Maxine Trout

HNR 403

Dr. Hogan

28 September 2020

All The President’s Men Analysis

All The President’s Men, is a book written by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The

two authors were journalists for The Washington Post and it tells the story of the investigation of

one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history- Watergate. In short terms, the Watergate

scandal started with a burglary at the democratic headquarters at the Watergate hotel. Bernstein

and Woodward, two men from very different backgrounds, were forced to team up and

investigate the burglary that took place after realizing that there was more to the incident than

what was made out for people to believe. The two men did some digging and interviewing and

found that there definitely was more to the story than told. Bernstein and Woodward were

starting to notice certain things like the jargon President Nixon was using in his press release. I

believe he said something along the lines of, “We were not involved in the particular situation”,

and this had the two journalists questioning what was actually happening. Through their

investigation, the two found out about a secret fund the government had which was meant for the

use of sabotaging the democratic party with spyware, but people were too scared to speak on the

matter. Woodward throughout his searching, found a government insider who went by the name

of Deep Throat and this person was giving Woodward information- no names or anything

extremely specific- that could help him and Bernstein continue to look into the Watergate

scandal. The two reporters learned overtime that there were more than 40 people hired to
sabotage the democratic party and were being secretly paid through an account with transactions

approved by “the president’s men”. Overtime, the real story about the Watergate burglary came

out- thanks to the tapes- and President Nixon was brought out and exposed for being a part of the

plans. President Nixon then resigned from office before being impeached.

As I am sure you can tell, I am not the world’s biggest history buff, but the Watergate

scandal was something I think everyone has heard about because, as I stated before, it is one of

the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. To be honest, I did not know much about this

situation as I have had some really bad history teachers, so I was very shocked reading this book.

Before reading All The President’s Men, I understood that Watergate had to do with spyware and

money and President Nixon, but the details I was unaware of. I learned a lot from reading this

book and also from our discussions in class. This book was a tough read for me, honestly I think

I zoned out a lot reading it as I feel like there are holes in my memory, but I got through it and I

genuinely think I learned a lot about the government and the scandal. I wasn’t necessarily

surprised that President Nixon was a part of this, because I knew in advance, but reading about

the situation in detail is what really surprised me. The fact that if these reporters had not realized

the holes in the stories and didn’t follow their suspicions, this horrible situation could potentially

never have made it to the public. It scares me that other situations like this could have happened,

or may happen again, and we might not ever know. That being said, I am even more terrified

because of who we currently have in office and the deceit that we see on a regular basis coming

from him. When he is finally removed from office, whether it be this election or not, the amount

of information that may come out because people won’t be (hopefully) scared to openly talk will

be huge.
 Overall, this book was a difficult, but interesting read and I learned a lot from All The

President’s Men.