been written out of the movie entirely. Filmmakers said they were worried that having three middle-aged white-guy editors on-screen was already confusing for the audience, and four would’ve been too much.

But that it was Sussman they chose to cut—the editor most involved in the story from day one—was galling to many, both in and out of the Post. When the director, Alan J. Pakula, was doing his initial research for the film, both Simons and Rosenfeld had told him that “if any one individual at the Post was deserving of a Pulitzer for the newspaper’s Watergate coverage … it was Barry Sussman.”

“Of all the filmmakers’ real and imagined derelictions, the elimination of Sussman as a character was the one that bothered Post staffers most,” the Post film critic Gary Arnold wrote in his review. “Indeed, it has proved a more serious drawback than one might have guessed, because the picture needs a rumpled, avuncular, dogged editorial type to contrast with Robards’ flamboyant Bradlee and to supply some lucid updating and recapping of information as we go along.”

“As history, this is inexcusable,” wrote Jim Mann of The Baltimore Sun, “because it expunges from the record the editor who worked most intimately and directly with the reporters in the early days of Watergate.”

The Post reporter Timothy Robinson told the Chicago Daily News he’d almost boycotted the movie because of Sussman’s omission. “The real hero isn’t even in it,” he said. “He was the guy who kept pushing and pushing that story.”

“When the celebrification of Watergate hit, Barry Sussman got cut out,” Mann, a former Post reporter, would say later. “If you take the hurt that Howard Simons felt, and you multiply that hurt by a thousand, you get to Barry Sussman.” In 1992, the Post itself would call Sussman’s omission “the most grievous example” of the movie’s “factual deficiencies.”


After the film, the break between Sussman and Woodstein was total. Shepard describes the movie as having done “permanent psychic damage” to Sussman. Thirty years later, when she called Sussman to interview him about Woodward and Bernstein, his reply was: “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.”

Read: Dealing with an out-of-control president, in 1973

The sociologist Michael Schudson has written a number of great books about the news business, but one that sometimes gets overlooked is Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (1992). Two decades past the break-in, Schudson detailed the stories Americans (and American institutions) told themselves about this national embarrassment. One of the institutions whose story was most affected, of course, was the press.

The story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in bold pursuit of the perpetrators of the Watergate break-in is resonant and powerful in both the world of journalism and the culture at large … The film, even more than the book, ennobled investigative reporting and made of journalists modern heroes. A mythology of the press in Watergate developed into a significant national myth, a story that independently carries on a memory of Watergate even as details about what Nixon did or did not do fade away.

At its broadest, the myth of journalism in Watergate asserts that two young Washington Post reporters brought down the president of the United States. This is a myth of David and Goliath, of powerless individuals overturning an institution of overwhelming might. It is high noon in Washington, with two white-hatted young reporters at one end of the street and the black-hatted president at the other, protected by his minions. And the good guys win. The press, truth its only weapon, saves the day.

This stripped-down morality tale, mano a mano, doesn’t leave much narrative space for other characters. The Post’s work required not just creative and dogged reporting by Woodward and Bernstein—it required editors, it required news librarians, it required lawyers, it required an owner, all willing to do their part and able to do it skillfully. It required an institution that could both commit the resources and then stand its ground against Nixon’s threats.


There’s no doubt that the technology-enabled rise of journalists-as-solo-practitioners has its benefits. But I worry that it’s better at incentivizing journalists to make themselves stars than it is at creating the editorial infrastructure they need to do the most meaningful work.

After Watergate, after Woodward and Bernstein became Redford and Hoffman, the temptation to follow their model was strong. Many years later, Ben Bradlee would remember younger reporters who “covered the most routine rural fires as if they were Watergate and would come back and argue that there was gasoline in the hose and the fire chief was an anti-Semite and they really thought that was the way to fame and glory.”

I first met Barry in 2008, when I joined the Nieman Foundation to start Nieman Lab. Barry had come aboard four years earlier to start a different publication here named Nieman Watchdog, a site with the tagline “Questions the press should ask”—a worthy match for what Halberstam had called his “combination of suspicion and logic.” As Barry put it when the site shut down in 2012, Watchdog’s goal was “to encourage the press to do better reporting on public policy issues … There just isn’t enough good journalism.”

