Essay: 'All The President's Men' (1976)

Journalism isn't sexy—it's mostly eating at your desk

Photo: Warner Bros.

The political thriller All The President’s Men tells the true story of two Washington Post reporters who uncovered a scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States. In the movie, these newspapermen did it by writing good old-fashioned pieces of honest American journalism.

It didn’t hurt that they were also portrayed by a pair of Hollywood superstars in their prime.

The 1976 movie was based on the bestselling book of the same name, written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who were portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, respectively. Both actors are believable as journalists interested in the facts and only the facts.

Almost believable. Redford and Hoffman were good-looking and charismatic—intense—but the real-life Woodward and Bernstein looked like a couple of young dentists. That’s not an insult. Most journalists are ordinary people. Some resemble librarians, others mail bombers.

I look like I belong in an AA meeting because I’m in AA. But we’re not heartthrobs, for the most part.

***

I rewatched All The President’s Men recently after reading excerpts from a thrift store copy of Bob Woodward’s 2020 Trump expose, Rage, a book where he tries to bring down the 45th President—but not too dramatically. This time, instead of secret meetings in parking lots with the deep state, he just called the commander-in-chief up and let the guy spew.

Over the decades, imagine how many young, impressionable people watched All The President’s Men and thought, “I’m going to become a glamorous journalist and speak truth to power!” Those poor souls.

All The President’s Men is a very good movie — a suspenseful, high-stakes, real-life cat-and-mouse game about two little guys with grit taking on a king. And those little guys do it with excellent hair.

Director Alan J. Pakula zapped the movie with the same hyper-realistic electricity as other legendary ’70s movies, like The French Connection and Dog Day Afternoon. Instead of cops or flamboyant bank robbers, All The President’s Men is an action movie with phones, not guns.

I noticed during this rewatch that if you’re a woman in All The President’s Men, you’re probably dating someone important to the plot. That’s the 70s for you, I guess?

The movie also starred legendary actor Jason Robards as The Washington Post’s old-school editor, Ben Bradlee, a shambling bulldog of a man with a good heart and a red pen. I’d watch an All The President’s Men prequel starring Michael Shannon as a grim and serious young Ben Bradlee.

Journalists should aspire to be like Bradlee: wise, gruff, and obsessed with facts. Bradlee would have hated Twitter, or X, as it's also called, but I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion. Twitter is a sort of interactive integrity test; you fail the moment you publish anything to it.

But that’s not the point. The point is this: All The President’s Men made a working-class profession look like a path to fame and fortune. It may have ruined multiple generations of journalists. Suddenly, ink-stained wretches were dreamy. They were scrappy underdogs. Here’s the bottom line: Journalism is mostly eating at your desk. The true art of the reporter is typing with one hand and holding a sandwich with the other.

***

I was born inside the Beltway in 1974, a few days before Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, a direct result of reporters exposing a vast government coverup. My dad had moved our family to Virginia from Texas to work for Senator Lloyd Bentsen, his first job as a press secretary. Previously, he had been a journalist. A broadcast journalist. He hosted the evening news for many years in El Paso, Texas.

Once, I asked him why he gave up the news, and without missing a beat, he told me one Christmas Day, he became depressed because he had to go to work and there was no news to report. He told me he wished for a murder or a horrible accident to help fill the hour.

Besides that, he never really talked about his time in front of the camera or reporting for local newspapers. He had a bunch of Time magazine bylines if I remember correctly. This would have been the ’60s.

He told me that when he first got out of the army, he lived in his car for a while and ate nothing but donuts. His first job was as a radio DJ, and he used to dedicate songs to my mom when they were dating.

He wanted me to know those jobs — radio, TV, newspaperman — weren’t reputable professions then. If you were born into a good family, you were likely encouraged to become a doctor or a lawyer. No one wants their kid to grow up to be a metro reporter with a drinking problem who’s good at annoying apparatchiks at City Hall.

Let me say for the record: God bless metro reporters.

But the job is strictly for maniacs who love punctuation and sensitive souls with authority problems. Journalism is not sexy. Necessary but not sexy. It’s like being a sanitation worker, only you’re up to your waist in lies.

***

When I finally got a job at a national magazine, I met small armies of unpaid interns. I didn’t understand how unpaid interns could survive in New York City without an income until I learned most of them came from privilege. I wondered why they weren’t, you know, lawyers. The truth is they wanted to fight for truth and justice and take down the powerful. The job was sexy. It was powerful. Exciting.

