All the Director's Men

Katherine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Howard Simons and Ben Bradlee in the Watergate era.

Dustin Hoffman, Redford, Robards, Jack Warden and Balsam
in the 1976 Alan J. Pakula film "All the President's Men"

You’d think that having the great actor Jason Robards portray you in a film would be an unalloyed pleasure, but Ben Bradlee said the experience cost him a long-time friend.

In the 1976 Robert Redford production All the President’s Men, the story of the Washington Post’s exposure of the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced President Nixon to resign, Robards played Bradlee, then executive editor of the newspaper.

Bradlee said he doubted that the film should be made at all, but — realizing that it would be produced with or without him — he cooperated, thinking it “made more sense to try to influence it factually.”

Bradlee teased the publisher, Katherine Graham, about who would play her in the film. “Names like Katherine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Patricia Neal were tossed out — by us — to make her feel good,” Bradlee said. “And names like Edna May Oliver or Marie Dressler, if it felt like teasing time. And then her role was dropped from the final script, half to her relief.”

However, managing editor Howard Simons wasn’t amused. Portrayed by character actor Martin Balsam, Simons “…felt that he and his role in Watergate were fatally shortchanged in the script (and that I and my role were exaggerated), and he never really got over his resentment,” Bradlee said.

“Our relationship, which had been such a joyous one, so congenial and close we could literally finish each other’s sentences, was never the same after the film.”

Bradlee couldn’t know, at the time, how the semi-fictionalized film would overshadow the real history of the Post’s reporting. “No idea, for instance, that all that generations to come would ever know about Watergate would be in that 147-minute film,” he said.

Still, Bradlee had hoped that the movie would reflect well on American journalism, and that it did. Today the film retains a 98 “fresh” percent rating from the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator website, which calls it, “A taut, solidly acted paean to the benefits of a free press and the dangers of unchecked power, made all the more effective by its origins in real-life events.”

Source: “A Good Life” by Ben Bradlee