“All the President’s Men” Is the Most Washington Movie Ever

After a month of voting, you readers, have decided that of all the films ever set in Washington since the dawn of the medium, All the President’s Men—Alan Pakula’s 1976 adaptation of the Washington Post’s reporting on the 1972 break-in at the Watergate complex—is the “most Washington” of them all. In ways, the movie is plenty deserving: Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman gave memorable performances as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively, Jason Robards won an Oscar for his portrayal of Ben Bradlee, and the film lives on as a canonical part of high-school journalism syllabi. You may even be citing the movie as inspiration right now, as you sit at your desk putting together an adorable listicle of dogs that don’t understand that they’re not people.

The final match, between All the President’s Men and Thank You for Smoking, pitted films from two different eras with a similar theme: the intersection of politics, power, and money. All the President’s Men was, according to its one-sheet, “the most devastating detective story of this century.” Thank You for Smoking, released in the current century, remains a cutting, if not classic, satire of contemporary influence peddling.

There’s only one problem with All the President’s Men winning: as enduring as it is, its message is a load of hogwash. That’s what W. Joseph Campbell, a professor at American University’s School of Communication and a longtime critic of Watergate mythmaking, says.

“The dominant narrative of Watergate is that the dogged reporting brought down Nixon’s corrupt presidency,” Campbell tells Washingtonian. “It ignores, omits and overlooks the contributions of many other actors and forces that were at work on this scandal, including the investigators who had subpoena power. Special prosecutors, FBI, grand juries, Judge [John] Sirica, both houses of Congress, and ulitmately the Supreme Court that forced Nixon to hand over the tapes.”

Without those tapes, which contained President Nixon authorizing payments to the perpetrators June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, Campbell says it’s very likely Nixon might have skated. The movie version of All the President’s Men doesn’t get into the tapes, or focus much on the characters who figured into the Nixon Administration’s undoing, like John Dean, Martha Mitchell, and H.R. Haldeman (outside of a few passing references). ...