Why It Still Feels So Urgent

No, even today these are not very bright guys. And things are definitely out of hand. But we seem clueless about how to effectively defy it, at least in any way that changes things. The 50th anniversary of All The President’s Men reminds us of the national integrity we’ve lost.

The newspaper work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein won the Pulitzer for The Washington Post in 1973, but the true prize was that their coverage galvanized the congressional and law-enforcement investigations that led to Nixon’s resignation and the imprisonment of many of those who aided and abetted him. The power of their printed words ignited a sense of hope and motivated countless young people to take up journalism in that era, and the movie adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s book, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the respective reporters, helped keep that inspiration surging for decades to come.

The onslaught was so profound that as plans for the film version leaked out in early 1975, Ray Nelson, associate dean at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, declared: “God help us when Robert Redford makes that movie.”

What a wonderful problem to have. Too many people, all grasping for the truth. God help us now for different reasons.

All the President’s Men released to theaters on April 5, 1976. It became a blockbuster less than two years after Nixon hit the bricks.

Looking back, the startling thing about All The President’s Men is the timeline of it all. These things had all just happened, and they were immortalized onscreen with impressive speed.

The film opens with a close-up of the bars of a typewriter hammering out the date June 17, 1972. That’s when five men were arrested in the midst of a late-night break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate hotel. Woodward was the first reporter to look into who they were, discovering that the men all had ties to the White House and Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (which was widely known as the too-good-to-be-true acronym CREEP.)

They would have gotten away with it too, if not for one pesky hotel security guard. Frank Wills, then 24, noticed someone had taped open the lock bolt on a doorway, and he called in the cops. Had the burglars stuck the tape vertically on the inside of the door, rather than horizontally so that the end stuck out conspicuously near the knob, Wills might not have noticed. The guard in the film is played by the real-life Wills, by the way, making him one of the only people in All The President’s Men to play himself (apart from the news footage of Nixon, of course).

As the relationship of the burglars to Nixon’s reelection committee became clear, the conspiracy to cover up the crime and the underhanded effort to manipulate the opponents in an election startled the nation. But not fast enough. The summertime break-in was not enough to stop Nixon from winning a second term on November 7, 1972, unequivocally crushing Democratic rival George McGovern with 520 electoral votes and 60 percent of the popular vote.

In the months after the arrests, Bernstein joined Woodward on the case, and together they published story after story, incrementally expanding the break-in’s reach until Nixon’s involvement became undeniable. The erosion was slow but steady. Despite having won with a clear mandate, the president faced looming impeachment and chose to resign instead.

Here’s where that timeline becomes astounding: The book All The President’s Men, compiling Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting, was published on June 15, 1974, almost exactly two years after the initial burglary. Nixon resigned nearly two months after that, on August 9, 1974.

Redford purchased the film rights for his production company Wildwood Enterprises in March 1974, almost three months before publication and five months before Nixon stepped down. He paid $450,000 for the project, which is the equivalent of $3 million today, adjusting for inflation.

Redford always intended to play Woodward, but Bernstein’s casting became the object of feverish speculation. In April 1974, both Al Pacino and Hoffman were floated as possibilities. Sydney Pollack, who had directed Redford in three other movies and was about to start work with him on Three Days of the Condor, was rumored as the filmmaker. Again—Nixon was still in office at this point and holding on indignantly.

After Nixon’s downfall, news on the film went dark for several months. In November 1974, Hoffman announced that he would take on the role of Bernstein, and Alan J. Pakula, an Oscar nominee for producing 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as being the director of 1971’s Klute and the Warren Beatty conspiracy thriller The Parallax View, was confirmed as the director of All the President’s Men.

Nixon had been pardoned in September 1974 by Gerald Ford, who stepped in to serve out the rest of his disgraced predecessor’s presidential term. “My conscience tells me that only I, as president, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book,” Ford said in his remarks about the pardon.

Not only was the book not “sealed,” but the Hollywood version was unstoppable. You could argue that the movie adaptation of All The President’s Men gave the American people the catharsis they needed. It did not and could not convict Nixon or his confederates for their wrongdoing, but it forever enshrined their guilt, making it evident to all.

Filming began in May 1975, and the movie was finished and released to theaters on April 5, 1976. That beat the four-year anniversary of the break-in by a few months. It became a blockbuster less than two years after Nixon hit the bricks.

Today, almost no one is left from All The President’s Men.

