Few journalists in America’s history have had the impact on their era and their craft as Carl Bernstein. In the early 1970s, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the Watergate story for The Washington Post and set the standard for modern investigative reporting, for which they and The Post were awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Since then, in books, magazine articles, commentary, television reporting, and as editor of a pioneering political website, Bernstein has continued to build on the theme he and Woodward first explored in the Nixon years–the use and abuse of power: political, media, financial, cultural and spiritual power.
At the podium, Bernstein engages audiences through his passion, humor and wit as he draws analogies between Watergate and the major political issues affecting America today. He discusses the weaknesses in our political system, the strength of the media and identifies why the political system is failing. In addition, he takes audiences on a behind the scenes look at the discoveries he and Woodward made to expose the Watergate scandal, how the White House abused its power, and why it changed the whole course of history forever.
Currently Bernstein is at work on three major projects: a dramatic TV series about the United States Congress; a film with director Steven Soderbergh; and a memoir about growing up at a Washington newspaper during the Kennedy era. He also appears regularly on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and in the 2008 presidential campaign was an on-air political analyst for CNN.
His most recent book was the national bestseller A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, acclaimed as the definitive biography of its subject, published by Knopf.
With Woodward, Bernstein wrote two classic best sellers: All the President’s Men (also a movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), about their coverage of the Watergate story; and The Final Days, about the denouement of the Nixon presidency.
His next book, a masterful memoir of his family’s experience in the McCarthy era, is titled Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir. He is also the co-author of the definitive papal biography, His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time, which detailed the Pope’s pivotal and often clandestine role in the fall of communism.
Bernstein’s magazine journalism and web commentary continues to combine rare reportorial skill with his renown as a prose stylist: from “The Ballad of John McCain,” a millennial portrait of the presidential candidate in Vanity Fair magazine, to ground-breaking Newsweek/Daily Beast commentaries in 2011 about the pernicious influence of Rupert Murdoch on the politics, journalism and popular culture of three continents. Bernstein is also a contributing editor of Vanity Fair.
Since his famous essay, “The Triumph of Idiot Culture,” a 1992 cover story for The New Republic about increasing sensationalism, gossip and manufactured controversy as staples of the American press, he has proved a prescient critic of his own profession.
In 1977-78, he spent a year investigating the CIA’s secret relationship with the American press during the Cold War. The resulting 25,000-word article for Rolling Stone, entitled “The CIA and the Media,” was the first to examine a subject long suppressed by both American newspapers and the intelligence community.
A lesser-known part of Bernstein’s journalistic career is his tenure as a rock-critic at The Washington Post while a metro reporter before Watergate; he continues to write (very) occasionally about rock and classical music.
Bernstein was born and raised in Washington, DC and began his journalism career at age 16 as a copyboy for The Washington Evening Star, becoming a reporter at 19.
He lives in New York with his wife and is the father of two sons, one a journalist and the other a rock musician.
