"All the President's Men" was a warning

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Howard Hawks' 1940 screwball comedy "His Girl Friday" stands as one of the earliest popular films about the newspaper business. Adapted from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play "The Front Page," Hawks changed the gender of star reporter Hildy Johnson for the film and cast Rosalind Russell, who had recently reinvented her image as a comic actor. This also created a second-chance romance dynamic with co-star Cary Grant as Hildy's ex-husband and editor, Walter Burns.

Hawks also wanted to break the record for the fastest film dialogue at the time. He used a sound mixer to increase the speed and added specific words as tags for lines, which allowed for the film's signature overlapping dialogue without sacrificing clarity.

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In his June 1974 review of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book, “All the President’s Men,” the New Yorker’s political columnist Richard H. Rovere was less than impressed. The book, which provided a detailed account of the journalistic process the two Washington Post reporters used to uncover the extent of the Watergate scandal, was primed to be a bestseller. For historians and rubbernecking readers alike, “All the President’s Men” would be a necessary tome, a how-to on exposing corruption. Rovere, on the other hand, found the book to be “barren of ideas and imagination,” and “scarcely more interesting or enlightening than the day-by-day newspaper accounts.” The authors were too hung up on facts over insights, he argued. This was not the gossipy publication that many anticipated, and to Rovere, that missing element made the book a disappointment. Thankfully for Rovere, director Alan J. Pakula would turn those humdrum parts of “All the President’s Men” into a gripping procedural just two years later, crafting a legendary piece of American cinema in the process. 

But near the end of his column, Rovere emphasized one particularly important point in the book: Woodward and Bernstein wouldn’t have had anything to investigate if it weren’t for Nixon’s bumbling political cabinet and the sloppy work done by the low-level criminal team conducting the Watergate break-in. “Twenty years ago, McCarthyism might have been a grace and continuing menace to the liberty of us all if the leader had been less indolent and more hungry for power,” he wrote. “Two years ago, the triumph of the Watergate mentality might have become similarly disastrous if those who planned and executed it had not been almost wholly lacking in political finesse.”

If only that were still true. These days, America endures a Watergate-level amount of corruption every week, spearheaded by politicians as dolting and imbecilic as the ones in Nixon’s trusted circle. Federal immorality is no longer brushed under the rug, just waiting to be splashed across newspapers in big-scoop headlines; it’s scrawled out and published on X and Truth Social by the very politicians and talking heads committing it. Our government is rife with the exact kind of juicy insights that Rovere hoped to find in Woodward and Bernstein’s book, freely and fearlessly displayed. You can’t cover something up if you have nothing to hide. 

Nearly 50 years after its theatrical release, Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” plays much differently than it once did. Despite its reputation as a rousing tribute to the value of journalistic process, all of the film’s finest, most impactful components have spoiled with time — and to no fault of anyone involved with the actual movie itself. The years have eroded the film’s relevance, sped up by pernicious politicians and unethical business practices that have all but made editorial institutions and the hope for a stable democratic government moot. Yet, watching the film all these years later, its ardent message of persistence is somehow all the more powerful. If Woodward and Bernstein can climb over every wall, turn over every stone and reroute themselves at every dead end, perhaps it's not too late for some good, old-fashioned salvation.

The problem is that every corrupt politician in America, as well as their cronies, also knows that our fate has not yet been decided — and they’ll do anything to accelerate doom if it means the world will spin in their favor. In Pakula’s “All the President’s Men,” the Washington Post newsroom functions almost like a secret lair, a place where the good guys can hide out and compile their facts. Phones ring off the hook, cigarette smoke fills the air and the coffee is always hot. It’s a safe haven for journalists to put their heads together and find a solution that will serve the reader, and in turn, the greater good of the American people. On occasions that the reporting takes Woodward (Robert Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) away from their cubicles, their work is financed and comped by their employers. And even though they’re on deadline, they’re afforded ample time to collect data and conduct interviews before returning to their typewriters.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this is, sadly, a very outdated look at what newspaper journalism used to look like. Access to the internet exacerbated the need for a quick turnaround in newswriting. The homepage has to be refreshed with saucy material that will bring new readers in and keep existing readers scrolling. The number of long-term investigations published by outlets with the resources to fund such pursuits has dwindled, fast. But most critically, venture capital has eaten away at the remaining vestiges of old-school journalism. Papers and websites can be bought, sold and traded, and quite often, the publication’s editorial voice will go with it.

Coincidentally, the Washington Post first endorsed a presidential candidate in 1976, the same year “All the President’s Men” hit theaters. The paper continued the practice for almost every presidential election cycle until 2024, when Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who acquired the publication in 2013, announced that the Post would halt its endorsements — just 11 days before the 2024 election. While Bezos’ reps claimed this would be a return to neutrality for the publication, many people, including Post staffers, saw the decision as a clear and irrefutable move on Bezos’ part to curry favor with Donald Trump. In the following days, the paper lost a top editor and 250,000 subscribers, an injury that could only aid the narrative that the paper under Bezos when 300-some employees were laid off earlier this year in a “bloodbath” cut. A publication that once stood for truth and justice, emboldening reporters like Bernstein and Woodward to uncover corruption, was now wantonly flaunting its own rot.

