“All the President’s Men” (1976) is a Hollywood film about the first seven months of the Watergate scandal (June 1972 to January 1973). It is based on the 1974 book of the same name by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for the Washington Post. It follows them from the time they were assigned to cover a break-in at the Watergate Hotel to the time they had “followed the money” all the way up to H.R. Haldeman, the president’s chief of staff.
Catchphrase: “follow the money.”
It stars Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. Jason Robards won an Oscar for playing Ben Bradlee, editor-in-chief of the Washington Post. Hal Holbrook, his face in darkness, was Deep Throat. It was directed by Alan J. Pakula, he who produced “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962).
I first saw it back in the 1980s. I rewatched it since it seems like history might be repeating itself, or at least rhyming, what with Russiagate.
Compared to Russiagate, some things are the same, some things are different:
- Fake news: In both cases the Washington Post is told it is wasting its time, that it is printing false stories based on anonymous sources, that it is letting its politics cloud its judgement, and so on. What would now be called “fake news”.
- Deep state: Unlike what seems to be the case so far with Russiagate, US intelligence was covering up the president’s crimes – and knew it went way deeper than just some break-in. What the Department of Justice (DOJ) called an “intensive” investigation missed or covered up extremely important facts which the Washington Post caught. As the film tells it, that is what blew the scandal wide open. But for a free press, in other words, Watergate would just be another building in Washington, DC.
Follow the money: Most of the film shows Woodward and Bernstein chasing down leads and Bradlee shaking his head, telling them that they did not have enough. From time to time Woodward would meet Deep Throat in a deserted parking garage, just like in a Hollywood film. Oh, wait. Deep Throat, someone high up at the FBI whom Woodward knew, would tell him if he was on the right track. He famously advised Woodward to “follow the money.” That phrase, at least, is a Hollywoodism: it does not appear in the book.
Fear: Anyone who knew anything big was too afraid to talk to them. Which in itself told them they were onto something big. What were they so afraid of? The few who said anything did it indirectly: Deep Throat’s hints, the bookkeeper giving the first letter of a name, the “non-denial denials”. To get facts confirmed Woodward and Bernstein had to resort to the old reporter’s trick of pretending to know things they were merely guessing at.
Courage: As the film tells it, it all came down to Ben Bradlee’s courage to stick out his neck when almost no one else would, even among his fellow editors.
– Abagond, 2017.
See also:
- YouTube: “All the President’s Men” Revisited – a 2013 documentary by Robert Redford (86 minutes)
- Watergate
- Russiagate
- fake news
- deep state
- propaganda model
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This is your matrix, Neo. You have to find the way out yourself:)
Everybody is busy crying of russian intrusion, and so far this had no concrete base. What’s the point in continuing? I think there’s just a need to admit, that 50% of people can always be wrong.
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Watergate, like Russiagate, is about serious disagreements inside the deep state. The publisher of the Washington Post Mr. Philip Graham, Katharine Graham’s husband, was a crony of LBJ. She was the publisher during Watergate. Her paper and NYT routinely spike news stories the government doesn’t care for in the name of ‘national security’. The whole free press getting at the ‘truth’ bit is part of the DNA of this society and a colossal lie. Sad to see you buying it and retailing it. Why didn’t this article appear in NYT or WP? https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165905578/Trump-s-Red-Line.html
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Thanks for the link Gro Jo.
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@ gro jo
In the post I said, “As the film tellls it.” I am not the screenwriter or the director or the producer or Woodward or Bernstein. Take it up with them.
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“In the post I said, “As the film tellls(sic) it.” I am not the screenwriter or the director or the producer or Woodward or Bernstein. Take it up with them.”
Instead of telling me what I already know, why don’t you tell me why you think it’s a good idea to revive this piece of heroic myth making? Are you hoping for some latter-day avatars of Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee?
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I have never seen “All The Presidents Men” but I did view the YouTube video “revisited” that you linked.
I do think Trump has a lot of the same characteristics as Nixon. He’s paranoid, carries grudges and is his own worst enemy.
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@ gro jo
In the post I gave my reason for rewatching it:
Yes, it is a Hollywood film that will want to make Woodward and Bernstein into the heroes of the piece. I understand that. That is how Hollywood likes to tell stories. But since it was made shortly after the events in question and is based on a first-hand account of part of the investigation, I was hoping to gain some insight. Not so much in terms of particular facts, but in terms of how Watergate was viewed before the truth came out.
In somewhat the same vein I did a post on Jonathan Schell’s “Time of Illusion” (1975):
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I would be interested in knowing what truth will come out about both Trump and Clinton.
Putin felt that Clinton interfered with the elections in Russia. Hillary laughed about the killing of Gaddafi,. The video of his murder is horrible. Why wouldn’t Putin want Trump elected. Clinton wanted to make history and she lost, and it wasn’t due to any proven interference. Clinton was an unpopular candidate to begin with. This election was a perfect storm for Trump to win. He is far worse than people who voted for him had anticipated but most of that negative opinion is from his own foolish tweets. Who lets him do this?
Trump acts like a clown but is he? Somebody is running things and it’s probably not Trump.
If Trump has connections to Russia, I would bet that Clinton has equally corrupt connections.
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@ Anton the Russian
This was the same sort of thing people told the Washington Post in the early days of the Watergate scandal.
