The New York Times recalls the film and era, and so do I.

It’s ironic that a retrospective on the 50th anniversary of the Academy Award-winning film b”All the President’s Men,” based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s best-selling book chronicling the Nixon gang, and their Washington Post reporting of Watergate that led to his resignation, appeared not in the Post but in The New York Times.

Introducing the Page 2 feature, the newspaper said, “Times journalists share why they regard the 1976 film as one of the best movies about their profession.”

Another irony: One of the Times journalists quoted is Adam Bernstein, who spent 26 years writing and editing obits for The Post and is now the Times deputy editor of Obituaries. As he writes, he had “memorialized” some connected to Watergate.

The feature triggered me, shall we say. Had I not seen it, I would have let the anniversary pass without notice. But I was at the Post then, certainly not at the center of the Watergate coverage but present “in the room where it happened,” and in my memoir-in-progress-on-sabbatical I write about what it was like. Hollywood went to great lengths to recreate the Post newsroom exactly as it was then. Film crews prowled the newsroom with microphones to record the ambient sounds. They even salvaged bags of newsroom trash to further assure the authenticity of the scenes.

A bit player…

I was but a bit player in the drama, reporting and writing occasional Watergate-related stories. Sure I would have liked a bigger piece of the biggest story of our time. Who wouldn’t? But these were minor insider complaints. “Woodstein” owned it.

And so they would become media stars, the first and biggest of their generation, immortalized not only in their books and in the lore of Deep Throat but also in the movies. The making of “All the President’s Men” was a media event of its own, as actors Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman made newsroom appearances to research their roles. Hoffman tagged along with reporter Fred Barbash for three weeks to learn how he did his job. Redford’s very presence in the building was enough to draw women from other floors into the newsroom just to see him.

The movie’s Washington premiere in April 1976 at the Kennedy Center happened to come in the wake of the pressmen’s disastrous strike at the Post that ended when Katharine Graham brought in permanent “replacement workers.” Feelings were still raw, and the presence of pickets at the premiere struck a discordant note in an otherwise gala affair.

I don’t know where Woodward sat, only that my wife and I were in the orchestra, fifth row center, near Rowlie Evans (of the syndicated team of Evans and Novak, whose “Inside Report” column was a must read) and humor columnist and Ben Bradlee pal Art Buchwald. Other staffers – we were all issued free passes – were relegated to the balcony. Clearly our choice seat assignments came about when someone saw my name and assumed that I was part of “the family” of Katharine Graham, nee Katharine Meyer, the only daughter of the late Post publisher Eugene Meyer, no relation. No doubt Woodward also received star seating.

On the heels of his Watergate successes – the stories, the first-ever resignation of an American President, the Pulitzer awarded the newspaper (but not the reporters) for its Watergate coverage, the movie and two books – Bob was made an editor. He would not apprentice as an assistant on the Metro desk. No, Woodward would start as Assistant Managing Editor for Metro. Clearly, Bob was the odds-on favorite to succeed Bradlee as newsroom boss. But his tenure was irreversibly marred a few years later when he greenlit a story about an alleged eight-year old heroin addict by a seemingly talented young reporter named Janet Cooke. The story, about which many had raised doubts, won another Pulitzer. But she was a fabulist, and Bradlee told a stunned newsroom that the Post was returning the coveted award.

Another date that will live in infamy

That day, April 15, 1981, was a day not unlike when John F. Kennedy was shot, or 9/11 when the Twin Towers were struck, the kind that you remember years later exactly when, where, and how you heard the news. I For me, it was on a weekday morning in the Holiday Inn in Cumberland, Maryland. It was also, it so happened, Tax Day, a day of reckoning. I felt angry, and betrayed. How could anyone do this to my newspaper, to my profession? A deep recession had brought me to The Queen City of the Alleghenies, economically stagnant in good times. The Reagan-era recession would be soon forgotten. But fallout from the Janet Cooke disaster would linger on, indeed would live in infamy.

I can only guess what Woodward felt that day, clearly the lowest point in his career. For this Navy veteran, Janet Cooke had happened on his watch, and he had been forewarned. In for a dime, in for a dollar, he’d said. Bob didn’t stonewall his staff. Instead, he called a meeting. It was held on a weeknight in the living room of his Victorian Georgetown townhouse, where reporters were rightly outraged.

The Cooke disaster would cost Woodward his job and stop his upward trajectory through the ranks of management. But while he still held the title of AME/Metro, he asked me to have breakfast with him. One breakfast grew into three, on consecutive mornings in the Madison Hotel coffee shop. Over bacon and eggs and coffee and home fries, we shared a lot of things, although I remember very little of what was said.

I had had this dream assignment on the Chesapeake Bay that somehow devolved from the front page to the Metro front and received a frosty reception from then managing editor Howard Simons, once a booster, suddenly not. Woodward had this powerful position where he could in the best of worlds nurture other great reporters.

We felt each other’s pain, but the only specific detail I can recall is this: I mentioned Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. Until the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopeckne in the car Teddy had been driving, everyone—the nation, his family—expected him to restore Camelot, to fill the presidential office once held by his slain brother. But after Chappaquiddick, Teddy Kennedy was freed from such expectations. He could now become the senior senator from Massachusetts, maturing into a more fitting role as the old warhorse for liberal causes, known for his raging rhetoric, politics be damned.

The Janet Cooke affair may have done the same for Woodward, I told him. Since Watergate, there had been the expectation that Bob would become Ben. But now he no longer had to be Bradlee. Instead, he could be simply Bob Woodward, the best damn investigative reporter of the century and beyond. And so he was.

As for me, well, I went back to being the best damn reporter I could be.