Max Holland

Beverly Gage on All the President's Men . . . Repeated

 

The title of Robert Redford’s new documentary, which aired on the Discovery Channel last night, is All the President’s Men Revisited. At times, it seems more like All the President’s Men Repeated. Though created to coincide with the 40^th anniversary of Watergate, the first half of the film contains little that could not be found in Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 political thriller starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman. You know the story: A pair of scrappy young reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stick to their guns when nobody else will, and their reporting helps to bring down a president.

This is, to be sure, a terrific story. No matter how many times you’ve heard it before, there is something gripping about watching Nixon’s slow, painful descent into national disgrace. Redford’s film hits all the highlights: Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissing the original break-in as a “third-rate burglary”; Woodward and Bernstein scrambling to “follow the money” all the way to the White House; Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield admitting to Congress that his boss maintained a voice-activated taping system; Nixon’s restrained farewell address to the nation, then his devastating, heartfelt goodbye to the White House staff.

As far as it goes, the film is a reasonably adequate primer on Watergate mythology, and it’s certainly fun to watch. But it is also a missed opportunity for historical reflection—and one that, given the age of most Watergate participants, is unlikely to come around again. Forty years out, we know most of the basic facts about Watergate. The real challenge is figuring out what they all meant.

The film begins with footage of Nixon mugging for cameramen (awkwardly, as always) just before his August 1974 resignation speech. Redford then cuts back to June 1972, when the neophyte reporter Woodward received an assignment involving some sort of botched break-in at DNC headquarters. There is no hint of the controversies that have dogged Woodward in recent years, such as the accusation that his reporting (then and now) relies too heavily on anonymous inside sources. Redford sticks to the script first introduced in Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book All the President’s Men, then repeated in the 1976 film, laying out how the “good guys” in the media got the bad guy in the White House.

We now know, however, that Watergate was more complicated than that. Woodward and Bernstein did perform heroic work in the early months after the break-in. But the Watergate story didn’t capture national attention until 1973, well after Nixon had been re-elected to office. In those early months, some of the Post’s best information came straight from government investigators, already conducting their own troubled but expansive inquiries largely outside of public view. By far the most famous of these was Deep Throat—now largely accepted to have been W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s No. 2 man, who died in 2008. The film shows an aged Felt waving at reporters from behind his walker in 2005, when he revealed his identity to Vanity Fair. But Redford barely explores the implications of this revelation: Was Felt using Woodward for his own ends, and if so why?

 

Read the entire Slate article here.

The Myth of Bob Woodward

 

In Newsweek, Max Holland asks: Why is this man an American icon?

 

For the past week Washington has found itself debating Bob Woodward. The occasion: his very public argument with White House senior official Gene Sperling, in which Woodward left the impression that Sperling had somehow tried to intimidate him—only to see this accusation undermined by the release of an email exchange in which the pair sounded rather conciliatory.

Bob Woodward at his home in Georgetown. (Andrew Cutraro/Redux)

Almost all the commentary about this flap fits neatly under the heading, “What the Hell Happened to Bob Woodward?” But posing that question, as New York magazine did last week, implies a transformation that never occurred. Woodward is the same now as he ever was. His misrepresentation of his interaction with Sperling is only the latest in a long string of questionable journalistic episodes.

To understand how this started, one has to begin near the beginning: Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about their Watergate exploits, All the President’s Men. The authors enjoyed titanic-sized credibility when the book appeared in the spring of 1974; not too many reporters could point to having received a public apology attesting to the veracity of their work from a press secretary to the president of the United States. (“I would apologize to the Post, and I would apologize to Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein,” Ron Ziegler had said on May 1, 1973, retracting his earlier criticism of the newspaper’s articles on Watergate.) The natural assumption was that Woodstein’s book would meet that same high standard. Why would their nonfiction for The Washington Post differ from nonfiction written for Simon and Schuster?

Read the entire article here.

Hollywood vs. History

 

David Warsh on All the President's Men

I like movies as much as the next guy, maybe more, but I was sorry to learn that Michelle Obama had announced the Oscar for the best picture last Sunday. She made the announcement via video feed from the White House. Presidential participation in the Academy Awards gives Hollywood story-telling a legitimacy that it does not deserve. Feature films entertain, inspire, illuminate, amuse. But truth-telling, as it is understood by acolytes of science, history and news, is pretty far down on their list.

Some cases in point this year: Canadians are annoyed because their involvement in the  caper depicted in “Argo” was significantly underplayed. “Lincoln” screenwriter Tony Kushner and director Steven Spielberg needed to build the drama in their climactic scene, so they invented two Connecticut congressmen to vote “No” as the roll was called on the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, ran into trouble in Congress because of the value (the film-makers were purposefully vague) ascribed to information produced by torture.

But the best example of Hollywood’s tendency to embroider to the point of fabrication is nearly forty years old. (I should say that I am leaving director Oliver Stone out of the discussion altogether.)  That is the spin that director Alan Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman put on the motivation of the anonymous source known as “Deep Throat,” in their 1976 film version of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Watergate best-seller, All the President’s Men.

 

To read entire article click here.

Lead and Gold.com: Leak "An Inconvenient Book"

 

 

In a two-part review, Craig Henry writes, “Max Holland’s Leak might have been the most important book published in 2012. Combining painstaking research with a dogged determination to separate fact from myth, Leak is a careful examination of Mark Felt and his role in Watergate.”

 

Part 1: Felt’s Game

 

Part 2: The Problem with Sources