non-romance, romance, #8: All the President's Men (dir. Alan J. Pakula, 1976)

run that baby

Have you listened to Reformed Rakes’ newest episodes? Chels goes full investigative journalist, dives into the primary sources, and tells Beth and me the story of Janet Dailey in Parts I and II. I’ve been working on my next episode for the pod, which is about Waterloo romances, so I’ve been reading lots of category romances. Next week, I’ll have a newsletter about the experience of seeing dukeless romances as a reader and what I’ve found in Waterloo set books. But for now, on the anniversary of the Watergate break-in (June 17, 1972), here’s one of my Non-Romance Romances about one of my favorite movies, All the President’s Men.

Genre fiction wise, All the President’s Men is more likely to be classed as thriller than romance. We’re following Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) piece together and track the Watergate break-in and coverup that leads to the resignation of Richard Nixon. The opening scenes are of the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in offices at the Watergate Hotel. The connections to the White House are not yet established and Woodward, new to the Washington Post, gets put on the city-level story. Bernstein, hungry for investigation work, starts editing Woodward’s early copy to get placed on the story. Woodward takes offense to this action, but Bernstein is a better writer, so he consents and they start working together.

The Watergate break-in happened in the early hours of the morning on June 17, 1972. Richard Nixon would win his reelection that November, but his impeachment procedure would be initiated by October 1973 and he would resign August 9, 1974. Woodward and Bernstein published All the President’s Men on June 15, 1974, particularly spurred by Redford’s interest in purchasing the film rights, shifting the focus of the narrative from the actions of the conspirators to the journalists themselves. The film takes a similar tact, focusing on what the Washington Post knows and when they knew it. Nixon himself only appears in archival footage—no actor plays Nixon. The film premiered on April 7, 1976.

In genre distinctions, I think of a thriller as defined by not knowing how the whole thing works out, either the mechanics of the mystery or the results. There may be a Hitchcockian twist or a big reveal. In Thrillers: Seven Decades of Classic Film Suspense, John McCarty identifies “tension” as the central feature of a thriller and argues that if this is supreme in the narrative, then any genre can be made in a thriller. Certainly “tension” in general is a little wide. Tension is a part of any narrative, but tension as the center of a thriller gets close to a definition.

In Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre, Jerry Palmer suggests that thrillers are about “conspiracies,” uncovering the threads or creating them, depending on if we follow the protagonist or antagonist. This definition suits a movie about Watergate well. But every definition I have seen of “thriller” acknowledges that it often intersects with another genre of storytelling, just value, whether it be tension or conspiracy, is elevated to the extreme. We might think of crime as the most obvious intersecting genre, but thrillers have some of the same ancestors as romance, like the Gothic tradition. Gothic romances have the reader and protagonist wondering who is bad and why they are bad while trying to ascertain or obtain safety (and likely marry into it). Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and The Mistress of Mellyn are about uncovering conspiracies that endanger our heroines before they triumph with a traditional romance ending of a hard-fought HEA.

Now in All the President’s Men, our heroes are certainly trying to uncover a conspiracy. And the movie is very tense! But where is the tension held? Any viewer who paid the least amount of attention in their US History class knows that Woodward and Bernstein prevail: the details of the conspiracy will come to light and Nixon will resign. And in 1976, when the movie came out, he had resigned less than two years ago! Original viewers had access to the original reporting on the whole process.

I’ve seen All the President’s Men upwards of twenty times. It became one of my law school fixations and I watched it a bunch in August 2019. But I think I followed the conspiracy details for the first time in September 2020, when I was watching it with my sister and trying to explain the conspiracy as we were going. To me, that movie is just simply not about that. The tension is in the same thing that I cared about: the romance, obviously.

Romance comes up, obliquely, in a few different places in the film. The movie acknowledges that romantic connection begets information, especially in a tightknit city like Washington D.C, where professional and personal connections often overlap. And I think the tension in a thriller film where you know the ending (not unlike a romance and it’s HEA) comes from the relationship driving the narrative forward, in this case, the working partnership of Woodward and Bernstein (who even have a ship name, “Woodstein,” that editor Ben Bradlee screams across the newsroom when he wants their attention). And finally, even though this movie was released in 1976, only four years after the events that it was based on started, a few things about how the setting functions make me think of historical romance (and, unsurprisingly, Waterloo).

flirtation as information

imagine how giggly she would have been if Redford interviewed her

The uncovering of information in the film frequently relies on sexual relationships, or at least flirtation. There are at least three women who Woodward and Bernstein press or use for information that is gained through romantic implications. First, there’s the fictional Sharon Lyons (played by Penny Payser), who Bernstein takes out on a lunch date. Bernstein says “You’re very attractive,” and she demurs “My girlfriend told me to watch out for you. He asks “Who?” as he smiles cheekily at her and she giggles “I’m not giving any names.” She doesn’t give names, but she does give him a lead.

