Last month the Gazette’s Books on Film club was reading Katharine Graham’s memoir, Personal History, which tells the story of her life leading up to and then becoming the publisher of The Washington Post from 1963 to 1991.

At the same time, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and the Post’s publisher since 2013, moved to quash his newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for President of the United States. 

It seemed a sign of the terrible times. The Washington Post is no longer a family-owned company, but a small piece of a global monopoly. Bezos’s main interest these days is his rocket ships at Blue Origin. He is competing with Elon Musk in a race for outer space, and billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts are at stake. A nod to a possible President Trump was required. 

Are Bezos and Musk pulling billions of dollars out of life on earth and sending it to Mars? Yes, they are. Are they willing to prop up a candidate who has made it clear he aspires to some sort of American dictatorship to do so? Yes, they are. 

I have heard the 2020s described as another Gilded Age. The last few decades of the nineteenth century in America saw vast fortunes accrued by robber barons who pulled money out of wages and created widespread poverty and unemployment. The forces at play now are more complex, but the same income and property gaps are obvious. To give just one example, reported in the County Foundation’s Vital Signs last month: property prices in the County have tripled over the past decade while wages have risen 14%. 

Real estate prices have spiked around the world because they are now tied to global monopoly finance and the stock market. Wages are not. Wages, like unemployment, are tied to the here and now. The divide we face in the 21st century is not just that between rich and poor. It’s between life on earth and life in space: global space, financial space, digital space. Outer space. 

And yet. There are still people here, on the ground, in real life, most of us, in fact, pursuing human-sized concerns. Bezos’s compromise of the editorial independence of a major national newspaper ingited a furor. It led to the principled resignations of six high-profile editors, writers and columnists, and the loss of over 250,000 subscriptions — a real hit in a time of declining newspaper readership. 

If only those subscribers had left Amazon rather than the Post. There, however, they would hardly have made a dent, a crucial element in understanding the vast forces that are in play. The owners of digital platforms — Bezos’s Amazon, Zuckerberg’s Facebook, even Musk, who is limping along with X while propping up Trump’s pathetic Truth Social — are operating a world apart from the world of ordinary people. Cancel your subscription to Amazon. Drop off Facebook. An entire country could do this and nobody would notice. 

Today’s contest, and that of the U.S. election this week, is between the forces of global monopoly capital personified by Bezos, along with the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg — if only barely, all three hardly seem human — and such dignified response as that demonstrated by the writers and editors of The Washington Post.

They are working in a great tradition. Take All the President’s Men, first published in 1976, and recently re-released in a 50th anniversary edition timed to coincide, not with the anniversary of its publication, but with the hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol. 

That attack occurred after then would-be president Trump lost the 2020 election and riled up the more deranged of his supporters to violently overthrow the government. 

By the time you are reading this, the polls of 2024 will have closed, and a clear winner will have emerged. I hope. But no matter who wins, this dangerous and destabilizing contest will continue. It will concern not just vote counts but, if those are not the right ones, the legitimacy of the vote itself. Democracy, in other words. 

All the President’s Men is by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who worked for Kay Graham, and, piece by piece, uncovered the connection between President Nixon, the White House, and the bungled burglary on the offices of the National Democratic Committee at the Watergate building in 1974. A new introduction underscores the many similarities between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. It brings the work of Woodward and Bernstein into the present moment.

Reviews note how it invites us into another world, “when the truth mattered,” or “when actions had consequences.” 

I’m not so sure that is a world we have truly left behind, though its values are certainly under pressure. 

Woodward and Bernstein exemplify the humility and heroism of work that subordinates the self. Nothing was too much, or too small. The sheer drudgery of dialing every single “Hunt” in the Washington phone book, chasing fruitless leads and waiting for interviews, until that one good piece of information makes it all worthwhile, is chronicled here in a way that involves the reader in every twist and turn of an enormously complex two-year investigation. 

In the end, every institution of government and civil life is tapped for clues. From the White House archives to the Public Library. From the FBI and CIA to a cul-de-sac in suburban Maryland. From the lies of the president’s spokesmen, to the civil servants who know the truth. 

The success of the Post investigation, as of the court case which led to the resignation of President Nixon, was a result of coordinated work across Justice, Government, the Civil Service, and the Media. The worry of a Trump presidency is precisely for those institutions. During his one term so far, he was able to compromise the integrity of the Supreme Court. He is now promising to dismantle the civil service, and an independent Judiciary. These are truly perilous times.

The success of the book is in its insistence on the value of  individuals, men and women, cooperating, in ways small and large, sharing glimmers of information, across day-to-day life, to bring the truth to light.

If democracy and the independence of the press are in jeopardy now, keep to the virtues on display in Woodward and Bernstein’s, and in the Washington Post’s, take on government. Keep your eyes on the prize. Keep chipping away. Never give up. Your day will come. It always has, it always will.