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The site was funded by a donation from Barry’s longtime Washington Post colleague Murrey Marder. He’d had his own long list of exploits, including reporting that had helped take down Joe McCarthy and breaking the story of the Cuban missile crisis. Barry said he edited the site in the spirit of Marder’s journalistic motto: “Wake up angry.” It was a line he took from a 1949 speech by the Louisville Courier-Journal managing editor James S. Pope:

I am convinced that the good editor — and perhaps any good and useful leader — has to wake up angry every morning. Not at the people who disagree with him on the numberless controversial topics of the day; in that arena he must maintain a tolerant calm. But he is not amused at all by the charming chicanery that surrounds him. He does not wait for the moment to crusade on a spectacular scale. He does not await an epidemic. He spots and cauterizes civic germs, regardless of the enemies gained, before an infection takes root.

An immune system is a fair metaphor for journalism. It can identify problems and make it more likely they get fixed. But doing so requires support that goes well beyond bylines. It doesn’t always generate sparkling open rates for your emails. Individual journalists can do great work, of course. But it’s usually much easier for institutions, packed full of those individual journalists, to do it—and to withstand those who don’t want to see those problems get fixed. David beating Goliath is a hell of a story, but in reality, the guy with the slingshot doesn’t win often.

It’s more than a little ironic that Barry died less than two weeks before the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, a moment that will be endlessly mined for content. The scandal will likely be remembered at least as much through myth—Robert Redford questioning Hal Holbrook in a parking garage—as through reality. Hollywood wrote Barry out of Watergate; mortality wrote him out of its anniversary. There’s plenty for journalists to celebrate about that particular Story of the Century; let’s just remember that the cast of characters wasn’t a short one.

This post appears courtesy of Nieman Lab.

Joshua Benton is a senior writer at Nieman Lab, which he founded and led for 12 years.



为什么 "水门事件三人组 "会以二人组的形式被人们记住？
做好新闻工作需要一个基础设施，包括许多没有得到署名的有才华的人。巴里-萨斯曼--既不叫 "伍德沃德 "也不叫 "伯恩斯坦 "的水门事件记者，就是其中之一。

作者：约书亚-本顿
潦草的苏斯曼画像
John Sunderland / The Denver Post / Getty; The Atlantic
2022年6月9日

1973年5月7日，《时代》杂志的标题非常明确，从数字上看。"水门事件三人组"。不是两个--三个。

下周公布普利策奖时，除非最后一刻出现逆转，否则报纸的公共服务奖将授予《华盛顿邮报》，以表彰其对水门事件和相关竞选丑闻的持续挖掘。

当然，邮报的顽强精神值得称赞。但业内人士知道，个人荣誉属于一个不太可能的三人组，他们都是资历较浅的新闻工作者，即《华盛顿邮报》哥伦比亚特区的编辑，38岁的巴里-萨斯曼，以及29岁的记者卡尔-伯恩斯坦和30岁的鲍勃-伍德沃德。

三人。一个不可能的三人组。对于几代年轻记者来说，扳倒理查德-尼克松的人，揭露水门事件的人，只有两个。伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦。伍德斯坦，如果你想让人们知道你已经掌握了行话。第三个人是谁--列在第一位的那个？


巴里-萨斯曼几天前去世，享年87岁，虽然他的去世赢得了一些关注，但这与他的工作的影响并不相称。在水门事件发生后的半个世纪里，在大众的想象中，水门事件三人组已经成为水门事件二人组。

部分原因是作为一个新闻编辑意味着什么。无论你如何塑造、改写或共同创造作品，你的名字都不会出现在故事的顶部--或底部，对于这个问题。成为一名编辑，意味着放弃作为记者的作者的荣耀。你的工作将在内部得到重视，但世界不会看到你的任何指纹。

但是，在《邮报》的水门事件报道从新闻故事转变为文化艺术品的过程中，苏斯曼也受到了独特的影响。真正的历史被加工成更容易消化的东西，而巴里不在其中。

这些天来，关于新闻业未来的讨论往往围绕着记者的个人品牌展开--记者们对这样一个词感到奇怪的自豪。在受众中建立起声誉？辞掉你的工作，摆脱束缚你的声音的约束（不管是真实的还是神话的），然后开始做Substack!


