# All the President's Men ***All the President's Men*** is [[Bob Woodward]] and [[Carl Bernstein]]'s account of their *[[Washington Post]]* investigation of the [[Watergate Scandal]], published by Simon & Schuster on June 15, 1974 — two months before [[Richard Nixon]] resigned. It is the founding modern template of accountability journalism and the channel through which much of the vault's Watergate vocabulary — [[Dirty Tricks]], [[Ratfucking]], Deep Throat — entered common use. ## What the book covers The book runs from the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices through the April 1973 resignations of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and the revelation of the White House taping system three months later. It is written as a reporting procedural, with the two authors in the third person: phone calls, night visits to Committee to Re-elect the President staff, and money trails. The turning point is a $25,000 Nixon campaign check made out to Midwest finance chairman Kenneth Dahlberg that turned up in a bank account of burglar Bernard Barker's real-estate firm — the first documented link between the campaign's money and the burglars. ## Deep Throat The book's most famous thread is Woodward's secret source, met at night in a parking garage. His identity stayed hidden for 31 years, until a May 31, 2005 *Vanity Fair* article named [[Mark Felt]], the FBI's second-ranking official during Watergate; Woodward and Bernstein confirmed it within hours. ## The dirty-tricks vocabulary The book connected [[Donald Segretti]]'s sabotage of Democratic primary campaigns to a circle of Nixon aides — Segretti, Dwight Chapin, Ron Ziegler, Gordon Strachan, Herbert Porter — who had practiced the same tactics in USC student politics, and it put their slang for it, "ratfucking," into print. A UPI reporter's memo, "Notes on the USC Crowd," supplied the connection. This is the passage that [[Ratfucking]], [[Dirty Tricks]] and the [[Disinformation Lexicon]] cite. ## The film and "follow the money" Alan J. Pakula's 1976 film, with Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, won four of its eight Academy Award nominations, including Jason Robards as editor Ben Bradlee and William Goldman's adapted screenplay. Its most quoted line, Deep Throat's "Follow the money," appears **in neither the book nor the Post's reporting**. NPR librarian Kee Malesky searched the book page by page without finding it, and Woodward and Goldman each credited the other with inventing it. The phrase is a screen invention that has hardened into Watergate lore; quote it as the film's, not Felt's. ## Why it matters to the KB The book models reporting that runs on documents, sources and money rather than access, and it set the expectation that a press investigation can bring down a president. Its sequel, *The Final Days* (1976), covers Nixon's last months. ## See Also - [[Watergate Scandal]] · [[Bob Woodward]] · [[Carl Bernstein]] · [[Mark Felt]] · [[Donald Segretti]] · [[Dirty Tricks]] · [[Ratfucking]] · [[Washington Post]] · [[Katharine Graham]] · [[Saturday Night Massacre]] · [[Muckraking]]