All the President’s
Men
(1976)
Artemus Ward
Dept. of Political Science
Northern Illinois University
Origins
• All the President's Men is based on the 1974
non-fiction book of the same name by Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two
journalists investigating the Watergate scandal
for the Washington Post and who won a Pulitzer
Prize for their coverage.
• Robert Redford bought the rights to Woodward
and Bernstein's book in 1974 for $450,000 with
the notion to adapt it into a film.
• William Goldman wrote the screenplay for which
he won an Academy Award. His 1983 book
Adventures in the Screen Trade is considered
essential reading for anyone contemplating a
career in Hollywood. The most famous quote
from his book about the industry is: “Nobody
knows anything.”
• The film was nominated for Best Picture but lost
the Oscar to Rocky.
Paranoia in
Political Films
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In the 1970s paranoia became the dominant trend within the political film genre.
By that time, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the unwinnable, interminable and
increasingly unjustifiable war in Vietnam, and the corrosive Watergate scandal which
culminated in the resignation of Richard Nixon had all contributed to a pervasive loss of
faith in America’s leaders and institutions.
Watergate’s cultural impact was evident in the decade’s paranoid thrillers, particularly
Francis Ford Coppola’s eerie The Conversation (1974) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of
the Condor (1975). Yet the political film that had the greatest impact in the 1970s dealt
with Watergate directly.
Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) framed the scandal that wrecked Richard
Nixon’s presidency as a detective tale. Clandestine meetings in darkened garages and the
palpable fear of campaign workers endowed the film with a strong sense of paranoia.
But the true-to-life ending of “little guys” on track to topple a corrupt president
reinforced the cozy Mr. Smith Goes to Washington/movie world-view of good men
making a difference. In this sense, All the President’s Men was the exception to the rule
of 1970s paranoid political movies. The heroes won; but in most others they lost—
frequently crushed by the imperious, impenetrable and invincible power structure.
Journalism as an Institution
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It is not surprising that the movies focus so heavily on the dilemmas faced by
journalist heroes or villains as opposed to a more nuanced examination of journalism
as an institution.
Film insists on history as the story of individuals. Hence, the personal becomes a way
of avoiding the often difficult or insoluble social problems pointed out by film.
So journalism movies focus on personal relationships between reporters, editors,
sources, and love interests. All the President’s Men is more about two reporters
acting as detectives than the complex historical reality of Watergate. The
relationships between the reporters (Hoffman and Redford) and their editors (Jason
Robards, Jack Warden, and Martin Balsam) and sources (Hal Holbrook, Jane
Alexander, and Ned Beatty) are explored rather than the relationships among the
political participants in Watergate.
In this sense, the film’s history is about journalism rather than politics.
Dualities: Outlaw v. Official Heroes
• The film depicts two kinds of hero journalists: the outlaw
and the official and how they reluctantly join forces to
better themselves by becoming more complete reporters.
• Bob Woodward is portrayed as the “good” or “official” hero
while Carl Bernstein is meant to be the “bad” or “outlaw”
hero journalist.
Dustin Hoffman
as Carl Bernstein
• Outlaw hero—Carl Bernstein is the outlaw journalist akin to
the wanderers and loners of American popular culture who
hold no particular hope for society’s betterment and view the
world and especially the institutions of government and big
business as inherently corrupt. Liberal and resolutely
independent, Bernstein shuns convention and obligation and
scorns officially sanctioned truth and morality.
• Bernstein is a chronic smoker, never finishes his work, is about
to be fired, and has no qualms in asking a colleague to sleep
with a source to gain information. He mentors the official
journalist in the “realities” of reporting while at the same time
he is redeemed by the official journalist’s idealism.
Robert Redford
as Bob Woodward
• Official Hero—Bob Woodward is the official journalist—a
dedicated public servant comparable to dedicated
teachers and lawyers, he believes that journalism can
facilitate constructive change through careful investigation
and reporting of the truth. He is a respectable, upright
member of society who works for the common good.
• Woodward is young, new, naïve, earnest, whose
conservative mid-western values prevail when a colleague
can get him crucial information by sleeping with a source.
He holds the outlaw journalist to a higher standard yet at
the same time is slowly seduced by the outlaw’s
iconoclasm.
Journalist as Underdog
• The film portrays a titanically imbalanced
struggle between two young newspaper
reporters and the federal government.
• The David v. Goliath dynamic is most
strikingly demonstrated as Woodward and
Bernstein sift for evidence through masses of
request slips in the reading room of the
Library of Congress.