对有些记者来说，这种模式是很有意义的。但是，巴里-萨斯曼的故事提醒我们，世界上许多最重要的记者根本就没有得到署名。他们的品牌是不可见的。无论什么模式，无论什么支持系统能激发新闻业的下一个形式，他们都需要找到一种方法来确保他们也能完成他们的工作。

阅读。大西洋的读者对水门事件有何看法？

1972年6月17日星期六，巴里-萨斯曼是《华盛顿邮报》的城市编辑，当时有五名男子因闯入并窃听位于水门大楼的民主党全国委员会总部被捕。几小时后，在一名律师提供线索后，《华盛顿邮报》总编辑霍华德-西蒙斯打电话给仍在床上的萨斯曼，告诉他闯入事件。苏斯曼决定指派两名记者报道此事：长期从事警察工作的记者阿尔弗雷德-E-刘易斯和一名名叫鲍勃-伍德沃德的邮报新手。

那个星期六，另一位相对较新的记者卡尔-伯恩斯坦也在新闻编辑室里闲逛，因为他还没有提交前一天的报道。刘易斯在第一天的报道中获得了署名权，伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦是获得 "对这篇报道有贡献 "的八名记者之一。瑟斯曼必须选择谁在第二天，即周日，来进行后续报道；他选择了伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦。不久之后，苏斯曼担任了全职水门事件编辑的新工作，并再次选择他们两人全职工作--为了让伯恩斯坦负责这个故事，他与上级领导的真正反对意见进行了斗争。

为了让你了解苏斯曼在随后的几个月里所发挥的作用，我想从此后许多年里关于水门事件的书籍中摘录几段话。首先，这是伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦自己在《所有总统的人》（1974）中对萨斯曼的描述。

苏斯曼38岁，举止温和，略微肥胖，卷发，有学者风范。他曾在弗吉尼亚州与田纳西州交界处的一家小镇报纸上做过文员，在纽约大学做过速读教师，做过社会编辑，然后是《邮报》的郊区编辑--一个离开布鲁克林打零工到华盛顿的流浪记者。

苏斯曼有能力抓住事实，并把它们锁在记忆中，在那里，它们仍然准备好即时回忆。比起《邮报》的任何其他编辑，或者伯恩斯坦和伍德沃德，苏斯曼成了一个行走的水门事件知识汇编，当图书馆都不能用时，他就会被召唤出来作为参考资料。在截稿时，他将这些事实源源不断地注入报道中，形成一套重要的信息，以支持那些原本看起来最薄弱的启示。在苏斯曼的脑海中，一切都很吻合。水门事件是一个难题，而他是一个收集碎片的人。

在内心深处，苏斯曼是一个理论家。在另一个时代，他可能是一位塔木德学者。他培养了一种苏格拉底式的方法，向记者们提出一个又一个问题。谁和斯坦斯一起从商业部调到了CRP？米切尔的秘书呢？为什么没有人说利迪什么时候去的白宫，或者谁在那里和他一起工作？米切尔和斯坦兹都负责预算委员会，对吗？这说明什么呢？然后，苏斯曼会吸着烟斗，脸上露出满意的笑容......

