Seemed like the right thing to do the other night to honor Robert Redford by taking another look at “All The President’s Men,” Alan Pakula’s crackerjack film about America’s Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to Richard Nixon resigning the Presidency in August of 1974.
Redford played the role of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. Dustin Hoffman played the chain-smoking Carl Bernstein.
I was finishing up college then. Following the stories of the Watergate scandal in the Boston Globe while working 39 hours a week at a grocery store, taking three classes at Rivier College, wondering what I’d end up doing for a living.
I wanted to write, I was pretty sure but the local newspaper, the Nashua Telegraph was lousy then. How lousy? Well, a guy I knew from Brookline, Peter Crowell, would free-lance photos for them and he saw me in uniform at a Fairground Junior High football game and offered to take a picture of me to go in the paper. And I said ‘No, thanks!” Later, I was Sports Editor there.
And politics? Wasn’t really all that interested, met the actor Cliff Robertson who was campaigning for Arizona Congressman Mo Udall and once had to talk to the folks gathered in the Student Lounge about the school newspaper, The Perspective. My history teacher Mary Ann Civitello heard me speak, she was a big Bobby Kennedy fan, and told me I ought to go into politics. “I’m too honest,” I told her. “Couldn’t do it.”
That moment came back to me, watching the Washington Post duo go after something — they didn’t know what —with an insatiable hunger for the truth, for what was really going on at 1600 Pennsylvania. They had to know. I loved that.
Do we still have that? Can we? We read of a $15 billion lawsuit against a newspaper for writing stories a President didn’t like. What?
Once Woodward, awakened on a Saturday morning to go to an arraignment for the Watergate burglars and when he heard one of them tell the judge that he had worked for the “CIA,” his reaction was what mine would have been. “Holy bleep,” he said and immediately, you could see he wasn’t buying that these were a bunch of crazy Cubans breaking into Democratic headquarters, which is what one of his editors at the newspaper suggested.
No, there was something else, something way more sinister going on. And sure enough, there was. It was worse than anyone who believed for a moment in our government would have imagined. So bad, so foul, so wrong, neither reporter could hardly believe what kept unfolding before them.
That was why, it seemed to me, that the No. 2 guy in our nation’s FBI, Mark Felt or “Deep Throat” spoke up. Somebody had to. Do we have that person any more?
They pursued the story relentlessly, even as the White House and their henchmen attacked them every way they could think of. Though many at their paper doubted them, their editor, Ben Bradlee didn’t. And I have to admit, I got a little emotional by the end of the movie, thinking, we had it right, once. No more. Will we ever have it right again?
You know what’s happened to Stephen Colbert. Now, to Jimmy Kimmel. With more to come, I’m certain.
Here we are, half a century later and is there anybody out there, possibly even his fans, who doesn’t doubt that if we really knew what was going on, we wouldn’t be appalled?
Financially, the New York Times can defend itself but with newspapers, including the Washington Post, now struggling, where do we go? In his first term, our networks had the conscience to refuse to show Presidential press conferences. Would they dare do that now?
I was lucky enough to meet Bob Woodward after he had a speaking engagement. I was teaching journalism, I told him, at my high school. “We watched “All The President’s Men.”
“Did they like it?” he asked, smiling.
“They loved it. And understood it, too.”
He liked that. “Good,” he said, stepping out of the elevator.” “Now that’s good news.”
And it was. Then.
John Nogowski, who formerly wrote for the New Haven Register, is the author of “Teaching Huckleberry Finn,” currently available on Amazon, along with his new baseball book, “Diamond Duels.”