Silence, the swallowing kind. A black hole of it, its stillness more startling than the sound that will soon puncture it, a mechanical bashing of metal into skin. Not a bullet, but a type slug hitting paper and exacting a “J” that initiates a date now friendly to the eye and familiar to microfiche, security ledgers, and school workbooks: June 17, 1972, the Watergate break-in.
There is an eerie slip of post-midnight, pre-dawn time when Washington, DC becomes something else: quiet like the opening of Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men, an empty scroll which will soon be filled with the facts that give Watergate shape and memory. The facts, of course, being the conspiracy to extract information from the perceived enemies of President Richard Nixon’s administration ahead of his upcoming re-election. Or, more importantly, the cover-up that followed, orchestrated by Nixon and his top brass as a way of maintaining power through whatever means possible, including, but not limited to, espionage, sabotage, surveillance, and intelligence-gathering. A symphony of corruption that would become the greatest American political scandal of the 20th century.
But silence first, and silence necessarily. On June 17, a pin-drop quiet filled the halls of the Watergate Office Building at 2600 Virginia Avenue NW, the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Sleekily modern, a cool contrast to the Capitol’s familiar marble grandeur, the building sat neatly within the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of DC, an affluent area stretched along the Potomac that displaced most of its working-class Black population during the Jim Crow years and became a centerpiece of Washington’s central business district. Those early morning hours, dark and shapeless, were, it turns out, ideal conditions for discovery. Shortly after signing in for the night, a 24-year-old security guard named Frank Willis (who plays himself in the film) found paper stuffed into doors on levels B2 and B3—not peculiar during working hours, but a red flag in the black of night. As Willis took a look around, he found something else: a door taped open. He removed the tape, believing it maintenance related, but when he returned and found it had been replaced, he called the authorities. It was just before 2 a.m. and the world was about to change. Because of paper and tape.
Paper, the conduit through which we first received information about Watergate—on uncoated newsprint, soft as tissue—is everywhere in frame in All the President’s Men. The Washington Post offices, painstakingly recreated for the film, are stuffed with accordion folders and notepads and cardboard bins of receipts and photo copies and shelves of hardbound books. Paper on desks, too, and so much of it; sheet after sheet fed to typewriter teeth. Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman knew the power and possibility of a blank page; newswriting curtains the film, the opening and closing shots marked by nothing but clattering keys and other newsroom ephemera.
Great journalists know how to set the stage. Great filmmakers, too. But sometimes reality lays the groundwork so precisely and dramatically that finding the stage is as easy as tripping on it. Sometimes an inelegant burglar reapplies the tape that pulls a thread that lets loose a knot of story as fantastical as it is hard truth. Truth—remember when that mattered? Try, if you can, to recall the newspaper in your hand, the bleeding ink on your fingers, the weight of it, as physically dense as the words impactful. Truth was once something you could run your hand over. It was once a “J” on copy paper, then a newspaper story, a book, a film. Sensory experiences gave Watergate dimensionality and hooked a nation in its ubiquitousness.
Silence, then rapturous sound. Twins, these two—sound and silence—for their merging makes music, denotes danger, tells stories. All the President’s Men tells the story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate reporting, but it also tells the story, incidentally, of the loss of form—the texture of news that made it real. Not in its runtime but in its aftertaste, 50 years later, when facts feel more like memories, orderless and shadowed; fantasy in the eye of the beholder. Manipulable in its lack of physicality, the truth that once set us free now hangs like a threat over a nation lacking tools to recognize or comprehend it.
***
In the first chapter of his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Canadian philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” Essentially, his thesis argues that the medium through which we receive information is more important than the information itself, because it’s the form of media, not the content, that shapes the way we think and feel and perceive reality, molding our individual and collective consciousness. This idea applies to books and newspapers and television, but also, of course, to film. Of film, McLuhan wrote:
“Mechanization was never so vividly fragmented or sequential as in the birth of the movies, the moment that translated us beyond mechanism into the world of growth and organic interrelation. The movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure. The message of the movie medium is that of transition from lineal connections to configurations.”
