Carl Bernstein Biography, Net Worth, Age, Early Years, height, weight, children, Wife, nationality, Career,& more

Carl Bernstein Biography

Carl Milton Bernstein is an American novelist and investigative journalist who was born on February 14, 1944.

Bernstein was paired with Bob Woodward in 1972 while he was a junior reporter for The Washington Post, and the two of them contributed significantly to the initial news coverage of the Watergate affair.

Numerous government investigations and President Richard Nixon’s eventual resignation were the results of these crises.

A seasoned journalist referred to Woodward and Bernstein’s work as “perhaps the single greatest reporting effort of all time.” Roberts Gene

Since Watergate, Bernstein’s writings have consistently addressed the issue of power abuse and misuse in both books and magazine articles. He’s also done opinion comments and television reporting.

He has written or co-written six books: A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (2007); Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir (1989); His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time (1996) with Marco Politi; All the President’s Men (1974) and The Final Days (1976), both co-authored with Bob Woodward; and Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom (2022), a memoir of his formative years in journalism. He frequently provides political commentary on CNN as well.

Carl Bernstein Wikipedia

Name: Carl Bernstein

Birth Year: 1944

Birth date: February 14, 1944

Birth State: D.C.

Birth City: Washington

Birth Country: United States

Gender: Male

Best Known For: Carl Bernstein is an investigative reporter who, along with Bob Woodward, is known for breaking the 1970s Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Industries: Writing and Publishing

Astrological Sign: Aquarius

Schools: University of Maryland

Instagram: @carlbernsteinofficial

Twiiter (X): @carlbernstein

Carl Bernstein Early Life and Career

Bernstein, the son of Sylvia (née Walker) and Alfred Bernstein, was born in Washington, D.C., to a secular Jewish household. In the 1940s, both of his parents were Communist Party USA members and civil rights advocates.

He was the circulation and exchange manager for Silver Chips, the school newspaper at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland.

He started working as a journalist at the age of sixteen, moving “quickly through the ranks” as a copyboy for The Washington Star. However, writing for The Star unofficially required a college degree.

He worked as a reporter for the independent daily, The Diamondback, at the University of Maryland, College Park. However, Bernstein’s poor grades led to his dismissal from the university after the fall 1964 semester.

Bernstein quit the Star in 1965 to work as a full-time reporter for New Jersey’s Elizabeth Daily Journal.

He took first place in the New Jersey Press Association’s investigative reporting, feature writing, and news-on-deadline competitions when he was there.

After leaving New Jersey in 1966, Bernstein started working as a reporter for The Washington Post, where he covered all local news and established himself as one of the paper’s best writers.

Bernstein and Bob Woodward were tasked with covering a break-in at the Watergate office complex that had taken place earlier that same morning on a Saturday in June 1972.

Four of the five burglars who had been apprehended in the complex, which housed the DNC headquarters, were former CIA officers who worked in security for the Republicans.

Bernstein and Woodward eventually linked the thieves to a sizable slush fund and a dishonest attorney general in the subsequent pieces.

Bernstein was the first to assume President Nixon was involved, and he discovered a laundered check connecting Nixon to the burglary.

Bernstein and Woodward’s disclosures prompted further investigations into Nixon, and on August 9, 1974, amid hearings by the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment.

Bernstein and Woodward published All the President’s Men in 1974, two years after the Watergate break-in and two months before Nixon’s resignation.

The book “remained on best-seller lists for six months” and was based on the research and notes made while writing pieces about the scandal for the Post.

Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein and Robert Redford played Woodward in the 1975 film adaptation, which went on to get nominations for several Oscars (including Best Picture), Golden Globes, and BAFTA awards.

In 1976, Bernstein and Woodward released a follow-up book titled The Final Days, which detailed Nixon’s final days in power.

Bernstein’s fame from his Watergate reporting led him to leave the Post in 1977 and pursue other endeavors.

He joined the broadcast news during a time of rapid expansion.

He served as a political analyst for ABC, CNN, and CBS and appeared as a spokesperson for a number of TV ads.

He started looking into the CIA’s covert collaboration with American media during the Cold War.

He worked on his research for a year, and Rolling Stone magazine published the results in a 25,000-word piece.

After that, he started working at ABC News. Bernstein served as the network’s Washington Bureau Chief from 1980 to 1984 before becoming a senior correspondent.

Ariel Sharon “deceived the cabinet about the real intention of the operation—to drive the Palestinians out of Lebanon, not (as he had claimed) to merely establish a 25-kilometer security zone north from the border,” according to Bernstein’s 1982 report for ABC’s Nightline about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Bernstein disclosed that his parents had been Communist Party of America members in his book Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir, published two years after he left ABC News.

The claim surprised some because even J. Edgar Hoover had attempted to establish Bernstein’s parents’ party membership but failed.

