Barry Sussman, Washington Post editor who oversaw Watergate reporting, dies at 87

The trigger was an obvious gastrointestinal bleed, stated his daughter Shari Sussman Golob.

In Hollywood and within the public eye, newspapering is commonly imagined as a solitary enterprise, the work of shabbily dressed reporters hunched over their keyboards with telephones cradled between shoulder and ear, barricaded in by notepads and papers piled excessive atop their desks.

In fact, journalism is a much more collective enterprise, with essential roles performed by folks whose names don’t seem under headlines within the area identified in newspaper jargon because the byline. One such particular person, and maybe the chief instance in The Put up’s unraveling of the Watergate affair, was Mr. Sussman.

A Brooklynite, Mr. Sussman started his journalism profession scribbling movie opinions within the darkened film homes of New York and got here to Washington by means of Appalachia, the place he landed his first full-time newspaper job in his late 20s on the Bristol Herald Courier on the Virginia-Tennessee border. Rapaciously curious, and with a savant-like recall of element, he rose in simply over a 12 months to turn out to be the newspaper’s managing editor. The Put up employed him in 1965 as a suburban editor on the Metropolitan desk.

By Saturday, June 17, 1972, when 5 burglars carrying enterprise fits broke into the Democratic nationwide headquarters on the Watergate complicated in Washington, Mr. Sussman was The Put up’s metropolis editor, accountable for 40 to 45 reporters and editors liable for protection of D.C.

One standout Metro reporter was 29-year-old Woodward. A button-down former Navy lieutenant, he had been with The Put up solely 9 months however had already distinguished himself together with his inexhaustible work ethic and investigative zeal, though not together with his literary aptitude. Mr. Sussman took Woodward on as a protege and private pal, journalist and Watergate scholar Alicia C. Shepard reported, serving to him enhance his writing “at a time when colleagues joked that for Woodward, English was a second language” and instructing him “easy methods to take his hard-earned info and therapeutic massage them into readable tales.” The morning of the Watergate break-in, Mr. Sussman instantly phoned Woodward at dwelling and known as him into the newsroom.

The extra renegade Bernstein, 11 months youthful than Woodward however with greater than a decade of further expertise, sensed intrigue within the Watergate housebreaking and needed in on the motion. Whereas different editors at The Put up had grown exasperated by Bernstein’s extra attempting habits — he was allergic to deadlines and as soon as rented a automotive on The Put up’s dime, parked it in a storage and forgot about it — Mr. Sussman acknowledged his worth as each a reporter and a author and argued efficiently to maintain him on the Watergate story.

Paired by Mr. Sussman, Woodward and Bernstein — identified collectively as Woodstein — grew to become essentially the most well-known reporters in American journalism with their incremental and inexorable revelations of the political sabotage, corruption and coverup that started with the Watergate break-in, despatched quite a few Nixon associates to jail and finally precipitated Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974. Throughout their reporting, Mr. Sussman was detailed to function particular Watergate editor.

“Should you have a look at the reporting, it wasn’t simply stringing collectively info,” Bernstein stated in an interview. “It wasn’t simply the knocking on doorways. It was additionally … an mental course of, and he had his finger on that in a manner that not one of the [other editors] did.”

The Put up’s Watergate protection obtained the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the best honor in journalism, and was dramatized in “All of the President’s Males,” the 1976 Hollywood film directed by Alan J. Pakula. Robert Redford performed Woodward, convening by evening in a parking storage together with his extremely positioned supply known as Deep Throat. Dustin Hoffman performed the shaggy-haired Bernstein. Mr. Sussman was omitted totally.

In her 2007 e-book “Woodward and Bernstein: Life within the Shadow of Watergate,” Shepard wrote that the filmmakers excised Mr. Sussman “for dramatic causes.” The story already had three editors — govt editor Benjamin C. Bradlee, portrayed in an Oscar-winning flip by Jason Robards; managing editor Howard Simons, whose real-life function the film diminished, performed by Martin Balsam; and Metropolitan editor Harry M. Rosenfeld, performed by Jack Warden.

If Mr. Sussman was deemed superfluous for the film — a choice that deeply wounded him, in line with Shepard’s reporting — he was by all accounts the other within the precise occasions that impressed it.

“Barry was important for The Put up’s Watergate” protection, stated former govt editor Leonard Downie Jr., who labored as an editor on the Watergate investigation, “simply as important as Bob and Carl.”

Journalist David Halberstam, writing in his 1979 e-book about American media “The Powers That Be,” described Mr. Sussman as “the proper working editor at precisely the proper degree.”

“Nearly from the beginning, earlier than anybody else at The Put up,” Halberstam wrote, Mr. Sussman “noticed Watergate as a bigger story, noticed that particular person occasions have been half of a bigger sample, the results of hidden selections from someplace within the prime of presidency which despatched smaller males to run soiled errands.”

Woodward and Bernstein, for his or her half, described Mr. Sussman as “Talmudic” in his mastery of essentially the most arcane particulars of the Watergate affair and “Socratic” in his capability to elicit leads from them by his insightful questioning.