Film, then, is a natural adaptive force when it comes to journalism, because what else is as fragmented and sequential as investigating and reporting? Note taking, call logs, library cards, receipts: all analog instruments of truth telling. In their absence, how does one convince an audience that these tools probe facts? Pakula and his crew—including legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis and sound editor Milton C. Burrow—used the medium of film to more or less enact the analog. All the President’s Men brims with life the more it pares down and zooms in on the banality of everyday sonority. David Shire’s score, droll horns and low brass, fades in and out but is almost always minimal. Instead, the soundtrack is the rhythm section of an active newsroom. Not just the fury of fingers on keys but the staccato tête-à-tête of Woodward and Bernstein’s blossoming, occasionally contentious, journalistic partnership.
Robert Redford as Bob Woodward is a remarkable thing to behold. The green reporter with hungry eyes sees a few steps ahead of everyone else. Through Redford, who bought the rights to real-life Woodward and Bernstein’s book and produced the film, we feel much of its texture. He is our medium with the message, in a way. Startlingly handsome, yes, but with something subtly deceptive about him, too. Beautiful but unknowable, save the quick glimpses at his barren apartment with Ritz crackers on the side table and papers stacked and scattered. A workaholic. And also, importantly, a furious note taker.
It’s through Woodward’s notes that All the President’s Men constructs itself. First, from the courthouse benches where he heads the morning after the burglaries and “discovers” the story, but also on his myriad phone calls with secretaries and officials and other sources whose careful words help map the Nixon administration’s shameful trail of corruption. Insert shots of these notes plant the viewer in Woodward’s head, revealing thoughts he doesn’t speak aloud (“Nervous! Knows him”), spelling out names and locations we’ll need to remember, ensuring familiarity but also our culpability in whatever comes next.
***
Media scholar Laura U. Marks wrote of what she calls “haptic visuality” in her 2000 book The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses—a theory that cinematic visuality functions like touch by triggering physical memories. Though she wrote mostly about the way film can connect diasporas to their culture of origin, haptic visuality is applicable to most instances of filmic sense memory. Woodward frantically scribbling in his notepad with a pencil conjures memories of the classroom, of eraser on graphite, of smooth up-and-down handwriting motions. The shrill bellow of a phone at the Post is every phone of that era we’ve heard, too, in grandma’s kitchen or the principal’s office. We can smell the Library of Congress and the cigarettes in Bernstein’s mouth and the swampish Potomac air in the streets. We can taste the bitter coffee the nervous bookkeeper gives Bernstein, all 20 cups of it, stale as any common room beverage. Their work is real to us because we not only see journalism as an action, but feel it in our sensory orbit.
The haptic visuality of the film is also present in its dimensionality. “Perhaps the most difficult part of photographing All the President’s Men, if not the most interesting, was the application of depth,” Gordon Willis told American Cinematographer in 2019. “There were times when backgrounds were just as important as foregrounds. That is to say, the environment could not be lost behind the actors, but had to be an integral part of the scene.”
To achieve this, Willis used split diopters in “outrageous fashion,” as pans and zooms and with a 360-degree rotating diopter frame built by Panavision. There are no fancy transitions or floral fadeaways. The world is plain and ordinary in every frame, just like its depiction of journalism: working class and matter-of-fact. Patterns on sofas are as ripe as the lines on Jason Robards’ face. The newsroom, an exact replica of the Post’s, is layered and lived in: cigarettes everywhere, smoke lipping the ceiling and casting a nicotine glow over the rows of desks and bodies.
Willis—whose other 1970s credits include The Godfather I and II, Klute, The Paper Chase, The Parallax View, and Annie Hall—could be credited for our memory of the decade, especially for those of us who didn’t live through it. We can attribute much of the realism and mood he created in all of his films to the indelibility of his camera and lighting work. Take the scenes with Deep Throat, for instance. The thriller elements of All the President’s Men pop here, in the dark garage, as Woodward goes to consult his most treasured and anonymous source, a government higher-up whose identity he won’t reveal for fear of losing access to vital information. Hal Holbrock plays the shadowy figure to great effect, but it’s the tactility of the scenes—the hierarchy of shadows, the flick and ignition of a lighter—that creates great myth-making.