Bernstein asks Sharon about Charles Colson directly. Colson, the special counsel to the President, has been connected to one of the Watergate burglars through Howard Hunt, one of his employees and a former CIA agent. Sharon (who, again, is fictional) minimizes her connections to Colson, saying she worked for an assistant in his office. She tells Bernstein that Hunt, in a capacity working for Colson, was investigating Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. This information spurs Bernstein to look into Hunt’s White House Library¹ check-out records. But later back at the WaPo newsroom, when a woman on the phone acknowledges to Bernstein that Hunt did use materials from the library, she is interrupted by a superior. When Woodward calls back, with Bernstein listening in on the line, she denies the conversation with Bernstein even took place, sparking their suspicions further.

After Woodstein has been shot down for not having enough hard facts by editor Ben Bradlee (so their early reporting is published, but a toothless version), Woodward now remembers that Kay Eddy (played by Lindsay Crouse) “goes with” a guy from the Committee to Re-Elect the President (known as CREEP.) Bernstein is again the one who presses her to reignite the connection to get a list of people who work on the committee after she says the relationship is over. Eddy is offended by their ask and Woodward lets up, but she silently delivers the list to his desk later in the day.

tfw two smug WaPo journalists just asked you to hit up an old boyfriend for a list of CREEP employees

The final woman Woodstein uses for her sexual relationships to gain information is Sally Aiken (played by Penny Fuller), based on a real reporter, Marilyn Berger. Ken Clawson, Nixon staffer, bragged to both Berger and her fictional counterpart about being the author of the “Canuck Letter,” an anonymous letter to the editor that was used to sabotage Democratic candidate Edmund McCuskie before the primary, with the goal of setting up George McGovern to be the nominee—who Nixon would later go on to defeat handily in the general election.

Clawson’s emphatic denial to Ben Bradlee (his former boss, since he was a WaPo reporter before he worked for Nixon) of his affair with Berger and the authorship helps develop Bradlee’s buy-in to Woodstein’s investigation for which he has continually demanded more evidence. A Nixon staffer writing the letter indicates the level of underhanded behavior the Committee, and direct reports under Nixon, were willing to go to guarantee a Nixon re-election. Including a break-in at the DNC Headquarters.

every shot of Jason Robards in this film is the coolest anyone has ever looked

Woodstein as structural romance

So information comes through intimacy as a baseline a few times in the film. But if a thriller is about tension, a romance is about people working together to have a conversation and to share information, including a rhetoric and a grammar so that they can understand each other. The supreme value of romance is communication and watching that happen for both people. The above examples give the aura of romance, but Woodstein is the romance.

In an early Reformed Rakes episode about miscommunication, we talked about how often romance novels are about two (or more) people working to understand each other’s methods of communication. “Miscommunication trope” is a common complaint for romance readers, but when it is done well, it is the basic plot for a romance! “I have thoughts and feelings and I am trying to express them. You have thoughts and feelings and I am trying to understand them.” Romantic plot comes from missteps toward this goal. For Woodward and Bernstein, they have to communicate both with each other and with an audience, first their editors and their sources, and then the American public.

Woodward has not been a journalist for that long, only two years when the break-in happened, and less than a year at WaPo. Bernstein has been working in the newspaper industry since he was a teen. Woodward is the Ivy-educated conservative, while Bernstein dropped out of college and came from a Communist Jewish family. The film shows them having different strengths in journalism. Woodward thrives in communicating over the phone with Washington insiders and Bernstein has a doggedness for getting every day people to talk, often conducting his interviews outside or over meals. Woodward is the one that Deep Throat (Mark Felt, played by Hal Holbrook) trusts, but Bernstein has an intuition for leads that Woodward is still developing. The movie frames the success of this story about how their relationship works and how they trust each other.

After a dead-end lead, when Woodward is driving Bernstein around DC, Bernstein presses Woodward to develop and trust his journalist gut more. He asks “If you get in a car, and there’s music playing the car, hypothetically, there’s music playing in the car for 10 minutes and there’s no commercial, what can you deduce from that? Is it AM or FM?” Woodward takes issue and thinks Bernstein’s deductions are leaps of logic. (For any millennial or Gen-Z readers, the answer is FM radio, which typically had fewer commercial breaks than AM radio in the 1970s. I did have to look this up to make sure.)