自从民主党总部被闯入后，苏斯曼一直在研究哈定政府的茶壶圆顶丑闻。他有一套伯恩斯坦和伍德沃德不太理解的关于水门事件的理论--这与历史的必然性、战后美国的伦理、商品销售和理查德-尼克松有关。

大卫-哈尔伯斯塔姆在他的经典之作《大国重器》（1979）中写道。

邮报的年轻记者们普遍认为，[苏斯曼]是迄今为止报纸的年轻编辑中最好的一位。他喜欢柔和的线索，如果一个好故事的实质内容存在，他不会坚持要求记者必须回到传统和机械的 "谁、什么、何时、何地"。当记者带着故事的大纲回到办公室时，苏斯曼往往非常有价值，他不仅履行了编辑的职能，而且还像记者一样把收集到的事实在脑海中过了一遍，有时比记者还更有意义。他是一个最好的梦想家，当他有闪光的洞察力时，他们很少是步行者。他是新一代的编辑中第一个与新一代的记者打交道的人。他可以提出更大的问题。

因此，几乎从一开始，在邮报的其他人之前，苏斯曼就把水门事件看作是一个更大的故事，看到个别事件是一个更大的模式的一部分，是政府高层某处的秘密决定的结果，这些决定派小人物去做肮脏的差事。他并没有在第一天就闻到尼克松的味道，但他几乎比任何人都更早地感觉到总统的角色，而且他把怀疑和逻辑结合起来，使他比其他人更早地看到整个事件的真相......。

因此，从一开始，《邮报》就异常幸运。它有一个完美的工作编辑，而且水平恰到好处。苏斯曼不是简单的鼓励，他对故事进行了头脑风暴，试图把这些碎片拼凑起来，把它们装起来，再装起来，直到最后，慢慢地，开始有了一个模式。更重要的是，他相信这个故事，他确信那里有东西。西蒙斯从一开始就很好，因为从最好的老式报纸的角度来看，他认为这听起来很有希望。在基层工作的苏斯曼甚至更好；其他编辑在处理如此困难的故事时，可能会对年轻记者带来的碎片产生怀疑，而苏斯曼只提供持续的鼓励。苏斯曼总是相信还有更多的东西，而鉴于理查德-尼克松和水门事件，总是有的。

这是未来的《华盛顿邮报》执行编辑Len Downie在1976年的《新混混》一书中所说的。美国调查记者的内幕。

那天，城市编辑巴里-萨斯曼......从田纳西州来的布鲁克林工匠，比新闻编辑室里的任何人都更清楚地认识到，水门事件是一个潜在的重大事件。苏斯曼，有时具有疯狂的想象力的分析头脑，对可预测的，即使有时是耸人听闻的事件不感兴趣，这些事件消耗了普通报纸的大量编辑资源和新闻纸。他对出乎意料的人类行为和社会趋势非常着迷--他把对哥伦比亚特区大部分日常新闻报道的监督权留给了下属，这样他就可以把精力集中在几个特别机智的记者的长期深入项目上......

正是伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦在苏斯曼富有想象力、不断进行理论研究的指导下，平心静气地工作，几乎没有休息，并以不可思议的方式进行协调，使他们遥遥领先于其他所有人。

摘自阿德里安-哈维尔的《深度真相：鲍勃-伍德沃德和卡尔-伯恩斯坦的生活》（1993）。

苏斯曼正在成为 "伍德斯坦 "的主要附属品--这是这个团队在新闻编辑部被称为的术语。可以说，在1972-73年，这个团队往往是三驾马车，以苏斯曼为首。"Woodsteinman "会更准确。

马克思-霍兰，《泄密》的作者。马克-费尔特为何成为 "深喉"（2012年）一书的作者马克斯-霍兰（Max Holland）将苏斯曼描述为 "三足鼎立而非二人转中最坚固的一环"。

随着水门事件蜂拥而至，美国政界的注意力转向了《邮报》。该报因水门事件报道而获得的第一个重要奖项是德鲁-皮尔森基金会调查性报道奖，这在当时是新闻界最高的现金奖（6000美元，大约相当于今天的4万美元）。该奖项（和奖金）被授予水门事件三人组。苏斯曼、伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦。

接着是《时代》杂志的报道。

邮报》的人开始对这个将他们从职业默默无闻中提升出来的故事有了共同的痴迷。除此之外，他们除了年轻之外没有什么共同之处。伍德沃德是共和党人，毕业于耶鲁大学和海军军官团......他被认为是一个流畅的采访者，但却是一个平庸的作家。

