In late October 1972, as the Washington Post was aggressively uncovering the secret, massive campaign of political spying and sabotage directed by Richard Nixon’s top White House and campaign officials, Watergate editor Barry Sussman started documenting a common theme in the public denials those stories were eliciting.

As Sussman wrote in his definitive 1973 book, “The Great Coverup: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate“:

I picked out seventeen examples of unfounded criticism of the Post or of carefully worded statements meant to pass as denials that had been made by [then-press secretary Ron] Ziegler, [then-White House official Clark] MacGregor and [then-chairman of the Republican National Committee Bob] Dole, and put together a four-page analysis of them for others at work. I felt I had found an important key to understanding the Administration’s response, one that might give us at least some comfort if the attack on the Post continued. We were trying to report the news as best we could; they were playing at semantics, trying to make The Washington Post, and not Nixon campaign spying, into an election issue… We had not been in error. We had hit a nerve.

The name for that made it into the pop-cultural lexicon in 1976, when Jason Robards, playing Post executive editor Ben Bradlee in the movie “All the President’s Men,” gruffly responded to administration statements like this: