Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2011–2025years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- When people tell me the Russians deliberately plotted to crash the Smolensk flight, I ask them to read
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/all-the-presidents-men-t...
- It's not about that hypothesis. It's a great book but it's more about how projects are products of organizational structures. It's a Pulitzer Prize winner. I'm still waiting for a movie to be made about it. An "all the presidents men" of the 80s minicomputer market.
If only I had infinite time, energy and money; the things I'd do...
- I know politics is generally off-topic on HN, but I see this as an exploration at attempts to remain anonymous given the reality of modern society. I think three great examples of this over time are actually representative of the times.
Mark Salter (2011) seems mostly to have been revealed by social connections - for example, the publisher's rep on O was the same person as for Salter's other, ghost-written works - and by a 24-hour news system that has space to publicise campaign staff, and even follow them up post-campaign to their writing den in Maine.
This is by no means as impressive an exposition as the discovery that Joe Klein (1990s) wrote Primary Colours - that was achieved through textual analysis and computing power - to a degree that wouldn't have been possible by a university team on an unfunded project even ten years earlier.
And of course there's the greatest tale of Washington anonymity - Deep Throat, aka Mark Felt (1970s). He got away with it for more than thirty years, until his family convinced him and Woodward / Bernstein to open up just before Felt's death. The only clues were from All The Presidents Men and the information revealed (though mostly it was double-checked) in newspaper articles, and even then the book included some red herrings.
Given today's newspaper is no longer tomorrow's fish-wrap (at least, the electronic version), I doubt it would be that easy today.
