It’s the birthday of Carl Bernstein, the journalist who, along with Bob Woodward, broke the Watergate scandal that—SPOILER ALERT—led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Bernstein and Woodward, writing for The Washington Post, received the Pulitzer Prize for their trouble and chronicled their coverage in the bestselling All the President’s Men (1974). In 1976 the two published The Final Days, detailing Nixon’s last days in office.

Bernstein was born in 1944 in Washington, D.C., to Alfred and Sylvia Bernstein; Alfred was an investigative attorney on Capitol Hill, and both parents had affiliations with the Communist Party. This led to their being investigated/harassed by the FBI in the late 40s and early 50s, a painful familial experience Bernstein wrote about much later in Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir (1989). At 16, he started at the Washington Star as a copy boy and later dropped out of the University of Maryland to pursue reporting full time. Because the Washington Star required a bachelor’s degree, he left in 1965 for the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey, and a year later left that paper for The Washington Post.

In 1972, Bernstein and Woodward were assigned to cover the story of five burglars caught at the Watergate office complex (headquarters of the Democratic National Committee). With the help of an informant known for over three decades only as Deep Throat, they were able to link the burglars to the Nixon aides who were paying them to do dastardly deeds, and eventually to Nixon himself. The rest, as they say, is history. In 2005, W. Mark Felt, former associate director of the FBI, came forward and revealed himself to be Deep Throat, after years of denying it—ending the mystery and frankly kind of ruining Washington’s favorite guessing game. This was real life cloak-and-dagger stuff, people, and if you don’t want to drop everything right now and watch Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat in the 1976 hit movie All the President’s Men, then you, sir, are no red-blooded American.

I digress. Bernstein left The Washington Post in 1976 to do investigative reporting for ABC and later wrote biographies of Pope John Paul II and Hillary Clinton. He does frequent gigs as a political analyst on news programs. He’s been married three times, the second time to famed writer and director Nora Ephron (d. 2012); during their marriage, Bernstein had an affair while Ephron was pregnant with their second child, an experience that Ephron used as inspiration for her 1983 novel Heartburn (later made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson but not, sadly, Hal Holbrook).

Have a pink and glittery Valentine’s Day and stay scrupulously honest to the data.