Carl Bernstein, Back on the Beat

But that was a long time ago. The two didn't speak for a brief period in the late 1970s, when Bernstein, by his own admission, underperformed during the reporting of "The Final Days," the duo's second Watergate book. That prompted Woodward to swear off future collaborations, but the two say they have a close if contentious friendship. When Bernstein landed in a bramble, Woodward usually got the first call.

"He's never turned his back on Carl," says Jim Wooten, an ABC correspondent who worked with Bernstein at the network in the early '80s, "and he was always aware of Carl's faults and his tendency for self-indulgence."

There are friends who believe that for as long as Bernstein is coupled in the public imagination with Woodward -- which is to say, forever -- Woodward will have a vested interest in helping to dust him off whenever he needs dusting. Other theories are more elaborate.

"I think Woodward feels a kind of survivor's guilt," says Alicia Shepard, author of "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate." "You have to remember that Carl had been a street reporter for years when the two started working together, and one of the things Woodward has always made clear is that he learned a lot from Carl. In a way, he was able to capitalize on Carl's talents more than Carl was."

Money, Fame, Parties

Bernstein started at The Post at age 22, and six years later, right before Watergate broke, his future with the newspaper looked shaky. He was smart and charismatic but willful and allergic to authority. He could write terrific and nuanced stories when engaged by the subject. When he wasn't, forget it. He was in the office on Saturday, June 17, 1972, as a kind of remedial punishment for a piece he couldn't seem to finish.

As tricky as he was to manage, he seemed like the right guy for a story that would involve local courts and cops. Bernstein had spent years exploring the District and knew its folkways and characters as well as any reporter on the staff. His father had been a government lawyer who was ground up by the communist inquisitions of the 1950s and who, lacking better options, opened a coin-operated laundry on Georgia Avenue. Bernstein attended the University of Maryland for two desultory years ("Sometimes I flunked, sometimes I quit," he says), but newspapers were his passion. His knowledge base of the area would prove invaluable to the Watergate investigation. As would his nerve, charm and stellar instincts about where the story was headed.

"He taught me, to the extent I learned," Woodward says. "If you look at 'All the President's Men,' the techniques in that book -- getting the list of people, knocking on doors, going back -- Carl was the energy source."

The hard part, as it happened, came after Nixon resigned, when "Woodstein," as they were dubbed, got the ticker-tape treatment and money gushed in -- money for two bestsellers, money for movie rights, money for speeches. Also fame and parties. A lot of parties.

It would put the zap on just about any head. One year, Bernstein is a reporter, earning less than $20,000 a year, and 24 months later, Dustin Hoffman is camped out in the newsroom, studying the guy's mannerisms for "All the President's Men."

"It's something I handled very badly in some ways," Bernstein says. "I hope not as badly as some have said."

Arguably, the most reckless of several reckless acts was cheating on Ephron, whom he'd married in 1976, and who discovered her husband's affair with the wife of the ambassador to England while pregnant with the couple's second child. By the time "Heartburn" was published, in 1983, Bernstein had left the newspaper and was working as a correspondent at ABC News. After his arrest for DUI that same year -- it was Woodward who retrieved him from police custody -- Bernstein checked himself into a hospital, citing migraines and depression. Charges were later dropped.

It's a measure of how far Bernstein had fallen that the brief in this newspaper about his arrest ran with this headline: "ABC News Correspondent Is Charged in Traffic Case." There was no mention that he'd ever worked at The Post.

Carl Being Carl

Bernstein would become a New York scenester of a certain age, turning up in a Spy magazine feature called "Nightlife Iron Man Decathlon." He tried his hand at a couple of different jobs, but none of them lasted very long, except the job of being Carl Bernstein.

"That was a full-time profession for a while," says John Stacks, his former editor at Time, where Bernstein briefly worked in the '90s. "Carl was very busy being Carl."

More recently, he has returned to the job he seems to relish the most: best-selling author. "A Woman in Charge" will debut at No. 7 on the New York Times hardback list the week of June 24. Touring the country, Bernstein is once again a teller of stories, a seeker of facts, a guy in the middle of it all, trading jabs with powerful people. Explaining Hillary Clinton's inner life and true motivations, he says over lunch, was a lot like solving the puzzle of Watergate.

Let's talk about the book, he says, though even the book leads, if only briefly, back to Watergate. For Bernstein, the endless fascination with the work that made his name is like a medal that he can't remove from his shirt -- an honor that he'll never escape. You get the feeling that if Shakespeare were around today, this is a character he would want to dream up: the proud, volatile man whose finest hour often seemed like his undoing. Surround our protagonist with enticements he can't resist and tether him to a friend-slash-rival who plows relentlessly forward as our leading man falters, and let the drama unfold.

The play would star a thoroughly mortal hero you can't help but root for with flaws that anyone can understand. The final act, of course, is under construction.

"You get to a certain point in your life and you say, 'Wow,' " says Bernstein. "I did some terrific stuff, took some hard knocks. But basically, the cliches are true. You're on a journey. All the cliches are true."