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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
"All the President's Men" caught the moment in which America got wise to White House corruption -- but the more recent "Dick" captures the sheer exhilaration of unseating a president.
Jun 17, 2002 | In "All the President's Men" is a scene, little noticed at the time, that today seems charged with unintended irony. It's summer, 1972, and the setting is a Washington Post story meeting. Every editor is making a pitch, each claiming that his section has the day's top story. The mood is competitive, almost raucous, and, to anyone who has spent any time in a newsroom or around reporters, recognizably self-satisfied.
When Post editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) has made his selection, his city editor (Jack Warden) protests that they've ignored the importance of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's latest Watergate story. Another editor sums up the unspoken consensus in the room by responding, "Nobody cares." The editor relates a story about a Nixon staffer asking him, if Watergate is such an important story, "Who are Woodward and Bernstein?"
When "All the President's Men" was released in 1975, that scene was a moment of self-congratulation for the audience. We knew who Woodward and Bernstein were. They were our heroes, the men who had broken the story open, who kept it alive when nobody cared. In retrospect, the Post's decision to put two police reporters on the story of a burglary at the Democratic national headquarters was what Mary McCarthy called one of the providential accidents of Watergate. Had the burglars taped the door lock vertically instead of horizontally, security guard Frank Wills might not have noticed the tape and suspected a break-in. Had Alexander Butterfield not believed that his boss had already divulged the information, we might not have learned about Nixon's taping system.
So when that editor says that Woodstein (as they came to be known) should be taken off the case and replaced by an "experienced political reporter," we know that would have been the end of the Watergate story. That editor's worldly-wise voice is the voice of foregone conclusions -- a long way from the frank astonishment that would be heard a year later in the voice of NBC anchor John Chancellor, as he reported the Saturday Night Massacre and said, "In my career as a correspondent, I never thought I'd be reporting these things."
The voice of experience in that scene from "All the President's Men" belongs to another editor, played by John McMartin. McMartin is one of those character actors whose face you know even if you don't know his name. Bland and confident about the world and their place in it, the men he plays are the embodiment of anonymous authority. In his incarnation here, McMartin warns Ben Bradlee off the story, offering the conventional wisdom: McGovern is self-destructing, Nixon is ahead in the polls. "Why would he do it?" he asks. "It doesn't make sense." And then, finally, the coup de grace: "I don't believe it." The lord of politics has revealed his wisdom; listen, ye lesser mortals, and tremble.
The irony of the scene is no longer what it was in 1975: that the experienced reporters, perhaps afraid of jeopardizing their inside contacts by pushing too hard, weren't ready to believe the seriousness of Watergate. The irony now is that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have, pod-like, become the men who once sought to take them off the story -- political insiders bent on preserving their access, satisfied with how things appear to be rather than the facts in front of their faces. In a cool, hard 1996 piece on Woodward in the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion suggested exactly how someone who helped bring down a presidency has become a favored confidant of those in power. "Those who talk to Mr. Woodward," she wrote, "can be confident that he will be civil ... that he will not feel impelled to make connections between what he is told and what is already known, that he will treat even the most patently self-serving account as if untainted by hindsight ... that he will be, above all, and herein can be found both Mr. Woodward's compass and the means by which he is set adrift, 'Fair.'"
"All the President's Men" might not seem so ironic now if we hadn't witnessed the same reluctance among the press to see the story in front of their faces all over again so recently in the coverage of Whitewater and the Lewinsky stories. It was present in the chumminess of Newsweek's Michael Isikoff with Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg, and in the Candide-like willingness of reporters like the Post's Susan Schmidt to believe exactly what Ken Starr's office wanted the public to believe. And it was present in Woodward and Bernstein themselves as they appeared on various political talk shows playing dual roles: Respected professionals and, for the nostalgia crowd, the once-golden boys who had revived muckraking political journalism.
Around that time, reading Joe Conason and Gene Lyons' "The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton," I chastised myself for not having paid more attention to the facts the authors had dug up about the baselessness of the charges against the Clintons -- until I realized that most of the media had steadfastly ignored, dismissed or buried them. The press had smelled smoke and concluded there was a fire.
This is how a movie that was intended to celebrate the press has, 27 years later, become a cautionary tale about the inadequacy of the press -- about the inherent conflict between the reporter's imperative to find the truth and the determination to maintain the insider status he or she prizes. Substitute "reporting" for "literature" in Hazlitt's line about "the fine link which connects literature to the police," and you have a description of what hobbles so many professional political journalists.
