Woodward and Bernstein on 'Deep Throat'

This is a partial transcript from "On the Record," July 12, 2005, that has been edited for clarity.

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GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, HOST: The man known as "Deep Throat" provided key information that eventually brought down President Nixon. His identity remained secret for more than three decades until 91-year-old Mark Felt finally came forward and outed himself.

Now, Bob Woodward is sharing more secrets in his new book "The Secret Man." Bob Woodward joins us here in Washington. And, Carl Bernstein, his colleague at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, joins us live in New York, welcome to both of you.

And, Bob, I read the book, loved the book and felt sorry for Mark Felt in the end.

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BOB WOODWARD, "THE SECRET MAN" AUTHOR: As Carl has said he is the ultimate tormented man. He was a Hoover guy in the FBI but he saw all of this lawbreaking going on in the Nixon administration and I was able to push him to help us. That's a happy man. He's 91 and his memory is gone but he's content and happy.

VAN SUSTEREN: You write in the book even that you had some sadness for him, at least at times.

WOODWARD: Sure, oh sure, absolutely. I mean he did something that was contrary to all of his instincts and not too many people are able to do that and there were personal motives. He was upset that he didn't get promoted to be the director of the FBI, but the Nixon White House, as we now know, was up to every crime in the book almost.

VAN SUSTEREN: Carl, where were you when you heard Nixon was going to resign?

CARL BERNSTEIN, FORMER WASHINGTON POST REPORTER: I was at the Washington Post. Both Bob and I were there at the time, I believe. But it's interesting the introduction to this segment reflects a kind of over simplicity that I think becomes more and more mythologized, not just about Deep Throat and our coverage but about Watergate itself, the idea that Deep Throat's information resulted in the resignation of the president.

A very complicated process resulted in the resignation of the president, part of which was our coverage. Then you had a courageous judge. We had courageous editors and publishers at the Washington Post.

You had a courageous Senator in Senator Sam Irvin in the Watergate hearings. You had especially courageous Republicans, including Senator Barry Goldwater, who decided we cannot have a criminal president.

VAN SUSTEREN: But in Bob's book, and you wrote part of it, at the end but it talks about how the FBI sort of fell over and didn't investigate aggressively. They sort of failed us.

BERNSTEIN: Absolutely. Every institution connected to the executive branch failed us but, at the same time, happily the Congress, a courageous judge and, again, the press — and one of the reasons the press was able to perform its role is because we had anonymous sources whose confidentiality we protected, not just Mark Felt but probably 100 people.

You know we wrote several hundred stories. Most of our sources were Republicans. Most of them were in the Nixon administration and the Nixon Reelection Committee and we protected their identities and that's the reason that this book and this moment, when Judy Miller is in jail for not giving up a source that's why it's so important to understand the concept of why we must protect the confidentiality of our sources.

VAN SUSTEREN: It's sort of interesting how Time magazine folded on that, Judy Miller that Carl raises. Are you surprised what Time did?

WOODWARD: You know, I think they waited and I think it was a hard decision but I tell you back in the old days, as Carl points out, we really had dozens of confidential sources. And, Ben Bradley, who was the editor, Katharine Graham who was the publisher, there is no way that some prosecutor or investigator was going to get our notes or find out who our sources...

VAN SUSTEREN: They were tough. They were tough.

WOODWARD: They were tough.

VAN SUSTEREN: I don't want to spoil it for the viewers and but even the former attorney general had something to say about Katharine Graham about whether she...

WOODWARD: That she was going to get a certain part of her anatomy caught in the wringer if we wrote a story.

VAN SUSTEREN: Yes, if she did. I guess we did tell the viewers now.

WOODWARD: But they held firm and Carl is exactly right, we're now in an atmosphere where we need to know what the government is up to, what's going on. We're in a war. It continues in Iraq. There is a very massive covert war going on against terrorism worldwide. The press needs to be active.

VAN SUSTEREN: Is the press aggressive or is the press not aggressive right now?

WOODWARD: I think we can always be more aggressive, much, much more to do particularly — what's the danger to our society? Secret government and the anecdote to secret government is a press that can really find out what's going on.

BERNSTEIN: There's another danger and that is when the White House — as the Nixon White House did and as the Bush White House has done — tries successfully to make the conduct of the press the issue in public policy rather than the conduct of the government or the president or the men around the president.

And there's much too much acceptance of that happening today, just as there was at the time of Richard Nixon. You know, it is important that people on the left, people on the right, people in the center realize that the press is the one independent institution in our culture.

VAN SUSTEREN: And I hope that everybody...

BERNSTEIN: Whatever our shallowness, whatever our problems we are independent and we need to be able to function without prosecutors going wild trying to send us to jail.

VAN SUSTEREN: And with that, "The Secret Man," Bob Woodward's book it's just out. You got to read it. Also, it's sort of fun to find out how he even met Mark Felt but I'm not going to spoil that. Go out and get the book and read it and you can learn yourself. Bob, Carl, thank you both very much.

WOODWARD: Thanks.

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