All the President's Men|Lafayette Park — A Bench in Sight of the House You Are Investigating

Bernstein meets a frightened contact on a park bench, and Pakula puts the White House over their shoulders. Nothing in the blocking is subtle. The man has something to say about phone records, he does not want to say it, and the building he is nervous about is a hundred and fifty metres away across Pennsylvania Avenue.

Lafayette Park earns its place in the film by being the most ordinary piece of ground in Washington. Seven acres, originally part of the President's own grounds, sliced off by Jefferson and turned into a public square. Clark Mills's Andrew Jackson on a rearing horse holds the centre, cast partly from British cannon captured at Pensacola and the first equestrian bronze ever made in the United States. Lafayette, Rochambeau, Kościuszko and von Steuben stand at the four corners, all of them foreigners who fought for the revolution — an arrangement that has struck visitors as odd for a hundred and thirty years.

The park has always been where Washington goes to be seen not talking to somebody. Job seekers waited here in the nineteenth century. Protesters have held the north side continuously since 1981. Squirrels work the benches with real professional confidence.

Sit on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, facing north, with the White House behind you. That is the reverse of the film's angle and it tells you the same thing: whoever is meeting here chose a place where being seen looks like nothing at all.