(Insturctor’s name)
Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward. All The President's Men. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974. Print.
Book review
Introduction
“All the president’s men” is a detective book written by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who are at the same time its main characters. The story covers the period from 1972 to 1974, and depicts the way The Watergate Scandal was developed, investigated, and resolved. Bernstein and Woodward were working for The Washington Post as reporters, and were directly involved in the Watergate issue investigation. Thus, apart from the fact that the book is a detective, it is attributed to biographical style as well. Basically, the book tries to present Bernstein and Woodward as people who played the determining role in disclosure of the scandal, and the subsequent Nixon’s resignation from the presidency. This review supposes that they are good in journalism, but are far from being good models.
Summary of the content
The book is entirely concentrated on the investigation of Watergate scandal conducted by two reporters from the Washington Post. The story begins on June 17,1972. Five burglars get caught red-handed while installing the wiretapping equipment at the US Democratic Party’s headquarters. The Washington Post executive editor, Benjamin Bradlee gives the issue to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for inquiry. The two reporters start putting all their effort to discover as much information as possible. For gathering that information, they hold a plenty of telephone conversations as well as personal meetings with dozens of people who are to different extents related to the Watergate. This eventually allows them to release a series of newspaper articles, which step by step disclose a set of disrobing materials about Richard Nixon’s administration. Over time, the investigation comes to a point when the position of Nixon and his allies becomes weak. However, at the moment when Nixon was re-elected for the second term, the story covered in the book finishes.
Analysis and evaluation
First of all, the end of the story should be considered. It took roughly a year after the events depicted in the book to uncover the most important disclosures, which would lead to the resignation of Nixon, and many of his accomplices would be brought to justice. With regard to Bernstein and Woodward, they would become Pulitzer Prize winners for the contribution to the issue, and their role in making the discoveries would be highly appreciated.
The way this book reveals the personalities of Woodward and Bernstein tells a lot about what a good journalist should be. Particularly, there are some important qualities which distinguish him. Those include, but are not limited to: acumen, cunning, insistence, patience, and equanimity. There were shown many examples of how to use those qualities in the reporter job. For instance, Bernstein has used a trick when talking to people on the phone: in order not to compromise his collocutor, he asked him to put the phone down in ten seconds if his statements had been wrong – this is a sign of good gumption ability.
In addition, both Bernstein and Woodward were practicing other tricks such as talking to each other to make the third person intervene when they are wrong or agree when they are right, and thus pull the information they seek for. This in combination with their ability to recognize the emotional states of people by voice or gestures and detect lies also demonstrates their outstanding psychological skills. More than this, Woodward and Bernstein are ready to sacrifice interests and safety of other people in order to achieve their goals, thus indicating the intrinsic cool-headed approach to the job. Above it all, being patient and highly goal-oriented is probably the key to a journalistic success. The best description for the reporters’ persistent intentions may be “When the Lord Closes a Door, Somewhere He Opens a Window.”
Concerning the other people working for Washington Post, some clear inferences can be made. Firstly, most of them are shown as cynic, sometimes indifferent persons. They do not hesitate to print biased or even gossip news and articles. Secondly, one of the prior tasks for them is to respond faster and perform better than the competing publishers. For that purpose, actions are usually taken despite the detriment to the quality of the content released. Overall, the book shows that the journalist activity needs a plenty of skills, the cool head, and a large portion of talent.
Can Bernstein and Woodward be potential models?
This is itself a very complex question. From the perspective of journalism, those two are really good in doing their job. Not without reason their contribution is considered to be predetermining in the disclosure of Watergate scandal. Possessing the skills discussed previously in this paper is quite obviously advantageous in the modern world. However, as to the main actors of the book, their actions are not always righteous. For clarity, when trying to achieve the desired result, Bernstein and Woodward fairly often act in bad manners. For instance, Bernstein once fraudulently entered the US general attorney’s office, thus making him embarrassed and at the same time put his secretary in an awkward situation. Another example of that was when Woodward and Bernstein put pressure on their colleague, Sally, by using her private life to gather particular information.
Despite that the provided examples characterize the reporters in a negative way, they are still nothing comparing to the fact that Bernstein and Woodward were endangering lives of many people. Trying to seek for information, they were visiting a lot of people who were in this or that way connected with the Watergate. Aside from being sometimes both insolent and hypocrite in communication, they could simply put the people they met under political persecution. After all, I opine that the book heroes should not be models in terms of human qualities and morality. However, this doesn’t prevent them from being great journalists.
What else I personally learnt from this book
The events depicted in “All the president’s men” gave me an idea of what the actual power of mass media can be.
The title of the book seems to imply that all of the people in the Nixon President Office were wrongdoers, which is in my opinion incorrect.
The “Deep Throat’s” mysterious behavior seems to be strange. It would be much easier to give all the answers to Woodward rather than giving indirect tips. Also, it is unclear to me what had motivated the “Deep Throat”.
As to Bernstein and Woodward, their motivation may also be called into questions. Sometimes it looked like they were more interested in writing a good article rather than working for the benefit of the country.
As to articles themselves, they were mostly misleading and based on half-truth – the people who were the sources of information usually said “I am not sure”, “probably”, “I guess”. Even Bradlee always realized that each new report was a risk, and any mistake would have led to the complete fail of the whole investigation.
