Background
Woodward and Bernstein had toyed with the idea of writing a book about Watergate, but did not commit until actor Robert Redford contacted them and expressed interest in purchasing the film rights. In Telling the Truth About Lies: The Making of "All the President's Men", Woodward noted that Redford played an important role in changing the book's narrative from a story about the Watergate events to one about their investigations and their reportage of the story.
The name of the book alludes to the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty ("All the king's horses and all the king's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again"), an allusion similar to that made more explicitly a quarter-century earlier in the Robert Penn Warren novel All the King's Men, which describes the career of a fictional governor loosely based on Huey Long.
Read more about this topic: All The President's Men
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“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
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“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
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