This is brusque, but feels true: All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> would not have the same impact if it were released today. Do Americans still care<\/em> about journalism? Two years after All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> was released in theaters, Earl C. Gottschalk Jr. wrote a hand-wringing piece for The Wall Street Journal <\/em>about how \u201cStudents favor journalism, but jobs are scarce \u2026 Unhappily [universities] are graduating far more students than the journalism job market can absorb.\u201d 40 years later, Gottschalk\u2019s piece seems eerily prescient: \u201cThe problem is that the job outlook for journalism students is grim, partly because of the oversupply of graduates and partly because the recession caused so many news staffs to be cut back.\u201d The industry is in shambles; according to the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas<\/a>, there were 16,160 American newsroom layoffs in 2020, which is 13% higher than the previous record of 14,265 cuts reported in 2008. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2018<\/a> that newspaper jobs have fallen 65% since 2000, nearly 300 daily newspapers have closed, and 1,000 journalists are laid off every month\u2014a faster rate than the decrease in coal mining jobs. Whistleblower movies aren\u2019t exactly journalism movies, but the subgenres overlap, and a number of recent films in the former category\u20142010\u2019s The Whistleblower<\/em>, 2016\u2019s Snowden<\/em>, 2017\u2019s The Post<\/em>, 2019\u2019s The Report<\/em>\u2014were released and almost exclusively ignored by audiences. The Post<\/em>, with its awkward final nod to All the President\u2019s Men<\/em>, is the only one that had a noticeable impact at the box office, and that\u2019s because the triple threat of Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and Tom Hanks is pretty impossible to deny. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Putting aside industry questions, a larger one presents itself: Do Americans still care<\/em> about the truth? We can barely seem to agree on it, thanks to the devastating impact of Fox News, conservative telecommunications conglomerates like the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and disinformation on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. More than 555,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, but 41% of Republicans polled<\/a> said they won\u2019t get vaccinated; conspiracy theories and hoax claims still persist. After the Jan. 6 insurrectionist attack encouraged by former President Donald J. Trump, Republicans lied about who was doing the storming<\/a>, claiming it was antifa members masquerading as Trump supporters. It is impossible to overstate the devastating impact of \u201cfake news\u201d and all the ego, bluster, and delusion that goes along with people who genuinely use the term. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A journalism movie, criticizing a partisan president, opening at No. 1 at the box office now<\/em>? Impossible to imagine. But All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> was a uniting pop culture artifact that explained to Americans who hadn\u2019t followed The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s coverage, or who hadn\u2019t read Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward\u2019s 1974 same-named nonfiction book, exactly what President Richard Nixon and his army of sycophants, enablers, White House staff, and U.S. intelligence community members did wrong before, during, and after the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Robert Redford, already a major star after 1969\u2019s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid<\/em>, 1973\u2019s The Sting<\/em> and The Way We Were<\/em>, 1974\u2019s The Great Gatsby<\/em>, and 1975\u2019s Three Days of the Condor<\/em>, threw his A-list power and Wildwood Enterprises production company behind All the President\u2019s Men<\/em>. In a 1975 Baltimore Sun<\/em> profile by Rex Reed, Redford \u201cgets almost misty\u201d when he talks about the film. \u201cI\u2019m very enthusiastic about it, but not for the reasons you might think. I\u2019m excited about making a film that will inform people. \u2026 I\u2019m cynical but optimistic,\u201d Redford said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Redford\u2019s production gamble paid off. All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> made nearly ten times its $7 million budget, received eight Academy Award nominations (winning for Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction and Best Sound), and was met with a slew of critical praise. (Ironically enough, not from the Post <\/em>itself; reviewer Gary Arnold<\/a> wrote that the film was \u201can absorbing movie that somehow fails to evolve into a rousing, dramatically satisfying movie as well. … lacks an expansive vision and an elemental spark of showmanship and inspiration\u201d). In 2010, the film was preserved in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, the location of the film\u2019s most iconic scene. In 2013, Redford produced the documentary \u201cAll The President’s Men\u201d Revisited<\/em>, which posited, as former Post TV critic Hank Stuever wrote in his review<\/a>, that Watergate would play out differently in the age of social media. \u201cWhat took Woodward and Bernstein (and other news organizations and, lest anyone forget, prosecutors) weeks and months to piece together could come together in a day or two,\u201d Stuever summarized as former Post<\/em> executive editor Marcus Brauchli\u2019s description of our \u201cnew media landscape and why things can never be like they were.\u201d And in 2015, Academy voters told The Hollywood Reporter<\/em><\/a> that if they could, they would name All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> the Best Picture of 1976 instead of the originally awarded Rocky<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But what we\u2019re seeing from the Republicans in the era of Trump isn\u2019t much different from Republicans in the time of Nixon, and their contemporaneous reactions to the film. The New York Times<\/em>, perhaps salty at the Post <\/em>breaking the story as thoroughly as they did, ran a series in which \u201ceach of the persons involved in the Watergate scandal and mentioned or portrayed in [the film] was asked by the Times<\/em> to comment on whether or not the movie dealt fairly with the facts.\u201d The result was that people like Herbert G. Klein<\/a>, former White House Communications Director, and Kenneth H. Dahlberg<\/a>, former Midwestern Chairman of the Finance Committee to Re-elect President Nixon (CRP, but more fittingly pronounced as CREEP), were given column inches to go all holier-than-thou (Klein\u2019s \u201cthe good \u2018President\u2019s Men,\u2019 and their good deeds, are ignored\u201d) or pouty (Dahlberg\u2019s \u201cI was portrayed as a nervous, scared, and apprehensive man, somebody with something to hide. Fact: I was very straightforward and up-front\u201d). Even back then, the mainstream media\u2019s desperate desire for evenhandedness gave way to \u201cboth sides\u201d foolishness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Does any Republican whining diminish the perfection of All the President\u2019s Men<\/em>? Not one bit. Not the inexorable tension captured by Pakula\u2019s crisp, engaging direction. Not the layers of typewriter keys, slammed doors, and pen scratching on paper molded into stellar sound design by Arthur Piantadosi, Les Fresholtz, Dick Alexander and James E. Webb. Not the shadowy blue parking garages, flatly fluorescent newsrooms, neatly disorganized desks, and well-to-do suburban sitting rooms designed by art director George Jenkins and set director George Gaines. Not the oppositional camaraderie captured by Redford as the ambitious but upright Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as the twitchier livewire Carl Bernstein. \u201cHoward, they\u2019re hungry. You remember when you were hungry?\u201d says Jack Warden as Metro editor Harry Rosenfeld, all irritation and defensiveness when Martin Balsam\u2019s managing editor Howard Simons tries to reassign the story away from Woodward and Bernstein. That hunger defines All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> in two ways: the Post<\/em> reporters and editors chasing the story, insistent on uncovering the truth, and the Republican web surrounding Nixon, desperate to retain their power and protect their corruption. Sounds familiar, doesn\u2019t it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> bookends itself with news footage and extreme close-ups of paper being fed into a typewriter, subject to the extremely jarring clacking of keys and the black ink they hold. The film begins on June 1, 1972, the night that Nixon returned from a historic summit with the USSR in Moscow and delivered a triumphant address to both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. The screen fades to black. On June 17, two flashlights provide pinpoints of light in the offices of the Watergate complex. A group of five men lug duffel bags of recording equipment into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, unpacking their contraband using gloved hands in front of a portrait of assassinated President John F. Kennedy. When they\u2019re caught hiding, sweaty, and sheepish, and arrested, the hundreds of dollars they\u2019re carrying, the Cuban heritage of some of the men, and a shared entry in more than one address book\u2014\u201cH. Hunt, W. House\u201d\u2014pique the interest of reporter Bob Woodward (Redford). <\/p>\n\n\n\n During his nine months at the Post<\/em>, Woodward only cut his teeth on various low-level local stories, but his instincts are good. He asks the questions that need asking, and he asks them again and again. \u201cIf no one asked you to be here, why are you here?\u201d he asks, with an easy smile, the lawyer he suspects is supporting the arrested five at the courthouse. He\u2019ll continue following the man throughout the day, refusing to accept his repetitive denials (\u201cI\u2019m not here\u201d; I just don\u2019t have anything to say\u201d; \u201cThey\u2019re not my clients\u201d; \u201cI don\u2019t want to talk about this anymore\u201d; \u201cI have nothing else to say\u201d). Equally dogged is Bernstein (Hoffman), who has been in the industry longer and who hovers all over the newsroom. One of cinematographer Gordon Willis\u2019s early split-diopter shots captures Bernstein lingering outside of an editor\u2019s office, unabashedly eavesdropping on the details of Woodward\u2019s story. When he begins \u201cpolishing\u201d Woodward\u2019s filed draft without his permission, a begrudging partnership forms. \u201cCould be a story, or could just be crazy Cubans,\u201d Rosenfeld theorizes, and Woodward and Bernstein are on it. (Later advice, from Rosenfeld again: \u201cDon\u2019t fuck it up.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prevailing theme: Questions that need asking<\/em>. In the buzzing newsroom, making calls upon calls, talking to sources who deny, change their stories, lie, or simply are never available. In the Library of Congress (a filming location only secured once Motion Picture Association of America then-president Jack Valenti intervened on behalf of the film), Willis\u2019s camera moving back and back and back, situating Woodward and Bernstein as two little ants trapped inside a panopticon. In the DC streets, meeting with sources in cafes in sunny afternoons and with Woodward\u2019s deep background source Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) in the early morning dark. \u201cFollow the money,\u201d Deep Throat tells Woodward, and the reporters use that dictum to guide them forward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Why did the burglars have former CIA operative Hunt\u2019s name and number? (His answer to Woodward about that: \u201cGood God.\u201d) How much money did Maurice Stans, finance chairman of CRP, have access to, and what did he use it for? Will anyone who works for CRP talk? What are their titles? Could Woodward and Bernstein get to them through their assistants, secretaries, or aides? What evidence did CRP bookkeeper Judy Hoback Miller (Jane Alexander, nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award) see before it was destroyed? What did Attorney General and Nixon campaign chairman John N. Mitchell do that scared Miller so much? (\u201cJesus. Jesus,\u201d Mitchell says when Bernstein calls to confirm a story.) What did CRP treasurer Hugh W. Sloan Jr. (Stephen Collins) tell a grand jury about the White House Plumbers, and what did he not<\/em> say about White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman? \u201cRat fucking\u201d is how someone describes the Republicans\u2019 uniformly underhanded methods, and one of the film\u2019s tensest scenes also includes one of its funniest line deliveries: Holbrook\u2019s bemused \u201cYou think something this size just happens?\u201d as Deep Throat nearly laughs off Woodward\u2019s shock at the broad scale of the conspiracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is a credit to William Goldman\u2019s adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein\u2019s book, and how steadily he fits together puzzle piece after puzzle piece, that audiences can keep track of all these names and all their myriad connections. What counts as evidence, what role common sense plays, and what dangers are held in assumptions all come up, too, as Goldman\u2019s script probes at the difference between suspecting something and being able to prove it. Putting viewers alongside Woodward and Bernstein and discovering what they do, as they do, keeps the narrative tangible, and Pakula punches up certain iconic lines (\u201cIt\u2019s a nondenial denial\u201d; \u201cIf you guys fuck up again, I\u2019m going to get mad\u201d) so they sear into our memory. The Post<\/em>\u2019s own movie review bristled at how the film version of the book chops off nearly its entire back half (as Arnold sniped, ending at \u201cpage 200 of a 336-page book\u201d), but that complaint ignores the effectiveness of the film\u2019s final moments. Pakula\u2019s juxtaposition of Nixon on the newsroom TV, being sworn in for his second term as president, with Woodward and Bernstein typing separately at facing desks, the camera creeping closer and closer, steadily edging out Nixon until only the reporters are in the frame, and the steady drone of their typewriters is given primacy. The dissolve from the reporters to their typed pages underscores this, tracking the rapid typing of a number of headlines from 1973 to 1974. Guilty pleas, convictions, prison sentences, until finally, with stark finality: \u201cNIXON RESIGNS.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat else besides the money? Where\u2019s the goddamn story?\u201d growls executive editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) after foreign editor Scott (John McMartin), one of the few fictional characters in the film, plainly tells Bradlee, \u201cI don\u2019t believe this story. It doesn\u2019t make sense.\u201d The invented, doubtful Scott serves as a sort of stand-in for all those who couldn\u2019t believe that the Republicans would be so reckless as to try and bug the Democratic National Committee, or smear and undermine their opponents, or engage in blackmail, or record incriminating conversations without the consent of all parties. But all of that happened. Some of that probably still continues to happen. \u201cForget the myths the media created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand,\u201d Deep Throat says in All the President\u2019s Men<\/em>, a film that does plenty of myth making of its own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThese are not very bright guys\u201d would be a reassurance for Democrats, perhaps, except for the example of Charles Colson, former special counsel to Nixon who Haldeman described as the president\u2019s \u201chit man.\u201d He organized attacks on students protesting the Vietnam War, he targeted anti-war activist John Kerry, he threatened Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, and he helped engineer the Watergate break-in\u2014and when he converted to evangelical Christianity in 1973, became a major figure on the evangelical right. After serving seven months in federal prison, Colson wrapped himself in the cloak of godliness: \u201cArrogance was the greatest sin of Watergate, the great sin of a lot of us … I think the great sin all of us are guilty of, and it\u2019s the hardest one to recognize, is admiring our own ego, our own selves,\u201d he\u2019s quoted as saying in \u201cCrime and Contrition: Or, How Do You Prove You’re Sincerely Sorry When the Liberals Now Thirst for Revenge?\u201d, a 1974 piece by Post<\/em> Outlook editor William Greider. In ensuing decades, Colson tied the idea of prison reform to Christian doctrine through the organization Prison Fellowship, funneled the support of religious conservatives around an array of Republican presidents and politicians, opposed same-sex marriage and Darwinism, and supported the post-Sept. 11, 2001, invasion of Iraq. He was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President George W. Bush in 2008 and died in 2012 as a hero to conservatives, with his prison sentence a footnote\u2014or perhaps even a badge of honor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It would be easy to nod along with Deep Throat and feel morally superior to everyone punished because of Watergate, and certainly no one involved in All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> could have guessed that Colson would secure a second act in American life. But perhaps all the damage Colson continued to do to this country after he was slapped on the wrist for Watergate is the unintentional warning that All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> offers viewers now. Ask questions, follow the money, get something on paper. Not everyone will believe you, but some people will. That might not be enough, but as Woodward and Bernstein showed us: It\u2019s a start. “All the President’s Men” is now streaming on HBO Max<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/atpm2-1024x577.jpg\")
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