All the President's Men (1976)
In the run-up to the 1972 elections, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward covers what seems to be a minor break-in at the Democratic Party National headquarters. He is surprised to find top lawyers already on the defense case, and the discovery of names and addresses of Republican fund organizers on the accused further arouses his suspicions. The editor of the Post is prepared to run with the story and assigns Woodward and Carl Bernstein to it. They find the trail leading higher and higher in the Republican Party, and eventually into the White House itself.
A masterpiece of political propaganda and the mother of all conspiracy theories, which was almost immediately made into a two hour negative attack ad, against the Republican Party by the Left operating in Hollywood, in the middle of the Cold War was, of course, the book All The President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In this political thriller, a jagged mountain is constructed, out of a gentle molehill. The actual purpose of this desperate Washington Post exercise was to assassinate a right-wing president's character, and hopefully bring him down, the reality of which is entirely twisted into innocuous investigative journalism, in the film version of the book. The esoteric elements of the Left hated the anti-Communist Richard M. Nixon, because of his role in bringing Whittaker Chambers' revelations about Communist infiltration into Franklin Delano Roosevelt's White House to light, in Chambers' book Witness, at the end of the 1940s, shortly before Nixon became Vice President, which ultimately lead to the famous Red Scare, in the 1950s.
Daniel Ellsberg illegally leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, in 1970, who in turn, illegally published them, in order to try to stoke resistance to the Vietnam War, in the court of public opinion. The so called “Watergate Scandal” was in reality, a media storm in a tea cup. If you strip away all the political hype, generated by the left-wing cheerleaders, in the media, you are left with an illegal but arguably justifiable entry, into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C., and Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in California, in August of 1971, by some CIA agents, known as the “Plumbers” who were looking for evidence against Daniel Ellsberg, who had perfidiously released top secret Pentagon documents, an act of high treason, during president Nixon's first term. No one was hurt or killed, in this affair, which later turned into a feeding frenzy by the same left leaning American media that illegally published Ellsberg's Pentagon papers and hypocritical political theater, by the monotonous televised Senate Watergate Committee Hearings, cast to resemble the Nuremberg Trials. While all this was happening, in 1975, Pol Pot was busy murdering millions of innocent people, in the rice fields, in Cambodia which was known to many reporters, who either chose to remain silent about it, or were ignored by their employers, because they didn't want to show that Khmer rouge Marxism needed to use mass-murder, in order to keep it's captive population under constant repression.
This whole Watergate incident is the best proof for the left-wing bias and double standard, within the news and entertainment industry, in the United States, which is still alive and well, to this day. Nixon was doing the right thing, focusing on Vietnam and Cambodia, where the real crimes against humanity were actually unfolding, while the left-wing media only wanted to ignore this major story and concentrate on destroying a president, who had different political views than they had. What more proof does anyone need that the media puts their political agenda, before their desire to inform the public of real danger? All of this is of course not even mentioned, in the movie “All The President's Men”, which premiered in 1976 and used the good looking actors Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, to portray the not so good looking Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Credit must be given to the director Alan J. Pakula, for taking a pretty uneventful and boring story, and turning it into a suspenseful and entertaining piece of film making, even if the truth is only half-told and the suspense is the candy coating, for this pill.
The most salient scene in the movie comes near the end, to help provide the film with some semblance of a conclusion, when Redford's character, Woodward goes to meet Hal Holbrook's character, “Deep Throat”, in a menacingly dark parking garage. Here Deep Throat whispers the core conspiracy and that “Your lives are in danger” to a stupefied Woodward, who hadn't even come close to realizing the incredible complexity of involvement and culpability of the whole American intelligence community, in this cover-up. If the intelligence community and the Nixon administration were really so deep, dark and dangerous, as the film suggests then, why couldn't they break into a hotel and a psychiatrist's office, without getting caught and sent to prison? What do we learn from all this? That the President and the intelligence community were involved in gathering information and engaging in clandestine activities. Oh, how shocking! If this is really a surprise to you then, you might be horrified to learn that there was never any Deep Throat and that there may not even be a Santa Clause! This avatar Deep Throat was most likely an invention of Woodward's, to be able to deflect accusations of inaccuracy, away from himself, if he wanted to field a conjecture, that he couldn't verify with any real facts. This kind of thing is even demonstrated quite clearly, on several occasions in the film, when Woodward and Bernstein pretend to know something, when they are interviewing some one, in order to acquire a confirmation, from this unsuspecting victim of their confidence trickery, in a surprisingly candid display of their true journalistic style.
The music is the real star of this movie. Melodic intonation is really key to how the audience is supposed to feel about people who worked for president Nixon. This movie is all about suspense, atmosphere and emotion, not about historical facts or accuracy, though it feigns to be objective and professional, by the use of an academically disciplined corporate looking introductory credits design and theme music which is almost militaristic and patriotic, in character. The theme music is reminiscent of a sombre military funeral march, that sounds like it is being performed by a Marine Corps band. This is done to effectively obscure any hint of subversive intent. It takes on a mystical and foreboding aspect whenever Woodward and Bernstein may be on to something, such as in the Library of Congress, shot from the dome above, where the lens gradually zooms out, as a lower frequency heartbeat pummel delicately kicks in and gradually becomes louder and louder. We see more and more of the articulated concentric pattern, of the library floor furniture, which presumably is supposed to symbolize the reporters' growing perspective on Nixon's alleged ineffable web of intrigues.
This splendid example of political propaganda was also the political opposite of movies like The Green Berets (1968), starring John Wayne or The Killing Fields (1984), starring Sam Waterston, which wanted to warn the public, in the world and draw people's attention to the atrocities, which were being committed in Vietnam, at the hands of Communists and Marxists. The recurring theme in our media is that our intelligence community, FBI, the CIA and police are the bad guys, while investigative reporters are the good guys, who really care about our well-being. All The President's Men was an important installment in the ethos of Western society, which creates a conditioning that ridicules the views of the moral majority on the right, while giving a magnified voice to the tiny esoteric inner circle of the Marxist minority, on the left.
Our media has always maintained that America's involvement in Vietnam was wrong and historically irrelevant. After America's withdrawal from Vietnam and president Nixon's resignation, the Communists invaded South Vietnam and started the massacre of millions of people who had been identified, as not being willing to acquiesce in the Marxist ideology of the North. The Left in Hollywood and New York, had been cultivating the notion that only the right-wing has a monopoly on mass-murder, by continually putting all attention on Hitler and the Nazis, while censoring all references to the humanitarian atrocities committed by the Communists. One direct consequence of our left-wing media's campaign to persuade Americans and other Western countries to ridicule Conservatives and shun the war against the Communists, in Vietnam, was the genocide aftermath, in the Killing Fields in Cambodia.
