“All the President's Men” was released 50 years ago this month, an anniversary that has been greeted with equal parts sadness and reverence by journalists, political junkies and discerning moviegoers who have adored the film for five decades.
As a member of those three constituencies, I've done my share of genuflection, most recently as chief film critic for the Washington Post, whose City Room was as vivid and fully realized on film as Robert Redford's Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman's Carl Bernstein.
Like so many Posties of my generation, I will never forget the surreal-real experience of walking into the fifth-floor newsroom for the first time in 2002. By then, standard electric typewriters and six-ply carbon paper had been replaced by much less visually interesting computers. But the office's pervasive atmosphere of hard work and calm concentration felt uncannily similar to its big-screen analogue.
For the past two years, I have been researching a book about the making of “All the President's Men,” the production of which involved almost as many contingencies and unresolved questions as Watergate itself. Among the film's many mysteries, one I found particularly intriguing involves Katharine Graham, editor of the Washington Post and CEO of its parent company during the Watergate investigations. As the film amply demonstrates, it took guts for Woodward and Bernstein to persevere with their reports in the face of terrified sources and their own growing paranoia. But, unbeknownst to many observers at the time, Graham was enduring even more withering pressures, with a determination that was all the more impressive for being almost completely invisible.
I'm still in the process of figuring out why he remained invisible in “All the President's Men.” By now, it's clear that the backstory is more nuanced than mere oversight or, as many are quick to assume, simple sexism.
In fact, William Goldman's first script for the film included a sequence with Graham and Woodward, a scene that appeared in all subsequent drafts. Based on a real encounter between the two, it is a cautious game of cat and mouse, in which the editor takes the measure of a nervous and still inexperienced journalist, seeking assurance that his report will be successful.
Earlier this year, at a January staged reading of “All the President's Men” at the Harmony Gold Theater in Hollywood, a fundraiser for the Stella Adler Academy, fans were able to conjure up what might have been. Mark Ruffalo played Woodward and Ethan Hawke played Bernstein in a version of the film compiled from different Goldman drafts.
The highlight of the evening was when Ruffalo and actress Susan Traylor brought the tentative, tense and provocatively playful Graham-Woodward scene to life. After questioning Woodward about his sources and sheepishly asking him about Deep Throat's identity, Traylor's Graham asked him if the truth about Watergate would ever be revealed. “It may never come to light,” Woodward responded of Ruffalo. “Don't tell me 'never,'” Graham laments, before closing the meeting with a gentle, peremptory “Do better.”
Perusing director Alan J. Pakula and Goldman's articles, I've probably read that scene dozens of times. But when I listened to it in real time, I was struck by the emotions it stirred: a mix of pride in Graham's legacy and deep sadness at how that legacy has been so inexplicably ignored in recent years.
I was also sad that Redford, who died in September, wasn't there. He often lamented that Graham was not a prominent character in “All the President's Men.” Keenly aware of how their character and steadfastness made Woodward and Bernstein's work possible, I wanted to honor that crucial support. When I first interviewed him in 2005, he insisted that intrepid homeowners were as important to preserving democracy as the journalists he and Hoffman helped elevate.
For the next two decades, every time I saw Redford, he lamented the “downward slide of this,” by which he meant the constellation of institutions that “All the President's Men” celebrates: not just journalism and a strong First Amendment, but a Washington where investigators, prosecutors, judges, the Senate and Congress did their jobs regardless of partisan allegiances, and a Hollywood where a studio as conventional as Warner Bros. would agree to finance a tough film about a controversial period and still raw. in recent history.
Of course, that movie was based on a best-selling book and starred two big stars. But today, with political and corporate leaders (including media companies) fighting each other to curry favor with President Trump, “All the President's Men” seems like an artifact of a long-gone era.
Nowhere is this more worryingly true than at the Post itself, where the newsroom immortalized by the film has been reduced by more than a third, and where Jeff Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013, seems determined to erase Katharine Graham's legacy until it disappears completely. During the first Trump administration, Bezos faced threats against the Post and the press in general that would make Nixon blush, or at least green with envy.
Now, Bezos has become a one-man meme for what author Timothy Snyder calls “obedience in advance,” overturning an endorsement of Kamala Harris, smiling ostentatiously during Trump's second inauguration, grossly overpaying for a promotional film about First Lady Melania Trump, and remaining conspicuously silent (at least publicly) when the FBI raided a Post reporter's home in January.
All of this has had an enormous moral and material cost: Thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions and an alarming number of the Post's best reporters and writers left for other publications and platforms. As my former boss Marty Baron told my former colleague Ruth Marcus in the New Yorker in February, it has been “disgusting” to witness Bezos’s turnaround: “a case study in self-inflicted, near-instantaneous brand destruction.”
Of course, that brand was built, in large part, by “All the President's Men,” who taught a generation to walk, talk, dress and act like real reporters. (Hint: a good corduroy jacket and a pen in your mouth won't hurt.)
In 1976, Pakula was interviewed about his dealings with Graham, whom he greatly admired and with whom he would become close friends. “I could make a movie about Katharine Graham's story,” he enthused. “It's a magnificent story.”
Thirty years later, Steven Spielberg would bring Pakula's idea to life with “The Post,” about Graham's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, a dress rehearsal for the even higher stakes at Watergate a year later.
“The Post,” starring Meryl Streep in an astutely judged performance of aristocratic security and creeping insecurity, premiered in Washington less than a year into the first Trump administration. Bezos attended that screening, which many of us saw as a tacit acknowledgment that he was taking its lessons in character, behavior, and competence to heart.
That was clearly an illusion. Graham may have finally assumed his rightful place in the canon of journalistic films, but we are still left to reflect on his absence from the most iconic journalistic film of the 20th century.
It's no longer leather reporters who need a big-screen tutorial on how to do their job. They are your bosses. An easy place to start would be to memorize the best two-word speech that will never appear in a major motion picture: Do It Better.
Ann Hornaday was a film critic at tThe Washington Post from 2002 to 2025, when he retired. “All the President's Men” plays on TCM Classic Film Festival Saturday at 2:45 p.m.
