For most of the 20th century, the reporters who covered the White House and Congress would rarely bite the hands of the lawmakers who fed them. That began to change in the early 1970s. This is the era when a few ink-stained wretches helped to end a war and bring down a president.
The best journalists now aspired to change the world that they observed. They were a throwback to the muckrakers of the early 20th century, who exposed the railroad trusts and the misery of tenements and factories and triggered enough public outrage to spur reform. Now the targets were the Army, the deep state, the police, and the White House. The journalists taking aim became household names.
None were more famous than the Washington Post team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who brought down President Richard Nixon as they followed the money behind a break-in at the Democratic National Committee. But for me, the man most responsible for making the journalist the star of American politics is Seymour Hersh. Between 1968 and 1975, Hersh proved that a man with a typewriter and a telephone could expose secrets that America’s spies and generals were determined to keep hidden.
