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When Barack Obama went to Athens in mid-November, 2016, on his last state visit as President, he celebrated democracy. The speech he delivered in the Greek capital, at a ritzy opera hall perched next to the Saronic Gulf, came only eight days after Hillary Clinton lost the Presidential election to Donald Trump; Obama, an era-defining leader, now mulled the likely unravelling of his legacy. His remarks evoked a world on edge, beset by growing social and economic divides and the uneven effects of globalization. But he clung to an optimistic theme, hailing the “rocky hills” of Athens as the birthplace of democracy, the incubator of such concepts as citizenship and equality before the law. He acknowledged that democracy in the Athens of antiquity was “far from perfect,” not unlike that of his own nation at its founding, but said that democracy was a “flame first lit here” that had “never died.” And, he insisted, the yearning for democracy reflected a universal dream. “We’ve been told that these are Western ideals,” Obama said. “We’ve been told that some cultures are not equipped for democratic governance and actually prefer authoritarian rule.” But, he said, his travels around the world during eight years in office showed him that that was not the case, that the “basic longing to live with dignity, the fundamental desire to have control of our lives and our future . . . burn in every human heart.”

When Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, went to Athens last week and gave a speech, he mentioned the word “democracy” just twice in almost thirty minutes. Instead, standing upon the Pnyx, a hilly outcrop that overlooks the Acropolis, he tub-thumped for the West. He declared ancient Greek city-states as “the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world,” the font not of universal value but of an exceptional cultural legacy that belonged to Europe and the United States—and not many others. Rubio turned to Plato and invoked the ancient idea of thymos—“the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride,” as he put it, that gives life to a civilization—and placed the Greek hoplites who resisted the advances of the Persian empire at Thermopylae (never mind that they were Spartans, not Athenians) in a line of great men that included Christian martyrs and the defiant Texans who perished at the Alamo. Their bravery, sacrifice, and loyalty to a greater cause, Rubio argued, were distinctly Western characteristics, rooted in an ennobling spirit that he claimed was under threat from those who have made nationalism “a dirty word” and taught children to be “ashamed” of their countries. “Now we take the West’s conception of these things—heroism, honor, duty—we take these things for granted,” he said, before offering a riposte to Obama’s idealism of a decade before. “We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not.” In his telling, European nations, gripped by mass migration and the torpor of liberalism, faced a civilizational “inflection point” and had to “awaken” from their “long slumber”; the West had to maintain “its place at the head of the world” and resist a “future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”

The first thing you notice about the film director Paweł Pawlikowski is that he looks like a movie star. This is an unusual state of affairs. As a rule, if you happen to be—as Pawlikowski is—demonstrably tall, dark, and handsome, with a flexible sense of humor, a yen for cinema, and industrial quantities of charisma, your rightful spot is smack dab in front of the camera. So why go and lurk behind it? Why didn’t Pawlikowski become an actor? “Oh, no, I’m a terrible actor,” he says. “I never know what to do with my eyebrows.”

These days, having recently turned sixty-nine, Pawlikowski has a dusting of gray in his hair and his stubble—the annoying effect of which is to render him more, not less, like the very model of a leading man. It made complete sense, as we walked together down a street in Sarajevo, in Bosnia, when a young woman in a white dress ran ahead of us, turned around, explained that she was an actress at the National Theatre, and professed her adoration for Pawlikowski’s work. He smiled, thanked her graciously, and moved on. That kind of thing must happen all the time to Keanu Reeves, but few directors—especially middle-aged Polish directors—can be guaranteed the same treatment.

Woodward, Darman,” he said. It was how every phone call from him began over two decades. Richard G. Darman was what I call a “hide in plain sight” source, because it was widely known that we were close friends. Not known, but perhaps suspected, was that he was a pipeline for me into the White House during the Presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

I first met Darman in 1973, during the Watergate affair, which I was covering for the Washington Post with my reporting partner Carl Bernstein. Darman and I were both thirty, and both obsessed with work and with the dramatic political history we were witnessing. At that time, Darman was a top aide to the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, who had refused to carry out Richard Nixon’s order to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. Richardson resigned and Nixon fired Cox. This was the firestorm called the Saturday Night Massacre, a crucial event that helped lead to Nixon’s resignation, on August 9, 1974. Darman regularly filled me in on the behind-the-scenes story, its color and meaning.

Darman was a Harvard graduate, an overachiever, clearly driven, cerebral, witty, and tenacious. He believed in the good that both he and the government could do for the country. He was an idealist and a cynic. He once told the New York Times that his only hobby was work.

We had countless long lunches together—Saturday or Sunday—at the Madison Hotel, across the street from the Post, discussing government, journalism, and ourselves. I felt like I was getting a master class in how government really operated. Plus, many scoops. In later years, Darman would drive out on weekends to our country house near Annapolis, Maryland, to spend large parts of the day with me and my wife, the journalist Elsa Walsh, who was particularly fond of him. Some people found him arrogant, but I loved his comfortable confidence as a friend and a source. It was part of what made him so extraordinary and valuable. He knew how to turn on the charm, and he did for both Elsa and me.

The most celebrated source of my career was Mark Felt, the No. 2 man at the F.B.I. during the Nixon years, who died in 2008. I referred to him as Deep Throat. But if Felt was on one end of the source spectrum—a secret source for thirty-three years, who operated entirely in the shadows, deeply paranoid and careful about what information he provided me and how he did it—Darman was his opposite. Flagrant and out in the open, he casually spoke to me about the most sensitive and high-level decision-making inside the Reagan and Bush White Houses.