It’s about 20 minutes into my video call with Carl Bernstein when I feel compelled to tell him something he probably already knows.

       “You have a Washington accent,” I say.

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       “Yes, I do have it still,” says the famed reporter. “And actually — consciously or subconsciously — I try to keep it.”

       It’s the accent of a 78-year-old native of Washington, or “Warshington,” as so many pronounce it.

       Bernstein’s R in “Warshington” isn’t as hard as, say, my father’s, but when he explains why the accent’s important to him, the twang comes through: “Awney air I've tried not to sound like everybody else,” he says.

       “Awney air”? Oh: On the air, a reference to when Bernstein jumped to TV news after leaving The Post in 1976. He didn’t want to sound like everybody else.

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       Though he’s now lived in New York longer than he lived here, it’s Washington that Bernstein celebrates in his new book, “Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom.” The memoir is about how a 16-year-old copy boy from Harvey Road in Silver Spring learned to become a reporter at the Washington Evening Star.

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       It ends long before he came to The Post. In this book, “Water Gate” isn’t shorthand for scandal. It’s the stone staircase behind the Lincoln Memorial where Bernstein would listen to music played on a barge in the Potomac.

       This is a very Washington — real Washington — book, I say to Bernstein. He pushes back a little.

       “What you’re calling local has a universality to it,” he says. “Neighborhoods and street names are not the important thing. It’s the depiction, and how the person writing the memoir lives in these places and works in these places.”

       Yeah, of course. You don’t have to have grown up in Washington to enjoy “Chasing History,” but if you did, you will be delighted at the places, things and people Bernstein mentions, from the “submarine races” off Hains Point to Eddie, the legless, monkey-wrangling pencil vendor of F Street NW.

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       “I took guitar from Mr. Papas,” Bernstein says. That was Sophocles Papas, who ran a guitar studio on Connecticut Avenue NW and had studied with Andrés Segovia.

       “Every time Segovia came to Lisner Auditorium, Mr. Papas would give a reception at his house afterward,” Bernstein says. “His students had to play for Segovia.”

       How’d that go?

       “It was horrible. I was not good, let me tell you.”

       Bernstein was always a better dancer.

       “There’s a video of me on ‘The Milt Grant Show,’” he says. “I put it up on Instagram. It’s really wild. You gotta see it.”

       I did. It is. Milt Grant was Washington’s Dick Clark, hosting a daily dance show on WTTG from the Hotel Harrington. In the clip, a nattily dressed Bernstein throws off sparks as he dances with a girl a head taller than he.

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       “The girl I danced with more often was Bobbi Parzow,” he says. He pulls out a Blair High School yearbook — he was Class of 1961, barely — to show me her photo.

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       “We danced what was called Queenstown,” Bernstein says. “The way kids danced was not from the city. It was from Queenstown in Prince George's County.”

       In the small-world department, Bobbi went on to marry Walter Gold. Gold — son of The Post’s Bill Gold, who in 1947 started the column I now write — was the Star’s cops reporter. He became a mentor, taking Bernstein on nocturnal jaunts across the city.

       “What I am as a reporter is grounded in my childhood and my years at the Star, more than the years at The Post,” Bernstein says.

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       Back then, it was the better paper.

       “One of the differences between The Post and the Star: We had all these natives of the city,” he says.

       These were people like Bernstein — and like Mary Lou Werner. She grew up in Alexandria, attending Whites-only schools. In 1959, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of integration.

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       Bernstein says he doesn’t really know today’s Washington, which he calls a “money town.”

       “It was never a money town when we grew up,” he says.

       The people with money back then were locals: Hechingers (hardware), Lerners and Benders (real estate), Cohens (groceries).

       Eventually, Bernstein had some money, too. (You’ve seen the movie.) He bought an apartment in the Beaux-Arts Ontario building. As a boy, he’d delivered clothes there to customers of his tailor grandfather.

       “I didn’t want to leave the neighborhood or move to Georgetown,” Bernstein says. “I could hear the lions at night, because it’s high up and the lions are right down below there, in the zoo.”

       The lions’ roar — just another Washington accent.