Movie night at Tsinghua: All the President’s Men

An exact replica of the Washington Post newsroom was built in Hollywood.

I held my first “movie night” for my Chinese journalism grad students on Sunday night. After considering a few journalism-related classics (you can probably guess which they are), I chose one that highlights the best of journalism: “All the President’s Men.” It’s not just a journalism movie, of course. It’s a great detective story and an all-around outstanding movie with crisp writing, superb acting and tension-inducing directing. “All the President’s Men” is important journalism history. It’s also important American history. But I discovered as I played the video that many of the uniquely American topics (and 1970s cultural norms) contained in the movie were difficult to understand for my Tsinghua University students. So, in addition to playing the movie with English subtitles (do you realize how quickly Dustin Hoffman speaks, with that nasal accent of his?), I occasionally paused the movie for verbal annotations. Here are some of the important points I needed to explain to the students:

What is that machine those actors are using? And who is Robert Redford?

Newspaper references:

• Why Ben Bradlee and many American journalists curse a lot
• How Ben Bradlee cursed on live national TV when I hosted him as a speaker at a National Press Club luncheon in 2005
• What kind of a boss Ben Bradlee was to my wife Pam Tobey
• Who Deep Throat was and what motivated him to leak
• Where the real Bob Woodward/Mark Felt garage was located
• How the movie’s producers created a replica of the Washington Post’s newsroom in Hollywood for the movie — and the Post newsroom looked exactly the same when my wife Pam began working there in 1984
• Why reporters call the targets of their stories for comment before publishing the story
• Why it was unethical when Carl Bernstein called the secretary in the Miami prosecutor’s office and pretended he was someone he was not
• Why Watergate motivated me (and the entire Woodstein generation) to become reporters

Cultural references:

• Why all of the editors in the Post’s budget meetings were men
• What a manual typewriter is (or was) and why they were all over the newsroom
• Why I took Mrs. Wolin’s typing class at Central High when everybody said that typing was for girls who wanted to become secretaries. (Of course, I wanted to learn to type so I could become a reporter.)
• Who Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are
• What the movie “Deep Throat” was about and why Woodward’s editor chose it as a code name for Mark Felt
• What John Mitchell was talking about when he said Katharine Graham would get a certain part of anatomy caught in a wringer
• What a “creep” means and why CREEP became the acronym for the Committee to Re-elect the President
• Why so many people smoked in public spaces

Political references:

• Who John F. Kennedy was and why his photo was in Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate
• The fact that JFK and his brother Bobby were assassinated
• Why the Vietnam War was so unpopular and why American society was torn apart by war, riots and civil rights struggles
• What the Pentagon Papers are
• Richard Nixon’s unique definition of “plumbers”
• Who Daniel Ellsberg is and why he had a psychiatrist
• Who George Wallace and Arthur Bremer were and how Woodward worked with Felt on stories about the Wallace assassination attempt
• Who the anti-Castro Cubans in Miami are
• What the Bay of Pigs is/was
• The long and sordid history of CIA scandals
• Why there is tension between the FBI and the CIA
• Why Nixon hated and feared the Kennedys
• What Chappaquiddick was
• Why George McGovern asked Tom Eagleton to leave the ticket in ’72
• Why Nixon wanted to run against McGovern and not Ted Kennedy or Edmund Muskie
• Why Ed Muskie “cried” in New Hampshire
• What a “Canuck” is

Any suggestions for my next American journalism movie night?