“It Is The Only Morning Newspaper In The Most Powerful Capital In The World”

Almost 40 years before Jeff Bezos rescued the Washington Post from stegosaurus status, the paper was ascendant in the aftermath of its Watergate reportage, and the focus of a 60 Minutes report by Mike Wallace. Watching Ben Bradlee in this story reminds how perfectly Jason Robards captured him, physically and spiritually, in All the President’s Men. “If we hadn’t been right, we would’ve been dead,” Katherine Graham notes in regards to Watergate, but years later integrity was no match for technology.

Quick question: Without pause, can you name the person ultimately revealed as the Woodward-Bernstein Deep Throat source? For decades, this was one of the mysteries most obsessed about in America, and it seemed to have become an afterthought nearly the moment it was solved. I think the name W. Mark Felt means almost nothing to the vast majority of people in the country today. Even before he passed away, Felt had returned to the shadows.

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