Three summers ago, Newsweek let fly with a cover story that set a record for that magazine's newsstand sales, a record not broken until last week.
The cover was slugged "Games Singles Play," and it showed a beautiful young woman-suntanned, blond, and large of breasts and teeth-standing by the pool of a "swinging singles" apartment complex. She wore a skimpy purple bikini and held a glass of red wine in her hand. On the decking behind her lounged two bronzed young men, who seemed ready, when the picture taking was over, to join their woman friend in something hedonistic.
That issue sold furiously. People were apparently relieved to see a woman spilling out of a bathing suit after weeks of Watergate faces squinting and grimacing under the Newsweek cover logo. In the eleven weeks before the Singles story, Newsweek had printed eight Watergate covers, splashed with pictures of John Dean (twice in a row), Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, McCord, and, three times, a dejected-looking Richard Nixon. After all that, people were desperate to read about swinging singles.
Now, 154 covers later, Newsweek has shattered the sales record of the Singles issue with a cover featuring . . . three pictures of a dejected-looking Richard Nixon. That cover, which ran last week, was promotion for the first installment of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's "The Final Days," an account of Nixon's activities as he fell from power, if not exactly grace. The second and last installment appears this week, and it is much like the first: compelling, gossip-laden, well-assembled, badly-written (if only Gay Talese could have purchased their notes), and, because the information confirms everything people suspected about Nixon in his final days, unsurprising.
The scenes Woodward and Bernstein sketch are by now legend, cackled over everywhere: Nixon praying on his knees with Kissinger, then pounding the carpet and sobbing; Pat Nixon spurning her husband's sexual advances- for 12 years; Nixon walking the White House halls at night, talking to portraits of former presidents.
Woodward and Bernstein took heavy flak last week for writing as they did about such things. The critics seem divided into two camps: readers who think Nixon's privacy was invaded, and reporters and editors who think it unethical to include dialogue that Woodward and Bernstein neither heard nor attributed (such as the Nixon-Kissinger exchanges).
The first criticism argues that evidence of a president's insanity is privileged information. Undoubtedly its strongest supporters are those who protested, as Woodward and Bernstein were unraveling the Watergate scandal three years ago, that it was improper to ask about a president's criminality.
The second criticism deserves more attention. The scolding reporters and editors are right, in a sense: a reporter shouldn't put quotation marks around something he can't prove was said, seactly as he quotes it. But in this extraordinary case, Woodward and Bernstein had to choose between quoting nothing of the important drama that paralleled Nixon's disintegration, writing a version attributed to the principals in the episode (whose statements for the record were certain to be self-serving of false), or reconstructing quotes as best they could from anonymous sources, many of whom kept detailed diaries. They made the right decision. And in explaining their methods in full, Woodward and Bernstein alert readers to the nature of the history they have written.
