All the President's Men

The reporting that brought down a presidency, told by the reporters who did it. Woodward and Bernstein traced the Watergate break-in to the White House through patient, document-by-document work, and the book is the record of how the press, at its best, holds power to account. Included as the founding text of the modern chronicler shelf: proof that the byline matters less than the method, and that the method, followed without flinching, can change history.

The reporter who, with Carl Bernstein, broke Watergate for the Washington Post, and who has chronicled nine presidencies through deeply sourced books built on documents and on-record interviews. His method is accumulation: get inside the room, then show the reader what was said. The books are durable records of how power was exercised, written close to the events and built to outlast them.