“Greater than another editor at The Put up, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman grew to become a strolling compendium of Watergate information, a reference supply to be summoned when even the library failed,” the 2 reporters wrote in “All of the President’s Males,” their 1974 e-book upon which the film was based mostly.

“On deadline, he would pump these info right into a story in a relentless infusion, working up a physique of great data to assist what in any other case appeared just like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman’s thoughts, all the things fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the items.”

The e-book “All of the President’s Males” reportedly contributed to a rift that opened between Mr. Sussman and the 2 reporters he had supported by essentially the most troublesome days of the Watergate investigation, when an error of their reporting involving grand jury testimony invited questions on their credibility, and when Nixon was privately threatening “damnable, damnable” penalties for The Put up in retaliation for its protection.

Mr. Sussman had hoped to co-author the account of Watergate with Woodward and Bernstein, Shepard wrote, however the reporters finally moved ahead alone with “All of the President’s Males,” which grew to become a bestseller. Shepard quoted Woodward as saying that “it was a reporter’s story to inform, not an editor’s,” and that Mr. Sussman’s “function is totally specified by the e-book.”

By the point the e-book was printed, Shepard wrote, Mr. Sussman had stopped talking to Woodward and Bernstein. In response to Mr. Sussman, they have been “improper usually on element” within the e-book and had a bent to “sentimentalize” the Watergate story.

Mr. Sussman wrote his personal e-book about Watergate, “The Nice Cowl-Up” (1974), which broadcast journalist Brit Hume, writing within the New York Occasions, praised as establishing “with readability the compelling case for Nixon’s complicity within the Watergate coverup.”

A long time later, when Shepard known as Mr. Sussman to inquire about his two former colleagues, he replied, “I don’t have something good to say about both of them.”

Reached after Mr. Sussman’s dying, Woodward stated in an interview that “Barry was one of many nice imaginative, aggressive editors at The Washington Put up throughout Watergate. All of us owe him a debt of gratitude, significantly Carl Bernstein and myself.”

Barry Sussman was born in Brooklyn on July 10, 1934. His mom, an immigrant from what was then the Russian Empire, was a homemaker. His father, who was born in the USA, was a civil servant.

Mr. Sussman graduated in 1956 from Brooklyn School, the place he obtained a bachelor’s diploma in English and historical past, and the place he was an editor and columnist on a faculty newspaper.

His first job post-college was at a New York promoting company. He hated the work however reveled in moonlighting as a film reviewer. He positioned an advert within the commerce publication Editor and Writer — “freelance author seeks first newspaper job” — and acquired one on the Bristol Herald Courier, greater than 500 miles and a universe away from New York.

In Bristol he met his future spouse, Peggy Earhart, whom he married in 1962. Survivors embody his spouse, of Rockville; two daughters, Seena Sussman Gudelsky, additionally of Rockville, and Shari Sussman Golob of Potomac, Md.; and 4 grandchildren.

At The Put up, Mr. Sussman grew to become a favourite amongst his reporters. One in all them, John Hanrahan, who went on to turn out to be govt director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, described Mr. Sussman in an interview as “by far the most effective editor I ever had on any newspaper or any undertaking I used to be ever concerned with.”

“He was great to price with on deadline,” one other, Lawrence Meyer recalled. “When there have been holes within the story, he would ship you again to fill them and handle to do all the things with none type of rancor.”

Mr. Sussman had lengthy cultivated an curiosity in public opinion. After Watergate, he grew to become The Put up’s first in-house pollster, serving to to discovered the Washington Put up-ABC Information ballot.

“If presidential elections are the center of the political course of on this nation,” he as soon as wrote, “political polls have turn out to be the chief instrument by which that coronary heart’s beat is measured.”

Mr. Sussman penned a column on polling for The Washington Put up Nationwide Weekly version in addition to a e-book on the topic, “What Individuals Actually Assume and Why Our Politicians Pay No Consideration” (1988).

His different books included “Maverick: A Life in Politics” (1995) written with Lowell P. Weicker Jr., the Republican turned impartial Connecticut congressman, senator and governor who had served on the Senate Watergate Committee.

In 1987, Mr. Sussman was employed by United Press Worldwide as managing editor for nationwide information; he resigned inside months in opposition to large-scale employees cuts on the troubled information company.

He later ran a non-public survey analysis agency, was a marketing consultant to newspapers in Spain, Portugal and Latin America and served as editor of the Nieman Watchdog Venture at Harvard College. Because the Web upended the newspaper enterprise mannequin and hollowed out newsrooms throughout the USA, he cited the shortage of overarching editors as “the one best failing of newspaper investigations nowadays.”

“There’s no cohesion within the reporting,” he advised Investigating Energy, a web-based historical past of investigative journalism. It appeared, he stated, that when new scandals arose, “there’s not an editor who’s advised ‘[this] is your story,’ the best way I used to be advised Watergate was my story, and also you’re going to resolve it.”

A long time after Watergate, Mr. Sussman was typically known as on to talk about Nixon’s undoing and the continued function of a free press in a democracy. All these years later — the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in will fall simply weeks after his dying — Mr. Sussman, ever the attentive editor, nonetheless had command of essentially the most granular particulars of the investigation he had overseen, and had at his fingertips the names of all of the president’s males.