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1998 Knight Lecture: Bob WoodwardThe Press 25 Years After Watergate
Bob Woodward, The Washington Post editor and author
You probably don’t follow the news as closely as I do and have not heard what just came out of Washington recently, tonight. You will recall last year there were these fence-jumpings at the White House, where people were trying to get in. Well, this afternoon there was a similar incident that was much more serious. Vice President Al Gore tried to jump the fence and get out. And the initial report of what happened to him is that he ran down Pennsylvania Avenue and someone tackled him and brought him back and he’s in his office as we speak dialing for dollars, once again. What I want to talk about is the press 25 years after Watergate. And I’d like to begin briefly, though Jim did an excellent job of saying was Watergate was, and in saying that I want to say what Watergate wasn’t. The scandal did begin in June of 1972 when five burglars were caught in the Democrat’s headquarters in Watergate. What did the D.C. police find that early morning? They found five men in business suits – not your ordinary D.C. burglars – pockets stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, sophisticated electronic and photographic equipment. The team of burglars had ties to the CIA, to the Nixon re-election committee and the White House. The break-in at the Watergate was like a thread on a very large sock. Pulling on it for more than two years revealed the host of secret and corrupt activities in the White House. In fact, it revealed a criminal president who was willing to use the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, even the sacred institution, the Secret Service, illegally. He was willing to use the power of the federal government to secure his political position and pay back – or as he inelegantly frequently called it on the White House tapes, to screw – his real or perceived enemies. Pulling on the thread revealed more wiretaps, break-ins, secret campaign funds, the payments of burglars for their silence, obstruction of justice, the subversion of government and law. The Nixon tapes in the end revealed a president obsessed and small and ultimately incompetent. He was not able to carry out his crimes of concealment and cover up. He was the wrong man to lead, according to those tapes. Nixon resigned in 1974 and then launched, in fact, one of the ugliest chapters of Watergate. For 20 years Nixon waged a lonely war against history and the historical record, mobilizing his lawyers to keep the additional secret tape recordings from coming out, trying to keep the lies that he had framed uncontradicted. But Nixon has lost that war. The regular, seasonal installment of the Nixon tapes – what we at the Post refer to as the gift that keeps giving – reveal Nixon as the conspirator in heart and mind using the language of vengeance and deceit, concealing and covering up. I’ve listened to some of those tapes. I urge any of you to go to the archives in Washington and listen and hear the voices and the tone and the climate that existed in the oval office when Richard Nixon was there. It’s chilling. There were so many lies – and I don’t mean to be ungenerous about Nixon, but I believe the record supports it. Several reporters and editors at the Washington Post working at that time spent years, several years, trying to keep the story alive. There were books and movies, the spotlight, endless television appearances, and eventually the myth about the press bringing down a president. Len Downey, one of the senior editors of the Watergate stories, and now the executive editor of the Washington Post, offered a different and somewhat more credible perspective about the press’s role in Watergate. He did this several years ago. I’m already sucking up to the boss by quoting him. He told Michael Schudson, who wrote the book, "Watergate in American Memory," Len said, "We felt small. We did not feel big and powerful. Our responsibilities were huge to us working on that story. We really didn’t believe that the president was going to resign. Most of us were dysfunctional the night he did resign. At the Washington Post it was a small group of people doing this. That’s still what this business of journalism is about. In all of this there is a lesson of Watergate, I want to remind people about. It was hard, it was not glamorous, and at the time it was dirty. People weren’t sleeping, people weren’t showering" – that’s nothing new – "Bernstein’s desk was a mess. He and Woodward were fighting all of the time. They were fighting with their editors all of the time. We were under such great pressure. It was difficult to figure out what was going on." That is all true. So there is the myth and then this reality. In journalism you only find fragments. Disclosure is unusual; full, total disclosure does not exist. Things are always hidden. Why is that? What’s going on? First of all I think individuals naturally are secretive. Put a bunch of individuals together in government, especially in the big ether of the White House, whether it’s in a Republican or a Democratic administration, and these people become even more intensely secret. Watergate was indeed unique, a mega-scandal, certainly. There were a multitude of truly crazy elements and characters that gave Watergate an unusual staying power. However, one theme of continuity with the Watergate past is the extent to which government now still depends and thrives on secrecy and the extent to which government and individuals in government still practice