Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate
By Alicia C. Shepard
John Wiley & Sons
288 pages, $24.95

In my files I have a folder of clippings, brown and soft as an old shoeshine cloth. The one on top led The Washington Post’s October 10, 1972, edition: FBI FINDS NIXON AIDES SABOTAGED DEMOCRATS. The double byline reads, of course: “By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.” That story was the one, according to Alicia Shepard, that proved that the Watergate break-in was not an isolated event, but one of many “illegal and corrupt schemes” run by the Nixon administration. That was thirty-five years ago, but Shepard offers a fresh account of the Watergate enterprise at the Post, deftly sorting fact from legend, giving credit where credit is belatedly due. She also deals well with the difficulties of describing the team’s separate careers after the mid-1970s, when they split after writing two best-seller Watergate books and seeing themselves portrayed in film by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. She somehow avoids making it all sound like good Bob, bad Carl. She leaves in plenty of blemishes for both—the trail of professional grudges and broken marriages—and gives equal respect to their separate efforts to find the best uses for the second acts of their lives.

Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond
By Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh
Columbia University Press
439 pages, $29.95

Although the title of this collection is not explicitly defined, in the past “administration of torture” has referred, not to bureaucratic arrangements, but to actual infliction of pain. And the United States, this black-bound volume makes clear, has inflicted a great deal of pain on its captives abroad, despite presidential denials and the government’s at least rote adherence to the...

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