Buried deep in their Washington Post review of the lessons of Watergate, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein made a remarkable admission: that they've failed to solve the Watergate break-in.
After all this time, they still can't tell us who ordered the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972—or why. This failure—which I wrote about here in April—doesn't diminish my admiration for the courageous, groundbreaking reporting they did on the Nixon White House cover up and other illegalities. Indeed their admission shows commendable humility amid renewed Watergate triumphalism around the 40th anniversary of the break-in.
At least, it would show commendable humility, if they hadn't used a strategy that might be called Nixonian in their attempt to cover up the significance of their inability to answer the primal questions.
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