WASHINGTON: How long since you saw All the President’s Men? I saw it again recently on a plane, and loved and hated it all over again, for different reasons. The loved part is easy. Those electric typewriters, fat and loud and unwieldy and delightful: they filled your desk with a faint whiff of burning and a strong sense of purpose. The characters: Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat, now unmasked as one Mark Felt, hissing his angry hints in the dark; Ben Bradlee with his shoes on the desk and his job on the line; Woodward and Bernstein, born to be acted by the pair that played them and made them.
The accessories: heavy spiral-bound notebooks, rich in quotes and doodles; big solid mad plastic Seventies telephones, routed through switchboard operators who would do human things like flirt and listen in (but would also instantly get you the number rather than do computer things like beep and fiddle and break and route you through Bombay to 24 minutes of Vivaldi’s Limbo) and then join you later for a Manhattan or two in some dirty brownstone bar. Being able to get away with smoking, everywhere, and stubbing it out in a hurry into a mug of nasty cold coffee because another fact had just come in; and getting away with Dustin Hoffman’s hair, and with tasselled jackets.
Well, you can just imagine the rapt teenager, spellbound in his cheesecloth tie-dye somewhere in the back of the Dominion Cinema, walking away afterwards into a warm Edinburgh twilight, mired in a fug of dreams. I was absolutely convinced of a couple of pieces of wrong-headedness: convinced that there did after all exist a calling in which integrity and glory could accompany each other — quite possibly true, still: but that calling it turns out is not, after all, journalism — and convinced I was the only person in the world who had decided then and there to get into newspapers.
Every year in this country, around 100,000 people train in media studies. It is not possible to knock them, for I’m sure most do so with the same highly principled motivation which inspired me all those years ago — a vaulting ego and a staggering inability to think of anything else to do - but it is possible to feel a little sorry for them.
Even if they make it, they can never, now, enjoy the Woodstein experience, which I suppose is why I hate the film, in the same way we all quietly resent anything that reminds you so luminously of something loved and gone and never to return. They cannot speed-wheel their chairs across tacky coffee-stained carpets back to their desks, to splay their shoe leather and borrow a light and chew on a beer and spit out a fact; because they won’t have a desk, or a chair, just a laptop, and they don’t want to be done by the health and safety, or the sprinklers.
Deep Throat, today, would turn out to be not the deputy director of the FBI but a giggly fit-up by Dom Joly, having a ‘laugh’ as part of his ‘Make Comedy History’ campaign. Richard Nixon’s first act would be to telephone Max Clifford. The armed break-in would relate not to an attempt to destabilise democracy but an attempt to make vast sums of money by stealing the first edition of a book for children.
It’s still an exciting little world, sometimes, but the axis has shifted. Today, when facts are free and comment is sacred, you can get more money writing sudoku puzzles than by breaking a big news story. Today, that suits me fine, as frankly at this late stage it would actually embarrass me to shout: ‘Hold the front page!’ ... but it does leave me feeling a little wistful for tie-dye boy.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.
