If Ingrid Bergman could do it for nuns, there was no reason why Robert Redford could not for reporters. When the matinee idol’s latest star vehicle, All the President’s Men, premiered at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on April 4 thirty-five years ago, the ostensible reason for the occasion—a benefit for a fund for investigative journalism—was entirely superfluous.
The blond actor, portraying Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, together with co-star Dustin Hoffman (taking on Carl Bernstein), had inadvertently glamorized an ink-stained profession, just as Bergman became the despair of American moms watching their dreams of grandchildren going down the drain as their daughters opted instead for the convent life. (How much the big screen departed immediately from reality, for a subject based on the dogged pursuit of facts, can be seen in the stark difference in appearance and tone between dark-haired, Midwestern Woodward and the man who played him, California sun-god Redford.)
This month’s issue of Vanity Fair contains the type of article that the glossy publication, when it’s not falling over itself photographing the preposterous playgrounds of the superrich, actually does quite well: chronicle the making of a classic film. (Past examples include Thelma and Louise and The Godfather.) This time, Michael Feeley Callan's piece, "Washington Monument," looks at the frequently tumultuous making—and triumphant reception of—All the President’s Men.
I adored that film when it came out, and I suspect that, were I to see it again, my reaction would be exactly the same. But it was so magical that, in certain ways, it exerted a baleful effect on journalism.
On my college newspaper, some fellow staffers were not merely prepared to run over their grannies if it meant jobs at the New York Times or Washington Post, but would, I’d wager, part with precious bodily organs to win admittance to these citadels of journalism.
The way things have been going lately in journalism, all of this might as well have been in the days of Horace Greeley. The outfits that can make a profit in the digital age are few and far between, and those publications that haven’t gone under or trembled as if they might (such as Newsweek) have been shedding what one would think of as their lifeblood: reporters.
The way things used to be—the boundless youthful energy, now seen, at journey’s end, as so much waste—and the way they are now are aptly summed up by a disillusioned veteran reporter in Black and White and Dead All Over, a marvelous satiric murder mystery by now-retired New York Times journalist John Darnton:
“It was like putting money in the bank—all those canceled holidays, those late nights, those planes you jump on to fly to the latest disaster, those kids’ birthdays you miss. Then the editors who praised you move on. New ones come up. They don’t know what you’ve done. You turn around one day and the slate’s clean. The bank account’s vanished. You get older. People don’t return your phone calls so much. When you get right down to it, nobody remembers any of the good stuff—nobody but you yourself.”
How different it all seemed when Alan Pakula’s true-life thriller hailed the triumph of “Woodstein” in cracking the Watergate scandal. The movie and the book that inspired it gave these impressions to aspiring journalists:
* You could not only be a crusader in print, but even bring down a government;
* You could write on subjects filled with conflict and drama;
* You could write a bestselling book, then sell the work to Hollywood for another bundle.
All of this inflated journalists’ (and journalistic wanna-bees) self-importance and sense of invulnerability—a very dangerous combination for anyone in a profession making noises about “the public’s right to know.” As the Roman writer Juvenal wrote, “Who will guard the guardians?”
Typical of much of the hooey that too many people—including journalists—came away with after seeing the film are the following assertions by Emanuelle Levy in an online DVD review:
* Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon. On the contrary: If any of the following had occurred, we would have seen a full second term for Tricky Dick, and the President could have told Katherine Graham, Ben Bradlee, and the rest of the Post, like the Duke of Wellington: “Publish and be damned”: a deeply divided (instead of unanimous) Supreme Court ruling on whether Nixon had to give up the Oval Office tapes; a bonfire of said tapes on the White House front lawn that, in one stroke, would have eliminated the evidence that brought down the President; special prosecutors getting cold feet about pursuing the case to its logical conclusion; a continual flow of Mideast oil that would have given the economy some breathing room instead of miring it in inflation, convincing the public that the President could perform his job without distractions.
* The film assured victory for a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, in 1976. On the contrary: Gerald Ford fell by a whisker to the Georgian, despite facing the following deficits: a GOP still deeply divided after Ronald Reagan’s near-upset of the incumbent; a Democratic-controlled House and Senate that made Ford look ineffectual by overriding one veto after another; a disastrous gaffe about Poland that lost Ford much momentum just before the election.
* The film boosted enrollment at journalism schools by 50,000. On the contrary: Aside from the fact that this assertion is unsourced and without a date specified, the film’s role in any jump in enrollment is likely exaggerated. One 1995 study, for the Freedom Forum media foundation, attributed the increase “to a larger extent from the appeal of the field to women, who ha[d] been attending universities in record numbers. The growth also in part reflect[ed] the applied nature of the field and its link to specific job skills.”
One deeply troubling trend arising from Watergate coverage was reliance on the anonymous source. Leave aside, if you can, the way in which using such sources subverts a person’s right to face and answer an accuser. Use of the anonymous source also gave reporters and their often all-too-credulous editors cover for stories that were at best inaccurate or, worse, one-sided, or, worst of all, invented from whole cloth.
The most prominent publications running into such problems—the ones who fell for their own self-created myth—were, in fact, the ones that my friends and I wanted to work for: the Times and the Washington Post.
Trouble caught up first with the Post, which less than a decade after Richard Nixon’s resignation, found its editors—including, by that time, Woodward—having to explain how Janet Cooke’s fabricated Pulitzer Prize-winning work ended up getting published on their work. It took two decades for the Times to catch up, but eventually it, too, found itself not just embarrassed, but in downright disarray because of the Jayson Blair scandal.
All the President’s Men, then, had a deleterious effect in depicting a glamorous profession. But one of the shots that has stayed with me the longest is of Woodward and Bernstein poring over circulation records in the Library of Congress in search of a missing piece to their puzzle.
That single scene gives the most realistic—and, in its way, idealistic—sense of a profession that, at its best, should depend more on dogged attention to tedious detail than on the Errol Flynn-type heroics that even Bernstein fell victim to in submitting a screenplay that he and then-wife Nora Ephron wrote about the exploits of himself and his partner.
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