The parking lot meetings are shot like noir, blues of every shade slicing through black shadows, all the negative space and swallowed light. The scenes feel remarkably physical despite their abstraction; the garage is wet with secrecy, concrete sweating around the edges of the frame. Willis floods the darkness with punctures of fluorescent light that isolate faces and gestures. The famous lines (“Follow the money”) matter less than the texture surrounding them, made more frightening because of their grounding in material reality. Woodward’s face, the anxiety and breathlessness that grows with each meeting, centers us. It, too, creates another sensory element: the physicality of even showing up. The notes from Deep Throat in his paper, the red flag he sticks under his balcony flower pot to signal a meet up, descending into the bowels of DC to stand in the dark beside another human whose breathing he—and we—can hear. Truth requires movement and effort. Most of all, it requires risk.
***
Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein is full of risk. It’s his defining characteristic: a little smarmy but undoubtedly charming, he uses his boyish smile to get the right words out of girls. Where Woodward is methodical in his note taking and quiet observations, Bernstein is all instinct, hunger in its rawest form. Pakula films their partnership like percussion, dialogue overlapping and colliding, a timpani and a triangle. Even their conflict becomes productive. It becomes jazz, improvisational and precise. Bernstein’s messiness sharpens Woodward’s caution; Woodward’s discipline tempers Bernstein’s recklessness. We watch them work for every piece of information, watch them stumble and succeed as they follow up with sources, head down dead end corridors, experience the humiliating necessity of asking the same question over and over until somebody finally answers it honestly.
Woodward and Bernstein’s mounting exhaustion is obvious in their increasingly frazzled nature, hyper from coffee or anxious from the surveillance Deep Throat warns them is attuned their way, but that’s part of the texture, too. As they barrel closer and closer to the truth—and eventually, prove what they’ve known all along—so do we, toward exhalation. It’s our journey together, heard and felt, weighted and relieved. Information is tangible in the film, and tangibility breeds belief.
One of the film’s most powerful and famous scenes comes just at the end, when Woodward and Bernstein rush to Post executive editor Ben Bradlee’s lawn to share Deep Throat’s revelation that the entire U.S. intelligence community is involved in the Watergate scandal. He tells them to rest up—but briefly. Their story is finally ready to tell. “Nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country,” he tells them, a grim sarcasm tinged with genuine fear. He stands by their reporting because he believes in it and because he’s seen the process—he’s felt it, too. He can practically smell the discipline. He believes, as all great journalists do, that truth matters most when it can survive pressure.
Bradlee is the anchor of the film, thanks in part to Jason Robards’ devastating, Oscar-winning portrayal, but also thanks to the actual man. Before he was executive editor of the Post, Bradlee was a police reporter, a foreign correspondent, and Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief; so many decades spent around power, he could easily identify its seductions. Robards wisely plays him with an exhausted posture, a man who knows precisely how fragile institutional integrity really is.
***
Watching All the President’s Men in 2026 provokes a gentle aching because it documents an ecosystem of institutional faith—that truth, once uncovered, possesses the power to shift the world and invite accountability that’s actually honored—that no longer exists. The film’s tactility is less nostalgic set dressing than it is evidence of a world where information moved slowly enough for people to examine it before reacting to it, where journalism was understood as labor, not performance. The main players behind the Watergate burglary—all the president’s men—were tried, some imprisoned. Nixon resigned. Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting became the stuff of legend, and they became celebrities.
Justice, one could argue, was served. But what for? The ensuing years were anything but honorable. It feels obvious, almost artless, to draw a clear line from the present day to Watergate. President Trump sits in his White House tower as his own men do immoral deeds on his behalf, the depths of which we may never know. Modern times make a mockery of the principles of decency we once expected from our leadership, the principles that All the President’s Men foolishly assumed would always be the case. But the ruse is up. As Deep Throat tells Woodward, “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
But corruption alone isn’t remarkable; it’s always existed and always will. People with power will almost assuredly abuse it. The issue now is oversaturation. Watergate was a rupture, but modern scandal is a sediment, layering ever atop itself until we can barely distinguish atrocity from ordinary political operation. Epstein files disappear into culture war slurry. Supreme Court ethics violations cycle through headlines beside AI-generated slop and skincare ads. Authoritarian rhetoric shares visual real estate with DoorDash and TikTok, all delivered by the same swift finger swipe.
