Reframe: ‘All the President’s Men’

Well over a decade ago, I worked for an education company owned by the Washington Post. While I never worked directly for the paper, I take a modicum of pride in saying I was once a Washington Post employee. It’s factually, if tangentially, true. 

One of the primary sources of that pride is the film my journalism professor showed to my fellow students and me many years ago: All the President’s Men. We all worked for the school newspaper, and I was the Managing Editor. It wasn’t a major paper at a significant school, but my time in that position gave me my first taste of journalistic responsibility: the need to get your facts straight and the story right before you go to print. 

As my prof queued up the film for us, he noted the need for diligence, checking your sources, and the importance of accuracy. The movie stuck with me then and still does today. 

After Robert Redford’s death on Tuesday, I pulled up three of his movies and had a mini-festival, including Three Days of the Condor, Jeremiah Johnson, and lastly, All the President’s Men. All three films are outstanding and still relevant, but none more so than Redford and Director Alan J. Pakula’s telling of the true story of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their remarkable Watergate scandal scoop. 

I say Redford and Pakula’s because the film’s opening credits state it plainly: “A Robert Redford-Alan J. Pakula Film.” It’s an unusual notation for an actor who did not also write, direct, or produce a film they were attached to. That being said, sometimes credits don’t reveal the engine driving the locomotive, and Redford was very much that engine. Interestingly, Redford is billed second after his co-star Dustin Hoffman, who plays Bernstein. Even in making a statement about who the film belongs to, Redford was still generous.

Pakula was the perfect director to document the break-in of Democratic headquarters that led to then-President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Pakula was an unfussy, deliberate filmmaker whose career was steadied on the building blocks of his entries in the paranoid thriller genre. Before All the President’s Men, he directed Klute with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, and The Parallax View with Warren Beatty—both powerful and resonant films about the fear of the unseen. After All the President’s Men, Pakula helmed Presumed Innocent and The Pelican Brief. Those two films also fit the genre, and The Pelican Brief, in particular, was far better than anyone might have expected a formulaic John Grisham adaptation could be. 

Woodward and Bernstein were two relatively unknown reporters at The Post who went on to make their names with their coverage of Watergate. Beginning in June of 1972, and following through the publication of the book that the film takes its name from in June of 1974, the two men wore out their shoe leather, phone lines, and their fingertips combing through documents to file a series of reports that would culminate with the toppling of the Nixon presidency on August 9, 1974.

Bernstein had been with the Post since 1966, and Woodward was on the job just nine months when their joint-reporting began on Watergate. Redford and Pakula’s film expertly illuminates every figurative step Woodward and Bernstein took, every call they made, and every piece of paper they touched in a film with true movie stars that plays like a documentary. The work of reporters in the pre-digital era was defined by copious amounts of notes often written in pencil. To watch the required analog effort put into breaking a story during the ‘70s, as showcased in All the President’s Men, is a rigorous wonder to behold. 

One of the best scenes in the film is a six-minute unbroken take of Redford’s Woodward sitting at his desk, juggling calls, taking notes, and finally typing with two rabid fingers as he gets the confirmation he needs. Redford is so present in the sequence that being the biggest movie star on earth is inconsequential. It is a piece of filmmaking that could have been boring and redundant, but the tension, anxiety, and proficiency of Redford is completely convincing and, therefore, riveting.

One of the many pleasures of All the President’s Men is watching the two reporters confirm their stories without getting an actual “yes” from those they are speaking with. One terrific scene shows Hoffman’s Bernstein counting to ten and asking the voice on the other end of the line to interrupt their call during the countdown if the facts Bernstein had shared are untrue. The call makes the distance. 

Some of the best-known scenes occur between Redford and Hal Holbrook as the infamously named informant “Deep Throat” in a dark underground garage with ominous blue lighting. At one point, Redford is seen waiting alone for Holbrook, just out of the shadows, and despite taking place in a location so mundane, the sense of risk and danger is nerve-wrackingly palpable. 

It is no overstatement to say that Woodward and Bernstein risked their lives to reveal the connection between the Nixon Administration and the Watergate burglars. However, as aware as the reporters are of the significance of their case, the film presents them as two dogged men doing their jobs. Were they heroic? Yes. Most certainly. But All the President’s Men is less about lifting up the individuals who brought down a presidency and more about the work—the long hours, the dismissal of a personal life, the desire to find the truth. 

