All the President's Men

A few weeks ago I watched William Goldman's All the President's Men on TV. I have told my TiVo for a few years now to record this whenever it is on in hopes of finding a very nice print. The one I watched was dreadful, from AMC and had not only been edited but had commercials as well. Normally I would not watch such a print, but it's been a long time since Woodward and Bernstein and I got together and took down that little shit Richard Nixon and, well, good print or bad print, I had to watch it.

Goldman's screenplay is as good as ever, even when messed up by the AMC sensors. He takes a very complicated book and breaks it down masterfully. By cutting out the last half of the book he reduced the amount of history he had to cover and created an amazing detective story from the perspective of the only journalistic institution in the country who seemed interested in investigating the Watergate break-in.

Goldman's script is masterful, but I think it is telling that the "gotcha" moment for me was not scripted. It's a tape of an interview with then U.S. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. In it he attacks the Washington Post for continuing to look into Watergate and spews off this long rant about how the government's own investigation of Watergate was the single greatest, most thorough investigation in the history of our country. Then the interviewer asks a simple question about something that had just come out in the Post and he admits that they didn't know about it.

All that smokescreen he tried to lay down, all that cover he tried to give that crook Nixon evaporates and you see it in his face. You know that he knows that he is toast.

And that is what I love about this film, because it points out that what Woodstein and the Washington Post did was not only save our country, but they gave the power to others to assist. Had it just been the Post and no one else, Nixon would have gotten away with his obstruction of justice. Had the Post given up, Nixon would have gotten away with it.

And though the action in the picture stops at a time when the circle around Nixon is tightening because Woodstein have made a mistake and we are not shown how the final fall of Nixon occurs, that one scene with Kleindienst illuminated the way. The institutions that should have been asking the hard questions started to ask them and it didn't matter that Bob and Carl had fucked it up. What they had done up to that point had righted the ship enough, that others could join in the struggle to find the truth.

God how we need Woodstein today. The Washington Post took the role of exterminator in the 1970s and rid the White House of traitorous vermin out to undermine the Constitution, but today rodents of the exact same ilk infest the White House again and a good exterminator is once again needed. That will only happen if we have an actual free press and a responsive Congress with the guts to do what must be done and to hell with the goose-steppers who will call them unpatriotic (or as we learned last week, "faggots") for doing it.

Just today I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was found guilty of perjury as he shielded the vile Vice President from his own traitorous acts; so progress can be made. But if it stops with Libby, if Cheney is allowed to go free, then it will be the equivalent of convicting Donald Segretti and letting Nixon and his other henchmen evade justice.

I leave you with some wonderful William Goldman dialog, the last real lines in the film, spoken by Jason Robarbs as Ben Bradlee:

You know the results of the latest Gallup Poll? Half the country never even heard of the word Watergate. Nobody gives a shit. You guys are probably pretty tired, right? Well, you should be. Go on home, get a nice hot bath. Rest up... 15 minutes. Then get your asses back in gear. We're under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing's riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys fuck up again, I'm going to get mad. Goodnight.