In her outstanding study of the post-Watergate press scandals and Congressional investigations of the illegal, immoral or otherwise pernicious activities of the CIA and FBI, Kathryn Olmsted refutes the conventional narrative of mid-seventies American political history as that of an out-of-control executive brought to bay by courageous investigative journalists and an emboldened legislature. The idea, Olmsted argues, that America's system of checks and balances saved the day, that in spite of a corrupt President and the nefarious actions of his secret intelligence services, democracy won out – indeed that the very downfall of that President and the curtailment of the CIA and FBI at the hands of a powerful fourth estate demonstrated the vitality of American democracy – was a comforting but misleading myth. This ideologically reassuring emplotment of the era was conceived in part by Hollywood. With the notable exception of Network (1976), journalists recurrently figured as heroes in the political cinema of the decade. Even in Alan Pakula's deeply cynical conspiracy thriller The Parallax View (1974), Warren Beatty plays a crusading investigative reporter; the warm hues of his newspaper office overseen by his avuncular editor contrast starkly with the ‘cold and forbidding’ interiors seen elsewhere in the picture. Pakula, the so-called ‘master of paranoia’, reprised the same theme when he took Watergate on directly in All the President's Men (1976) a few years later. The message, as Slavoj Žižek sardonically puts it, is simple: ‘[W]hat a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys [Woodward and Bernstein] like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth!’

But the reality, according to Olmsted, was very different. Tenacious investigative reporters like Woodward and Bernstein or Seymour Hersh were exceptions rather than the rule. Watergate, far from heralding a new era of aggressive advocacy journalism, encouraged trepidation from major newspaper editors who feared an anti-press reaction if they pushed their hard-won First Amendment privileges too far. Woodward and Bernstein's editor Katherine Graham at The Washington Post, for example, urged caution and restraint by journalists in the wake of Watergate who had become, in her words, ‘too much a party to events, too much an actor in the drama’.