Keeping track of All the President's Men

Hunt… Colson… Clawson… Liddy… Mitchell… Dahlberg… MacGregor… Stans… Magruder… Porter… Segretti… Chapin… Haldeman…

The names of All the President’s Men fly fast and furious, challenging us to keep up with Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s dig into the truth of the Watergate scandal. It’s ‘the most devastating detective story of this century' and director Alan Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman tell it with an apt journalistic hand — sticking to the facts and inundating us with exposition that assumes (or disregards) our familiarity with the case while avoiding narrative climax or embellishment. This true story highlights the nuance of real life.

That means phone calls… more phone calls… endless talk about faceless names — sizzling developments cloaked in the mundanities of journalism. Pay attention or you’ll miss a White House librarian inexplicably contradict herself to Dustin Hoffman’s Bernstein, or Robert Redford’s Woodward hitting pay dirt on a campaign check while ‘working the phones’ — from Dalhberg to MacGregor — back to Dalhberg. “He gave it to Stans!” he tells Bernstein on yet another call. …who? We don’t need to know to realize “the stakes have just taken a quantum leap,” as the script states — the rising tension in Redford’s performance matched by an imperceptible camera push-in over the length of a single six-minute shot. Credit Pakula for some of the most patient, subtle work to come out of the decade of the director.

Also credit Goldman’s Oscar-winning screenplay for giving the faces we do see a story beyond Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein begin as proverbial ‘humpers’ — Bernstein’s aggression — muscling into homes for interviews and prodding coworkers to sleep with men for information — playing counterpoint to Woodward’s caution: “I need more fact for a story…and I think you should need the same thing.” They’re both “hungry” in the words of their boss — for people to stop asking “who in the hell are Woodward and Bernstein?” and for the trust of their gruff editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards in another Oscar effort) who isn’t shy about telling them: “I hate trusting anybody.”

But soon it’s Bernstein talking Woodward off unconfirmed facts and Woodward muscling evasive sources like Deep Throat: “I’m tired of these chicken-shit games!” The two have rubbed off on each other. The end, which doesn’t culminate in Nixon’s resignation (the movie was released a mere 20 months after — the book two months before) but with TV footage of his second inaugural as Woodward and Bernstein type dutifully in the background, leaves us with a choice of understated moments as climax: Deep Throat’s tip “it was a Haldeman operation,” vindicates the reporters mired in controversy. Woodward’s report that “everyone is involved,” is the first allusion to Nixon’s eventual resignation. But the peak may come earlier when Bradlee, forced to respond to the fallout from Woodward and Bernstein's unconfirmed implication of Haldeman, simply writes, “We stand by our story.” They've finally earned his trust -- more nuance from real life.