Watergate? Yawn.
It's an interesting read, with Bernstein discussing the "kinship" he feels with the library and how visiting it was a "moving experience."
Then, towards the end, came the strangest passage I've read in awhile:
Not all those in attendance at his speech were aware of Bernstein's iconic status.So we've a story about one of the most influential journalists of the past century. We've got an account of how he visits the library of the President that his journalism took down. And then we've got … a shrug from a young visitor who was only there for extra credit.Sayra Morales, 26, a journalism student at Fullerton College, said she attended for extra credit. She said she was unfamiliar with the details of Nixon's presidency, of Watergate, of Bernstein's role in history. She knows him as the author of the Clinton biography.
"I'm not big on politics," she said.
How does this get into the story? Is it a gratuitous slap at apathetic youth? (Or the journalism program at Fullerton College?) Is it an attempt to contextualize history? Was it a ploy to get to a certain word count? Couldn't the author of the piece have found someone who, I don't know, knew about the Nixon presidency or the Watergate investigation?