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Book Challenge #4: All The President's Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
All the President's Men
, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
First, an embarrassing admission. I knew there was a famous and generally well-regarded writer named Bob Woodward who wrote books on Washington politics. I also knew that the famous investigative journalists who were instrumental in cracking the Watergate case were Woodward and Bernstein. I did not know until right before I picked up All the President's Men that they were the same person. Duh.
...That's probably as good an intro as any to my second point, which is that 20th century political history is not an area where I know very much. I mean, I knew the general outline of the incident, but it basically boiled down to "There was a break-in, and a coverup, and Woodward and Bernstein, and some tapes, and an 18 1/2 minute gap, and Spiro Agnew resigned for some reason, and a smoking gun, and then Nixon resigned. And somewhere in there he said he wasn't a crook." So in some ways I was in the perfect place for reading the book: I knew enough to be interested, but not so much that I could predict what was going to happen next.
And of course I knew that there was a lot more going on than that brief synopsis. It's really a fascinating story, and as presented in All the President's Men it's a detective story. The book was published in 1974, and covers events from the initial break-in (June '72) through November 73, when Nixon announces that he will not be resigning. In other words, the 'story' as I know it is unfinished by the end of the book, which gives the book a real sense of immediacy. Whatever sense of "but I want to know what happens next!" I had at the end of the book -- someone living in 1973/74 and paying attention to politics, when this was current events and not history, must've felt the same thing times about a hundred.
(Side note: the book is written in 73, published in 74, and about current events. That means that it doesn't waste a ton of time explaining who the major players are, any more than a book published now would waste a lot of time explaining who Condoleezza Rice or Hilary Clinton are. In some ways that streamlines the story and really hammers home the way that this is a contemporary account, but it did send me scrambling to the 'cast of characters' page -- and occasionally to Wikipedia -- because I had lost track of who a particular person was and why they were important.)
It's really hard to know how to talk about this book. It's a great read -- the authors can really turn a phrase (there's a great bit where they're discussing an interview with someone, and they describe the way he waggled his eyebrows up and down as being like a predatory bird attempting to take off with a prey animal slightly too heavy for it), and in some places it's downright hilarious. (The book is written in third person, despite the fact that it follows the movements of Woodward and Bernstein themselves, who are the authors -- which means that there's a great bit at the beginning where they describe how much they didn't like one another at the outset of the investigation, and each were annoyed to be saddled with the other.) The book sticks pretty closely to Woodward and Bernstein, and so the reader learns things about the investigation as the two investigators do, for the most part, which ratchets up the drama considerably. Not that the drama isn't considerable to begin with. So: it's a well-written book on a fascinating historical topic, which is good enough of a recommendation to me.
One thing that did occur to me as I was reading it was that I think I would have had a terrible time getting through it had I tried to read it before Obama had won on November 4. It's absolutely full of really filthy politics -- the kind of politics I'd heard described as 'Rovian' throughout the past campaign cycle, but that it's increasingly clear to me reach back much, much farther than Carl Rove. And the depressing thing is that the dirty tricks, the 'games,' as Deep Throat called them, worked, at least in the election. And if it hadn't been for the fact that the Watergate burglers kind of cocked up their job -- and the fact that the Washington Post continued with its investigation despite heavy pressure to stop, including more questionable tactics in an attempt to silence them -- it would have worked in the long run, too. Of course, knowing that Nixon would be forced to resign made it more bearable; knowing that Obama won the election helped a lot, too. In a lot of ways it's still hard to read, to see how fragile democracy really is in the face of liars.
In a lot of ways, this hammered home a point![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
triath made recently: that we ought to be worried about major newspapers going under. Without a Washington Post, there would have been no Woodward or Bernstein, and without them, who knows whether the official investigation would have found out how far down the rot spread?
Anyway. If you have any interest in American politics or 20th century history, or just a good read, I'd recommend All The President's Men, painful though it occasionally is. And when you get it, go ahead and order The Final Days (which I am reading right now), too, because you'll want to find out how it turns out.
