Celebrating 50 Years of "All the President's Men"

​To commemorate the 50^th Anniversary of All the President’s Men, John Dean, who’d famously warned Richard Milhous Nixon “that there was a cancer growing on the presidency,” presented the 1976 movie detailing the reportage about how the Watergate scandal metastasized, causing the only resignation of a U.S. president in history. On May 2, Dean, who served as Tricky Dick’s White House counsel from 1970-1973, screened the Best Picture Oscar nominee – the world premiere of a new 4K restoration by Warner Bros. Discovery – during the TCM Classic Film Festival at what is arguably the world’s best known movie theater, TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX (formerly Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, with its fabled legendary courtyard featuring stars’ footprints and handprints immortalized in cement along Hollywood Blvd.).

Up front inside the capacious Chinese Theatre Ben Mankiewicz, primetime host of Turner Classic Movies, the 24/7 cable TV channel specializing in vintage films that Ted Turner founded in 1994, introduced Dean as “an American hero,” despite his overseeing of hush money payments to the Watergate burglars, being a disbarred attorney convicted of obstruction of justice and sentenced to prison time. Nevertheless, the then 31-year-old did go on to expose Nixon’s wrongdoing and enemies list during the Senate’s Watergate hearings, and deserves the standing ovation he received from about 600 film fans packing the cinema with faux Asian decor, where I had a second-row bird’s eye view.

In a live interview preceding the screening, Mankiewicz described All the President’s Men – which co-stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the dogged, young Washington Post investigative reporters Bob Woodward Carl Bernstein – as a “process story about journalism, how they do their job when they do it right.” Mankiewicz should know; in addition to being a scion of Hollywood royalty – his grandfather Herman J. Mankiewicz co-wrote Citizen Kane, the 1941 masterpiece about a newspaper publisher, while his granduncle was producer/writer/ director Joe Mankiewicz – Ben’s father, Frank Mankiewicz, was the press secretary for Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign until his assassination, while Ben’s brother Josh is an NBC News reporter.

For his part, Dean called All the President’s Men “a great film,” although he confessed to having only seen the 1976 movie twice before. However, during its making, he visited the movie’s set and was “blown away” by how accurate it’s rendition of the Washington Post’s newsroom was. On a lighter note, the 87-year-old also remembered Woodward telling him, “You won’t believe what having Redford play me has done for my dating life.” (Future West Wing prez Martin Sheen was Golden Globe-nominated for portraying John Dean opposite Rip Torn as Nixon in the 1979 mini-series Blind Ambition, which adapted Dean’s 1976 memoir of the same name.)

This screening was also likely only the third time I’d seen All the President’s Men since 1976, but I loved it more than ever. I had forgotten that it opens with the break-in at the Democratic Party National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate complex. As it turns out, these bungling burglars have suspicious ties to the White House, which the intrepid Woodward and Bernstein breathlessly unravel by pounding the pavements, wearing out their shoe leather, proving through their relentless (and rules bending) journalism that the attempted burglary and/or the cover-up of it went all the way up the chain of command, including the president himself (who is only glimpsed onscreen in news clips). Along the way, from the shadows an enigmatic government insider nicknamed “Deep Throat” (Hal Holbrook) steers Woodward to keep him on course during the murky investigation, famously urging the ink stained wretches to “follow the money.” The investigative reporters’ determination finally pays off with the conviction of many of Nixon’s henchmen (including John Mitchell, who had been Attorney General, as well as Dean who became entangled in the Watergate web as White House counsel), and the resignation of Tricky Dick himself.

For those old enough to remember or familiar with the history of the Watergate brouhaha, the high stakes riding on Woodward and Bernstein’s journalistic sleuthing keeps us on the edge of our seats. While Alan Pakula’s tautly, tensely directed All the President’s Men has a Film Noir-type vibe that would warm the heart of TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, I couldn’t help but wonder if viewers unfamiliar with Nixon and Watergate would find it very suspenseful and moving? Would they understand what was hanging in the balance, even though Post editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards, who won one of the film’s four Academy Awards, for Best Actor in a Supporting Role) tersely tells Woodward and Bernstein: “Nothing’s riding on you except the First Amendment of the Constitution plus the freedom of the press…” This movie is an ode to the essential importance of independent media (and, one might add, film festivals) for a democracy.

