Word: bernsteins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the New York Times last week published its dramatic story on the CIA's domestic snooping, the article and those that followed carried a familiar byline: Seymour Hersh. At 37, Hersh ranks as an almost unrivaled master of the governmental exposé. Woodward and Bernstein have Watergate, but Hersh's revelations over the past six years read like a historic road map to a generation: the massacre at My Lai, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's wiretapping of his aides (Kissinger has called him "my nemesis"), Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia, the Pentagon...
...there was another Jack Benny -less comic but considerably more generous. It was that trouper who traversed the country, raising some $6 million for America's leading orchestras. Thank yous were always abruptly dismissed. "Soloing with Leonard Bernstein," he liked to claim, "is like being on a desert island with Zsa Zsa Gabor and her boy friend. You feel you're not needed...
...indeed gone underground. Requests for interviews are being declined, and Woodward said recently: "We've dropped out." Woodward, 31, and Bernstein, 30, have had their troubles coping with sudden fame. As a friend explained their new reticence: "People were always asking them for big public-policy statements. They don't want to be pundits." Adds Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee: "They're journalists, and they're not journalisting when they get distracted by other reporters...
...offer to buy movie rights to the book for fear the Hollywood version would be, well, too Hollywood. They were right. The first draft of Writer William Goldman's script was excellent in parts, but generally superficial. "It read like a Henny Youngman joke-book of one-liners," Bernstein complained to a friend. "Harry Rosenfeld [Post metropolitan editor] came out looking like Phil Silvers, and Ben Bradlee became Walter Pidgeon. It was just too shallow." So Bernstein and Esquire Contributing Editor Nora Ephron, his sometime roommate, have rewritten large chunks of the script...
Money has changed their life-styles only mildly. Bernstein bought a cooperative apartment in a decayed Northwest Washington neighborhood, lent a friend money for a down payment on a house, and bought a closetful of expensive clothes ("which he wears badly," sighs one acquaintance). Bernstein still does not own a car, and he crashed in a rented auto two months ago. He broke two ribs, contracted a mild case of pleurisy and put on a quick 15 Ibs. because of enforced inaction while recuperating. Friends describe him as inhibited by his Watergate-related publicity and irritated at no longer being...