I'm not really sure why Turner Classic Movies chose to show "All the President's Men" tonight at 10 p.m. (Central). After all, TCM's annual "31 Days of Oscar" salute concluded yesterday.
Perhaps it was in recognition of the fact that today is March 4, which was the regularly scheduled presidential Inauguration Day for more than 130 years. But I guess that could have been accomplished with any film about a president from the 19th century. A movie about Watergate wouldn't have a lot of relevance to March 4 beyond the presidency.
But the thing is that a movie about Watergate — indeed, the very subject of Watergate — has a great deal of relevance to the presidency — well, presidential power, at least. And Watergate was the story of how one president abused his power beyond the point that most Americans would have thought possible.
That's the thing I have always found remarkable about Watergate — the fact that so many people resisted the truth about Nixon. It was almost as if the nation had not just been through the many deceptions of Lyndon Johnson and his subordinates. In the days of Watergate, even those who hated Richard Nixon — and there were many — had a hard time imagining a scoundrel like Nixon occupying the Oval Office. Perhaps it was the residual effect of being taught, as most people who grew up in America were, to trust and respect authority.
It was as if the fact that a politician had been elected president, even if by a narrow margin, transformed that person into a saintly person, above pettiness, above the messiness of grudges and personal insecurity.
At his best, Richard Nixon was not a bad president. He possessed a mind that was often capable of conceiving original, creative solutions to the nation's problems. But it was a great misfortune, for both Nixon and the country, that he was at his worst far more often than he was at his best.
In many ways, Nixon was a textbook example of what a president should not be — a paranoid introvert.
But "All the President's Men" wasn't really about Nixon. He wasn't even a supporting character. "All the President's Men" was about the crimes that were committed in his name, the men who committed the crimes — and the men who uncovered the whole ugly mess.
I have a soft spot in my heart for "All the President's Men" — both the book and the film. The story of Woodward and Bernstein (which was masterfully presented on the big screen by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford) inspired me to study journalism and pursue it in my professional life.
And it taught me a lesson about the vulnerability of freedom and democracy — and the vital role that a free press plays in preserving both.
