All The President’s Men

"What is so good about All the President’s Men is that most books about journalists are full of gun fights and car chases – but that’s just not what the job involves. Woodward and Bernstein simply wrote a great, really detailed account of the work that went into the case. I still use sections from it as case studies when I give lectures. Yes, that sounds like something he might say. Many investigations start like that – you’ll have one or two leads, and then you need your imagination to develop theories about what the truth might be. So you are in the dark about what the truth is. You can feel out of your depth in more ways than one. Firstly you can feel out of your depth in terms of understanding – by that I mean in very complex and technical investigations like the ‘Tax Gap’ investigation that I worked on with The Guardian earlier this year. Or it might be simply because you don’t know where the investigation’s headed, and what exactly you want to find out. Also, you can feel out of your depth when you find yourself in a risky situation. When I was working on my book Dark Heart – investigating poverty, working with child prostitutes, trying to get into crack houses – you do get into slightly dangerous situations. I’d be dealing with some big guys, who I’d definitely come off worse than in a fight."

"All the President’s Men is a dramatic story of how dogged reporting exposed the Watergate scandal and kept public focus on it at a time when a lot of the press corps was ready to move on. I almost didn’t put All the President’s Men in because Nixon himself is not really a character. The book was later made into a very successful movie. It became iconic as a representation of our understanding of what investigative journalism can and should be. It’s the wonderfully written story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They were young metro reporters who were assigned to Watergate when it was seen as a local burglary that happened to be at the Democratic Headquarters in DC. Recall, reports about Watergate didn’t deter Nixon’s reelection by a landslide in 1972. But the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein did catch the attention of senators and the judge in the trial of the burglars who were apprehended during the Watergate break-in. So, their reporting was influential and consequential."

"It’s probably the most iconic book of reporting in the United States to this day. It’s written by Woodward and Bernstein, and about their investigation, when they were young reporters at the Washington Post , into the shocking crimes committed by President Richard Nixon. When I first read that book, it gave me a sense that reporting could have a nobility and a moral purpose behind it. Of course, much reporting is not quite like that but… Yes. The crimes include everything from breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s offices to bugging political opponents to covering up evidence. I think the book is particularly relevant today which is partly why I picked it. In a day and age when public officials are trying to subvert and muddy the truth, the need for deep reporting to hold these people accountable is as important as ever. This book is a seminal case of that—a case where investigative reporting was essential to revealing the corruption at the highest levels of the United States and to preserving our democracy. Too often when we think of crime stories, we think of them in one dimensional ways—we think of a bank robbery, or a holdup, or someone breaking into a house—but some of the crimes that are just as important, in some ways maybe even more important, are those that are political in nature. They don’t need to involve murders. This one almost provoked a constitutional crisis. Precisely, and this was a case where the system was driven to the brink but ultimately functioned: Nixon eventually stepped down. Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting played an essential role in protecting the country. This book, and all the books on this list, have left a mark on me, often in different ways, and what I remember most about this one is the doggedness of the reporting. All the President’s Men is a book where there is no fanciful writing—Bernstein and Woodward are not Mailer or Capote. They are journalists writing perfectly clean, decent prose and they have a story to tell, and they tell it in such a way that it has enormous power. Yes. I think what makes important true crimes books is not simply the stories they relate but the authors that investigate them. You can have investigative historians like Larson. Or you can have investigative reporters like Woodward and Bernstein. In both cases they are trying to unearth some deeper truth. In many true crime books, the author-investigator is not unlike the detectives he or she is writing about. The skills are very similar, I think, in terms of unearthing evidence and trying to create some kind of structure, plot, or narrative that helps to make sense of the chaos, and piece things back together. That case is about the Osage Indians who in the 1920s became the wealthiest people in the world because of oil under their land in Oklahoma. And then they begin to be serially murdered. It becomes one of the FBI’s first major homicide cases. Tom White, who leads the FBI probe, is an interesting character. He traces the emergence of a more modern, professionalised detective in the United States. He began his days riding horseback as a frontier lawman in Texas when justice was pretty much meted out by the barrel of a gun. And then, by the time of the 1920s, when he was investigating the Osage murder cases, he’s trying to learn how to do fingerprinting and ballistic analysis and handwriting analysis. He’s wearing a fedora and a suit, and he has to file paperwork and reports which he can’t stand doing. In his life you can trace part of the story of the modern United States. When he began his career, the frontier lawman—the cowboy lawman—was very popular in literature, especially in novels. And then, by the 1920s, there’s a new figure emerging in literature and culture which is the ‘G-man,’ the FBI agent. In general, I try to be pretty minimalistic when describing crimes. My hope is to be respectful of the story and faithful to it. I try to just get myself out of the way. One of the reasons I remember liking The Executioner’s Song was because it had that minimalistic approach. And I don’t think that the approach should change whether it’s writing about crimes in the past or in the present. I’ve written about both types: with the story about the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, he was not alive when I was working on the story, but family members were, as well as the prosecutor and many of the detectives. This required enormous sensitivity. But even with a historical case like the Osage murders, I tracked down many of the descendants of both the killers and the victims. And, speaking to them, you realize how the impact of crimes can effect generations. The descendants gave me a sense of how the past still lives in the present. So, in some ways, it felt no less alive to me."