• The camera pulls away from their desk, rising
higher and higher in a bird’s-eye perspective,
dwarfing our intrepid young heroes until they
are little more than specks on the screen.
• Director Alan J. Pakula asks us to think about
whether two unlikely people can take on the
United States government. And in a larger
sense, the film asks us to consider the extent
of our own involvement in public life and
whether we too can make a difference.
Campaign Finance Reform
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Woodward and Bernstein find that the Watergate burglars are linked to the White House
as well as President Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) via campaign
contributions.
Nixon and his subordinates used campaign funds to pay political operatives, including
“hush money” to buy the silence of those involved in Watergate.
Though some campaign finance regulation was in place prior to Watergate, it was largely
ineffective, easily circumvented and rarely enforced.
Following Watergate, Congress enacted legislation (over President Ford’s veto) to
substantially beef up regulation on campaign finance. For example, they created the
Federal Election Commission (FEC) to regulate and monitor campaigns and enacted strict
limits on contributions and expenditures.
The regulations were challenged in court and in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) the Court ruled
that money is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment and that
campaign expenditures could not be limited.
Still, they did say that campaign contributions could be limited in the interest of
preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption.
The decision has spawned further legislation and court rulings as Americans continue to
grapple with the role of money in political campaigns.
Gerald Ford
and the 1976 Presidential Election
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Perhaps the most significant image in the film is the televised excerpt from the
Republican Convention of 1972 which showed then-Congressman Gerald Ford
announcing that Richard Nixon had been renominated for the presidency.
This was the same Gerald Ford who, just one month after entering the White House in
1974, had granted Nixon a full presidential pardon.
Ford was the Republican nominee for president in the year of All the President’s Men’s
release – and the inclusion of that clip, implicitly linking him to Nixon, surely did Ford no
favors on election day.
Indeed, the entire film was a potent vote for the Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter
who capitalized on the widespread disillusion of America’s institutions and leaders by
successfully presenting himself as a Mr. Smith-style “outsider” when he vowed that he
would never lie to the American people.
Film Imperatives:
Simplicity, Inaccuracies,
Omissions
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Film imperatives such as structure, storytelling, and time-sequencing make historical accuracy
virtually impossible.
Even a film such as All the President’s Men, which strives for historical accuracy, simplifies,
omits, and is even inaccurate at various points.
While the overall story is generally true to historical events, many details were not. For
example, City Editor Barry Sussman, who played a vital role in helping Woodward and
Bernstein piece their discoveries into a meaningful pattern was entirely written out of the film,
just as if he never existed. The analytical role of Howard Simons, the Post's much-loved and
resourceful managing editor 20 years ago, is trivialized in the performance of Martin Balsam.
Yet Simons was from first to last the senior editor most involved in the day-to-day progress of
the Watergate story.
Perhaps the most gratuitous visual inaccuracy in the film is the repeated depiction of
Woodward and Bernstein laboring alone in an empty newsroom. The truth is that almost
everyone in the newsroom (if not the building) from the humblest copy aide to publisher
Katharine Graham, who regularly dropped in to show support, became swept up in the
Watergate coverage: staying late, fielding queries, passing along tips and offering assistance. It
was almost involuntary: they were part of the paper and they knew what was happening and
nobody believed them. It was like being in combat together. Nobody did a tenth as much as
Woodward or Bernstein, of course, but everyone, it seemed, contributed something, if only by
remembering seemingly inconsequential past incidents that took on new meaning as the story
unfolded.
Deep Throat
• Perhaps the biggest mystery of Watergate was the
identity of Woodward’s chief source who was known
as “Deep Throat” because he was never quoted and
only provided “deep background” information to
keep Woodward in the right direction.
• For over 30 years, only Woodward, Bernstein, and
editor Ben Bradlee knew who the source was and
repeatedly said that they would only reveal his
identity after his death.
• In 2005, W. Mark Felt revealed that he was
Woodward’s source. Felt was the Associate Director
of the FBI and had been in line to become FBI
Director after J. Edgar Hoover’s death in May 1972.
Yet Nixon broke with protocol and instead of
promoting a career FBI man from within – Felt – he
installed L. Patrick Gray who was loyal to Nixon and
did not investigate Watergate per White House
direction.
• Felt was bitter for being passed over and angry at
Nixon for politicizing the FBI. His “leaks” to
Woodward were a way to get even.
Sources
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Ehrlich, Matthew C., Journalism in the Movies (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
Ringle, Ken, “Journalism’s Finest 2 Hours and 16 minutes,” Washington Post, June 14, 1992.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/features/dcmovies/watergate.htm