Here we are, almost 50 years after the release of All the President’s Men, and America’s political climate feels like it’s on the brink of disaster. We’re a nation steeped in misinformation, conspiracy theories, and ideological warfare. Toxicity and acidity are everywhere.
In the film, we watch as the Watergate reporting moves from inside the paper to the bottom of the front page to the lead story. What if it never reaches the front page? What if it had, after that first story, lost momentum and died? What then? All the President’s Men insinuates that potential, that future. Which lends it a haunting quality. Because it’s not just a story about what happened. It’s a warning of what could.
The film exalts the role journalism plays in a healthy democracy. How tragic, then, when you look at the state of journalism in the 2020s. Reporting has become entertainment. A product. And so the quality of information varies. The spin on information varies. The intention varies. Which leads to a complete fracturing of perspective. The truth shattered and scattered across print, broadcast, and digital mediascapes. For every Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who write the truth, you have a thousand others who twist and deny it. Why? “Follow the money.”
All the President’s Men transcends its era because its commentary and lessons endure.
All the President’s Men explained
Themes and meaning
Welcome to the grand conspiracy
In All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein start off in a state of innocence. They, like everyone else, hear about the men arrested at the Democratic National Committee and think it’s surprising but not meaningful. By the end of the movie, they’re part of a full-blown political conspiracy and appropriately paranoid by their role in revealing the truth to the public. This journey from ignorance to knowledge and the consequences of possessing such knowledge is the core of the film. It’s a classic Garden of Eden story.
How did William Goldman and Alan Pakula accomplish this? I’m glad you asked! This stuff is really cool.
So we start with the initial crime at the DNC. That’s the inciting action. It creates a divide between the 99.99% of people who don’t know the truth about this event and the .1% who do. Woodward and Bernstein are part of the 99.99%. The Uninformed. Over the course of the film, they engage with the .1%—nervous whistleblowers, secretive operatives. AKA: the Informed. And each of those encounters illustrates the divide. The Informed are nervous, paranoid, and fearful. While everyone else gets to go about life as they always have.
The more Woodward and Bernstein find out, the closer they get to the truth, the more nervous, paranoid, and fearful they become. The duo telling The Bookkeeper that they parked around the corner, just in case someone was watching, illustrates a growing skepticism. At that point, there’s no evidence anyone is watching. But they’ve become informed enough to start doing such things. This sense of “someone’s watching” escalates when Woodward runs down the street then suddenly looks over his shoulder to check for a tail. And it culminates, at the end, after Deep Throat finally tells Woodward what he knows, when Woodward crashes Bernstein’s apartment and goes full conspiracist—he turns up the music in case the apartment is bugged, then writes on the typewriter so no one listening would know what they say.
Deep Throat says our lives may be in danger
SURVEILLANCE BUGGING
I talked to Sloan. Heard what we wanted to hear. He said he would have named Haldeeman to Grand Jury – was ready to blame Haldeman but nobody asked him about Haldeman.
Now they’re part of the .1%. They’re informed. They’re the Informed. What happens in the very next scene? They go to Ben Bradlee’s house to tell him what they know. Why in person? Because they don’t trust the phones. And even there, they refuse to go inside in case someone already bugged the home. The two are finally acting like everyone they had previously interviewed or tried to interview.
In that talk with Bradlee, we get the ultimate line: [Deep Throat] said everyone is involved. The implication of “everyone” ties back to what Deep Throat had tried to convey to Bernstein in their penultimate talk.
- Woodward: Segretti won’t go on the record, but if he would, we know he would implicate Chapin.
- Deep Throat: That would put you inside the White House.
- W: Who? Can you be specific? How high up?
- DT: You’re gonna have to find that out for yourself. I don’t like newspapers. I don’t care for inexactitude. And shallowness.
- W: The CREEP slush fund that financed the rat f***ing, we’ve just about got that nailed down. I don’t know how—
- DT: Did you change cabs? [Paranoia]
- W: Yeah. Does the FBI know what we know? Does Justice? Why haven’t they done anything?
- DT: If it didn’t deal directly with the break-in, they didn’t pursue.
- W: Who told them not to?
- DT: Don’t you understand what you’re on to?
- W: Mitchell knew?
- DT: Of course Mitchell knew. Do you think something this size just happens?
- W: Haldeman had to know, too.
- DT: You get nothing from me about Haldeman.
- W: Segretti said that—
- DT: Don’t concentrate on Segretti. You’ll miss the overall.
- W: The letter. The letter that destroyed the Muskie candidacy—the Canuck letter—did that come from inside—
- DT: You’re missing the overall.
- W: What overall?
- DT: They were frightened of Muskie, and look who got destroyed. They wanted to run against McGovern. Look who they’re running against. They bugged. They followed people. False press leaks, fake letters. They cancelled Democratic campaign rallies. They investigated Democratic private lives. They planted spies, stole documents, and on and on. Now, don’t tell me you think this is all the work of little Don Segretti.
The subtext of that conversation is Deep Throat begging Woodward to understand Nixon’s involvement. But Woodward continuously stops short of implicating the president. Why? Because, at the time, that seemed an inconceivable thing for a president to do. Woodward was still too innocent. Once he’s joined the Informed, he confidently tells Bradlee that “everyone is involved.” And that means Nixon. We then cut to the offices of the Post. Woodward and Bernstein, in the background, are writing away, while, in the foreground, a TV shows Nixon’s inauguration.
We then see headline after headline, as the Watergate scandal unfolds, and the 99% percent become, over the months and years that followed, part of the Informed.
The implication there is immense.
We saw how the Informed behaved. Every single person who knew the truth lost their innocence and felt a sense of conspiracy. How, then, does a nation react to such knowledge? All the President’s Men positioned America as this Garden of Eden and Watergate as the forbidden fruit. Woodward and Bernstein are Adam and Eve. Their bite from the apple costs all Americans life in Paradise. The nation will not, can not be what it was before. That premise has been borne out.
Cast
- Bob Woodward – Robert Redford
- Carl Bernstein – Dustin Hoffman
- Deep Throat – Hal Holbrook
- Ben Bradlee – Jason robards
- Harry M. Rosenfeld – Jack Warden
- The Bookkeeper – Jane Alexander
- Hugh Sloan – Stephen Collins
- Donald Segretti – Robert Walden
- Based on – the book All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
- Written by – William Goldman
- Directed by – Alan J. Pakula
