The journalists who disclosed Nixon's felony

 

Woodward and Bernstein 

adapted from biography.com

Carl Bernstein (born 1944) and Robert Woodward (born 1943), investigative reporters for the Washington Post, wrote a series of articles about the Watergate scandals that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Carl Bernstein, born on February 14, 1944, in Washington, D.C., began part-time work at the Washington Star at the age of 16 and later dropped out of the University of Maryland to work full-time as a reporter. He joined the Washington Post's metropolitan staff in 1966, specializing in police, court, and city hall assignments, with occasional self-assigned feature stories.

Robert Upshur Woodward, born on March 26, 1943, in Geneva, Illinois, attended Yale University on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship, after which he served for five years as a naval officer. He joined the Washington Post's metropolitan staff in 1971.

On June 17, 1972, Woodward was assigned to cover a story about an attempted burglary the night before in which five men had been arrested at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. Woodward was soon joined on the story by Bernstein, and together the two young reporters undertook a series of investigative reports that gradually revealed the connections between the burglary and a converging pattern of crimes that finally implicated President Richard M. Nixon himself, forcing his resignation in the face of otherwise certain impeachment. The burglary was revealed as part of an extensive program of political espionage and sabotage run by Nixon subordinates at the White House and its political campaign organization, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, or, as referred to in most later press coverage, CREEP). In addition to the espionage and sabotage, another series of felonies stemmed from the attempt to cover up the earlier crimes by perjury and other obstructions of justice.

Bernstein and Woodward did not, all by themselves, bring about the destruction of the Nixon presidency, but some historians of the period do credit their early investigations with both informing and stimulating the official investigations by a special prosecutor, the courts, the Senate Watergate Committee, and the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives that eventually forced Nixon to resign when it was revealed that he had participated in the cover-up almost from the beginning.