All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein

Redford says about the film’s legacy, “The role and fate of journalism is an ongoing issue and constantly needs to be looked at and looked after.” All the President’s Men, glorious and eternally fresh, remains just the movie for that. He is the author of Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir, and has coauthored His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time with Marco Politi, as well as All the President's Men and The Final Days with Bob Woodward. Those scenes echo all too familiarly, so soon after journalists feared for their safety during the Capitol riot in January, and after years of being called “enemy of the people” by Donald Trump and his White House. Carl Bernstein is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine and has written for a variety of publications. Deep Throat warns Woodward that his and Bernstein’s lives may be in danger. Woodward and Bernstein watch White House press secretary Ron Ziegler on television (in real news footage) attacking “the shabby journalism that is being practiced by the Washington Post.” They see Nixon’s attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, dissemble to protect the president. The film’s realism now plays like a forecast of recent years. As Bernstein said in a 2019 interview, the movie is great “because it’s about the process of reporting. But as Woodward and Bernstein knock on doors, their tenacity and devotion to facts feel timeless. Today a Google search would find in seconds information it took days to discover in the ’70s. William Goldman’s crackling script is one of the greats, and it includes the now familiar line “Follow the money.” The phrase has entered the culture so thoroughly that most people think Woodward’s source, Deep Throat (a perfectly cast Hal Holbrook), said it in real life. There are dead ends in the reporting, paranoid sources, clandestine late night meetings in a shadowy parking garage. Pakula makes every scene as tense as a cloak-and-dagger, filled with adrenaline.

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein