Journalism's Finest 2 Hours and 16 Minutes

It changes names, alters facts, eliminates crucial historical figures and mythologizes others.

It over-glamorizes reporting, oversimplifies editing and makes power appear the only proper subject for a newsman's pen.

But 20 years after Watergate, "All the President's Men" remains the best film ever made about the craft of journalism and an eerily accurate evocation of the mood and psychology -- if not the details -- of that byzantine presidential deceit and its unmasking.

For those of us who lived through those draining, mesmerizing, pulse-racing days within these walls a generation ago, there's both wonder and discomfort in that realization. Wonder because few of us ever hoped for as three-dimensional a portrait from Hollywood; discomfort because most journalists in those days thought of themselves as chroniclers of events, not major players. To revisit the 1976 film is to be reminded how much in our profession -- and our building -- the film helped change, not always for the better.

If "All the President's Men" brought a kind of final public absolution to a Washington Post economically battered and publicly reviled by the Nixon White House, it also brought an institutional self-consciousness distinctly disquieting to the once free-swinging journeymen and women of the fourth estate.

We may not have been a better paper before Hollywood discovered us, but we were probably less pompous and we certainly had more fun.

Little of that fun is evident in the movie, of course, which makes journalism out to be such a humorless, single-minded -- though vaguely glamorous -- calling that it subsequently attracted to the profession legions of humorless, single-minded young people vaguely in search of glamour. Once they would have all become lawyers.

The factual deficiencies of "All the President's Men" are all too obvious to people obsessed with details, as journalists tend to be. The most grievous example is the dramatic absence of City Editor Barry Sussman, who played a vital role in helping reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein piece their discoveries into a meaningful pattern but was entirely written out of the film, just as if he never existed.

Likewise, the analytical role of the late Howard Simons, the Post's much-loved and resourceful managing editor 20 years ago, is trivialized almost to idiocy by William Goldman's screenplay and by a befuddled performance by actor Martin Balsam. Yet Simons was from first to last the senior editor most involved in the day-to-day progress of the Watergate story.

Other small events are rearranged, names changed, characters combined or fictionalized, all by people so purportedly obsessed with "authenticity" that they spent tens of thousands of dollars duplicating the Washington Post newsroom, right down to the labels on the filing cabinets, then shipped genuine Washington Post trash to Hollywood to clutter its desks.

Dialogue and incidents throughout the news-gathering process were manufactured or exaggerated. Only the discoveries themselves remain wholly authentic.

The most gratuitous visual inaccuracy in "All the President's Men" is the repeated depiction of Woodward and Bernstein laboring alone in an empty newsroom.