routinely, individually, official denial. In the press there is much breast-beating and handwringing and talking panels. You see them on television all the time, talking about the media’s role in what’s going on. There are accusations of sensationalism, simplification, distortion, ignorance, no accountability, and the list is endless. There are deep problems in the media. There’s no question about that and we need to be intensely humbled by those problems because they’re real and we need to be introspective about them. But in trying to pull the camera back personally and look at Watergate and the press and what we tried to do in the news media 25 years later, I still think the central reality, the biggest stumbling block to delivering a better version of events to the public is this habit of official denial. I don’t want to dwell overly on my own experiences as a reporter and book author, but the incidents offer a context of what’s happened in the last 25 years. In 1972-73, the Nixon White House waged a campaign organized and orchestrated by Nixon to discredit the press and to discredit, particularly, the Washington Post and our Watergate reporting, because that reporting was on to the thread on the sock that might reveal what was really going on inside. Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, once spent in public 30 minutes denouncing the Post for one of our stories. He accused us of every crime in journalism – shabby journalism, character assassination – went on for a full half hour. At the time I was age 29 and I want to tell you it gets your attention when the spokesman for the leader of the free world unleashes on you and your work for half an hour. I had an assistant who works for me go to the Nixon archives and listen to some of the tape recordings and transcribe them, and there are some tape recordings there that have never been public or transcribed that he did, in fact, make transcripts of, and they show some new things. One is how Nixon and Ziegler developed a game plan in April 1973, right after I had personally gone to the White House and talked to Ziegler’s deputy to tell him that I wanted a comment on new information that was going to come out showing that Nixon, himself, was implicated in Watergate. In the tape-recorded conversation where they’re gaming this out, Ziegler advised Nixon, "Tell Woodward stay 100 percent away from it. There’s no fact to it. There’s no substance," to the allegations that the president was involved. Nixon finally told Ziegler to warn me, personally, and in Nixon’s style he resorted to this language, "Tell him he better watch his goddam ass. They’re going to attack the president’s men but they must not attack the president." Along the same vein of official denial, Carl Bernstein and I did a book called "The Final Days" about Nixon’s last year in office. It was greeted with a number of howls of denial. How could we know that Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had prayed on their knees together the night before Nixon resigned? Then several years later, in Kissinger’s own memoir, Kissinger describes virtually the same scene, only in more dramatic and emotional terms, revealing Nixon emotionally shattered and unraveling. In 1979, as Jim mentioned, I co-authored a book on the inner workings of the Supreme Court. Again the reaction was a version of how day you and how do you know. There were denials. Today the papers held at the Library of Congress, from the files of the former Justices Marshall, Brennan and Douglas, show that we made a mistake in "The Brethren." We simply understated the degree of hostility and maneuvering that was often carried out in the name of high legal principle by justices from the left, the right, or the center. I could go on. Official CIA denials. Official Pentagon denials. Official White House denials. Often when you look under those denials or time emerges, you see that, in fact, the denials did not hold up. Come to the present. In his first news conference after winning the 1996 election, President Clinton was asked about allegations of improper fund raising by his campaign. The president said, "Wait, wait, wait. There have been no allegations of improper funding." The reporter then chimed in and said, well, by the Democratic National Committee. Clinton said, "That was the other campaign that had problems with that, not mine." Today, now a year later, a year’s worth of reporting disclosures, Senator Thompson’s investigation in the Senate, the release of thousands of pages of documents, internal documents from the White House and the Democratic National Committee, we know the extent to which the president controlled and directed that alleged other campaign. We now know it was his campaign, in fact, much more than the one officially run by the Clinton-Gore campaign. As the fiction of separate campaigns has evaporated, Clinton has tried other official denials. "The Lincoln Bedroom was never sold," he said on February 25, 1997. "That was one more false story we have had to endure." Now we know a memo came out showing in Clinton’s own handwriting, in a 1995 memo, he put a price tag, himself, on the use of the Lincoln bedroom and he wrote that he wanted to start the overnights for the donors who had given $100,000 or $50,000. Two days later, Clinton was asked, "Can you really say that the White House was not used as a fund raising tool." "Absolutely," Clinton declared, in the face of the mountain of evidence that the lure of the White House was used to court thousands of real or potential donors to his campaign or the Democratic Party. I could do the same thing