Watching this Watergate classic makes me yearn for pre-Trump America

April 25, 2026 — 9:30am

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At a moment when a great country on the cusp of its 250th birthday is feeling the foundations beneath it shake, it’s worth thinking about a more recent but still potent American anniversary. It’s been 50 years since the release of All The President’s Men. That was the classic 1976 film adaptation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book, which detailed how their dogged reporting for The Washington Post on the Watergate break-in ultimately brought down a US president.

Woodward and Bernstein were young staffers on the local beat for the Post. They weren’t among the paper’s coterie of prestigious political reporters. Almost by chance, they ended up covering what seemed, as we Americans might say today, a “nothingburger” of a story: the arrest, late one night in 1972, of a group of men in an office building in the Watergate complex, a sprawling residential and commercial development on the west end of downtown Washington. The Watergate “burglars” were, in fact, placing surveillance bugs in the offices of the Democratic campaign committee – the people trying to defeat Republican president Richard Nixon that November. Woodward and Bernstein slowly, painstakingly, and not without mistakes, uncovered the dark forces behind the break-in.

Despite the attempts since by Nixon’s acolytes, and by Nixon himself, to minimise the scandal, scores of officials in his administration, and most of his top aides, went to........

© The Age