Chapter Text
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, with its white-tie dress code and its who’s-who-in-Washington guest list, loomed large in the dreams of every young, ambitious political reporter in the country. And Carl Bernstein, not even turned thirty, could now cross it off his bucket list.
The victory was soured, slightly, by three things: firstly, he had spent most of the evening so far dodging various White House aides and Justice Department officials who had served as sources for stories with both the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, and as a consequence of pretending not to know anyone he could find very few people to talk to. Secondly, one of the people in attendance he knew quite well was Bob Woodward, and try as Carl might to avoid him, fate seemed intent on continually throwing them into each other’s paths. Thirdly, he felt like a penguin.
“Hey, we match,” Woodward said on their first run-in, a goofy smile gracing his lips, his white bow tie askew. “Do you think people will think we coordinated our outfits for the awards?”
Carl irritably straightened the bow tie. “I hope not.”
He supposed he ought to be grateful. His tense months of partnership with Woodward at the Post had helped him build the foundation of sources and knowledge that fed his stories for Rolling Stone and which had brought him to this point, receiving a joint award for his Watergate reporting with his erstwhile partner. He wouldn’t be there if not for Woodward.
But even though it was a joint award, it was clear to Carl as he made his rounds of the ballroom that Woodward was the star of the show. Typical. Carl worked for a paper for nine years, fought his way onto a story, carried that fight with him to a new publication, and wound up spending the night listening to constant raptures over the Post’s bravery in standing alone against the Nixon administration. And just as he had during the year Carl had known him at the Post, Bob Woodward had skipped several rungs on the ladder to land beside Carl simply by standing still.
“So, how’s Rolling Stone?” Woodward asked, the next time they bumped into each other. His bow tie was crooked again.
“Good,” Carl said, trying not to let any of his bitterness bleed through. “It lets me write the kind of stories I like to write.”
Woodward took a step forward to let a waiter squeeze past him and then stayed there, caging Carl in with his superior height in the packed room. “I’ve read them. It’s a good fit for you,” he said sincerely. Then, in hushed tones more suited to a confessional booth than the raucous crowd around them, he added, “thanks for still fighting for it. I - we really appreciate it, you backing us up.”
Any goodwill Woodward had earned himself by admitting to reading Carl’s stories immediately evaporated. “I’m not backing you up , I’m doing my own reporting for my magazine. I understand if you’re not familiar with the concept,” Carl snapped.
This time he did not fix Woodward’s bow tie before stalking off into the crowd.
The infuriating thing, Carl thought as he licked his wounds over by a side table serving as a holding place for discarded champagne glasses, was that crooked bowtie or not, Woodward looked good in a tux. No penguin comparisons for Bob Woodward, no; he wore the ridiculous get-up as easily as Carl imagined he had once worn his navy uniform. Carl wanted to tear it off him. Not all the way; just one sleeve, maybe. Just enough to disrupt that handsome, symmetrical silhouette and put Woodward as off-balance as Carl felt.
He occupied himself until dinner with fantasies of a blushing, partially dressed Woodard that only toed the line of inappropriate.
Dinner brought with it more indignities: namely, being seated directly beside the well-dressed man himself. Their table, shoved into a back corner of the room, was populated with other guests apparently not prestigious enough to sit with the cream of the journalistic establishment or - god forbid - the men who ran the country.
“It’s probably for the best,” Woodward said, accurately reading Carl’s thoughts. “We have more enemies than friends here, I think.”
Carl pointedly cut into his steak and did not acknowledge the validity of Woodward’s point. “Speak for yourself. I’m very likable.” Although, he was forced to admit, of the two of them Woodward moved much more confidently among the circles of the powerful and made much more successful small talk with people who, in all honesty, probably did hate them.
“The way you’ve been skulking along the walls all night says otherwise,” Woodward said, biting in spite of his unruffled demeanor. “Avoiding everyone’s eyes but mine.”
“You know damn well who I was avoiding,” Carl said. He hadn’t realized he’d been looking at Woodward enough for Woodward to take notice of it. Their dining companions looked on avidly, seemingly much more interested in the budding argument than the comedy routines on the stage at the far end of the room. Dinner and an intimate, up-close show.
Woodward’s lips quirked in the beginnings of a smile. “Everyone?”
Carl couldn’t help a sheepish smile in return. “I can’t remember who I’m not supposed to know.”
