Jay Rohr
All the President’s Men encapsulates how great films have myriad facets. The surface layer of this 1976 neo-noir political thriller recounts the uncovering of the infamous Watergate scandal. In that respect, it’s a historical drama centered on the intrepid reporters who refused to ignore the abuse of power by the President of the United States. Going just a hair deeper reveals why it’s endured as a film worth watching for fifty years.
For those unfamiliar, Watergate was the catch-all term for a series of events that unfolded from 1972 to ‘74. Burglars caught in the offices of the Democratic National Committee had connections to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign. They were attempting to steal documents and illegally wiretap phones. Although it was never proven who initiated the unlawful operation, Nixon actively worked to cover up the incident. All of this was discovered by The Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting helped spur the President’s resignation on August 9, 1974.
It forever changed United States politics, injecting a cynicism that had not been predominant in the public perception of politicians, especially higher offices like the presidency. In many ways, that cynical bent has never really gone away. Furthermore, ever since, every major scandal, particularly political ones, acquires the -gate suffix as an indication of implied severity. Perhaps perceiving this historical importance, Woodward and Bernstein wrote a book titled All the President’s Men detailing their investigation and the subsequent resignations throughout the Nixon administration.
In Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, Michael Korda, editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster, wrote, “It transformed book publishing into a red-hot part of the media… journalists had always considered the book to be a kind of lumbering dinosaur… Books contained history, not news… (Dick Snyder) made All the President’s Men not only newsworthy but news.”
While working on 1972’s The Candidate, a coldly comical satire about US politics, Robert Redford became familiar with the reporting Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published in The Washington Post. The actor soon got in touch with the journalists after they implicated H. R. Haldeman in the scheme in an unsubstantiated claim, a major setback that reduced the credibility of their accusations.
Redford said in Time magazine, “I wanted to see them when they had bottomed out. People who take wild shots and miss interest me.”
These interactions eventually led to him buying the film rights to their book for $450,000. Warner Bros. Pictures put up the money along with a $5 million budget contingent on Robert Redford committing to two more pictures. They then hired William Goldman, who’d won an Academy Award for writing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, which had propelled Redford into stardom.
The script did not come together smoothly. In William Goldman’s 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting, the writer detailed his perception of the process. Among several issues with the book, like the way it jumped around without structure, Goldman worried that “Watergate had been so heavily dealt with in the media that a lot of people, rightly, were already sick of it.” Still, he put together the best draft he could, only for Redford to pull the rug from under him, presenting a rewrite composed by Carl Bernstein and the reporter’s romantic partner (and future filmmaker), Nora Ephron.
Apparently, that version of the script made Bernstein a suave ladies’ man, seducing women at a glance to get his way. It was rejected too. Then, when director Klute and The Parallax View director Alan J. Pakula joined the production, fresh off those two successful political thrillers, he asked Goldman for another round of rewrites. According to the writer, that final version, despite some ad-libs and scenes in different places, largely became what’s seen on screen.
Writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Joe Pollack opined that “as is an extremely difficult task. Investigative reporting… involves a lengthy search for sources and tedious checking and cross-checking of facts… All the President’s Men has turned these potential minuses into gigantic pluses.”
He goes on to laud Pakula’s direction along with the work of cinematographer Gordon Willis. Together, they composed a shadowy world full of paranoia and intrigue. There’s a constant sense of things hidden, perhaps in plain sight, while potential danger is in every shrouded spot. Only the brightly lit interior of the newspaper office is a place where all can be seen plainly. Camera angles capture a sense of being under surveillance, while lighting turns mundane spaces into chiaroscuro nightmare factories full of shadows like shark’s teeth.
Acting absolutely enhances many elements with subtle skill. There are masterful moments where Robert Redford is on the phone as Bob Woodward, his expression betraying excitement, as he struggles to maintain a calm, cool demeanor so as not to spook whomever he’s talking to. It’s like watching someone fishing, who knows they’ve got a trophy on the line, but reeling in the win requires chill patience, not an aggressive rush. Contrasting that is Dustin Hoffman’s almost brash attitude as Carl Bernstein.
The two, though working together, play the parts as coworkers with conflicting views. Bernstein is happy to go with a story that’s mere implication, while Woodward becomes increasingly reluctant to present anything without sufficient evidence. As such, they represent mindsets all too common, especially in political discourse; those who only need the feeling of truth and those who need concrete proof.
At the same time, both roles are presented as hungry young reporters chasing the story of a lifetime. Urging caution all the while, one could even argue indirectly molding the young journalists, are a team of senior editors. Veteran performers make up the assortment. Jack Warden (Twelve Angry Men) is the metro editor perpetually defending the pair. Martin Balsam (Catch-22) is managing editor Howard Simons, who dubbed the source “Deep Throat”. Finally, Jason Robards (Once Upon a Time in the West) portrays Benjamin Bradlee the executive editor, who wants the story solid but isn’t afraid to follow it into the fire.
