Chasing History by Carl Bernstein

Author:Carl Bernstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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With no school to concern me, I worked forty hours plus overtime on the dictation bank five days a week and took on assignments at night from Mr. Porter, Ludy Werner, Harry Bacas, Coit Hendley, Emerson Beauchamp, Charles Puffenbarger, and on special occasions Sid Epstein himself.

Mr. Porter sent me to D.C. Stadium for Opening Day because Tom Brown, probably the greatest athlete in the history of Montgomery Blair High School, was starting at first base for the Senators in his first major league game. Because there had been so many stories in the papers about Brown’s extraordinary talent in two professional sports (he had also been drafted by the Green Bay Packers to play professional football), Kennedy had mentioned to someone that he was looking forward to seeing him play at the opener. The Senators’ manager had no choice but to start him.

The editors were giving me opportunities, and watching me pretty closely. If I made a mistake—say, burying the lede of a story—I heard about it. A lot of the work was dull stuff, but they were bringing me along: zoning hearings, school board meetings, County Council deliberations, civil rights demonstrations in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, meetings of business associations and labor unions: the clippings in my scrapbook reflected an expanding range.

I would also roam the city with my yellow “press card” for the sheer fun and fascination of it. I could go places that until now had been off-limits to me and meet people I would never otherwise have encountered. Sometimes I would approach these adventures with an idea for a story, but there were just as many times when I merely wanted to experience and observe. Harry Bacas had indicated he was willing to accept a piece—“If you have a really good idea”—for the weekly rotogravure Star Magazine.

I liked to work the late dictation shift that winter. If Rupe Welch was covering night police, something interesting was bound to turn up.

About one thirty one night, riding in a blue Star radio car after we’d left the scene of a supermarket burglary near Dupont Circle, Rupe said he had a special place he wanted to show me. But first he made me swear that I wouldn’t tell anyone at the paper where we’d been. On Swann Street, he said, which puzzled me.

I thought I knew Swann Street well enough to be certain it was of no special interest—a five-block swath of row houses between Fourteenth and Nineteenth Streets N.W. It was the borderland between the Dupont Circle and Logan Circle neighborhoods: the area around Dupont Circle, where my mother was born on P Street, was almost all white; Logan Circle, altogether Black. Swann Street was a little of both.

In the 1700 block of Swann, on the south side of the street, Rupe parked the car. We headed a few houses up the block on foot, then went down a dimly lit half flight of stairs. Rupe knocked lightly on the door, then stationed himself in front of the peephole, pulling me a little closer so that whoever was inside could see me too.

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