“Me neither. I’ve been lying through my teeth all night; I keep pretending to have forgotten people’s names and only later I realize I’ve been rude to some of them.”
Carl didn’t entirely believe that Woodward actually shared his struggles, but that attempt to empathize was enough to crack the ice at the table, and they chatted surprisingly easily through the rest of the meal, ignoring the succession of Watergate jokes being rehashed onstage. Their table was situated far back enough that the punchlines often got lost among the clinking of glasses and silverware, so Carl didn’t feel guilty about tuning them out. He heard enough about Watergate at his day job already.
One of their table-mates, CBS’s Leslie Stahl, had struck up a friendship with Woodward sometime after Carl’s departure from the Post, and Carl found her to be a charming and insightful conversationalist. She, more than anyone aside from Woodward and Carl, had understood the importance of Watergate from the very beginning, and her sincere congratulations on learning they were to be honored for their reporting, though directed mostly at Woodward, went a ways towards soothing Carl’s bruised ego.
By the time dinner ended Carl was feeling a lot more charitable towards Woodward, and more than a little tipsy. Woodward, too, seemed a little unsteady on his feet as they pushed their chairs back and began to pick their way across the room at the call of their names, weaving through the maze of tables and famous faces. Hundreds of eyes followed their progress, burning into Carl’s back and setting his teeth on edge.
Woodward, once again, sensed it. “They could’ve seated us closer to the stage,” he murmured, skirting around Bob Dole’s protruding chair.
“Yeah, but then who would they gawk at?” Carl murmured back.
“Agnew?”
“You think he’d show his face here tonight?”
“Probably not,” Woodward allowed. “Can’t say I enjoy the spotlight either, but at least I haven’t been accused of taking bribes.”
“Don’t let these guys hear you say that; you’ll give them ideas,” Carl said. They were coming up on Henry Kissinger.
Though the walk had been an ordeal, reaching the front of the room was even worse. Carl’s fight-or-flight instincts screamed at him to let Woodward accept the honors for both of them while Carl found some dark closet to hide in, and only his refusal to let Woodward take all the credit kept his feet moving forward, up the shallow steps to the podium where the speaker, and the eyes of the entire room, awaited them.
“Time to meet the press,” he muttered, not really for Woodward’s ears.
Woodward laughed anyway. “Face the nation.”
The matching dry sarcasm in Woodward’s tone startled Carl, and he nearly missed a step as he turned to look at Woodward in surprise. Woodward raised his eyebrows as if to say, see? I can make off the cuff quips too. Carl scowled.
Woodward grinned at him. “Is it really such a hardship to spend thirty minutes with me?”
Carl’s lips began to twitch. Woodward and his stubborn bow tie had won; Carl was just a little bit charmed. “Every minute with you is an eternity,” he murmured back, just as they cleared the final step onto the platform and turned to face front.
Woodward, ducking his chin to hide a laugh, didn’t see at first what Carl saw. When he did, he froze.
“Well, shit,” he said quietly.
There in front, clearly having entered late, sat Richard Nixon and a retinue of very thin, clean-cut men. Returned POWs, no doubt. What a cruelty, Carl thought: a guy finally gets to take off his army uniform after seven years in a jail cell and as soon as he does, you shove him into a penguin suit. Torture upon torture.
It was commonly said that Nixon never smiled with his eyes. Carl couldn’t attest to never, but as he shook hands with the speaker and posed for a picture with Bob, he was excruciatingly aware that in this particular instance, the familiar rictus of a grin he had seen on television so many times couldn’t mask the hatred burning in the president’s dark gaze. He suppressed a shiver and focused on the POWs instead, out of place among the politicians who had sent them to war and their long imprisonment. They looked healthier than they had on their televised return, Carl thought, handsome and not too much the worse for wear, but Woodward still wore a tux better than any of them.
“Jesus, my heart’s pounding,” Woodward said as they took their seats. “No one’s ever looked at me with that much veiled hatred in my life. Not even you.”
He didn’t specify who he meant in front of their companions, but he didn’t need to. “I don’t look at you like that.” Veiled dislike wasn’t really his style.
“No, you’ve never bothered to veil your hatred,” Woodward said, laughing. Leslie Stahl hid her own laughter behind her napkin.
