Not long after the resignation of Richard Nixon in August 1974, Woodward and Bernstein took a leave of absence from "The Washington Post" in order to begin work on the book. They originally intended to cover just the last hundred days of the Nixon presidency but then expanded it further back. They hired two research assistants, Scott Armstrong and Al Kamen, and among them they interviewed 394 people involved in the tale. People were anxious to talk in an effort to get their (sometimes self-serving) perspective on the events included in the narrative, and almost all of the sources were promised anonymity in return. In this way, Woodward and Bernstein constructed a fly on the wall type narrative of the events in question.