Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom Carl Bernstein

934 Pages·2022·5.325 MB·English

by  Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom ,Carl Bernstein

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About the Author
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Copyright Page

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For those in this book who put me on a path
And for Lance Morrow especially
And for Jeff Zucker

PROLOGUE
I needed a suit.
I had a proper suit, a winter one, but I had never owned a summer suit
—a necessity in the immense heat of Washington, D.C., where most of the
senators and congressmen from farther down south began dressing in
whites and wearing straw hats in mid-April, not long after the cherry
blossoms were done blooming. If I was now to enter the grown-up world of
work in the nation’s capital, I would require a summer suit.
I meant to buy it at Woodward & Lothrop, the big department store on
F Street. I had forty-five dollars in my pocket, saved up from my Saturday
job at S. N. McBride’s layaway department store on the edge of
Swampoodle, a ramshackle neighborhood the trains passed through as they
slowed toward Union Station. After buying my suit, I hoped to ascend to a
higher vocation: the newspaper business. I knew almost nothing about it,
except that as a child I’d always read the sports section and the front-page
news in the Washington Post. And at ages twelve and thirteen, after my
family moved from the city to Silver Spring in the Maryland suburbs, I had
a paper route delivering the final edition of the Evening Star from a red
wagon.
On this June morning in 1960, I hitchhiked up Colesville Road to
Georgia Avenue, and then I walked the half mile to the B&O railroad
station diagonally across from the pool hall where on any other summer day
(and too many during the school year) I was likely to be found.
I boarded the Capitol Limited, which carried me in air-conditioned
luxury through Takoma Park and Northeast Washington, past Catholic
University and the Old Soldiers’ Home, whose ancients, some still in
uniform, looked up from their wooden chairs on the lawn and waved when
the engineer blew his horn in tribute. I had read in history class that
Abraham Lincoln summered each year of his presidency in a cottage at the
Old Soldiers’ Home, when the heat downtown made life unbearable in the
White House, which had been built over a swamp.
From Silver Spring, Union Station lay seven miles down the tracks, its
marble colonnade facing the Capitol of the United States—worlds away
from suburban Maryland, it seemed to me, though our next-door neighbor
was a U.S. senator, Alan Bible of Nevada. The senator’s sons Billy and Paul
were my schoolmates. Their father was something like the emperor of
Washington, D.C., by virtue of being chairman of the Senate Committee on
the District of Columbia.
Union Station was magnificent, modeled on some famous Roman
baths, as the tour guides liked to point out. Usually when I took the train
downtown, I’d linger in the station’s pinball room, adjacent to the USO
lounge, and test my skill at the machines until I’d exhausted a shotgun roll
of forty nickels. That might take a couple of hours on a good run.
But on this day I headed straight for the streetcar up Pennsylvania
Avenue, getting off at Tenth Street and then walking past Ford’s Theatre
and the house across the street where Lincoln died. Downtown Washington
was territory I’d known from the time I was a small child. My father’s old
office, the one he’d had at 930 F Street until it was closed down during the
Joe McCarthy business, was around the corner from where Lincoln was
shot. And a few blocks west, at Fourteenth Street, was Garfinckel’s
department store, where my grandfather—my mother’s father—had gone to
work as a cuffer in the men’s tailoring department after he got off the boat
from Russia. Next to Garfinckel’s, F Street stopped abruptly at the Treasury
Department—adjacent to the White House, which my class from grammar
school visited almost every year. My maternal great-grandmother, a tiny
woman with shriveled skin, still lived downtown, on Seventh Street, just
beyond the big department stores, atop a little photo studio where the
youngest (and strangest) of her five children snapped portraits, sometimes
of congressmen or a clutch of local businessmen.
I’d been disoriented by our move from the city to the suburbs. The
jumble of downtown Washington, where the shrines and emblems of the
nation gleamed next to squat mercantile buildings and faded antebellum
rooming houses, had for me an enchantment of familiarity. I’d turned
sixteen on Valentine’s Day and felt much more adult now, with a work
permit in my wallet and my underage employment at McBride’s—
