WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: How one-third of “The Watergate Three” got written out of journalism history.
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.
Most of them were happy with their portrayals. (Robards won an Oscar 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 [Barry] 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 1 — was galling to many, both in and out of the Post. When director Alan 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,” 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.”
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.”
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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 the cast of characters wasn’t a short one.
As Max Holland wrote in the Weekly Standard right around this time in 2017 in “The Woodstein Tapes:”
The truth was that All the President’s Men was a fabulistic account of a newspaper procedural, part and parcel of what was then called the New Journalism. It presented a sanitized and often trivialized account of what had gone on inside and outside the Post—or what Barry Sussman described to Pakula as a “modified, limited hang out,” intentionally parroting John Ehrlichman’s infamous phrase about the tactic of presenting misleading information in order to divert attention from the real facts. In particular, Deep Throat was a fiction—not in the sense of a completely invented character—but in the motives attributed to him.
What Woodward and Bernstein conveniently left out of their explanation to Pakula—either because they were all-too-acutely aware of it or were inexcusably ignorant of it—was that this last rendezvous had coincided with [Mark] Felt’s abrupt departure from the FBI because he was suspected of leaking to the press. He had never talked to Woodward out of a concern for the office of the presidency or the bureau, much less the law or morality. He had leaked to damage the reputations of his rivals for the FBI directorship, which he coveted above all things. In May 1973, years of scheming had finally come to naught, and if he wasn’t experiencing a nervous breakdown that night he was close to one.
Woodward and Bernstein, of course, could hardly fess up: It would have been impossible to do so without providing Pakula with a serious clue to Deep Throat’s identity, and they were intent on keeping his name secret. More importantly, the mythology of Deep Throat-as-whistleblower had become central to their book and their reputations—and soon it would be central to the movie. So the duo kept up the pretense that Felt was a truth-teller and they had been in danger. Pakula faithfully recreated the paranoia in the film’s penultimate scene, careful, as Redford counseled, not to deliver the message “with hysterics.”
And “Woodstein” apparently didn’t mind a 138 minute gap in the film for Sussman, as well.
Related: From Glenn: Nixon’s Revenge. “But ultimately, that tolerance—and even the ruling class self-policing—was the product of deep-seated security in power. The liberal establishment of that era, which had crushed Sen. Barry Goldwater’s campaign like a bug, saw no one who might challenge it. This is why Nixon’s election was so traumatic for them. Like Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, the election of a Republican seemed somehow fundamentally wrong. Republicans in Congress could do things, and could even occasionally snatch a short-lived majority. But after four Roosevelt inaugurations, and a string of Democratic presidents interrupted only by Dwight Eisenhower, who could have had the nomination of either party and who showed no inclination to interfere with the post-New Deal federal gravy train, the presumption was that the Executive and the bureaucracy would stay essentially Democratic forever. Then, Nixon. Not the Camelot-redux hoped for with Bobby Kennedy, or even the party-establishment regime promised by Hubert Humphrey, but Nixon. A man from a small college instead of the Ivy League, a sometimes-awkward introvert, a fervent anti-communist when anti-communism was seen as declassé, Nixon was very much not our kind, dear.”
(Bumped.)
