all the president's men review
meyerson
29 july 76
journ 291
REVIEW: All the President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Warner Paperback Library, 1975. 383 pp.
"O.K., Charles," I muttered as I entered the interview room in April 1973. "A 52-hundred dollar scholarship on the line here. Be cool and calm, and your chances are good."
So I faced the group of seven school-board and faculty officials in that conservative suburb of Chicago and told them I'd been accepted at Princeton, University of Chicago, University of Michigan and Northwestern but I thought instead I'd go to the University of Illinois majoring in journalism.
The questions started.
"A journalist, huh? Well, what do you think about this Watergate business?"
I don't know. Don't know if anyone's done anything wrong, but it seems a healthy process of reevaluation is going on....especially following executive abuses during the Vietnam war.....so, as long as it doesn't get out of hand--
"Don't you think it's gotten out of hand already?" "Isn't this just another witch-hunt, run by the
media this time?" "--a personal vendetta run by the liberal Eastern Establishment?"
No, no--I don't think so. It's important that we have the press around to keep the government in line. The government's still running, and there seems to be evidence that something's gone wrong here--we don't know for sure--so I think the investigation should go on. I'd rather overinvestigate and risk a slight inconvenience for the government than underinvestigate and let what may be major violations of our civil rights go unpunished.
Three or four interviewers nodded. The rest just looked at their notes. The subject changed, and ten minutes later I left the room uneasily.
My Watergate views may not be the reason I didn't get the scholarship, but I wonder--
All the criticism leveled at the media by the Nixon administration cast journalists as the villains in the national melodrama. My heroes--from Clark Kent to Mike Royko to my journalist father--were being fingered as the bad guys…and I was guilty by association.
But All the President's Men reversed the charges.
Most of the President's men have been removed from the White House, his second-string Vice President seems headed for defeat--either in August or November--and Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (or Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, if you insist) are folk heroes.
And that's the real value of All the President's Men.
Journalistically, Woodstein did nothing any other good journalist wouldn't have done, given the resources of the Washington Post and Deep Throat. The Arizona Republic's Don Bolles got killed for doing the same job on a different playfield, and there won't be any movies about him.
Not to discount the work of Woodstein: Their book and the resulting film do an intelligent, witty and accurate job of portraying the work of newspeople.
But the best part of All the President's Men is that it's removed most of the dirt dumped on the Fourth Estate during the Nixon years. Journalism schools are overcrowded, journalists are celebrities and aspiring reporters all over the country are asking questions, eyes peeled for future abuses of power.
All of which is fine with me, because, as I sheepishly told that interview panel in 1973, a healthy skepticism is just a small part of keeping the press lively and the nation free.
July 29, 1976, seems to have been a deadline day for that class, because I also turned in a review of six journalism books—concluding: “Surely, the nation faces the greater threat not from this bunch of reporters brandishing studied biases up front but from those who carry the concealed weapons of half-truth, deception and lies.”
