Carl Bernstein: ‘Our democracy, before Trump, had ceased to be working well’

  • 📰 GuardianAus
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 81 sec. here
  • 3 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 36%
  • Publisher: 98%

Australia Headlines News

Australia Latest News,Australia Headlines

The acclaimed journalist talks about life before Watergate, as portrayed in his new book Chasing History, and life after Trump

Their 1974 book about it, All the President’s Men,

The teenage Bernstein had another asset: he could type nearly 90 words a minute after joining his school’s otherwise all-female typing class. This, combined with an assist from his father, landed him a job at the Star as a copyboy running errands when he was just 16. He was like a puppy on a leash that day, he recalls, and was handed a late-afternoon edition that had just come off the presses, its pages still warm. He says in the interview: “I was 16 years old. I got the best seat in the countryThere were great wordsmiths at the Star. One would go out on his boat on the Chesapeake Bay and encounter oystermen from remote communities who still spoke with an Elizabethan accent. A rewrite man could “make the words jump like trout”.

“A pall cast by the civil war hung over us,” he says, recalling how the local cinema and ice cream parlour of his childhood were racially segregated. “People in this country have no idea. I went to legally segregated public schools in the capital of the United States until 1954.when I was eight or nine years old to desegregate the restaurants and the lunch counters downtown.

Yet half a century on, Bernstein is appalled by the Trump-infused Republican party’s efforts to reverse those gains through state-level“Now we have one of the two major political parties that in the 21st century is committed to disenfranchising particularly “When Black Lives Matter comes along, it’s because of not continuing to fulfil the promise that began in that civil rights revolution. In addition, there is a political party that is committed to stopping that movement.”

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.
We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 1. in AU

Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines

Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.