For those who were not of age then, it’s hard to imagine how raw the country still was, how tumultuous this all must have seemed. It was a movie literally ripped from the headlines, and the public—the very voters who had just reelected Nixon—wanted to know the truth. That’s what has now changed about us for the worse.

After a decade of Trump, including the toothless and dismissed Mueller report, and four years during the Biden administration when little to no progress was made to hold Trump and his associates responsible for their wrongdoings, it seems like a miracle that the work of Woodward and Bernstein could motivate the cleansing that flushed Nixon out of public office.

Apart from its historical relevance, All The President’s Men is astounding for other reasons too. If it were pure fiction—and some critics would argue it actually is overly dramatized, but even if it were just made up entirely—like those other paranoid classics like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, it would still stand as a masterpiece.

Pakula, working from a script by legendary screenwriter William Goldman, created something taut and compelling, while still largely focusing on the mundane task of gathering facts. Goldman at that point was best known for writing the 1966 Paul Newman mystery Harper and 1968’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Later he would be known for The Princess Bride (an adaptation of his own novel), Misery, and coining the famous Hollywood aphorism “Nobody knows anything.”

Pakula would later be known for Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Presumed Innocent (1990), but All the President’s Men presents both storytellers at the peak of their powers. Add to that Gordon Willis, the cinematographer jokingly renowned as “the Prince of Darkness,” doing some career-best work here, which is saying something given that his other credits include The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Annie Hall. Together, they made an unforgettable film that is just as powerful now as it was then.

When All The President’s Men was in production, Newsweek reported on the making of it and concluded with this quote from Goldman about the intense pressure they faced. “Expectations are so high on this movie that if the film is only good, it won’t be good enough,” he said.

The surprising thing about Woodward and Bernstein’s depiction in the film is how many dead ends they hit, how much time they spend mired in tedium. The most famous shot in the movie is the overhead image of the duo going through forms in the Library of Congress. As it zooms up and fades to ever-wider perspectives, the reporters are reduced to specks and the long passage of time becomes evident.

They found what they were looking for because they were diligent, because they were patient, and because they were granted that time. What magazine or newspaper has the resources now to let two writers spin their wheels like this? But that spinning is how wheels find purchase, and the take-off that follows is the reward.

Woodward never revealedto Redford the identity of his top-secret source, the infamously nicknamed Deep Throat. That person, who helped guide the investigation from the shadows (literally so, in the movie) remained a mystery for decades until Mark Felt, the former deputy director of the FBI, came forward at the age of 91 in 2005 to verify that he had been the anonymous source.

This was confirmed by Woodward, who subsequently explained that he had first met and befriended Felt when the younger man was enlisted in the Navy in the late ’60s, serving as a courier at the White House for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This information is not in the film, of course, but it resolves one of the movie’s enduring mysteries: How does Redford’s Woodward know to call this executive-branch insider, who then sets up an elaborate cloak-and-dagger means of in-person meetings that can’t be traced?

Hal Holbrook played Deep Throat, and his casting holds up now that the identity of Felt is public knowledge. He is both eerie and world-weary, an example of how people in power use back channels to get the outcomes they seek—or to clear their own consciences.

Redford purchased the film rights for what became All the President’s Men in March 1974, almost three months before publication and five months before Nixon stepped down.

Today, almost no one is left from All The President’s Men. Woodward and Bernstein are still here, of course, but the core creators of the film are almost entirely gone, apart from Hoffman and Jane Alexander, who earned an Oscar nomination for her brief role as a reluctant source.

Redford died last year. Pakula, Goldman, and Willis have long since passed away. Supporting players like Holbrook, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, and Jason Robards, who actually won the Supporting Actor Oscar for playing legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, are all as gone as the men they portrayed. Nixon died in 1994, somewhat redeemed as an elder statesman, although the legacy of his power grabs remains all too alive in the White House today.

Some would even add The Washington Post to the in memoriam, following its recent corporate evisceration, although it remains technically on life support. The glory days of journalism that followed Woodward and Bernstein’s pioneering work are definitely over. Even worse, the public that once cared about such reporting, rather than indulging reflexive partisan side-taking, seems to be gone. Maybe not forever. We’ll see.

The movie that commemorated this effort to find the truth is still here. And still strong. Far better than “good enough,” as Goldman once said.

Like I said already, it feels as if it could have been made yesterday. More’s the pity.