Frames per Second: Defending democracy

Woodward and Bernstein had described Watergate as an attack on American democracy. It seems too close home now

Bob Woodward (Robert Redford), one of the protagonists of All the President’s Men (1976), is still in bed on Saturday, June 17, 1972, when he gets a call from the city editor of The Washington Post asking him to cover the arrest of five men who had broken Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington DC in the early hours of the morning. Woodward had been at the Post for only nine months, covering similar stories. Returning to the newsroom from the court, he learns that his colleague Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), who had a reputation for working