A review by lesserjoke
All the President's Men by Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein

4.0

A gripping firsthand account of the Watergate investigation, told by the two Washington Post reporters who first broke the story and kept following up on its leads until the scandal ultimately brought down a president. It's easy for people like me, born long after Watergate, to not grasp how shocking all of this was at the time, or to let our later knowledge of Nixon's corruption color our understanding of his downfall as inevitable. But the truth is that Richard Nixon was a very popular president (winning 49 states when he ran for reelection even though the Watergate burglary was already common knowledge), and no one could have predicted where the Post story would lead.

Woodward and Bernstein place us squarely in the context of that time, documenting every step of their quest to discover who was pulling the strings behind Watergate in the face of enormous political pressure and initial public disinterest. It's a fascinating story of the relentless pursuit of truth, and a clarion call for all journalists to put that pursuit over politics.