Carl Bernstein's memoir of his apprenticeship in reporting, "Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom," is on the surface a story about journalism, and about America, in a historical period that to most of us now seems long in the past. Bernstein's first job in the business came in 1960, as a 16-year-old "copy boy" for the Evening Star, at the time the No. 2 daily in Washington, D.C. (The Star ceased publication in 1981, part of a wave of newspaper consolidation that prefigured the industry-wide collapse of the internet era.) This book begins there, allowing for a bit of back story, and concludes in 1966, after Bernstein had left the Star and spent a year at the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey (a paper that, almost unbelievably, had a circulation of 50,000). He was about to return to Washington and take a job with the Star's better-known competitor — but that story is not this one.
I was both relieved and delighted to discover that "Chasing History" is not an elder statesman's nostalgic account of the Good Old Days, nor a reverse-engineered personal history of how a Great Man rose from obscurity. It's both subtler and more interesting than that, as well as an immensely entertaining read — jam-packed with famous names and juicy anecdotes — for anyone who cares about the past and future of journalism, or the lessons to be drawn from that tumultuous period of American history.
