All the President's Men

The best insight into how they [the USA] are governed.

It is a work barren of ideas, of imagination, and of a sense of either the tragic or the comic aspects of the subject, and one that would be essentially boring if it were not for the historical importance of the events dealt with. The reportorial techniques employed by Bernstein and Woodward differ hardly at all from those that might be used by a pair of reporters examining the misdeeds of small-town grafters, and while this is not in itself a failing—small fish and large ones are caught by the same means—the lack of a sense of history diminishes the magnitude of the story. But this account will be indispensable to those who for one reason or another have not kept up with the running accounts of events and to those who will someday place it in its proper historical setting.

The suspense in “All the President's Men” is more pervasive and finally more terrifying than a suspense story which holds its readers shivering in the darkness of graveyards and gothic castles because the setting is sunny Washington, D.C., a familiar place suddenly made unfamiliar by the presence of overwhelming fear. Disaffected C.R.P.. employes trembling in their doorways, wanting to be helpful but afraid of the consequences, plead with the sleuths never to call again. “Nobody knows what they'll do,” one employe said. “They are desperate.” Who are they?...