I promise I will at some point post a review of a book I don't care for, just so I look less like a shill. ;)
, by Bob Woodward and Carl BernsteinFirst, an embarrassing admission. I knew there was a famous and generally well-regarded writer named Bob Woodward who wrote books on Washington politics. I also knew that the famous investigative journalists who were instrumental in cracking the Watergate case were Woodward and Bernstein. I did not know until right before I picked up All the President's Men that they were the same person. Duh.
...That's probably as good an intro as any to my second point, which is that 20th century political history is not an area where I know very much. I mean, I knew the general outline of the incident, but it basically boiled down to "There was a break-in, and a coverup, and Woodward and Bernstein, and some tapes, and an 18 1/2 minute gap, and Spiro Agnew resigned for some reason, and a smoking gun, and then Nixon resigned. And somewhere in there he said he wasn't a crook." So in some ways I was in the perfect place for reading the book: I knew enough to be interested, but not so much that I could predict what was going to happen next.
And of course I knew that there was a lot more going on than that brief synopsis. It's really a fascinating story, and as presented in All the President's Men it's a detective story. The book was published in 1974, and covers events from the initial break-in (June '72) through November 73, when Nixon announces that he will not be resigning. In other words, the 'story' as I know it is unfinished by the end of the book, which gives the book a real sense of immediacy. Whatever sense of "but I want to know what happens next!" I had at the end of the book -- someone living in 1973/74 and paying attention to politics, when this was current events and not history, must've felt the same thing times about a hundred.
(Side note: the book is written in 73, published in 74, and about current events. That means that it doesn't waste a ton of time explaining who the major players are, any more than a book published now would waste a lot of time explaining who Condoleezza Rice or Hilary Clinton are. In some ways that streamlines the story and really hammers home the way that this is a contemporary account, but it did send me scrambling to the 'cast of characters' page -- and occasionally to Wikipedia -- because I had lost track of who a particular person was and why they were important.)
It's really hard to know how to talk about this book. It's a great read -- the authors can really turn a phrase (there's a great bit where they're discussing an interview with someone, and they describe the way he waggled his eyebrows up and down as being like a predatory bird attempting to take off with a prey animal slightly too heavy for it), and in some places it's downright hilarious. (The book is written in third person, despite the fact that it follows the movements of Woodward and Bernstein themselves, who are the authors -- which means that there's a great bit at the beginning where they describe how much they didn't like one another at the outset of the investigation, and each were annoyed to be saddled with the other.) The book sticks pretty closely to Woodward and Bernstein, and so the reader learns things about the investigation as the two investigators do, for the most part, which ratchets up the drama considerably. Not that the drama isn't considerable to begin with. So: it's a well-written book on a fascinating historical topic, which is good enough of a recommendation to me.
One thing that did occur to me as I was reading it was that I think I would have had a terrible time getting through it had I tried to read it before Obama had won on November 4. It's absolutely full of really filthy politics -- the kind of politics I'd heard described as 'Rovian' throughout the past campaign cycle, but that it's increasingly clear to me reach back much, much farther than Carl Rove. And the depressing thing is that the dirty tricks, the 'games,' as Deep Throat called them, worked, at least in the election. And if it hadn't been for the fact that the Watergate burglers kind of cocked up their job -- and the fact that the Washington Post continued with its investigation despite heavy pressure to stop, including more questionable tactics in an attempt to silence them -- it would have worked in the long run, too. Of course, knowing that Nixon would be forced to resign made it more bearable; knowing that Obama won the election helped a lot, too. In a lot of ways it's still hard to read, to see how fragile democracy really is in the face of liars.
In a lot of ways, this hammered home a point
triath made recently: that we ought to be worried about major newspapers going under. Without a Washington Post, there would have been no Woodward or Bernstein, and without them, who knows whether the official investigation would have found out how far down the rot spread?Anyway. If you have any interest in American politics or 20th century history, or just a good read, I'd recommend All The President's Men, painful though it occasionally is. And when you get it, go ahead and order The Final Days (which I am reading right now), too, because you'll want to find out how it turns out.
I promise I will at some point post a review of a book I don't care for, just so I look less like a shill. ;)