technically illegal, like some of its layaway interest rates—behind me as
well.
I walked past the sooty Hotel Harrington and the television studios of
WTTG and the DuMont network, where every couple of weeks I danced on
The Milt Grant Show with other teenagers—white ones, because the Black
kids danced on a different day of the week. Woodward & Lothrop, my
destination, was a turn-of-the-century pile that Washingtonians called
Woodies. It was the biggest department store in the city and took up a full
square block.
My mother and father, in the early 1950s, had taken me with them to
join the sit-ins at Woodward & Lothrop to desegregate its Tea Room. In
those days, Union Station was the only place downtown, besides the
government cafeterias and a few others owned by a man named Evan Sholl,
that would serve Black customers at tables. They could stand and eat at the
lunch counters inside the dime stores and department stores but were
forbidden to sit.
On F Street, a block from Woodies, a legless vendor of pencils worked
his turf on a dolly with roller-skate wheels, propelling himself with his
hands and arms while a pet monkey held tight to his shoulder. I’d seen the
man many times and had wondered about him. Flush with cash this day, I
asked him for two pencils. I extended a quarter.
It was not often that I towered above the person I was talking to—or
his monkey. The vendor seemed gabby, wanting to talk. He asked me where
I was going, and I told him I was heading to Woodies to buy a suit. He was
wearing tattered pants that had been cut off and sewn or folded somehow to
cover the stumps of his legs. He suggested that perhaps I’d like to buy half
a dozen pencils. He asked my name, and when I told him, he brightened and
said his name was Bernstein too, Eddie Bernstein, which made me
suspicious, and that his monkey was named Gypsy, which sounded about
right.
To prove he was Eddie Bernstein he produced his vendor’s
identification, then asked which Bernsteins I was from. I was sure we
weren’t related; there were no Bernsteins outside our immediate family who
were kin that I’d heard of. Plus, this Eddie Bernstein said that his family
was from Florida. He asked how much I wanted to spend on a suit. I told
him maybe forty dollars.
“You should go see my friend Louie,” he said. “No-Label Louie.” He
was insistent, but in a friendly way. He said that Louie sold suits at a steep
discount, probably half of what I’d pay at Woodies, and that if I asked for
Louie himself and told him Eddie Bernstein had sent me, I’d get an even
better deal. I’d brought along a picture of a blue cord summer suit I liked,
clipped from the pages of a magazine, though I didn’t show it to him.
He pointed east and said Louie’s store was on D Street near the
intersection of Seventh, a patch I knew well because my great-grandmother
and the photo studio were almost around the corner. I bought four more
pencils from Eddie Bernstein and headed down the street, past my father’s
old union office.
Louie Goldstein’s “haberdashery,” as its owner referred to his store
when I walked inside, was conspicuous from the sidewalk because of its big
electric sign—unusual downtown, where almost everything shut down by
six o’clock in the evening except for a few restaurants and bars, and the
peep show movies and burlesque house on Ninth Street. Louie was wearing
a beret (something else not often seen in the neighborhood) and smoking a
cigar. Eddie had been truthful about the quantity of suits. There were
thousands of them, maybe five or six thousand, rack after rack, stacked
halfway to the ceiling from the front of the store to the back. In one aisle,
there was just enough space for a two-sided placard with pasted photos of
well-dressed customers: NO-LABEL LOUIE’S—WE WON’T BE UNDERSOLD! One
of the pictures showed the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, in a suit
by Louie.
I told Louie I wanted a cord suit for the summer, which he agreed was
just right for someone my age, and after he’d taken the tape measure that
was draped from his neck and determined my size, he came back with three
or four. One was almost cream-colored, not blue. Looking closely, I could
see that the stripes were light brown. This suit would look best on me,
Louie said, because I had so many freckles.
He had me stand on a box in front of a three-way mirror, the same way
my grandfather did when he’d fit my clothes in his tailor shop (which was
hardly bigger than Louie’s dressing room). Louie was right that the cream-
colored suit looked best.
I could have the suit for twenty-five dollars, no questions asked,
including alterations. I was thinking I should take the suit to my
grandfather, who was a master tailor. But Louie said his man in the back