Back on the beat

In the ’80s, he showed up with some regularity in New York tabloids, the celebrated reporter turned night-life fixture, squiring the likes of Bianca Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor. The period he spent studying Hillary Clinton may well be a personal record in the category of ‘Longest Time With the Same Woman’.

“I might have made seven years once before,’’ he says.
In a way, A Woman in Charge feels like his attempt to shape the narrative of his own life as much Hillary Clinton’s; its very existence offers an alternative ending to the tale of his erratic post-Watergate career.

“All I care is that it’s done, it’s out there,’’ he says, waving his arms at his book as if it were a kid he’s shooing off to college. “It’ll have its place in the world.’’

Dressed in a dark sport jacket and a white Oxford shirt, Carl Bernstein looks like an aging Italian tycoon. He is 63, white-haired and plump. He lives with his third wife, Christine Kuehbeck, an executive assistant at a nonprofit called the International Longevity Center, whom he married in 2003. The two kids he had with Ephron are grown. Jacob is a writer and Max is the lead singer and guitarist of a pop-punk band.

A Woman in Charge was conceived well before talk about another Clinton in the White House. Knopf reportedly paid $750,000 for the rights. The delay in delivering the final draft can be explained, Bernstein says, by his gift for procrastinating and his fondness for listening to music and traveling.

Bernstein started at The Post at 22, and six years later, right before Watergate broke, his future with the newspaper looked shaky. He was smart and charismatic but willful and allergic to authority. He could write terrific and nuanced stories when engaged by the subject. When he wasn’t, forget it. He was in the office on Saturday, June 17, 1972 (the day Watergate first broke) as a kind of remedial punishment for a piece he couldn’t seem to finish.

As tricky as he was to manage, he seemed like the right guy for a story that would involve local courts and cops. The hard part, as it happened, came after Nixon resigned, when “Woodstein”, as his co-author Bob Woodward and he were dubbed, got the ticker-tape treatment and money gushed in — money for two bestsellers, money for movie rights, money for speeches. Also fame and parties. A lot of parties.

Let’s talk about the book, he says, though even the book leads, if only briefly, back to Watergate. For Bernstein, the endless fascination with the work that made his name is like a medal that he can’t remove from his shirt — an honor that he’ll never escape.
David Segal(LAT-WP)