It may come as a shock to be reminded that Watergate dragged on so long that

Woodward and Bernstein's book was actually published while Richard Nixon was still President. (In fact, the "smoking gun" tape wasn't released until four weeks after today's discussion.) Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein are candid -- as they were in their book--in admitting that they pressed the ethical limits of journalistic investigation. WFB then raises a question of presidential ethics, in Richard Nixon's having (a) taped his conversations and then (b) not immediately destroyed the tapes once the investigation began: "I think that private conversations are awesomely private and ought to be; besides, unless it's a soliloquy, you're involving somebody else, and to exercise dominion over somebody else's conversation and disclose it I simply find heinous."