Bernstein authored a cover story for Time in 1992 about Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan’s partnership. He later co-wrote the papal biography His Holiness with Vatican specialist Marco Politi.

In his 1996 book, Bernstein said that the Pope’s backing for Solidarity in his own country of Poland, along with his geopolitical skill and profound spiritual power, was a major contributing element to the fall of communism in Europe.

Bernstein criticized contemporary journalism for its sensationalism and preference for gossip over factual news in a 1992 cover story for The New Republic magazine. “The Idiot Culture” was the title of the piece.

On June 5, 2007, Alfred A. Knopf published Bernstein’s biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The initial printing of Knopf was 275,000 copies. For three weeks, it was listed as a New York Times Best Seller.

In an end-of-year study of publishing “hits and misses” conducted by CBS News, A Woman in Charge was classified as a “miss” and its overall sales were estimated to be between 55,000 and 65,000 copies.

Bernstein frequently appears as a guest and expert on television news shows. In 2011, he wrote articles for Newsweek/The Daily Beast that compared Watergate to Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World phone hacking incident.

Carl Bernstein allegedly received paid for his speech in 2012 when he addressed a rally of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, an opposition Iranian group that the US had previously designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Bernstein stated on CNN in 2024 that President Biden experienced 15 to 20 instances of cognitive impairment in the first few months of the year, which heightened media demands that he resign before he did.

Carl Bernstein Personal Life

Bernstein has been married three times, first to a colleague reporter at The Washington Post, Carol Honsa; secondly to writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron from 1976 to 1980; and since 2003 to the former model Christine Kuehbeck.

Bernstein met Margaret Jay, the wife of Peter Jay, the British ambassador to the United States at the time, and the daughter of British Prime Minister James Callaghan, when he was married to Ephron.

In 1979, their adulterous affair was well reported. Later on, Margaret rose to the position of independent government minister.

When Ephron, Bernstein’s second wife, found out about her husband’s romance with Jay in 1979, she was already expecting their second son, Max, and they had a baby boy named Jacob. When Ephron learned, she gave birth to Max too soon.

Ephron was inspired by the events to write the 1983 novel Heartburn, which was made into a 1986 film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

Bernstein gained notoriety in the 1980s while she was unmarried for dating people including Martha Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, and Bianca Jagger.

Carl Bernstein Portrayals

Bernstein was played by Bruce McCulloch in the 1999 comedy Dick and by Dustin Hoffman in the movie adaptation of All the President’s Men.

Jack Nicholson played Carl Bernstein’s character, Mark Forman, in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, a semi-autobiographical comedy/drama from 1986.

Differences between Bernstein and Woodward

Although they collaborated to inform the world about the Watergate affair, Bernstein and Woodward were very different people. Woodward was a well educated, polite man who grew up in a conservative Republican home.

He began working for The Washington Post after graduating from Yale University, and nine months later, he was given the scoop of the Watergate break-in.

Bernstein, however, came from a Jewish Communist family. His disobedient behavior caused him to drop out of college.

At the start of the crisis, he was ten months further along in his career than Woodward.

Their working techniques also differed. Since Woodward excelled in investigation, he concentrated on looking into the Watergate affair.

To learn as much as he could, he met his Deep Throat source in private. His writing was sober and straightforward.

Bernstein was the first of the two, nevertheless, to believe that President Richard Nixon might have something to do with the Watergate scandal.

Being a better writer than Woodward, Bernstein based his articles on the data that Woodward provided from Deep Throat.

Other journalists saw them as the ideal partnership because of their distinct styles. Alicia Shepard reported, “Carl was the big thinker, and Woodward was the one that made sure it got done.

They knew that each of them had strengths that the other didn’t, and they relied on one another.”

FAQs

Who is Carl Bernstein?

Carl Milton Bernstein is an American journalist and author who specializes in investigative reporting. Bernstein collaborated with Bob Woodward as a teenage reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, and the two did much of the first news reporting on the Watergate scandal.

How old is Carl Bernstein?

Carl Milton Bernstein will turn 80 in 2024. Records show that Carl Bernstein was born on February 14, 1944, in Washington, DC.

What’s Carl Bernstein’s height and weight?

He is 5.8 feet (1.73 meters) tall and 158 pounds.

What nationality is Carl Bernstein?

American citizenship is held by Carl Bernstein.

What’s Carl Bernstein’s profession?

To work as a full-time journalist for the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey, Bernstein left the Star in 1965. While there, he won first prize in the New Jersey Press Association for breaking news on a deadline, feature writing, and investigative reporting.

Who is Carl Bernstein’s wife?

According to his dating history, Carl has been married three times. Before being hitched to author Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein was previously married to Washington Post reporter Carol Honsa.

Christine Kuehbeck is Carl’s wife right now.