伯恩斯坦，头发长，穿着邋遢，大学辍学，是《头版》中的人物。尽管他在散文方面很有天赋，但他因表现不佳而声名狼藉，部分原因是他被上司抓到在市政厅的新闻发布室里明显睡着了......。

尽管他们在风格上存在差异，而且在社交方面也很少见面，但在苏斯曼热情洋溢的指导下，他们合作得很好......三人的作品已经赢得了六个主要的报道奖项......。

正如《时代》杂志所预测的那样，《华盛顿邮报》事实上赢得了当年的普利策公共服务奖。与其他普利策奖不同的是，公共服务奖是颁发给整个新闻机构的，而不是给个别记者的。伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦最初对此并不满意，正如多年后邮报编辑本-布拉德利在其回忆录《美好生活》中所叙述的那样。多年后，邮报编辑本-布拉德利在他的回忆录《美好生活：报业和其他冒险》中回忆道。

伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦当然很高兴，当我第二天早上[在普利策奖宣布之后]见到他们时，他们并没有高兴得不得了。他们走进我的办公室 "谈话"，但很快就可以看出，他们的想法比相互争吵要多。他们不敢马上进入主题，但很快就溢出来了。

为什么普利策奖被授予报社，而不是授予他们，伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦，他们在报道中占了很大份额？

可供利用的信用总是有限的。

阅读：我的祖父如何帮助推翻了尼克松总统的职位

随着水门事件丑闻的蔓延（但离尼克松辞职还有一年多的时间），人们要求出版一本关于邮报报道的书--这是它在新闻纸之外更广泛的生活中迈出的第一步。

最初的讨论是由 "水门事件三人组 "共同撰写；这就是最初向代理人大卫-奥布斯特提出的方案。但伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦后来决定将苏斯曼排除在外。以下是艾丽西亚-C-谢泼德在她的《伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦》一书中写到的。水门事件阴影下的生活。

他们不想伤害萨斯曼的感情，因为他们清楚地意识到他为他们所做的一切，以及他如何经常改进他们的故事。他们认为他是一个出色的编辑，但他们现在不需要一个编辑。他们会从西蒙-舒斯特公司那里得到这些。

"我感到抱歉，"伍德沃德多年后会说。"你知道，这是一个记者要讲的故事。而不是一个编辑的。"

在水门事件之前，苏斯曼和伍德沃德一直是亲密无间的朋友--在苏斯曼的家里闲逛，安排周末的触摸式足球比赛，就新闻工作谈上几个小时。苏斯曼曾是伍德沃德在邮报的导师。但把他从书中删掉，打破了双方的关系。当《总统的男人》在书店上架时，他们已经不再交谈了。

苏斯曼从《邮报》抽出时间来写他的《水门事件》一书，这本书成为《伟大的隐瞒》。这本书成为《伟大的掩盖：尼克松和水门事件的丑闻》。这本书被寄予厚望；在《总统的男人》问世后不久，一位作家说："据说哥伦比亚特区的编辑巴里-萨斯曼正在写一本持久的书，它将在水门事件的书籍洪流中脱颖而出。" 而在12月出版后，它受到了评论家和历史学家的称赞。("苏斯曼在将水门事件纳入这个国家的视角方面做得最好。" "对水门事件最好和最清晰的解读。" "关于水门事件最值得一读的书"）。


但它在销售和文化影响方面无法与《总统的男人》相比。(《深喉》只得到了简短的、二手的提及。) 水门事件三人组的分裂直接被编入其文本。伍德沃德在该书的最后115页中没有出现。

真正的匕首来自于好莱坞的召唤。总统的男人》这本书当然成为《总统的男人》这部电影。

1976年春天，《邮报》的水门事件小组聚集在一起，对即将完成的剪辑进行了一次私人放映。房间里的人看到自己在屏幕上被塑造成大牌明星。罗伯特-雷德福扮演伍德沃德；达斯汀-霍夫曼扮演伯恩斯坦。三位邮报编辑由获奖的角色演员扮演。杰森-罗伯茨扮演本-布拉德利，马丁-鲍尔森扮演霍华德-西蒙斯，杰克-沃顿扮演哈里-罗森菲尔德。

