All the President’s Men was published by Simon & Schuster in 1974, written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein while the Watergate story was still unfolding. The book traces the investigation from its origins — the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex — through the painstaking process by which Woodward and Bernstein connected the burglars to the Committee to Re-elect the President, then to the White House staff, and ultimately to Richard Nixon himself.
The book’s enduring power lies in its method. Woodward and Bernstein were young, relatively junior reporters — Bernstein had not even attended college — who broke the biggest political story of the twentieth century not through brilliance or connections but through relentless, tedious work: knocking on doors, making hundreds of phone calls, cross-referencing records, and slowly building a case from the bottom up. The narrative reads like a thriller because the structure is a thriller’s structure — each discovery leads to a bigger question, each source leads to a more dangerous source, each revelation increases the pressure on the reporters.
Deep Throat — the anonymous source in the FBI who confirmed and guided the investigation — is the book’s most famous element. Mark Felt, the FBI’s Associate Director, was not identified as Deep Throat until 2005, more than thirty years after the book’s publication. The parking-garage meetings between Woodward and Felt, with their cloak-and-dagger atmosphere, became iconic scenes in the 1976 Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman film adaptation.
Impact on Journalism
All the President’s Men had an enormous and not entirely salutary effect on American journalism. It inspired a generation of young people to enter reporting, enrollment in journalism schools surged, and “investigative journalism” became a prestigious specialty. But it also created a template — two reporters, a secret source, a presidential scandal — that subsequent journalism has struggled to escape. Every political scandal since Watergate has been covered with the expectation that it will produce a comparable narrative, and the suffix “-gate” attached to every controversy is a testament to the book’s cultural dominance.
Collecting All the President’s Men
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1974): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $300–$800
- Very good/very good: $100–$300
- Signed by both Woodward and Bernstein: $800–$2,000
- Signed by Woodward alone: $300–$700