Bob Woodward had only been at the Washington Post for nine months and was used to doing stories on local police corruption or unsanitary restaurants. He had been trying to get more high profile assignments. 

When the city editor called him one Saturday morning (June 17, 1972), asking him to investigate a burglary at the local Democratic Party headquarters, he wasn’t particularly excited. 

That was until he learned it wasn’t the local Democrat office that had been broken into, but the HQ of the Democratic National Committee in Washington DC’s fancy Watergate office-apartment-hotel complex. 

The five burglars were wearing business suits, carried rolls of film, cameras, lock picks and bugging devices. 

Four were Cuban-Americans from Miami, but the fifth was James McCord, security manager for President Nixon’s Committee for the Re-election of the President (aka CREEP). 

An address book found on one of the burglars contained contacts for Howard Hunt, White House consultant connected to Charles Colson, special counsel (lawyer) to the President.

Woodward wasn’t pleased that another reporter, Carl Bernstein, had started working on the story; Bernstein had a reputation for muscling in on good stories and claiming them as his own. Bernstein, 28, had been a reporter since he was 19. He was a college dropout and had long hair

Woodward, 29, was a Yale graduate whose father was a judge – in Bernstein’s eyes an Establishment type. But Woodward admitted Bernstein was a better writer, and as they began working together trust grew. 

Barry Sussman was their immediate editor, but they were ultimately answerable to flamboyant Post executive editor Benjamin Bradlee, who had been a close friend of President Kennedy, and Post publisher Katherine Graham.

As Sussman began reading the drafts of Woodward and Bernstein’s first articles, he put down his red pen and pipe: “We’ve never had a story like this. Just never.”