do this story. for woodward and bernstein it wasn t only that the break-in seemed fishy. there was something just as odd about the white house response. presidential press secretary ron ziegler called it a third-rate burglary attempt. ron ziegler calling it a third-rate burglary, that was the tipoff to us. there seemed to be nothing third-rate about it except they got caught. they raised the stakes so high. with this third-rate burglary nonsense. it was apparent that something here was really rotten. nixon assigned his top lieutenants the president s men the task of managing the fallout from the break-in. among them chief of staff bob haldeman and presidential adviser john ehrlichman would become the guardians of the clandestine activities.
[ typewriter sounds ] the senate tonight voted 77-0 to establish a select committee to investigate the watergate bugging case. the committee will be headed by barely eight months after woodward and bernstein. published their first article, the senate created a committee to investigate the scandal. the story started with a reporters nosing around a suspicious break in. it has grown into a full-fledged examination of the nixon white house. i know we are obstructing justice. i told haldeman that. i told ehrlichman that. they didn t want to hear that. ehrlichman said, john, there s something putrid in your house. he said, john, there s something putrid in your drinking water out there where you live and i
but as president i must put the interests of america first. the president had been driven from office because the american people had learned the truth about richard nixon. but how we learned the truth, that fascinated me. nixon s downfall had begun two years earlier when five men were caught spying and wiretapping at the democratic national headquarters at an office complex called watergate. over at the washington post two rookie reporters, bob woodward and carl bernstein, picked up the story. their investigation would unfold like a political thriller. and so i thought that the part that they played in exposing the scandal would make a movie, maybe even a good movie. action.
discover was that nixon s re-election committee was engaging in a campaign of espionage and sabotage against the democrats. woodward and bernstein were beginning to pull back the curtains on a strange and shadowy world. and i wanted to know how they were doing it. i got really intrigued with the idea of making a film about woodward and bernstein because one was a jew, the other was a wasp, one was a radical liberal and the other was a republican. what interested me was beyond that was the hard work they did together to get at the story. so i gave woodward a call. he was pretty chilly on the phone. i said hi, this is bob redford calling. he said, yeah. and i said, i wanted to know if i could meet and you your partner because i have this idea i want to share with you. woodward came to me and said that redford had called. and i put together who redford was. and was interested in talking to us or whatever. i said we re busy, we ve got to
record. she also had to keep her foot on the pedal. she used the machine to show how it happened. when i asked her to demonstrate she pushed the button and kept her foot on and supposedly reached back about six feet to get the telephone. her foot came off the pedal just with the mere movement and there was just no way it was believable. the white house contention that the talk between the president and halderman will give more ammunition to the president s critics. to hear something so obviously untrue changed a lot of the american public s true of the whole situation. rosemary woods would stand by her story. bob woodward would later write it became a symbol for nixon s entire watergate problem. the truth had been deleted. the truth was missing. the truth was missing. as a struggling actor, i need all the breaks that i can get. at liberty butchumal- cut.