with the speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich and his problems, and the sequence of official denial, categorical denial; there’s new information, often the denial remains intact. Then the moment comes, as it did with Gingrich when he said, "Oh, yes, it all happened and I’m sorry." To go through the various Clinton scandals and see the pattern of official, often total denial. Whitewater would have probably gone away in the 1992 campaign if all the documents and information had been put out. It would have gone away in 1993 when there was another chance when the White House had that opportunity to release the documents. They did not do it. The Paula Jones case is not just a national but probably an international embarrassment. Whatever went on in that case, there were just total denials about things that there is a record of and rather substantial testimony of, namely that Clinton and Paula Jones met in this hotel room. Clearly, official denial is alive and well in Washington. What’s dangerous is that the mechanisms for denial are now much more sophisticated than they were 25 years ago. The White House now hires special public relations professionals, often attorneys, to handle administration scandals. The press is less equipped to deal with these operators because they’re official denials and often lies are now dubbed "spin." Spin is somehow benign. Political management and damage control are seen as harmless and a necessary part of the political dialogue. The public and the press have grown to expect and accept it. Nobody says what these words really are. "Spin" is often a euphemism for a lie or an untruth. Lanny Davis, the president’s special counsel and spokesman for Whitewater and other related scandals, travels to Senator Thompson’s hearings on Capital Hill to pronounce what’s coming out "old news." It’s a very clever and effective ploy. Journalists want to be on the cutting edge reporting on the fresh and the new. Declaring something "old news" appeals diabolically to every journalists’ natural insecurity. In the information age, there is so much out there, perhaps it was in an overlooked newsletter or on the Internet. Presidential campaigns from both parties send out professional spinners after the debates to spin away their candidate’s performance. So accepted is the practice that the campaigns actually designate the official spinners and there’s a "spinners’ alley" for them and the journalists to meet to go over and share the various spins and takes on what has occurred in the debate. It becomes a habit and these things are not called what they often are. Last summer, to put the spotlight on myself for the moment, last summer my wife and I had a baby, a baby girl, and about a month, when our daughter was a month old she was waking up for her 2 a.m. feedings, and one night she woke up and my wife, Elsa, started breast feeding her and I wanted to do my part, play my role. So I turned on the television and started surfing around the various channels. Equal work for equal pay. ABC was running that night at 2 a.m. the movie version of the book Carl Bernstein and I did on the reporting of Watergate, "All The President’s Men" and I had not seen it for 12 or more years and so we started watching it. And there’s a scene near the end of the movie where Jason Robards, who is playing Ben Bradlee, then the editor of the Post – it’s the spring of 1973 and Bradlee’s reporters come to tell Bradlee, Jason Robards, that Watergate is about to blow up, there are new and amazing disclosures just about to come out or they are around the corner. In the movie version which I saw that night at 2 a.m., Bradlee says after learning this, "Well, nothing is at stake except freedom of the press, free speech, and possibly the future of the country." I thought to myself, that isn’t right, that’s a classic example of Hollywood hype, press arrogance and self-importance. What I remember, I distinctly have a memory of what Ben said when we took him that information. And I want to give a sanitized V-chip version. What Bradlee said is that there is a very important private part of our anatomy now on the chopping block. I was sure. Happily Carl Bernstein and I wrote down everything Bradlee said – it’s one of the things he hated most – and kept records. So I went to the record and it turned out that both the Hollywood version and my memory had it dead wrong. That night in the spring of 1973, when Bradlee learned that Watergate was about to explode, he said the following: "What the hell do we do now?" And that’s the right question. That’s the question that we confront and live with daily in journalism. When big stories or small stories, when something occurs suddenly, it’s never clear, you don’t give speeches about the First Amendment or make clever wise cracks. You’re lost, you’re facing uncharted territory. As Len Downey said, you feel small, not large. As Ben Bradlee said, you ask what the hell do we do now. And when you look at the history of asking that question, what the hell do we do now, how do we find out, how do we explain what’s going on, almost always we in the press are confronted by this apparatus of official denial. It seems to lurk around every corner and it complicates, to say the least, the process of trying to figure out what the hell to do, or how to explain what’s going on. Now significantly at the time the movie was made I knew, this is the hard part, I knew the Hollywood version of this scene was not right. Overall, the movie was a near perfect rendition of what happened in covering the Watergate story. Capturing the specifics and the