All three convey the sense of people who have lived their jobs. There’s a marvelous scene where they and several other performers are composing the layout for an upcoming edition. The back and forth between everyone is some of the smoothest dialogue delivery ever. At the same time, it conveys not only how the newspaper is run but shows how minimal the Watergate situation seemed at first. That helps prevent knowing the ultimate outcome from draining the tension out of the picture. Alongside Pakula’s perfect pacing it inspires curiosity about when exactly the story is going to explode. What transpires is the metaphorical observance of fuse wire burning down to ignite a bomb.
Every document discovered. Every phone call. Each conversation. All seem combustible. And when something doesn’t set off the blast, the tension doesn’t die so much as it gets replaced by a mounting infuriation. One begins to appreciate Bernstein chomping at the bit, yet when setbacks like the Haldeman mishap occurs, Woodward and Bradlee’s caution is equally understandable.
Oddly enough, the film doesn’t close with a grand victory. Instead of reenacting any gotcha moments or even replaying the resignations, All the President’s Men breezes through several years. There’s only a speedy teletype machine furiously hammering out the news wire, summarizing articles and headlines published by The Washington Post. The next several month and years reduced to breezy text. The final result being Richard Nixon’s resignation.
That’s because the movie ultimately isn’t about the historical event itself so much as what those events meant. Cinematically, it shows how all history is condensed to mere sentences while implying that even when buried beneath a mountain the truth can be uncovered by those dedicated to chipping away at the coverup. This isn’t a movie about a scandal so much as the mechanics of investigative reporting.
Journalism has a history of amusing silver screen depictions. There’re few better than The Front Page (1974) or its alternative version His Girl Friday (1940). Both set the tone for witty journalists wisecracking their way through whimsical investigations. However, All the President’s Men aimed at a more serious tone. Combining the two tones is the comedy-drama The Paper (1990). Cheery as that flick can be, it still endeavors to show the hard work reporters put in to bring the truth to light. Perhaps a better spiritual successor is The Post, a 2017 Steven Spielberg picture about The Washington Post featuring several of the same editors struggling to expose the Pentagon Papers (documents that showed the US committed to the Vietnam War totally aware they couldn’t win, resulting in the needless loss of lives). Spotlight (2015) similarly highlights journalistic methodology.
Narratively, almost any scandal could fit into the formula established by All the President’s Men. There’s a procedural quality to the picture. Someone stumbles on an innocuous incident that strikes a spark in the dark, inadvertently illuminating a bigger picture. They go looking for more matches and eventually illuminate something sinister. What really shapes the story is how close it is to its moment in time.
Hollywood is often in a rush to capitalize on historical events fresh in the public consciousness. That’s why by 2006, just five years after the tragedy of 9/11, two docudrama disaster flicks emerged: World Trade Center and United 93. The 2013 Boston bombing got turned into the 2016 action thriller Patriots Day. The 2010 Copiapó mining accident became the disaster-survival drama The 33. Even more recently, less than a month after saving the pilot downed in Iran during Epic Fury, Michael Bay agreed to direct a film adaptation of that incident. Z (1969), Eight Deadly Shots (1972), Battle in Seattle (2007)—the list goes on.
The hardest past to portray is the most immediate. It’s often too personal to be observed objectively, while all the facts are rarely available. The result is that any fictionalization is impressionistic, a sense of that moment at that time. Oddly enough, this makes cinematic adaptations of such events, besides possible propaganda, time capsules. In that respect, All the President’s Men, despite having many accurate facts, isn’t so much about the Watergate Scandal as it is a drama proving that the guardrails held and, as such, people should still have faith in the system.
Consider that at the time, no one knew Mark Felt was the source referred to as “Deep Throat”. Though well played by Hal Holbrook (Wall Street), the depiction might be completely different if his identity was known at the time. Furthermore, it would alter the way he’s been presented in other, typically comical, representations over the decades. Take, for example, the 1999 comedy Dick, where Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams play a pair of ditzy teenagers who humorously become the informant.
Despite William Goldman’s concerns, audiences were not so sick of Watergate. All the President’s Men was a box office hit, raking in $70.6 million. Critics loved it as well. Desmond Ryan of The Philadelphia Inquirer called it, “not only a stunningly accurate account of the way big-city newspapers operate, down to the last paper clip and derisive curse, but it is also a superlative movie by any standard.” Sally Smith praised its “low-key realism — as opposed to being a shrill polemic against Nixon.” Or, as Chris Nashawaty said in a retrospective review in Entertainment Weekly, the film is “a victory lap for American journalism.”
All the President’s Men escapes from the pitfalls of historical dramas by being about more than the moment it’s dramatizing. As much as it revolves around the Watergate Scandal, it’s also about how the Fourth Estate held the line against the abuse of power. In addition, it’s the dramatization of various journalistic mechanics, the same way 2003’s Shattered Glass is both about a reporter fabricating stories but perhaps more so about how a publication investigates and deals with such a situation. This all illuminates a system that exists to ensure trustworthy information is being given to the public; that there is a source the general populace can count on to tell the truth.