This is McLuhan’s thesis realized in its bleakest form: our current mediums—phones, computers—have flattened meaning. News is no longer ceremonial, just as it’s no longer physical. Perhaps it’s facile to believe that a tangible newspaper made news tangible, but it’s worth interrogating this possibility. Spreading a paper across the table with your morning coffee ritualized the event. An entire nation was riveted by Watergate because it stood idly alone atop less domineering news cycles. It was the news, all of it. As Gore Vidal said on an episode of The Dick Cavett Show, which tirelessly covered the scandal, “I have to have my Watergate fix every single morning in the paper.”
“There are Watergate junkies all over the place,” Cavett replied.
Today, it’d be a drop in the bucket. Barely noticeable, or noticeable for less than a day. The Russian interference in Trump’s first election—remember that? The bottom layer of the sediment by now. Maybe even washed away entirely. Watergate-level, but so is every day. And at a buffoonish level, too. The serious and the trivial have adopted the same visual language and now it’s all the same. Corporate consolidation has left many major newspapers owned by billionaires. The Washington Post, centerpiece of All the President’s Men and the paper that almost singlehandedly made Watergate a word so powerful it’s now a cultural shorthand, is now owned by Jeff Bezos. The CEO of the company that delivers toilet paper to your doorstep in hours, more powerful than Ben Bradlee ever was.
The then-Post editors’ resistance to tribalism is a missing cog in the engine of our current moment. Powerful liaisons and absurd amounts of money and stubborn pride propel politicians more than love of country, and many journalists more than hunger. “Howard, they’re hungry,” Post news editor Harry M. Rosenfeld says approvingly of Woodward and Bernstein when they’re first assigned the story. “Remember when you were hungry?”
Remember when we were?
***
It ends with a “J”. The same dip and curve, smooth in its construction. It’s January this time—January 20, 1973, the winter sky crisp and blue over the East Portico of the United States Capitol, temperatures chilly but not brutal, 42°F with 16 mph winds. Despite a landslide reelection, the crowds were muted at the second inauguration of President Richard Nixon. Watergate was firmly in the public consciousness by now and the Vietnam War hung heavily on the people of the United States, as the world peered inward at a country in crisis.
There was no evidence of crisis inside the Portico that afternoon, but just beyond it, where a reported 100,000 anti-war demonstrators assembled. There, on the Capitol steps, as Pat Nixon stood in a fur-lined turquoise coat next to her husband, the president placed his hand on a Bible, was sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger, and was celebrated with a recognizable political pageantry emulating violence the protestors lamented: military artillery salutes, 21 of them. As booming cannon fire echoed through the National Mall, two young reporters sat at their desks and typed up their findings of Nixon’s role in the Watergate burglary and its ensuing cover-up. He would resign 18-and-a-half months later, on August 9, 1974.
Perhaps these events did not overlap so cleanly in real life, but they do in the haunting final sequence of All the President’s Men. No silence, just Woodward and Bernstein’s furious rat-a-tatting typewriters and Nixon’s inauguration on a fuzzy television. Willis’s camera slow-zooms through the newsroom and toward the TV set until it fills half the screen. The meeting of mediums: television, paper. Ceremonial fire and office buzz in chorus. The gunfire begins to trail off, but the echo of inky keys on paper remains, louder than the cannons—and more potent.
Violence announces itself but documentation survives it. Administrations will collapse and demagogues will die, but Homer’s poetry outlives ancient war. As do the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the writings of Ida B. Wells, the photographs of Vietnam, the footage from Selma, the phone recordings from 9/11. Tactile media as weighted memories, even while mediums shift. Civilization is built from preserved witness, and film is preservation. Haptic visuality. We watch All the President’s Men and we remember the labor that willed its repercussions. Because film keeps the texture of truth alive, even as the world that produced it disappears.