Barry Sussman: Washington Post editor who oversaw Watergate reporting

Although he never received as much fame as Woodward and Bernstein, Sussman played in a key role in the greatest scoop of all time

Sussman was the Post’s City editor at the time of Watergate (Denver Post/Getty)

Barry Sussman, the Washington Post editor who directly oversaw the Watergate investigation by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, providing invaluable – if at times unheralded – contributions to the news coverage that helped force President Richard Nixon from office, has died aged 87.

In Hollywood and in the public eye, newspapering is often imagined as a solitary undertaking, the work of shabbily dressed reporters hunched over their keyboards with telephones cradled between shoulder and ear, barricaded in by notepads and papers piled high atop their desks.

In truth, journalism is a far more collective enterprise, with crucial roles played by people whose names do not appear below headlines. One such person, and perhaps the chief example in The Post’s unravelling of the Watergate affair, was Sussman.

A Brooklynite, Sussman began his journalism career scribbling film reviews in the darkened movie houses of New York and came to Washington by way of Appalachia, where he landed his first full-time newspaper job in his late twenties at the Bristol Herald Courier on the Virginia-Tennessee border. Rapaciously curious, and with a savant-like recall of detail, he rose in just over a year to become the newspaper’s managing editor. The Post hired him in 1965 as a suburban editor on the Metropolitan desk.

When five burglars wearing business suits broke into the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington in 1972, Sussman was The Post’s city editor, in charge of 45 reporters and editors responsible for coverage of DC.

One standout Metro reporter was 29-year-old Woodward. A former Navy lieutenant, he had been with The Post only nine months but had already distinguished himself with his inexhaustible work ethic and investigative zeal, although not with his literary flair. Sussman took Woodward on as a protege and personal friend, journalist and Watergate, scholar Alicia C Shepard reported, helping him improve his writing “at a time when colleagues joked that for Woodward, English was a second language” and teaching him “how to take his hard-earned facts and massage them into readable stories”. The morning of the Watergate break-in, Sussman immediately phoned Woodward at home and called him into the newsroom.

The more renegade Bernstein, 11 months younger than Woodward but with more than a decade of additional experience, sensed intrigue in the Watergate burglary and wanted in on the action. While other editors at The Post had grown exasperated by Bernstein’s more trying habits – he was allergic to deadlines and once rented a car on The Post’s dime, parked it in a garage and forgot about it – Sussman recognised his value as both a reporter and a writer and argued successfully to keep him on the Watergate story.

Paired by Sussman, Woodward and Bernstein – known collectively as Woodstein – became the most famous reporters in American journalism with their incremental and inexorable revelations of the political sabotage, corruption and coverup that began with the Watergate break-in, sent numerous Nixon associates to prison and ultimately precipitated Nixon’s resignation. During their reporting, Sussman was detailed to serve as special Watergate editor.

“If you look at the reporting, it wasn’t just stringing together facts,” Bernstein said in an interview. “It wasn’t just the knocking on doors. It was also ... an intellectual process, and he had his finger on that in a way that none of the [other editors] did.”

The Post’s Watergate coverage received the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the highest honour in journalism, and was dramatised in All the President’s Men, the 1976 movie directed by Alan J Pakula. However, Sussman was omitted from the film entirely.

In her 2007 book Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate, Shepard wrote that the filmmakers excised Sussman “for dramatic reasons”. The story already had three editors – executive editor Ben Bradlee; managing editor Howard Simons, whose real-life role the movie diminished; and Metropolitan editor Harry M Rosenfeld.

Sussman speaks alongside Post publisher Katharine Graham at the National Press Club in 1972 (The Washington Post)

If Sussman was deemed superfluous for the movie – a decision that deeply wounded him, according to Shepard’s reporting – he was by all accounts the opposite in the actual events that inspired it.

“Barry was essential for The Post’s Watergate” coverage, said former executive editor Leonard Downie Jr, who worked as an editor on the Watergate investigation, “just as essential as Bob and Carl.”