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他们中的大多数人都对自己的形象感到满意。(罗伯茨因扮演布拉德利而获得了奥斯卡奖，尽管出场时间只有10分钟）。但西蒙斯被影片中他在布拉德利手下的表现深深地伤害了；实际上，布拉德利只是在破门而入的几个月后才轻轻地参与了这个故事。一位评论家指出，西蒙斯 "被说成是一个希望他们退出报道的傻瓜"，而实际上他是 "记者们最有力的辩护人"。(西蒙斯后来成为尼曼基金会的馆长，直到1989年因胰腺癌去世。在他的追悼会上，伍德沃德为电影中对西蒙斯的描述表示道歉）。

但是，水门事件三人组的领导人萨斯曼并没有被不准确地描绘，他只是根本没有被描绘出来。他被完全写进了电影里。电影制作人说，他们担心屏幕上有三个中年白人编辑已经让观众感到困惑，而四个人就太多了。

但他们选择裁掉的是苏斯曼--从第一天起就参与故事的编辑，这让许多人感到痛心，无论是在邮报内部还是外部。当导演艾伦-帕库拉（Alan J. Pakula）为这部电影做最初的研究时，西蒙斯和罗森菲尔德都告诉他，"如果邮报的任何一个人因该报的水门事件报道而值得获得普利策奖...那就是巴里-萨斯曼"。

"邮报》影评人加里-阿诺德（Gary Arnold）在他的评论中写道："在电影制作者所有真实的和想象的失职中，消除萨斯曼这个角色是最让邮报工作人员感到困扰的。"事实上，它被证明是一个比人们所猜测的更严重的缺点，因为这部电影需要一个皱巴巴的、有礼貌的、顽强的编辑类型来与罗伯茨的浮夸的布拉德利形成对比，并在我们前进的过程中提供一些清晰的信息更新和回顾。

"巴尔的摩太阳报》的吉姆-曼写道："作为历史，这是不可原谅的，因为它从记录中删除了在水门事件早期与记者合作最密切、最直接的编辑。"

邮报》记者蒂莫西-罗宾逊（Timothy Robinson）告诉《芝加哥每日新闻》，由于苏斯曼的遗漏，他几乎抵制了这部电影。"他说："真正的英雄甚至没有出现在里面。他说："他是那个不断推动和推动这个故事的人。"

"当水门事件的喧嚣袭来时，巴里-萨斯曼被排除在外，"前邮报记者曼恩后来说。"如果你把霍华德-西蒙斯感受到的伤害，乘以一千，你就会发现巴里-萨斯曼。" 1992年，《邮报》自己称萨斯曼的遗漏是电影 "事实缺陷 "的 "最糟糕的例子"。


在这部电影之后，萨斯曼和伍德斯坦之间彻底决裂。谢泼德形容这部电影对萨斯曼造成了 "永久性的心理伤害"。30年后，当她打电话给苏斯曼采访他关于伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦的情况时，他的回答是 "我对他们中的任何一个都没有什么好的评价。"

阅读。1973年，与一个失控的总统打交道

社会学家迈克尔-舒德森（Michael Schudson）写了许多关于新闻业的好书，但有一本有时会被忽略的书是《美国记忆中的水门事件》。我们如何记住、忘记和重构过去》（1992年）。在水门事件过去20年后，舒德森详细介绍了美国人（和美国机构）对这一国家尴尬的故事。当然，故事受影响最大的机构之一是媒体。

鲍勃-伍德沃德和卡尔-伯恩斯坦大胆追捕水门事件肇事者的故事，在新闻界和整个文化界都产生了共鸣和影响......这部电影，甚至比这本书更让调查性报道变得高贵，让记者成为现代英雄。一个关于水门事件中的新闻界的神话发展成为一个重要的国家神话，这个故事独立地延续着对水门事件的记忆，即使关于尼克松做了什么或没有做什么的细节已经逐渐消失。

