Is there any site that gives a summary of the BOOK "All the President's Men"?

Question

I put book in capital letters because most sites talk about the movie, not the book.

Answer 1

Here is one link that seems to have it.

Answer 2

Local bookstore(s) will probably have Cliff's Notes and may have the novel you're looking for.  English teachers really don't like Cliff's Notes don't tell anyone I told you about them

Answer 3

Try wikipedia. There should be a summary of the plot...

Answer 4

There are many valuable lessons to be learned from journalists' books about how they got the story.

Carl Bernstein was born in Washington, D.C., in 1944 (Bernstein 1). His journalism career began when he got a job as a copy boy at the Washington Post when he was 16 (Bernstein 1). “He worked his way onto the reporting staff, dropping out of the University of Maryland at College Park along the way” (Bernstein 1). “After an award-winning stint at the Daily Journal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Bernstein returned to Washington, D.C., as a reporter at the Post in 1966” (Bernstein 1).

Bernstein was not originally assigned to cover the Watergate break-in (Bernstein 1). He “took great interest in the story and soon was teamed with Woodward to investigate the burglary” (Bernstein 1).

Robert Upshur, known as Bob, Woodward was born in Geneva, Illinois, in 1943 (Woodward 1). He earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1965 and served in the U.S. Navy from 1965 to 1970 (Woodward 1). “Woodward interned at The Washington Post in 1970 but was let go due to his lack of experience” (Woodward 1). He then reported for the Montgomery County Sentinel in Maryland where he yielded a number of significant stories (Woodward 1). Woodward was hired back to the Post in 1971 as a full-time reporter (Woodward 1).

“In 1971, Woodward and Bernstein were assigned to cover the arraignment of five men who had been arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.” (Woodward 1). Their “reporting eventually showed that the break-in had been orchestrated by high-ranking officials of the Nixon administration and the Committee to Re-elect the President, and that the break-in was part of a pattern of White House political ‘dirty tricks’ that included wiretapping, burglary and disruption of Democratic Party activities” (Woodward 1).

T  WENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pretty much invented a new book genre when they wrote ³All the President's Men.² Sure, investigative journalists had recounted their exposés before, but usually as a small part of mostly inconsequential full-life memoirs--inconsequential because journalists are, after all, outsiders who rarely know anything firsthand and are often misled by their sources.

Now here was the Washington Post duo putting themselves immodestly at the center of a political corruption tale reaching into the Richard Nixon White House. Not a full-life memoir, this. Woodward and Bernstein were so young in 1974 that neither could have sustained a pre-Watergate memoir for more than 50 pages.

No, "All the President's Men" is a narrative account of one investigation as it unfolds in unexpected directions, an account that transmits journalists' reporting techniques, thought processes and even ethical lapses to a general audience. The book turned journalists from easy-to-dismiss outsiders to heroic players in the game of governing. It inspired, among others, an even younger man named Michael Isikoff.

Last year, the same Michael Isikoff, a Washington Post alumnus turned Newsweek reporter, brought the Woodward-Bernstein genre full circle with his first-person account of another investigation that reached into the White House. The official subject of Isikoff's book "Uncovering Clinton" (it could have been aptly titled "All the President's Women") is presidential character, or the lack of it. But the book is very much about the same subject as "All the President's Men"--an investigative project, as it unfolds in unexpected directions, with the investigative journalist at center stage. The subtitle, "A Reporter's Story," is not ambiguous.

In between Woodward/Bernstein and Isikoff, there have been dozens of books by journalists who have adopted the technique to tell the stories of their own newsroom adventures. Enough books fall into the category by now to constitute a genre.

The growing genre raises questions: Is it a sound way to convey the unfolding of a story? Is it defensible for journalists to place themselves on center stage when they are by definition outsiders dependent on insider sources? What lessons can be learned about the craft of journalism from an examination of these books?

Based on careful readings of Isikoff, Woodward/ Bernstein and the rest, the last of those questions can be answered definitively: A lot can be learned by journalists about the practice of journalism from these accounts. That conclusion is equally true for nonjournalist readers who want to know how investigative reporters operate. "Uncovering Clinton," "All the President's Men" and the lesser-known tales of this ilk are unintentional textbooks.

Lessons about journalists' relationships with their sources are especially noteworthy in the Isikoff and Woodward/Bernstein books because of the high stakes. There are 25 years between the two accounts, but the lessons on cultivating sources, following paper trails and wrestling with ethical dilemmas are timeless.

During that 25-year interval, Janet Malcolm thrust the journalist-source relationship into a controversial context. In "The Journalist and the Murderer" (Knopf, 1990), Malcolm opens with this now-notorious passage:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.... On reading the article or book in question, [the subject] has to face the fact that the journalist--who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things--never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on this story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject.

Valuable lessons derived from "Uncovering Clinton" and "All the President's Men"--not to mention "The Journalist and the Murderer"--could continue for many pages. No other books from this genre are as well-known, and few if any combine such a significant topic with so much instructional material. But many of the books are worth reading.

What follows are the most significant and/or interesting contributions to the genre since it became self-conscious. Excluded are most full-life or full-career memoirs, in which the journalist/author is by definition the focus. Also excluded are most books about historical rather than contemporary events, most books about the media, most textbooks meant primarily for college classrooms and most books published originally outside the United States.

Answer 5

The movie is true to the book. It's all journalistic research and no 'artistic license' was taken. The book is dry because of its journalistic approach. Rent the movie and you'll understand the trail of logic they were following to get to the conclusion.