Lawyering is less so.

I didn’t go to journalism school. I am a failed playwright, but I failed very early, so I was able to learn another trade. Here’s how I became a journalist: I was a temp one day, and the next day I was a fact-checker. There is no ceremony. If you want to become a journalist, just say “I’m a journalist” into the mirror three times, and then, presto!

After that, it’s a lifetime of late nights, questions, and worrying about dangling participles. Early in my career, I got the price wrong for an expensive external hard drive I wrote about for a magazine about technology and small businesses. My editor was not pleased. You know that adage, “Don’t sweat the small stuff?” Well, that editor told me the job was to sweat the small stuff.

He taught me valuable lessons. You have to be truthful and accurate—both at the same time. That’s one lesson. The other one is never to order a hot sandwich because it’s greasy, and the grease will get all over your fingers.

Try typing with greasy fingers or holding a pencil, for that matter.

My old man was proud of being a political flack. I remember that. He was the son of a preacher his whole life and prided himself on his honesty. Politics is ventriloquism, but you could see his lips move. He loved reporters and was respected on Capitol Hill. But he also knew the best ones were junkyard dogs who needed to be fed truth daily or else.

I think that’s why he loved them. The ones he knew well were honest to a fault. They couldn’t help themselves. He also loved journalists with dark humor because my dad loved morbid jokes.

I recall him griping about do-gooders with press passes who dreamed of best-sellers and Pulitzers. Showboaters. He generally preferred his reporters to be wary.

All The President’s Men sells the romance of a newsroom, circus-like open offices where journalists save the world. The last shot of Redford and Hoffman shows them in the newsroom hunched over typewriters, dramatically banging out the words that would save the Republic.

The problem with the movie is journalists aren’t superheroes. A good journalist knows that power in any measurement — even a spoonful — corrupts. Sometimes, rotten meat can smell sweet. A good journalist isn’t unbiased. They’re human beings. This means they’re hugely biased assholes. A good journalist knows that everyone is an asshole, including journalists. There are no creatures under heaven who excrete rose petals. Reporter, expose thyself.

Journalists are not sexy Robert Redford, with sensitive furrowed brows. Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein is a chain-smoking ladies’ man in All The President’s Men. Woodward and Bernstein were ex-hippies in tight pants with egos the size of Chevy Impalas — like the rest of their generation. Oy, Boomers. The movie made them rock stars, and only rock stars are rock stars. All The President’s Men is a fun fantasy to watch for two hours and 18 minutes, but it’s just make-believe. You know, bullshit. The Adventures Of Bob And Carl.

***

Journalism isn’t a sacred calling. It certainly isn’t a religion, which is the best business model in the history of the world. It’s a job and not a particularly well-paying job. You’re going to get laid off, probably more than once. It’s a job that is easy to dismiss or mock, especially when you don’t think you need it. Most people don’t think about firefighters until there’s smoke.

You know a fraction of the truth about this world. It is a minor miracle that you know anything at all. That miracle happens every day because some reporter with a hangover or indigestion pressed send on a follow-up email or dialed a phone—reporters love the phone because it makes some people uncomfortable, especially those hiding something.

America’s elite fear any truth getting out, even a squirt. Did you know the strong steal from the weak every day? That preachers lie, and police officers murder the innocent? As you read this, the rich dig spurs into the soft flanks of elected officials.

Now, the powerful constantly whine about the press—poor us! They ask questions, and they question our answers! They play the victim, but they’re simply annoyed by reporters. Offended. The gall of these nobodies.

Our political machines can summon immense sums of money, which they then use to influence and shape reality to suit their ends. The press, ultimately, cannot stop this project. There's no real competition between power and those who want to tell the truth. The former will probably crush the latter. But the battle is fought day by day, so there is hope. 

The world is on fire; you only know about it because journalists reported it. Finding that out and writing it up was likely boring, and that person was probably insulted on social media afterward. Dismissed. Harassed. Laughed at—authoritarians, and their faithful, are jackals.

And, yet, tomorrow morning, there will be headlines screaming truths — fact-checked stories written by serious-minded journalists with Ivy degrees and no degrees, wearing condiment-stained shirts, who are uninterested in fairy tales or best-case scenarios. Those headlines and stories will scream whether you want to read them or not. The powerful definitely will. Assuming these reporters done their jobs ethically, you owe your freedom to them — regular people paid to think, question, point, and shout, “Who do you think you are?”

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