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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