Opinion: 'All the President's Men' is 50 years old. A former Post staffer tells us why that matters

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“All the President’s Men” was released 50 years ago this month, an anniversary that’s been greeted with equal parts rue and reverence by the journalists, political junkies and discerning cinephiles who have worshiped the film for five decades.As a member of all three of those constituencies, I’ve done my share of genuflecting, most recently as chief film critic at the Washington Post, whose city room was as vivid and fully realized in the movie as Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein.Like so many Posties of my generation, I’ll never forget the so-real-it’s-surreal experience of walking into the fifth-floor newsroom for the first time in 2002.

By then, standard-issue electric typewriters and six-ply carbon paper had been replaced by far less visually interesting computers.But the office’s pervading atmosphere of hard work and quiet focus felt uncannily similar to its big-screen analog.For the last two years, I have been researching a book about the making of “All the President’s Men,” whose production involved almost as many contingencies and unresolved questions as Watergate itself.

Among the film’s many mysteries, one I’ve found particularly intriguing has to do with Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post and CEO of its parent company during the Watergate investigations.As the movie amply demonstrates, it took guts for Woodward and Bernstein to persevere with their reporting in the face of terrified sources and their own growing paranoia.

But, unbeknownst to many observers at the time, Graham was enduring even more withering pressures, with determination that was all the more impressive for being almost entirely invisible.Movies From ‘All the President’s Men’ and ‘The Natural’ to ‘All Is Lost,’ these films capture the legacy of Oscar winner Robert Redford onscreen and behind the camera.I’m ...