Woodward, Bob; Bernstein, Carl "All the President's Men"

Woodward, Bob; Bernstein, Carl "All the President's Men" - 1974

Wow, what a story. Unbelievable what a president can do! Or is it? If I look at the present incumbent, yet is more to come …

Watergate. It was always a name that elicited strong feelings in everyone. I have read a lot about it but not enough, I always wanted to read the book and now I have. I am glad I did. I think it is more current than ever and should warn many people to watch some people more than closely.

American politics is not my politics but as a world citizen I truly believe that it concerns us all. When something happens in America, it has a huge influence on the rest of the world. And that goes for many other big countries, too, only too few people realize that and think they are by themselves and whatever is decided in their country only counts for themselves.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.are heroes. They risked a lot for the truth. Even today, journalists sometimes pay with their lives for detecting certain stories.

The book also tells us what goes on behind the scenes, how a newspaper is run, how stories are written and how is decided what is published and what isn't. It's a tough job in a tough world.

I was not surprised about a lot of things, especially this paragraph:
"During their Watergate investigation federal agents established that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nixon campaign contributions had been set aside to pay for an extensive undercover campaign aimed at discrediting individual Democratic presidential candidates and disrupting their campaigns." It really seems that nothing has changed.

It looks like the book is in high demand at the time being. I had to wait almost six months to get it. There is hope. You would think that politicians would be able to learn their lesson through history. Unfortunately, not.  So, we all have to be even more vigilant.

I'm definitely glad I have finally read this book.

From the back cover:

"In what must be the most devastating political detective story of the century, two young Washington Post reporters whose brilliant investigative journalism smashed the Watergate scandal wide open tell the whole behind-the-scenes drama the way it really happened. 

The story begins with a burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972. Bob Woodward, who was then working on the Washington Post's District of Columbia staff, was called into the office on a Saturday morning to cover the story. Carl Bernstein, a Virginia political reporter on the Post, was also assigned. The two men soon learned that this was not a simple burglary.
Following lead after lead, Woodward and Bernstein picked up a trail of money, secrecy and high-level pressure that led to the Oval Office and implicated the men closest to Richard Nixon and then the President himself. Over the months, Woodward met secretly with Deep Throat, now perhaps America's most famous still-anonymous source. 

Here is the amazing story. From the first suspicions through the tortuous days of reporting and finally getting people to talk, the journalists were able to put the pieces of the puzzle together and produce the stories that won the Post a Pulitzer Prize. All the President's Men is the inside story of how Bernstein and Woodward broke the story that brought about the President's downfall. This is the reporting that changed the American presidency."

The authors were part of two Pulitzer Prizes won by The Washington Post for Watergate and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973.