When I first saw “All the President’s Men,” it was over the course of three days. My high school history teacher showed the film to our junior class, broken up in 50-minute segments that would adhere to the school bell. Despite being the staff of my school’s newspaper, I expected the film to be a slog; boring and obsessed with detail and names I didn’t know or care much about. 

To my surprise, I was gripped from its outset, fascinated by the way Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman managed to make the mundane so fascinating. Scenes of Redford and Hoffman taking phone calls and scribbling down notes, or poring over library slips in desperate search of a kernel of a lead, were thrilling. And it wasn’t only the method that was fascinating; it was the effect. Tugging on a tiny piece of thread can unspool a yarn of corruption so vast and wide-reaching that it goes all the way up to the highest office in the Western world. It’s impossible to watch “All the President’s Men” and not feel inspired by Woodward and Bernstein’s tenacity. 

“Because these perpetrators were held accountable, it would be nearly impossible for a political crime of this level to happen again,” I remember our teacher telling the class. That’s a nice thought, even if it’s myopic. Less than a decade after my graduation, Trump was elected and the veil was pulled. Political cover-ups like this happened all the time, I realized. Now they were just more visible.

“All the President’s Men” is not the defining American portrait of good triumphing over evil that a more naive version of myself once thought it was. Rather, it was a warning. Pakula and Goldman saw obstacles on the horizon. The country was rocked by the Watergate fallout, but its citizens also lapped up the gossip — like Rovere hoped to do with what little tidbits made it to Woodward and Bernstein’s book. The public both abhorred and adored the scandal. The more that top-level political corruption dominated the headlines, the less taboo it became. 

The ripples of the botched Watergate operation spoke to all of those arrogant enough to think they might be able to do it better. All America needed to kick things into high gear was a pervasive advancement in technology that made it easier to silo oneself into conspiracy and conservatism, and a political sub-party like the MAGA crowd to fuel the “fake news” rhetoric. Suddenly, even if a story in the papers went through a rigorous fact-checking process and was sourced accordingly, it didn’t have to be true if you didn’t want it to be.

To certain people, reality is a fickle thing. It comes and goes, and we get to choose to accept it when we feel like it. But just because so many have made up their own truths doesn’t mean that facts aren’t real, or that actions don’t have consequences. Jeff Bezos might be trying to systematically dismantle the Washington Post, and Bari Weiss may be doing the same thing to CBS News, but not all Americans are sitting by to idly let it happen. Weiss hasn’t been able to spend one day in her tenure at CBS without flubbing something and getting called on it by concerned citizens, and Washington Post readers recently joined the paper’s union in protesting. And while the net effect of this outcry isn’t as immediately visible as governmental corruption, it’s crucial to remember that Woodward and Bernstein started small, too. “All the President’s Men” underscores that sentiment with its matter-of-fact final shot, watching a teletype machine writing out years of front-page headlines leading to Nixon’s resignation.

Journalism doesn’t look the same as it did 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean that the stubborn reporter is a thing of the past. There are plenty of people who care enough to put the time and effort into uncovering the extent of the amoral world we’ve found ourselves in. Sifting through the noise and the voices takes more time, but it’s worth it. You never know when you’ll find yourself on the ground floor of a scandal, reading a story that will change history forever and result in the unthinkable. As Pakula’s brilliantly stark ending reminds us all these years later, justice requires patience.

What’s your memory of “All the President’s Men” for its 50th anniversary?

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A bonus recommendation from Salon’s Managing Editor Igor Derysh:

Good investigative journalism typically requires an obsessive persistence. It demands that you trust your instincts in the face of constant pushback from people who want you to stop. Woodward and Bernstein were repeatedly told by people in power to move on but kept digging anyway and uncovered a deep web of corruption. So did Ron Trosper. 

Trosper, played by Tim Robinson in his HBO comedy “The Chair Company,” embarks on a seemingly endless investigation into a shady company called Tecca after one of its chairs breaks beneath him at an office meeting, humiliating him in front of his colleagues. With every thread he pulls, he discovers that things are not what they seem. With every question he asks, he gets more pushback from the show’s bizarre cast of characters and his own family. 

Ultimately, the irrational-seeming middle manager stubbornly refuses to accept defeat and follows his instincts down a cringe-fueled, chaotic rabbit hole that leads him to uncover a full-blown conspiracy linked to his own family and company. It’s a reminder that uncovering wrongdoing requires a lot of gumption and tenacity but can be done by anyone motivated by injustice, not necessarily a Washington Post byline.

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