The headline in Time magazine — May 7, 1973 — was quite clear, numerically speaking: “The Watergate Three.” Not two — three.
When the Pulitzer Prizes are announced next week, the citation for public service by a newspaper — barring a last-minute reversal — will go to the Washington Post for its continuous digging into the Watergate case and related campaign scandals. Certainly the Post deserves credit for its tenacity. But the trade knows that personal honors belong to an unlikely trio of relatively junior newsmen, the Post’s District of Columbia editor, Barry Sussman, 38, and reporters Carl Bernstein, 29, and Bob Woodward, 30.
Three. An unlikely trio. For generations of young reporters, the men who brought down Richard Nixon, who exposed Watergate, were two in number: Woodward and Bernstein. Woodstein, if you wanted people to know you’d mastered the lingo. Who’s this third guy — the one listed first?
Barry Sussman died a few days ago at the age of 87, and while his passing earned some notice, it wasn’t commensurate with the impact of his work. In the half-century since the Watergate break-in, the Watergate Three has become, in the popular imagination, the Watergate Two.
Part of that is just what it means to be an editor in a newsroom. No matter how much you shape, rewrite, or co-create the work, your name isn’t the one at the top at the piece — or the bottom, for that matter. Becoming an editor means giving up the authorial glory that comes with being a reporter. Your work will be valued internally, but the world won’t see your fingerprints on any of it.
But Sussman was also uniquely shortchanged by the transformation of the Post’s Watergate coverage from news story into cultural artifact. The real history got processed into something more easily digestible, and Barry wasn’t in it.
These days, talk about the future of journalism often circles around reporters’ individual brands — the sort of word journalists take a strange pride in hating. Build up a reputation with an audience? Quit your job, lose the constraints (however real or mythical) muzzling your voice, and start a Substack!
There are journalists for whom that model makes a lot of sense. But the story of Barry Sussman reminds us that many of the world’s most important journalists don’t get bylines at all. Their brand is invisibility. And whatever models, whatever systems of support inspire journalism’s next forms, they need to find a way to make sure they can do their work, too.