All the President's Men (Bloomsbury Film Classics)

by Carl Bernstein

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Knew the story and still couldn’t put the book down. The movie barely scratches the surface, as does what I’ve learned about it from other sources. Here’s the full story. Exhaustion, fears, doubts, and all.

And Woodward and Bernstein are reporters, not storytellers. Real life invents its own story, especially in this case, so that’s not a detriment here. But you can see their hand in this book as soon as they start shaping a story out of the facts and it’s endearing how blunt and unembellished it is. Even with that journalistic remove you feel for every single one of these people, maybe even more so because that journalistic remove keeps reminding you, this is real life.

I was born into the post-Watergate world. The world these two men helped expose, if not necessarily create. When somebody like Hugh Sloan relates his disillusionment with the people in power— “People in the White House believed they were entitled to do things differently, to suspend the rules, because they were fulfilling a mission; that was the only important thing, the mission.”— what’s hard to believe is that there was a time when that wasn’t accepted fact. What’s surprising is how much innocence we had to lose.

Now, the Woodwards and the Bernsteins and the Hugh Sloans are the relic of a bygone era. The good guys. Noble and uncompromising, and I know they still exist somewhere, but as a country I don’t think there’s a return to that idealism. I think we’ve bit the apple for good.