a blog by Jack Limpert, Editor of The Washingtonian for more than 40 years.
From a Washington Post review by Kathy Kiely of Carl Bernstein’s book “Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom”
“Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom” doesn’t mention Watergate. The occasional references to Richard Nixon have nothing to do with the scandal that Bernstein would help uncover about the nation’s 37th president. And the newspaper that the work of Bernstein and Bob Woodward vaulted into the journalistic pantheon rates only relatively glancing mentions.
From a Washington Post column by David Von Drehle headlined “Who was Carl Bernstein before Watergate? A natural news hound, learning the trade.”:
By the time he was 43, newspaperman Carl Bernstein had been portrayed on the Hollywood big screen by two of the greatest actors of his generation, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson. (One version was mostly factual, the other somewhat fictionalized.) It’s doubtful anyone in the history of ink-stained wretches can match that record.
From a Wall Street Journal review by Thomas Mallon of Carl Bernstein’s book “Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom”:
Throughout “Chasing History,” the Washington Post appears not as the paper that made Carl Bernstein famous but as competition to the one that made him a newsman, the old Evening Star. He tells the tale of a vanished, noisy print world in which “every page was composed, literally, within a rectangular metal form, called a ‘chase,’ that replicated the size of a newspaper page and served as a fence to contain the tens of thousands of pieces of type inside.” Perhaps unintentionally, Mr. Bernstein’s title is a play on words: his book is not so much about chasing after history as it is about “chasing” within those metal rectangles what’s often called history’s first draft….
From a New York Times book review by Dwight Garner headlined “Carl Bernstein, Looking Back at His Start, Conjures the Newsrooms of the Early 1960s”:
Carl Bernstein’s new book, “Chasing History,” is his second memoir. His first, “Loyalties,” appeared more than three decades ago, in 1989.
“Loyalties” was about growing up in an idealistic and radical family — his father, a union organizer, had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1940s — under constant surveillance and harassment from the F.B.I.
