The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat by Woodward Bob

Author:Woodward, Bob [Woodward, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

IN APRIL1976, the movie version ofAll the President’s Men was released. Dustin Hoffman played Carl, capturing Bernstein’s frenetic, jumpy persistence. Redford played me, and Jason Robards played Bradlee as if they were twins. The Bradlee looks, manner and drive were perfect. Robards would win the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. It was not really a White House movie, but a journalism movie. The center was thePost newsroom. Nixon and his men only appeared on TV sets in the newsroom or as disembodied voices issuing denials on the telephone.

Nat Hentoff wrote in theColumbia Journalism Review, “In some places the gritty familiarity is so compelling that a watching reporter may get hit with the nagging feeling that he’s missing deadline while sitting there.”

Leonard Downie, who in 1991 succeeded Bradlee as executive editor of thePost and who had been one of our Watergate editors, put the myth in some perspective for Michael Schudson’s 1992 book,Watergate in American Memory: “We felt small,” Downie said. “We did not feel big and powerful. We were not swaggering. Our responsibilities were huge to us. We didn’t really believe the president was going to resign. Most of us were dysfunctional the night that he resigned…. It was a small group of people doing this…. That’s still what this business is about. That’s still what makes a difference. That’s a lesson of Watergate I want to remind people about. It was hard. It was not glamorous at the time. Later on it was glamorous with movies and movie premieres at the Kennedy Center and so on but at the time it was dirty. People weren’t sleeping, people weren’t showering, Bernstein’s desk was a mess, he and Woodward were fighting all the time…. We were all under such great pressure, it was difficult to figure out what was going on because everybody was against us, because people were whispering to Katharine Graham that they’ll ruin her newspaper.”

That’s some of what the movie captured—the uncertainty and doubt. Most of the sources and informants were low-level players who saw just a piece of the conspiracies. Director Alan J. Pakula picked actor Hal Holbrook to play Deep Throat. Holbrook was the wise actor of the era, cerebral and high-minded. He was the one who seemingly knew the entire story but wouldn’t tell it all. It was a powerful performance, capturing the authoritative and seasoned intensity, cynicism and gruffness of the man in the underground garage.

In a long February 16, 2001, article inThe New York Times by Rick Lyman, director Steven Soderbergh, who won the Best Director Oscar forTraffic, watchedAll the President’s Men and explained why it is one of his favorites:

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