Coppola, who wrote and directed, considers this film his most personal project. He was working two years after the Watergate break-in, amid the ruins of the Vietnam effort, telling the story of a man who places too much reliance on high technology and has nightmares about his personal responsibility. Harry Caul is a microcosm of America at that time: not a bad man, trying to do his job, haunted by a guilty conscience, feeling tarnished by his work. --Roger Ebert 2/4/01

Publicity-generating industries cultivate the memory of Watergate, as of so much else.

This is a defining feature of our time, the so-clalled "post-modern" era that feasts on imagery and luxuriates in spectacles, pseudo-events, and celebrities, emphasizing a form of consciousness shaped most of all by the visual stimulation of television and film. Watergate receives its post-modern, image-conscioius, spectacle-fixated due, but no more than its due. --Schudson, 59-60

Even in the world of television and home computers and cellular phones and twenty-four-hour news from around the globe, people acquire culture primarily from their family, their friends, and their neighbors, and they do so in the homes, schools, streets, and parks where they live their face-to-face-lives. But part of the culture people typically acquire is a sense of national identity, a sense of themselves as tied to the national society as a whole. This national identity is present only in small ways in everyday life, as in the daily Pledge of Allegiance in schools. It is routinized in national holidays and quadrennial presidential elections. It is powerfully established through military service or through the experience of war for both soldiers and civilians. It is also instituted through people's shared attention to explosive and traumatic national events judged historically significant. Americans have collectively put everyday life aside to attend to the Army-McCarthy hearings, the television quiz show scandals, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Watergate committee hearings, the Challenger disaster, and other such events. These cultural flashpoints generate collective, widely shared experiences through which people establish, and come to care about a relation to public discourse and public action. -Schudson, 66

If President Nixon himself had not ultimately been implicated in the Watergate scandal, if the scandal had stopped with Jeb Magruder, no one would remember Watergate. If the scandal had stopped with Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean, Watergate would be remembered as a great journalistic coup, bringing investigation into the White House itself. But it would not be the heart of American journalism mythology. Watergate found a president guilty of crimes, waist-deep in deception, and forced him from office. That makes Watergate, with all of its complexities for the press, the unavoidable central myth of American journalism. --Schudson, 126