All the President's Men|The Kennedy Center — Lunch on the Terrace, Trouble at the Interval

Carl Bernstein takes a source to lunch high above the Potomac, and the film lets the river do the talking behind them. The Roof Terrace level of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was four years old when the crew arrived in 1975 — white Carrara marble, ceilings tall enough to feel like a mistake, and a terrace that looks straight down at Roosevelt Island and across at Rosslyn. Pakula uses the height. Two people trading small pieces of information, framed against a capital city that appears entirely orderly from this angle.

The building comes back at night, when Woodward is at a performance and the story reaches him anyway. That is the trick the film keeps playing in Washington: no one is ever off duty, and the most public rooms in the city are where the private conversations happen.

Edward Durell Stone's design was called a marble box by people who wanted it to be more daring, and they had a point. But the Grand Foyer works, all six hundred feet of it, with Robert Berks's rough bronze Kennedy head at one end and eighteen Orrefors chandeliers overhead. The Hall of States and Hall of Nations hang their flags in silence.

Go up to the Roof Terrace and step outside. Admission to walk the building is free, daily, and nobody will ask what you are doing there. From the west side you can see the Watergate a quarter mile north — the two buildings in this story sitting in plain sight of each other.