All the President's Men


All the President's Men is a 1974 non-fiction book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two of the journalists who investigated the June 1972 break-in at the Watergate Office Building and the resultant political scandal for The Washington Post. The book chronicles the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein from Woodward's initial report on the Watergate break-in through the resignations of Nixon Administration officials H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman in April 1973, and the revelation of the Oval Office Watergate tapes by Alexander Butterfield three months later. It relates the events behind the major stories the duo wrote for the Post, naming some sources who had previously refused to be identified for their initial articles, notably Hugh Sloan. It also gives detailed accounts of Woodward's secret meetings with his source Deep Throat, whose identity was kept hidden for over 30 years. Gene Roberts, the former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times, has called the work of Woodward and Bernstein "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time."
A film adaptation, produced by Robert Redford, starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, respectively, was released in 1976. That same year, a sequel to the book, The Final Days, was published, which chronicled the last months of Richard Nixon's presidency, starting around the time their previous book ended.

Background

Woodward and Bernstein had considered the idea of writing a book about Watergate, but did not commit until actor Robert Redford expressed interest in purchasing the film rights. In Telling the Truth About Lies: The Making of "All the President's Men," Woodward noted that Redford played an important role in changing the book's narrative from a story about the Watergate events to one about their investigations and reportage of the story.
The name of the book alludes to the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty. An allusion similar to that was made more explicitly a quarter-century earlier in the Robert Penn Warren novel All the King's Men, which describes the career of a fictional corrupt governor, loosely based on Huey Long.

Important individuals

The President

White House

of Simon & Schuster purchased the right to publish the book through the agent David Obst. The authors received an advance of $55,000. In his memoir, Michael Korda said of the book's publication that it "transformed book publishing into a red-hot part of media" and books became "news" instead of history.
Because the book was embargoed until publication day, there were no advance copies for reviewers. Simon & Schuster became known as the "Watergate" publisher by following up All the President's Men with books by John Dean, Maureen Dean, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.