Later, after some successes at getting people to talk and piece together the conspiracy, we see Woodward adopt a metaphor of deductive reasoning to encourage Bernstein to go with his gut. They are trying to get Hugh Sloan, CREEP treasurer who resigned over ethics concerns, to confirm Bob Halderman’s involvement in controlling the CREEP fund that paid the Watergate burglars. Bernstein wants more proof than “nobody denying it.” Over a meal of quarter pounders at McDonald’s, Woodward says “you know if you go to bed at night and there’s no snow on the ground, you wake up, there’s snow on the ground, you can say it snowed during the night even if you didn’t see it snowing.” They make a plan to reinterview some witnesses, but to the narrative, the important thing is that these guys are now a team and thinking like each other.

this is my dream dinner date, by the way

In one of the most stirring scenes is near the end of the film, Woodward comes to Bernstein’s apartment and refuses to speak out loud for fear of bugging. Instead, they effectively text each other on a typewriter. One of their witnesses has seemingly betrayed them by giving an on-the record-comment contradicting his off-the-record interview with them. Hugh Sloan, when asked about his grand jury testimony, says he did not name Haldeman during the testimony. Deep Throat tells Woodward that letting Haldeman get away was a mistake that jeopardizes the much larger overall conspiracy, putting Woodward and Bernstein’s lives in danger. Bernstein talks to Sloan and realizes Sloan was never asked about Halderman at the grand jury. So Sloan’s confirmation of Haldeman to Woodstein has not been contradicted, also suggesting the conspiracy and the resulting cover-up go well beyond just covering up CREEP’s messy and criminal finances.

Woodward turns up the classical musical and relates this to Bernstein, over the typewriter. To me, this is the union, the restoration of the scene where Bernstein silently edits Woodward’s copy without his consent. Now the journalists face the same typewriter, totally aligned for a purpose, taking turns typing and speaking to each other. When they explain to Bradlee (outside his home, to avoid surveillance bugs), he gives them the blessing to continue their work. The final scene in the WaPo newsroom is a long shot of both journalists working, while the rest of the newsroom watches Nixon’s second swearing-in. There’s a dolly zoom, so just the pair and the TV are in frame. Their typing noises line up with the guns saluting at the swearing-in. Then a fade to a split diopter shot, where both are in focus, facing each other, working. The final shots of the film are text on a typewriter, reporting the conspiracy dominos falling, culminating with Nixon’s resignation.

fuck it, let’s stand by the boys

Immediate history as setting

The general rule I have heard for historical romance/fiction “counting” as historical is a setting 50 years before the writing date, with the idea that it takes the reader out of a setting that happened in their lifetime. Sure, I think this makes sense as a general rule. But I think there’s something to setting something right before a disaster or a monumental change in the world that feels like a period piece much earlier than waiting for 50 years to pass.

I’ll never know what it was like to watch All the President’s Men in 1976, but ever since I first watched it, I have connected it to A Room with a View, another story that deals with a world about to change radically. A Room with a View deals with characters at the tail end of the long 19th century and All the President’s Men has characters investigating the scandal that will end the long 1960s. Forster doesn’t know the details of WWI and its impact on England at the time of writing, as much as the threat of change is coming from modernity at large. But there’s this specificity of moment where some people are looking back and some people are looking forward. In the English pensione in Florence in A Room with a View (published 1908), two portraits hang in the dining room: one of Queen Victoria (died 1901) and one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (died 1892), firmly placing the setting in the Victorian setting in spirit, if not in timeline. This causes tension between the stuffy residents of the pensione and the modern Emerson family, and Lucy Honeychurch stuck in the middle.

In All the President’s Men, you can see a portrait of John F. Kennedy behind Ben Bradlee’s desk. Bradlee and Kennedy were close friends and this bit of set decorating acknowledges that. But it is also a gesture to a decade that has literally ended and is metaphorically over. And what will it be replaced with? A new age of disillusionment and mistrust, surveillance and evasion.

I think this close-by historical setting might work better for thrillers than romances. Quite a few “just before WWI” thrillers were written and published during the war, like The 39 Steps by John Buchan (more literally a thriller) or The Good Solider by Ford Madox Ford (the thriller nature comes from a really unreliable narrator here). But I am also reading all these Waterloo romances in anticipation of a Reformed Rakes episode we’re recording. These deal with a world changing event, written with much more distance than those WWI thrillers or All the President’s Men. But they are still distinct from the normal mode of historical romance.

Even the most grounded romance I can think of is unlikely to have a certain event happen that is so historically documented. If a book opens with the date “February 15, 1815,” I expect some consequences to connect that plot to the major event that happens June 18, 1815. But just like All the President’s Men, where we know where we are going, the success of a Waterloo romances comes from those two people getting there and getting through it.

recommendations

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig: Like a Waterloo romance, this is a story of love corrupted by tragic setting, though don’t go into thinking it is a romance novel. I’ve wanted to read Zweig for years, ever since I saw and loved The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson based the author character in it on Zweig and some of his writings).

Next week’s newsletter will be all Dukes and books that don’t have them. I highly, highly recommend reading Carla Kelly, my new category romance obsession. I love The Lady’s Companion or The Admiral’s Penniless Bride. You certainly don’t have to read a Kelly to get the newsletter, but she’s so delightful and her books are so short, you ought to read them.

Chels on Bill Dailey! More Dailey story from all of Chels’ outstanding research

I watched For All Mankind (dir. 1989, Al Reinert) last night for the first time for Father’s Day. I cried a lot! Sending a bunch of jock scientists into spaces makes them into poets and artists. What could be more romantic than that?

1. (I will say, as a librarian, even conspirators library records should be confidential),