Journalist David Halberstam, writing in his 1979 book about American media, The Powers That Be, described Sussman as “the perfect working editor at exactly the right level”.

“Almost from the start, before anyone else at The Post,” Halberstam wrote, Sussman “saw Watergate as a larger story, saw that individual events were part of a larger pattern, the result of hidden decisions from somewhere in the top of government which sent smaller men to run dirty errands.”

Woodward and Bernstein, for their part, described Sussman as “Talmudic” in his mastery of the most arcane details of the Watergate affair and “Socratic” in his ability to elicit leads from them through his insightful questioning.

“More than any other editor at The Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed,” the two reporters wrote in All the President’s Men, their 1974 book upon which the movie was based.

“On deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman’s mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.”

The book All the President’s Men reportedly contributed to a rift that opened between Sussman and the two reporters he had supported through the most difficult days of the Watergate investigation, when an error in their reporting involving grand jury testimony invited questions about their credibility, and when Nixon was privately threatening “damnable, damnable” consequences for The Post in retaliation for its coverage.

Richard Nixon addresses the press after his resignation in August 1974 (Getty)

Sussman had hoped to co-author the account of Watergate with Woodward and Bernstein, Shepard wrote, but the reporters ultimately moved forward alone with the book, which became a bestseller. Shepard quoted Woodward as saying that “it was a reporter’s story to tell, not an editor’s”, and that Sussman’s “role is fully laid out in the book”.

By the time the book was published, Shepard wrote, Sussman had stopped speaking to Woodward and Bernstein. According to Sussman, they were “wrong often on detail” in the book and had a tendency to “sentimentalise” the Watergate story.

Sussman wrote his own book about Watergate, The Great Cover-Up (1974). Decades later, when Shepard called Sussman to inquire about his two former colleagues, he replied, “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.”

Reached after Sussman’s death, Woodward said in an interview that “Barry was one of the great imaginative, aggressive editors at The Washington Post during Watergate. We all owe him a debt of gratitude, particularly Carl Bernstein and myself”.

Barry Sussman was born in Brooklyn on 10 July 1934. His mother, an immigrant from what was then the Russian Empire, was a homemaker. His father, who was born in the US, was a civil servant.

Sussman graduated in 1956 from Brooklyn College, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English and history, and where he was an editor and columnist for a school newspaper.

His first job post-college was at a New York advertising agency. He hated the work but revelled in moonlighting as a movie reviewer. He placed an ad in the trade publication Editor and Publisher – “freelance writer seeks first newspaper job” – and got one at the Bristol Herald Courier, more than 500 miles and a universe away from New York.

In Bristol, he met his future wife, Peggy Earhart, whom he married in 1962. Survivors include his wife; two daughters; and four grandchildren.

Sussman had long cultivated an interest in public opinion. After Watergate, he became The Post’s first in-house pollster, helping to found the Washington Post-ABC News poll.

“If presidential elections are the heart of the political process in this country,” he once wrote, “political polls have become the chief instrument through which that heart’s beat is measured.”

Sussman penned a column on polling for The Washington Post National Weekly edition as well as a book on the subject, “What Americans Really Think and Why Our Politicians Pay No Attention” (1988).

In 1987, Sussman was hired by United Press International as managing editor for national news; he resigned within months in opposition to large-scale staff cuts at the troubled news agency.

He later ran a private survey research firm, was a consultant to newspapers in Spain, Portugal and Latin America and served as editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project. As the internet upended the newspaper business model and hollowed out newsrooms across the US, he cited the lack of overarching editors as “the single greatest failing of newspaper investigations these days”.

Decades after Watergate, Sussman was sometimes called on to speak about Nixon's undoing and the ongoing role of a free press in a democracy. All those years later – the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in will fall just weeks after his death – Sussman, ever the attentive editor, still had command of the most granular details of the investigation he had overseen, and had at his fingertips the names of all the president’s men.

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