Before gaining fame as one of the Washington Post reporters who uncovered Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal, Carl Bernstein served a precocious apprenticeship at the legendary Washington Evening Star.
Bernstein recounts his hard-knocks education as a cub reporter in "Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom," a gripping addition to the long list of journalistic memoirs.
As the subtitle indicates, Bernstein tells how he was thrust into the midst of history while still a teen who struggled to graduate from high school and later flunked out of college.
The book's portrait of Washington D.C. during the John F. Kennedy era deserves a broader readership beyond nostalgic baby boomers, offering younger generations a fast-paced education about major and not so major events of the early 1960s.
A rebellious teen - what the era called a juvenile delinquent - Bernstein landed an Evening Star copy boy job at age 16. Partying with his high school friends and languishing in the classroom, Bernstein astutely planned his newspaper career, courting favor with higher-ups like the swashbuckling city editor Sidney Epstein, his mentor.
Under Epstein's guidance, the ambitious Bernstein began drawing reporting assignments, leading to rapid promotions to the fast-paced dictation desk, as Epstein's clerk and ascending to full-time reporter.
Bernstein recalls visiting Epstein at his home in his later years. The old editor still called the Watergate hero and middle-aged pundit Kid, asking Bernstein to speak at his funeral.
While failing his chemistry and Spanish classes - Bernstein only graduated from high school because the principal and teachers were sick of him - he kept meticulous journals detailing lessons from Epstein and other newspaper veterans. He developed sources and maintained files packed with information he gathered.
Along with Epstein, he was also adopted by standout reporters like Pulitzer Prize winners Mary McGrory, Mary Lou “Ludy” Werner and Haynes Johnson.
Devoted more to his newspaper career than a university degree, he flunked out of the University of Maryland while building friendships with Ivy League colleagues Lance Morrow and Tom Dimond.
A Washington native whose parents were union organizers and former Communist Party members who were targeted by federal investigations during the McCarthy era, Bernstein also delivers a vivid history of the capital's neighborhoods and local characters. His nocturnal journeys with the newspaper's crime reporters to murder scenes and seedy underground clubs read like a novel by D.C. noir chronicler George Pelecanos.
After losing his job as a union organizer, Bernstein's father moved the family out of D.C. to suburban Silver Spring, Md., where he operated a laundromat.
Bernstein's recollections of his teen-age antics give a familiar American coming of age story of girls, beers and fast cars. It's been told endlessly, but Bernstein brings a comic flair. I was reminded of one of the surprisingly best books about growing up in D.C. during the prosperous Eisenhower years - Pat Buchanan's campaign autobiography.
Heightened by Bernstein's massive ego, the narrative often veers toward disaster set up by Bernstein's hubris.
Yet, often with the help of Epstein and others, he keeps escaping and moving forward.
After a composing room faux pas that could have brought his firing, he's given plum assignments by the impossibly magnanimous Epstein. Subject to the draft after flunking out of Maryland, and courting academic fraud, he avoids service in Vietnam by finding a rare spot with an Army reserve unit.
But at last he meets in implacable foe, Star managing editor Bill Hill, whom Bernstein dismisses as "useless." Hill insists that Bernstein must have a college degree to keep working at the Star.
But leaving the Star also turns out well: Bernstein excels at a job he lucks into at a newspaper in Elizabeth, N.J., then lands a reporting position at Ben Bradlee's surging Washington Post. He would use the police reporter skills he polished at the Star and his insider DC savvy in joining with Bob Woodward to bring down Nixon.
Known as a writer's newspaper beloved by its employees, the afternoon Star underwent a slow decline as suburban commuters turned to TV news.
Bernstein traces the roots of the Star's fall as the area's major newspaper to the Post's purchase of the Washington Times-Herald in 1954. The Post gained the Times-Herald's subscribers and popular comic strips, blows from which the Star never recovered.
As the Star plummets downward, Bradlee burnishes the Post by hiring from the Star reporters like Johnson and David Broder. However, Bradlee couldn't entice McGrory to leave her beloved Star until it finally stopped publishing in 1981. McGrory kept writing her column for the Post, but never felt at home there, Bernstein says.
Bernstein fondly looks back on the Star's massive operations, from the hectic, Dickensian newroom to the composing room with its rows of Linotype machines and army of printers who hammered lead slugs into metal trays to form pages and read type upside down.
Unlike the stodgier Post, the Star was like a family, where professional and personal lives blended. After work, reporters repaired to a saloon called Harrigan's to drink, gossip and flirt. Bernstein lived with several other young reporters at a frat-house-like place in Arlington.
A notorious womanizer tarred by his former late wife Nora Ephron's novel "Heartburn," Bernstein here presents himself in innocuous relationships that sound like 1960s teen movies starring Troy Donahue.
Baby boomers will shed tears at Bernstein's memories of covering JFK's inauguration on a bright, frigid Washington morning and watching the helicopter carrying the assassinated president's body land at the White House.
Inevitably, Bernstein cites Jacqueline Kennedy's famous quote that the Kennedy presidency was like Camelot.
In Bernstein's recollections, the Washington Star is also a vanished magical kingdom.