Review: "Chasing History," Carl Bernstein

 By Paul Carrier

Carl Bernstein is known as the Washington Post reporter who, while teamed up with Bob Woodward, helped expose the Watergate scandal that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

But Bernstein’s new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, does not deal with Watergate or even Bernstein’s decade-long stint at the Post.

As the subtitle suggests, Chasing History focuses on Bernstein’s introduction to journalism at the Washington Star, a legendary (but now defunct) newspaper which, in Bernstein’s time, employed such heavyweights as Mary McGrory, David Broder and Haynes Johnson.

Starting as a copyboy in 1960, while still in high school, the ambitious and inexhaustible Bernstein soon found himself working as a reporter during an epochal time in American history that coincided with the glory days of the newspaper industry. Bernstein writes of his coming of age with insight, wit, charm and an abiding love for the beauty and power of the printed word.