Carl Bernstein, the esteemed Watergate reporter, addressed a gym full of Roanoke College students and staff at midday on Tuesday, urging them to listen carefully, take risks and embrace their failures.

Bernstein, too, targeted a press that lets quick summaries and easy answers slide, without searching for — in a line that echoed through his remarks — "the best attainable version of the truth."

"Watergate was a triumph of the system," Bernstein told reporters after the speech, referring to both a press and legislature that hounded Richard Nixon.

That system has fallen apart, and most people in the college-aged crowd have never witnessed a triumph like it in their lifetimes, he said.

Bernstein had a lush head of gray hair and a grandfatherly tone, but he spoke sharply of the disconnect between words and actions that go unquestioned on TV and in print.

More than once during the morning, he thumped the GOP for showing a patriotic video at last week's Republican National Convention of the first responders to the 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, but not discussing the overall condition of the nation’s infrastructure.

Bernstein appeared for the Roanoke College convocation, the formal kick-off to the academic year. The running theme for speakers this year, President Micahel Maxey said in his opening remarks, is a retrospective on the 20th century.

In the early 1970s, Bernstein and fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward broke the story of a break-in at the Watergate apartment building, that led to Nixon’s resignation.

He is now a political analyst for CNN and contributing editor for "Vanity Fair" magazine.