Carl didn’t bother with a rebuttal. It irked him that Woodward still knew him so well. They had never been friends, and certainly now they were professional rivals. Woodward should not be able to reach into his head and skim off his thoughts.
He brooded through the rest of the evening, but after seeing Nixon’s disgust at their mere presence he had resigned himself to putting on a show of solidarity with Woodward in front of their mutual enemies. In that spirit, when Woodward rose to leave, Carl followed suit. Leaving together would look good.
“So,” Woodward said awkwardly as they threaded their way through the stream of exiting journalists and officials, “will I see you at any of the parties?”
Carl didn’t understand why Woodward would want to, nor did he understand why Woodward hadn’t taken advantage of being close to the door and slipped out before the stampede. Instead he had lingered at the table even after Leslie and the others had left, trying to engage Carl in renewed conversation. Only when Carl had refused the olive branch a second time had Bob given up and made for the door.
“I have to stop by Rolling Stone’s party first,” Carl said noncommittally.
Woodward seemed disappointed. “Right, of course. I’m heading to the Post’s, obviously. But maybe later in the night? You’d be welcome.”
It was technically already morning, but Carl refrained from pointing it out. He did not want to go to the Post’s party, the theme of which would no doubt be ‘a toast to Bob Woodward’.
The crush of bodies had forced them into such close proximity that Carl’s nose was nearly pressed to the back of Woodward’s neck, close enough to smell his cologne, and so at first Carl thought the tug on his sleeve was an accident.
Woodward tugged again. “Look. Kleindienst.”
Carl couldn’t follow Woodward’s gaze from behind, but it wasn’t hard to spot Kleindienst on his own. The attorney general was holding court on the far side of the lobby, and as Carl and Woodward passed him a gap opened up in the throng, leaving a clear pathway.
They both came to the same conclusion at the same moment. Carl thought they must look like a perfectly matched pair, shoulders brushing as they strode in lock-step determinedly towards the attorney general. No one watching them would notice Woodward jostling Carl with his elbow, hoping to knock him out of the running in the race to catch Kleindienst first. The attempt failed; Carl had covered plenty of protests for the Post and knew how to keep his feet in a crowd.
They reached Kleindienst at the same time. He was shorter in person, forced to look up to meet Woodward’s eyes if not Carl’s.
“You two follow the strength of your convictions,” he said, as if they were a team after all and not two people who barely tolerated each other. Although Woodward was becoming more palatable as the night went on. Maybe Carl would even be glad to see him if they ran into each other later.
Woodward had started up a polite exchange of small talk. That wouldn’t do. Kleindienst was a busy man; they had to get to the point quickly if they wanted any hope of succeeding. Carl interrupted. “What’s going on?”
Woodward glared at him. Carl paid him no mind.
As expected, Kleindienst took the interruption in stride and pivoted with such ease that Carl suspected he had just been waiting for them to ask. “The Watergate case is going to blow up,” he said simply.
“We should talk,” Woodward said. “What about tomorrow?” Typical, Carl thought, gritting his teeth. Carl got his foot in the door, and Bob Woodward slipped in ahead of him. Every goddamn time.
“I have to go to church,” Kleindienst said. Carl took vindictive pleasure in the fact that he looked at Carl for just as long as he looked at Woodward as he said it. There was something to be said for their projected image of partnership.
“We’re anxious to talk to you,” Woodward persisted. At least he’d said we.
Kleindienst sized them up for a moment. He nodded. “Okay. You go to church with me tomorrow morning, and afterwards we’ll come back to my house and have breakfast.”
Woodward thanked him effusively, and Carl, not to be beaten, dredged up an equal amount of effusiveness. Kleindienst reaffirmed their meeting time, and, with a nod, turned back to his circle of admirers. Carl and Woodward headed for the door.
“Guess we’re both invited,” Carl said.
Woodward didn’t seem too bent out of shape about it. “Truce for now?”
“For now.”
Just outside the door, Woodward hesitated, shooting Carl a furtive, inscrutable look. In the darkness Carl could make out very little of his features, but his white bow tie caught the light spilling from the open door. It was crooked again.
“Come to the Post’s party,” Woodward said. “Everyone misses you.”
Carl reached out once more to straighten Woodward’s tie. For the last time, he told himself. “See you in church.”
“See you in church,” Woodward echoed.
They parted ways, and Carl vowed to get very drunk.