After the screening Dean and Mankiewicz returned to discuss the film and take questions from the audience. The TCM host asked the onetime White House counsel “what isn’t right in the film?” and Dean replied that while it is “the received history of Watergate, it misses the bigger picture.” Although there is some dialogue alluding to a grand conspiracy involving the entire intelligence community, and Donald Segretti (Robert Walden, who went on to play a reporter on the Lou Grant TV series from 1977-1982) discuses “rat fucking” to disrupt the presidential campaigns of Nixon’s Democratic rivals such as Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, Dean criticized the 138-minute movie for focusing too narrowly on the Watergate burglary and cover-up, not on the grander scheme of the Nixon regime subverting the electoral process through dirty tricks, surveillance, covert ops such as the break-in of the office of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, etc.

Dean also ruminated about whether or not Pres. Gerald Ford should have pardoned Nixon, after replacing him in office. For decades, a favorite parlor game of Washingtonian wonks was trying to guess the true identity of who “Deep Throat” was. Dean related that Woodward said he dropped clues as to who his source really was in All the President’s Men, the nonfiction book he and Bernstein co-authored and which was adapted for the screen by William Goldman, who struck Oscar gold for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.

Indeed, it appears Woodward tosses a tantalizing tidbit during an onscreen reference about FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover. His number two, Deputy Director Mark Felt, expected to succeed him as Director, but Nixon passed him over after Hoover’s death about a month prior to the Watergate break-in on June 17, 1972. Felt was critical of Hoover’s successor, Patrick L. Gray, who had no bureau experience, and there’s speculation that Felt became “Deep Throat” “because he was frustrated at not being named director of the FBI by President Richard Nixon and sought revenge” on Tricky Dick. Felt solved one of journalism’s best kept secrets in 2005, when he confessed to Vanity Fair that he was indeed Woodward’s top confidential informant. At the Chinese Theatre, Dean said he’d written a book trying to crack the case of Deep Throat’s hidden identity (2002’s Unmasking Deep Throat) and suspected Felt, who Dean claimed was an inveterate leaker.

The still sharp 87-year-old went on to put the Trump regime within the context of Watergate. Regarding the Justice Department’s lack of independence, Dean – who’d worked as an associate deputy in U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell’s office before becoming White House counsel – who wrote the 2004 book Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, mused about that phrase “Worse than Watergate,” asserting: “In his darkest day Nixon would not have tolerated such conflicts with the rule of law,” as we are experiencing today during Trump’s presidency. “Names are being taken of lawyers involved [in Trump’s Machiavellian machinations] and they will face bar proceedings” for violating the law and oaths of office after Trump is no longer in power. Earlier during his Q&A with Mankiewicz, Dean insisted: “I think lots of law licenses are on the block after this is over” (that is, once Trump leaves office).

Like an Old Testament prophet, Dean added: “I’ve written two books on authoritarianism, including 2020’s Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. This personality is on the rise in the Republican Party. While there is authoritarianism on the Left, it is mostly on the right.”

John Dean is correct: All the President’s Men definitely is a great movie, but what made the viewing experience even greater was having one of the real life players in this Nixonian sordid saga hold forth on it, along with “Mank,” a worthy Watergater “interrogator,” surrounded by a community of movie buffs who love films that not only comment on the real world, but which, perchance, may also change it, too. Alas, at age 87, TCM’s creator who Jane Fonda has called her “favorite ex-husband,” died just days after the close of the filmfest derived from the channel Ted Turner had innovated.

The 17^th annual TCM Classic Film Festival took place in Hollywood April 30-May 3. For more info: https://filmfestival.tcm.com/.

Aloha oe (a fond farewell) to Ted Turner, truly one of the greats.

The fourth book co-authored by Ed Rampell and TCM guest host Luis Reyes about filmmaking in Hawaii drops in August: https://mutualpublishing.com/product/on-location-in-hawaii/.