Nevahh Seen It! All The President's Men

The feel-less-gross-movie-of-the-year! Even though it came out in 1976

Inauguration Monday was a lot. No, it was too much. I didn’t watch anything in real time, but I ended up exposed, which seems like the best word here given its connotations of disease and toxicity, to it all the same. I would like to fast forward through the next four years. I’m not a fan of this tortoise approach to change that after all is said and done cannot even guarantee that I will see good prevail and evil vanquished in a very satisfying way (See: Nazi face melting at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Make Nazi Faces Melt Again, please!). Maybe subconsciously this is why I chose the 1976 film All The President’s Men to screen for this edition of Nevahhh Seen It!

I knew it was about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) breaking the story of the burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Hotel in the summer of 1972. As most people know, it was the scandal that ended up unraveling Richard Nixon’s presidency, compelling him to resign in disgrace two years later. You guys, remember when political leaders were capable of feeling disgrace? Sigh Sing it Archie: Those were the dayyysssssss! What I didn’t know is how this movie would give me hope in the face of America’s distressing political moment.

“Are you trying to seduce me, Carl Bernstein?” Hoffman sits like this in, like, EVERY scene. QUIT TRYING SO HARD, DUSTIN! Image via Academy Museum

All The President’s Men offers a primer in three lessons for grappling with the next four years of gross hypocrisy, jaw-dropping chaos, stomach churning corruption, inevitable crimes against humanity, disgraceful international double-dealings, rampant fraud, spectacular grift, salacious greed, terrible suffering, and horrific tyranny. Did I miss anything? Oh right-dazzling stupidity.

Lesson #1: Trust the Trifles: Investigative anything is boring and tedious and usually unsexy. Here’s a true story: When my mother graduated high school in the 1950s, she and her best friend moved from their hometown in Poughkeepsie, New York to live in Manhattan. They were able to get jobs as secretaries with the New York offices of the FBI. Her job was to transcribe reports from agents. My ears perked up. Of course I wanted to know everything. Did she have eyes on super secret communique about nefarious plots to destroy the world? I imagined her jogging down the hallway in her Mad Men style pencil skirt toward THE DIRECTOR’S office, clutching a memo of NATIONAL importance. Hardly. It was so boring, she told me. It was mostly agents who were assigned to watch people that might be Communists (as one does because, 1950s), so it was a lot of “9:30 a.m. gets newspaper; 9:40 a.m. goes back to apartment.” She said she thought the agents must be bored, too. James Bond: 00Yawn.

Everyone wants to believe that it’s something like a reporter or detective happening upon a warehouse full of bomb making materials that breaks the case. Maybe in Tom Clancy’s hands. But in real life it’s phone records, bank transactions, a detail dropped in conversation that no one else thinks is worth remembering, or items in someone’s recycling bin that become the puzzle pieces of the crime itself. For the right person or people, it’s the trifles that spell trouble.

Lesson #2: There Are No Small Roles: A lot has been made of Deep Throat, the anonymous high-level insider that fed Woodward tips and info to keep him on the right track. But neither reporter would have gotten as far as they did before Deep Throat entered the picture if it weren’t for people like secretaries, librarians, assistants, wives, and staffers. The overlooked, underestimated, seemingly unimportant people are more vital than anyone initially realizes. It’s the individuals who are seen as low status and inconsequential that end up having crucial information or bearing witness to a scene that changes everything precisely because no one in power considers them relevant. This renders them invisible in ways that work to the advantage of the people laboring to uncover the truth. We already know that this new president loves flashy people who exude power and popularity. His mistakes will come from sweeping aside those he determines are “losers” and looking through the types of people who will play a role in his ultimate downfall.

Lesson #3: Truth is a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Woodward had only been at the Post for a handful of months, but he had applied himself on other much, much lower profile pieces before Watergate turned up. Same with Bernstein. In the beginning of the film he’s seen skulking around the office of Harry Rosenfeld, the managing editor, eavesdropping on a conversation about the police report from the Watergate burglary. Bernstein wants in. Rosenfeld yells at him to go finish the story he’s already working on before jumping onto another. Both men are hungry, ambitious, and driven. The underlying factors behind those elements are irrelevant. That’s the fuel they need to sustain them for the long haul, which is not without its setbacks, defeats, closed doors, and dead-end leads.

While the film compresses events and actions into a period of several months, in real life Woodward and Bernstein’s efforts extended through the presidential campaign season and into Nixon’s second term in office. The film ends with a shot of the two reporters in the background of a nearly empty newsroom. Their desks facing one another, the two men type while in the foreground a television shows the scene of Nixon triumphantly taking the stage on the eve of his reelection. The work continues. Persistence, tenacity, and courage are the batons that must be passed in the marathon to hold those in power accountable.

As I’m writing this, I’m pretty scared for all of us. We are in deep, treacherous waters that make me feel at a loss of where or even how to make some kind of impact that might matter. Honestly, it’s tempting to give up because it all feels so vast, so impossible, like being swallowed by a leviathan. I have to imagine that at many points Woodward and Bernstein felt something similar playing David to the Goliath of a network with seemingly limitless reach and power.

All The President’s Men is not a movie big on aesthetics. No explosions or car chases or sly camera tricks. But there is one beautiful scene that stayed with me. Early on Woodward stumbles upon an odd detail that Howard Hunt, a CIA officer in the Nixon inner-circle, had been obsessively checking out library materials about Senator Edward Kennedy, a formidable and rising star in the democratic party, from the Library of Congress. Woodward and Bernstein get ahold of all the request cards–hundreds and hundreds of index cards–for the past year, hoping to find something that sheds light on why the DNC offices were bugged in the first place. The shot begins as a close-up of two sets of hands setting out and placing stacks and stacks of cards on a dark, mahogany table. The camera slowly pans up, widening the shot to reveal a spacious, circular room. Tables and chairs form concentric circles to create a hub and spoke formation. As the camera rises, the figures below get smaller, pieces on a game board.

The machinery of corruption is large, it depends on many hands on many levers, each one operating as required to keep everything running smoothly. All it takes is one individual who fails to perform as expected and the beginning of the end is set in motion.

And when that does happen, not even all the president’s men can stop it.