All the President's Men

All the President's Men

The cover of the 1974 first edition.
Author	Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Publication date	1974
Media type	Hardback
Pages	349
ISBN	978-0-671-21781-5 (first edition)
OCLC	892340
Dewey Decimal	364.1/32/0973
LC Class	E860 .B47

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 considered the idea of writing a book about Watergate, but did not commit until actor Robert Redford 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 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 was 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 corrupt governor, loosely based on Huey Long.

Cast of characters

Publication

Dick Snyder of Simon & Schuster purchased the right to publish the book through the agent David Obst. In his memoir, Michael Korda said of the book's publication that it "transformed book publishing into a red-hot part of media" and books became "news" instead of history. The book was embargoed until publication day—meaning no advance copies for reviewers. Simon & Schuster became known as the "Watergate" publisher by following up All the President's Men with books by John Dean, Maureen Dean, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.^[5]

Notes

External links

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