Woodward and Bernstein are shown as crafty, competitive men who were not above pushing the envelope’s corner or trafficking in trickery to make their story. For all that’s at stake in the film, which is nothing less than a government’s survival, All the President’s Men is a quiet film about the slow chase, the tapping fingers, and hastily scribbled notes that lead to print.

The film ends as it begins, with typewriter keys striking paper, putting together words that would change the course of a nation. It is profoundly inspiring in its medium-cool way. Any meaningful slice of journalism is built upon the repetitive rigor seen in All the President’s Men. 

As I watched the film Tuesday night, a bleak melancholy fell over me. That once bold newspaper led by the Graham family with the great Ben Bradlee (played with flint and fire by Jason Robards) as its Managing Editor, is now a shell of its former self. Since being purchased by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on August 5, 2013, for $250 million, The Washington Post, like many other media outlets, has been focused not on disseminating information but on controlling what information is disseminated. As the Post made more and more cuts to staff, the quality of the reporting began to slip. More nefariously, during the 2024 Presidential Election, Bezos forbade the paper’s editorial board from making an endorsement of either candidate running for the highest office in the land. Under the guise of preventing media bias, Bezos ended a long-standing tradition at the Post, resulting in resignations from the paper’s editorial board and the loss of 200,000 subscribers. 

The trouble with such an act is that the job of the editorial writers at a newspaper is to dissect the news and offer a reasoned opinion on the matters of the day. To take away the editorial board’s ability to make an endorsement is not only to undermine the importance of the board and the paper, but also to call into question whether editorials at the Post can be trusted in the future. Or, whether the editorial board will exist at all. 

After the election of Donald Trump in 2024, the country has seen an all-out attack on the First Amendment. Despite arguing for years that freedom of speech on the right side of the aisle has been diminished by liberal bias in the media and the “wokeness” of the left, what has been revealed is that once in power, what Trump and the GOP really want is to squash any speech that does not share their opinion. Last night, as the day closed, Trump’s appointed FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr pressed on Disney and ABC to remove Jimmy Kimmel Live! from their schedule after the host made a relatively innocuous comment about the GOP politicizing the murder of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. 

ABC and its parent company, Disney, folded under the pressure and suspended Kimmel and the show indefinitely. This latest removal of a long-standing late-night program follows the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in July of this year. Kimmel and Colbert are frequent critics of Donald Trump, and were targeted by the President, who then took glee in the demise of their programs. 

These attacks on the country’s freedom of speech would be ominous enough were it not for the slow grind to irrelevance of the free press. On September 15 of this year, the Washington Post fired its last Black opinion writer, Karen Attiah, for making a post on the social media platform regarding Charlie Kirk and his perspective on the “brain power” of Black women. Attiah was removed from her position of eleven years for quoting Kirk directly. 

The most famous quote in All the President’s Men occurs in one of those underground garage scenes between Woodward and “Deep Throat.” Pressing his reluctant informant for more information, “Deep Throat” gives Woodward the following words of advice:

“Follow the money.”

On December 12, 2024, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon would be donating $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. 

Despite its ubiquity, it can be easy to forget what the Watergate break-in actually entailed. On June 17, 1972, a group of men associated with Nixon’s re-election effort broke into the Watergate complex, which housed the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters. They burglarized offices and installed listening devices in an attempt to undermine the Democratic Party. They did so under the cover of darkness.

As significant an infringement as the Watergate break-in was by Nixon’s acolytes, it pales in comparison to what is being done to freedom of speech in broad daylight. He who controls the airwaves and the media controls the most valuable commodity in our modern era: information. 

Information is power. Whether it’s your personal identity that gets shared with online providers of goods and services, or the political ability to control the national narrative through news organizations, the desire to do so comes back to one value: that of the dollar. The bending of the knee by Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, X’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, and even Microsoft founder Bill Gates is entirely about sustaining their market position and individual wealth, at the expense of all else. Even if “all else” is the democracy upon which this nation was founded. 

“Just follow the money.”