It’s hard to imagine the young reporter who helped break the Watergate scandal and topple President Richard Nixon — and won the Pulitzer Prize for telling that story — as a 16-year-old truant who almost flunked out of high school.

But Carl Bernstein has always been known as a risk taker, which might well be the secret to his success. After squeaking through school by the skin of his teeth, by the age of 19 he’d earned a spot as a reporter at the Evening Star, Washington, D.C.’s afternoon newspaper. He didn’t keep it for long, however, because he refused to finish college. Still, within a year, he was back in the game with a job at The Washington Post and on his way to becoming a pioneer of investigative journalism.

In his new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, Bernstein traces his early days in the bedlam of the nation’s capital and joins us to discuss, with his typical frankness and wit, a determined young man’s dogged commitment to truth and a lifetime of taking on the powerful.

After leaving the Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein reported for ABC, CNN, and CBS, breaking story after story about the CIA and American media, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the political dexterity of Pope John Paul II.  He is the author of five other books.

Bernstein will be in conversation with Molly Jong-Fast, novelist and an editor-at-large at The Daily Beast.