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Abagond, it’s been almost a year now. You know, the funny thing is I was watching a lot of CNN before the elections (I have no russian channels here where I am). And it was pity to see how they put the face of Trump in the dirt. Just because of that I was already hoping he’ll win (childish, I know). I have nothing to do with US, and I really don’t care who is the president there right now. But I’ve been there for three months right after election – it was sad to see all the disappointment on the faces of Ann Arbor people. Now that time I started to feel pity for you guys. This was new for me. But what makes the situation even more miserable is the hysteria, which was there regarding the “Russian intrusion”. I wish you guys that this stops very soon, otherwise you will have our russian disease, where all the wrong “was the result of the US intrusion”.
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I remember that movie being boring as hell.
Unfortunately today thecreal journalists take mortar fire or end up like gennifer flowers et al.
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@anton rt news has an android app?
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@ Anton from Russia
It seems like you are saying you know for sure the Russiagate thing is not true. And you know that how?
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My personal opinion is that Russiagate is speculation.
If Trump goes down it won’t be over Russiagate but rather over Nixonish abuse of power.
We are in this surreal cycle where both Trump and the MSM are liars.
The upside of all this media speculation directed against Trump as well as Trumps own boofenery has been that it has kept him from implementing more of his agenda. That’s a good thing.
In re-reading Abagonds orginal post on Donald Trump what jumped out at me was Abagonds reliance on the MSM’s interpretation of Trump as well as Abagond’s use of polls.
Abagond .. “From the way they cover him, you would never know that Trump represents less than 10% of US voters.”
Abagond goes on to say that the last politician that spoke like Trump was Gov. George Wallace, who got around 13% of the vote, so politicians later were more careful about how they spoke.
What puzzeled me was that I had come to believe the U.S. to be a racist white supremist place yet here Abagond was contradicting his own premis of U.S. racism based on what he was reading in the MSM.
The presumption was that “Americans” wouldn’t vote for a boorish racist. The vibe I was feeling out there during elelction season and my gut told me that givin the opportunity U.S. voters would vote for a racist because that was the identity that was famliar too them.
The reality is the MSM has lost the pulse of the country and the political class lives in a self deluded bubble.
So today we have this media obsession over Russia and Trump, and I just can’t sign onto it.
I don’t trust MSM or the alternative press so I parse everything and in the end make a choice.
Truthdigg doesn’t give the story much weight.
http://m.truthdig.com/report/item/russiagate_continues_to_lack_actual_evidence_of_core_allegations_20170524
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@ michaeljonbarker
Republicans, and Democrats like the Clintons, have long been appealing to White people’s racism to win office – the Southern Strategy. That is not new or surprising. But since the late 1960s they have been doing it by using dog whistles.
What made Trump different is that he did not limit himself to dog whistles. He “told it like it is.” He made open, naked appeals to White racism.
The last person to try that at the presidential election level was George Wallace. He got only 13% of the popular vote in 1968, losing to Nixon, who spoke in coded racist language.
Most White people in the US are racist but do not want to think they are racist. Thus the dog whistles. And thus the misleading polls in 2016.
You can say that Trump won on a technicality – he lost the popular vote. But 46% is way more than 13%. So is the 42% or so who told pollsters upfront that they would vote for Trump.
It bespeaks a change in White racism from the colour-blind racism that has been common since the 1970s. It falls in line with the way Whites have become more openly racist over the past eight years or so.
More:
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@ michaeljonbarker
“…Russiagate is speculation.”
Russiagate is beyond mere speculation. I think it is a major distraction cooked up by the worthless Democratic party to cover their failure to lead, inspire and mobilize large portions of the population.
Better to have their media partners and gullible liberals/progressives/leftists running off on a Russian goose chase than to cast a critical eye on empty suit that once covered the Democratic party fluttering in the wind.
If the American people are not snookered, they might start building independent political parties that represent the interests and aspirations of large portions of the electorate. That would destroy the Democrats.
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Russiagate has too much media play — and trump keeps speaking on it almost every other day — to be a whim of the Democrats, or a rumor run riot.
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The best I can tell, the Russiagate stuff is driven mainly by the FBI, which is not exactly a hotbed of Democratic angst nor a Friend of Hillary. Nor does it seem to be for reasons of deep state, as some would have it, since if all they wanted to do was to bring down Trump as a threat to the status quo, it would have been way easier to stop him before the election. Instead they gut-punched Hillary Clinton! And if they did not bother to go after Trump before the election because they did not see him as a threat, then why invent such a fantastic lie to begin with?
In other words, the FBI is not making it up. That means the Russian hacking is most likely true and that they have good reason (but maybe not yet proof) to suspect Trump’s top people of working with the Russians.
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Vote rigging basically erodes the only ‘freedom’ left to us americans. It’s probably the administration and the russians trying to restrain a public inquiry by the fbi.
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@ abagond
And do you think that such development is bad or good for Blacks?
When reading your blog oft I got the impression that some people people think that open racism is maybe better than dissimulated racism because it doesn’t allow you – the victim – to delude yourself about it, and therefore it creates an atmosphere where reactions against it, are more likely to happen.
My opinion is that Blacks in America should take any opportunity available in any circumstance (open or dissimulated racism) to better their position. For example, right now, why not to think about ways to exploit the New American Nationalism for their own gain, instead of take an a priori position that the new phenomenon is automatically bad for Blacks?
This is called realpolitik.
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You’re right, abagond. No concrete evidence from my side. I like evidence based medicine (I am a doctor). This allows me to use only proven methods of treatment, and disregard anything else, for the benefit of patients. It’d be useful to apply same principles here.
Though I enjoy your critical thinking.
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Notice that Anton’s comment got a like from resw….
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Lol. Indeed, It can mean something.
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