Carl Bernstein

Both his parents were civil-rights activists and members of the Communist Party USA in the 1940s.

He attended Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he worked as circulation and exchange manager for the school's newspaper Silver Chips.

He began his journalism career at the age of 16 when he became a copyboy for The Washington Star and moved "quickly through the ranks".

The Star, however, unofficially required a college degree to write for the paper.

At the University of Maryland, College Park, he was a reporter for the school's independent daily, The Diamondback.

Carl Milton Bernstein (born February 14, 1944) is an American investigative journalist and author.

However, Bernstein was dismissed from the university after the fall 1964 semester for bad grades.

In 1965, Bernstein left the Star to become a full-time reporter for the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey.

While there, he won first prize in New Jersey's press association for investigative reporting, feature writing, and news on a deadline.

In 1966, Bernstein left New Jersey and began reporting for The Washington Post, where he covered every aspect of local news and became known as one of the paper's best writing stylists.

While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Bernstein was teamed up with Bob Woodward, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal.

These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon.

The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts.

Bernstein's career since Watergate has continued to focus on the theme of the use and abuse of power via books and magazine articles.

He has also done reporting for television and opinion commentary.

He is the author or co-author of six books: All the President's Men and The Final Days with Bob Woodward; His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time with Marco Politi; Loyalties; A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Chasing History, a memoir of his early years in journalism.

Additionally, he is a regular political commentator on CNN.

Bernstein was born to a secular Jewish family in Washington, D.C., the son of Sylvia (née Walker) and Alfred Bernstein.

On a Saturday in June 1972, Bernstein was assigned, along with Bob Woodward, to cover a break-in at the Watergate office complex that had occurred earlier the same morning.

Five burglars had been caught red-handed in the complex, where the Democratic National Committee had its headquarters; four of them turned out to be ex-CIA agents who did security work for the Republicans.

In the series of stories that followed, Bernstein and Woodward eventually connected the burglars to a massive slush fund and a corrupt attorney general.

Bernstein was the first to suspect that President Nixon was involved, and he found a laundered check that linked Nixon to the burglary.

Bernstein and Woodward's discoveries led to further investigations of Nixon, and on August 9, 1974, amid hearings by the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon resigned in order to avoid facing impeachment.

In 1974, two years after the Watergate burglary and two months before Nixon resigned, Bernstein and Woodward released the book All the President's Men.

The book drew upon the notes and research accumulated while writing articles about the scandal for the Post and "remained on best-seller lists for six months".

In 1975, it was turned into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Robert Redford as Woodward which later went on to be nominated in multiple Oscar (including Best Picture nomination), Golden Globe and BAFTA categories.

A second book, The Final Days, was published by Bernstein and Woodward in 1976 as a follow-up chronicling Nixon's last days in office.

Bernstein left the Post in 1977 and expanded into other areas due to his reputation from the Watergate reporting.

He joined broadcast news in a high growth period.

He worked at ABC, CNN, and CBS as a political commentator, and was a spokesman in various television commercials.

He began investigating the secret cooperation between the CIA and American media during the Cold War.

He spent a year in his research, which was published as a 25,000-word article in Rolling Stone magazine.

He then began working for ABC News.

Between 1980 and 1984, Bernstein was the network's Washington Bureau Chief and then a senior correspondent.

In 1982, for ABC's Nightline, Bernstein was the first to report during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that Ariel Sharon had "deceived the cabinet about the real intention of the operation—to drive the Palestinians out of Lebanon, not (as he had claimed) to merely establish a 25-kilometer security zone north from the border".

Two years after leaving ABC News, Bernstein released the book Loyalties: A Son's Memoir, in which he revealed that his parents had been members of the Communist Party of America.

The assertion shocked some because even J. Edgar Hoover had tried and been unable to prove that Bernstein's parents had been party members.

In 1992, for Time, Bernstein wrote a cover story publicizing the alliance between Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan.

Later, along with Vatican expert Marco Politi, he published a papal biography entitled His Holiness.

Bernstein wrote in the 1996 book that the Pope's role in supporting Solidarity in his native Poland, and his geopolitical dexterity combined with enormous spiritual influence, was a principal factor in the downfall of communism in Europe.