All the President's Men

All the President's Men is a 1974 non-fiction book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two of the journalists investigating the first Watergate break-in and ensuing scandal for The Washington Post. The book chronicles the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein from Woodward's initial report on the Watergate break-in through the resignations of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and the revelation of the Nixon tapes by Alexander Butterfield in 1973. It relates the events behind the major stories the duo wrote for the Post, naming some sources who had previously refused to be identified for their initial articles, notably Hugh Sloan. It also gives detailed accounts of Woodward's secret meetings with his source Deep Throat whose identity was kept hidden for over 30 years.^[1] Gene Roberts, the former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times, has called the work of Woodward and Bernstein "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time."^[2]

A film adaptation, produced by Robert Redford and starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, respectively, was released in 1976. That same year, a sequel to the book, The Final Days, was published, which chronicled the last months of Nixon's Presidency, starting around the time that their previous book ended.

Background

Woodward and Bernstein had toyed with the idea of writing a book about Watergate, but did not commit until actor Robert Redford contacted them and expressed interest in purchasing the film rights. In Telling the Truth About Lies: The Making of "All the President's Men", Woodward noted that Redford played an important role in changing the book's narrative from a story about the Watergate events to one about their investigations and their reportage of the story.^[3]

The name of the book alludes to the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty ("All the king's horses and all the king's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again"), an allusion similar to that made more explicitly a quarter-century earlier in the Robert Penn Warren novel All the King's Men, which describes the career of a fictional governor loosely based on Huey Long.

Cast of characters

Notes

External links

• The Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers, an exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin