Wikipedia

All the President's Men

This article is about the non-fiction book. For the 1976 film, see All the President's Men (film).

All the President's Men is a 1974 non-fiction book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two of the journalists who investigated the June 1972 break-in at the Watergate Office Building and the resultant political scandal for The Washington Post. The book chronicles the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein from Woodward's initial report on the Watergate break-in through the resignations of Nixon Administration officials H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman in April 1973, and the revelation of the Oval Office Watergate tapes by Alexander Butterfield three months later. It relates the events behind the major stories the duo wrote for the Post, naming some sources who had previously refused to be identified for their initial articles, notably Hugh Sloan. It also gives detailed accounts of Woodward's secret meetings with his source Deep Throat, whose identity was kept hidden for over 30 years.[1] Gene Roberts, the former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times, has called the work of Woodward and Bernstein "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time."[2]

All the President's Men
The cover of the 1974 first edition
AuthorCarl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
LanguageEnglish
GenreTrue crime
PublisherSimon & Schuster
Publication date
15 June 1974
Publication placeUnited States
Media typeHardback
Pages349
ISBN978-0-671-21781-5 (first edition)
OCLC892340
364.1/32/0973
LC ClassE860 .B47
Followed byThe Final Days 

A film adaptation, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein respectively, was released in 1976. The same year, a sequel to the book, The Final Days, was published, which chronicled the last months of Richard Nixon's presidency, starting around the time their previous book ended.

Background

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Woodward and Bernstein had considered the idea of writing a book about Watergate, but did not commit until actor Robert Redford expressed interest in purchasing the film rights. In Telling the Truth About Lies: The Making of "All the President's Men", Woodward noted that Redford played an important role in changing the book's narrative from a story about the Watergate events to one about their investigations and reportage of the story and was thus successful in transferring the content from one medium and one genre to another (see: media-adequacy).[3][4]

The name of the book alludes to the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty ("All the king's horses and all the king's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again"). An allusion similar to that was made more explicitly a quarter-century earlier in Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel All the King's Men, which describes the career of a fictional corrupt governor, loosely based on Huey Long.

Important individuals

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The President

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The President's men

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They are listed with their 1972 positions in either the president's executive staff or in his re-election committee, where applicable.

White House

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Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP)

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Rest of the President's men

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The burglars

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The prosecutors

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The judge

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The Washington Post

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The senator

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The informant

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Publication

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Dick Snyder of Simon & Schuster purchased the right to publish the book through the agent David Obst. The authors received an advance of $55,000.[7] In his memoir, Michael Korda said of the book's publication that it "transformed book publishing into a red-hot part of media" and books became "news" instead of history.

Because the book was embargoed until publication day, there were no advance copies for reviewers. Simon & Schuster became known as the "Watergate" publisher by following up All the President's Men with books by John Dean, Maureen Dean, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.[8]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b In 2005, Deep Throat was revealed to be then-FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt.
  2. ^ Roy J. Harris, Jr., Pulitzer's Gold, 2007, p. 233, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ISBN 978-0-8262-1768-4.
  3. ^ Giessen, H W (2015). "Media-Based Learning Methodology: Stories, Games, and Emotions". In Ally, Mohamed; Khan, Badrul H. (eds.). International Handbook of E-Learning Volume 2: Implementation and Case Studies. Routledge, 43-54.
  4. ^ Telling the Truth about Lies: the Making of 'All the President's Men'from Internet Movie Database
  5. ^ Senate Watergate Report. Carroll & Graf. 26 July 2005. ISBN 9780786717095 – via Google Books.
  6. ^ David Rosenbaum (June 30, 1973). "PROSECUTORS QUIT WATERGATE CASE". NYT. Retrieved 30 November 2017.
  7. ^ Cohen, Roger (1991-06-30). "Profits - Dick Snyder's Ugly Word". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-04-03.
  8. ^ Korda, Michael (1997). Another Life: A Memoir of Other People. United States of America: Random House. pp. 364–367. ISBN 0679-456597.
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