All The President's Men alert

I didn't see it until my junior year of college. After I saw the whole thing, I went straight to Wal-Mart and bought it. I never get tired of seeing it.

 

Call Ben Bradlee and tell him "fuck you."

I screwed up. But I wasn't wrong.

 

Our paper's ME was at the Post at the time and had something to do with it. I never have fully grasped his take (although I've heard it so many times I could puke) because he starts grumbling bitterly. From what I piece together, he was/feels usurped on the story or something. He was there when the call came in. Shoulda been his ... yada yada yada.

I forget which one it is, Woodward or Bernstein, one my guy likes the other he detests, but when his name comes up it's always "mumble mumble mumble fuck that motherfucker."

I usually chuckle aloud.

 

"God dammit. When is somebody going to go on the record in this story?"

 

I took a journalism class my junior year of high school because I thought I might like the profession. We watched ATPM in class and that made me decide what I wanted to do.

 

The movie didn't have anything to do with it. I took a high school journalism class as a junior, the 1975-76 school year, and the movie came out in April 1976, a month after I wrote my first professional story (small-town muni court proceedings). I won the school's prize for journalism that year and the award was a copy of Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days (the end of Nixon's presidency, sequel to the book All The President's Men) with the award glued inside the book. Which I still have, of course.

My high school had a required half-year class for freshmen called Current Events. We read The New York Times every day and discussed it. That was the 1973-74 school year. By then Haldeman and Erlichman and John Dean were gone, but there was still plenty happening -- Nixon would resign in the summer of 1974. Our teacher was a longhair just out of college. He was from Maine and he ranted a lot in a heavy New England accent, often referring to Nixon and his crew as "dirty baaah-stads."

It was a cool school as far a newspapering went. Junior year in a history class, we had to pick a news topic and follow it for the school year, had to clip The New York Times every day. I made the mistake of choosing the NYC financial crisis, the one that begat the famous New York Daily News headline, Ford To City: Drop Dead. I believe I filled four loose-leaf binders with clips, it was a fucking avalanche of newsprint.

If all high schools did this kind of thing, newspapers would be in far better shape today. And so would the kids.

 

In my first journalism class in college, we had a news quiz first thing each class. Could be anything that was in the L.A. Times that day. News quiz at 9 a.m. We were supposed to have read the entire paper by then.

 

I halfway wished my high school would have done something like this. I'm pretty sure most of my class would have failed that class (hell, most of them couldn't make it through Intro to Government on the first try and failed the citizenship test that started out, "Who was the first president of the United States?") They didn't read newspapers, didn't watch Headline News and I laugh to think of any of them reading CNN.com. Unfortunately, with the apathy that exists this this retarded generation of mine, the thought process goes, "If it doesn't directly affect me, what does it really matter?"

 

"We know P is Porter."

 

We watched it sophomore year of college in a 200-level reporting class.... the movie was terrific, but the book put me to sleep. Ick.

 

Bingo... it really bothers me that *most* people in our generation... (I'm 26) could give one half of one shit about anything that actually fucking matters.

 

The day Agnew resigned, our English/journalism teacher (it was a big enough high school to have a two-year "journalism" track) sent us out to do man-on-the-street interviews, seeking reaction from students and faculty for the school paper.

That's when a light went on, for two big reasons: I liked rolling up my sleeves for something ... important and current, rather than reading and writing about a musty 19th century novel.

And I liked getting out of the "office."