Everybody’s heard of Woodward and Bernstein, if only from their portrayals by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the avenging angels of Watergate in All the President’s Men. But their editor, Barry Sussman? Not so much. Yet it was Sussman, then the city editor of The Washington Post, who guided the young duo and their paper to a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. “From the start, the Post was ... unusually lucky” to have Sussman, the late David Halberstam wrote in The Powers That Be, his monumental book on the media. “Before anyone else at the Post, Sussman saw Watergate as a larger story, saw that the individual events were part of a larger pattern, the result of hidden decisions from somewhere in the top of government which sent smaller men to run dirty errands.”

Sounds familiar. Some four decades later, with the media and Donald Trump in a similar titanic struggle, it seemed a good time to get Sussman’s take on events then and now. Contrary to decades of myth-making, Sussman reminds us, the Post didn’t bring down Richard Nixon alone and certainly not overnight. As with Trump today, Nixon retained a large segment of hardcore supporters in Congress and the public that hung on—until, at the last minute, they didn’t. As Sussman explains, what turned opinion against Nixon was a watershed moment that dramatically shifted public perceptions. And he suggests that moment may come for Trump soon, too.

Jeff Stein: What’s your take on the press coverage of Trump, starting with the first allegations about his associates’ contacts with the Russians, up to the Mueller report? How has the press been doing?

Barry Sussman: The problem is the media have allowed Trump to set the agenda. When he changes the subject, they change the subject. They follow him wherever he goes. He leads the press around by the nose. That was even true on the Russia investigation. How many weeks did we go, months, where there were front-page stories questioning whether Trump would even testify? Imbeciles like Giuliani were getting press attention as though they had something to say, when all they were doing was trying to stretch things out and humiliate the press. That’s my main difficulty, not only with the Russia investigation but with everything else.

The press didn’t even cover the presidents every single day until Reagan. You may remember this. It was Reagan’s sharp advisers who decided to make him the center of attention and pretty much get stories day by day, every day. Before then, there was not even daily coverage of presidents. I think that we might keep that in mind as Trump is covered.