在最广泛的意义上，水门事件中的新闻业神话断言，两名年轻的《华盛顿邮报》记者扳倒了美国总统。这是一个关于大卫和歌利亚的神话，是无权无势的个人推翻了一个具有压倒性力量的机构。这是华盛顿的正午时分，两个戴白帽子的年轻记者在街道的一端，戴黑帽子的总统在另一端，由他的爪牙保护。好人赢了。新闻界以其唯一的武器--真理拯救了世界。

这个脱胎换骨的道德故事，没有给其他角色留下太多的叙述空间。邮报的工作不仅需要伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦的创造性和坚持不懈的报道，还需要编辑、新闻图书管理员、律师和老板，他们都愿意尽自己的职责，并能熟练地完成。它需要一个既能投入资源，又能在尼克松的威胁下坚持立场的机构。


毫无疑问，由技术促成的记者作为个体从业者的崛起有其好处。但我担心的是，它在激励记者使自己成为明星方面做得更好，而不是创造他们做最有意义的工作所需的编辑基础设施。

在水门事件之后，在伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦成为雷德福和霍夫曼之后，效仿他们的模式的诱惑很强。许多年后，本-布拉德利还记得那些年轻的记者，他们 "把最普通的农村火灾当作水门事件来报道，回来后会争辩说水管里有汽油，消防队长是个反犹太主义者，他们真的认为那是获得名声和荣耀的途径。"

我第一次见到巴里是在2008年，当时我加入尼曼基金会，创办尼曼实验室。四年前，巴里在这里创办了一个不同的出版物，名为尼曼看门狗，这个网站的口号是 "新闻界应该问的问题"--这与哈伯斯塔姆所说的他的 "怀疑与逻辑的结合 "是相称的。正如巴里在该网站于2012年关闭时所说，看门狗的目标是 "鼓励媒体对公共政策问题进行更好的报道......只是没有足够的好新闻。"

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该网站由巴里的华盛顿邮报长期同事穆里-马德的捐款资助。他有自己的一长串经历，包括帮助扳倒乔-麦卡锡的报道和打破古巴导弹危机的故事。巴里说，他本着马尔德的新闻座右铭："愤怒地醒来 "的精神编辑网站。这句话是他从《路易斯维尔信使报》总编辑詹姆斯-S-波普1949年的一次演讲中摘录的。

我相信，好的编辑--也许是任何好的、有用的领导人--每天早上都必须愤怒地醒来。不是针对那些在当今无数有争议的话题上与他意见相左的人；在这个领域，他必须保持一种宽容的冷静。但他对围绕在他身边的迷人的诡计一点也不感到好笑。他不等待时机，以惊人的规模进行讨伐。他不等待流行病的发生。他在感染扎根之前就发现并烧毁民间病菌，而不计较获得的敌人。

免疫系统是对新闻业的一个公平的比喻。它可以发现问题并使问题更有可能得到解决。但这样做需要的支持远远超出了署名的范围。它并不总是为你的电子邮件带来闪亮的打开率。当然，个别记者可以做伟大的工作。但是，对于那些挤满了个人记者的机构来说，通常更容易做到这一点，也更容易抵御那些不想看到这些问题得到解决的人。大卫击败歌利亚是一个很好的故事，但在现实中，拿着弹弓的人并不经常获胜。

巴里在水门事件50周年前不到两周就去世了，这实在是有点讽刺，这个时刻将被无休止地挖掘内容。人们对这一丑闻的记忆至少会通过神话--罗伯特-雷德福在停车场询问哈尔-霍尔布鲁克--而不是通过现实。好莱坞把巴里从水门事件中写出来，而现实则把他从周年纪念中写出来。对于这个特殊的世纪故事，记者们有很多值得庆祝的地方；让我们记住，这个人物的阵容并不短。

这篇文章是由尼曼实验室提供的。

约书亚-本顿是尼曼实验室的资深作家，他创立该实验室并领导了12年。