feelings, the uncertainty and doubt in working on that story, again, working with pieces, going home with a lump in your tummy. But even though I knew that, I did not protest and try to get the movie scene and some other scenes in the movie fixed. The movie makers needed something that they thought would resonate and be more powerful. I was doing somebody a favor, I thought. I was being passive and allowing an untruth to flourish. It was easy to say, "Oh, it’s only a movie after all," or, "That’s Hollywood, what can you expect?" Well, as I said, overall the movie was incredibly accurate. But to participate and not protest was to begin to travel down, on my part, the road of deceit. And you take that as a little beginning step on that road and ask yourself the question well, how far is Oliver Stone behind that? And I wish I had protested at the time and I didn’t have the guts to do it. Today there’s also an impatience in the news media, after Watergate. One of the big changes in the media is CNN. I think CNN has really changed the business, significantly. CNN is on televisions placed strategically throughout the news room of the Washington Post. It’s on almost all day. Editors and reporters look to it, they want to say and see well, what’s the latest, what’s happening. Everyone worries in the news business, are we on top of the news, are we missing something? So there’s CNN chattering away. The terrible truth, CNN brings the latest. The trouble with the latest is, first, it’s often just wrong and second, the latest is often irrelevant, a minor shift in something of insignificance. It’s kind of like watching the stock market. Averages, watching them continuously all day or for a week. What does it mean? What do you learn? The answer is you can’t tell. You have to look at the stock market for months or years or decades and then try to determine the forces that really are at work. Often those forces are many. They often overlap and sorting them out takes time. The questions in the news business worth asking ourselves are not what’s the latest, but the question is what’s really going on, what are the true causes, how do we make the system, whether it’s government, whether it’s business, whether it’s ourselves, the news media, how do we make ourselves accountable. We need to ask questions like what’s going on in the local police department? What’s really behind the White House delay in turning over the video tapes? Why are health maintenance organizations raising your health care premiums by 5 percent next year? Meg Greenfield, the Post’s editorial page editor argued recently that the press should stop looking at the bizarre and take a look at the seemingly respectable. That the big stories of the last few years, she argued, are those concerning sometimes the most plain vanilla, non-controversial institutions, the United Way of America, or the government of Switzerland, or the health insurance organizations, as she said, whose executives are ripping off everything not nailed down. She’s quite right. The news has to probe institutions and look at large forces. The key to understanding is understanding. Reporters, journalists, editors, producers, spending the time necessary against the problem, having the patience, examining, re-examining, interviewing, re-interviewing, thinking and doubting. Often it takes someone, someone has to come along and ask a simple question. Like take the simple question which I think is very important to understanding all kinds of things in this country: How and why did President Clinton win re-election in 1996? Just one year ago. Part of the answer is in the money and the television advertising. I think he went through a process of self-hearing his message that he was putting out in the advertising and he repeated it daily, as president, and for the first time there was a very real consistency in the Clinton White House, one of the weaknesses that was quite evident in the first three years of his Presidency. You can go on and on about the reasons, but if you dig deeper – and having thought about the question – you come up with part of the answer being Clinton’s personality and his power to communicate. I recall in 1994 going to interview Clinton in the Oval Office with the book I was doing on the making of his economic policy, a book that came to be called "The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House." It was about 5 o’clock at night and two of Clinton’s aides were present and came in and he immediately drilled me with eye content, devastating eye contact. I had a list of questions. I would look down, ask a question, look up, he was answering, never – I’m picking on you, sir, I’m sorry – he never let up. Something dropped in the Oval Office or in the office next door and there was a loud noise, everyone looked over, but Clinton, eye contact. He was drinking a Coca-Cola and he got down, he was done with the Coke, chewing the ice and I was reading a question off and I looked up and looked through the bottom of the glass and he was drilling me with eye contact. Now if you can do that, you don’t need a wife who talks to Eleanor Roosevelt. Powerful. Very powerful. I thought it was a great interview. I was mesmerized. I went back and transcribed the tapes. It was a D+, D-as-in-dog-plus interview. His capacity to make eye contact, communicate with individuals or groups. I’ve interviewed people who have been with Clinton in the Oval Office or in a meeting of just a few people and they have said nothing and they come out and they swear on the lives on their children that Clinton agrees with them. And they’ve said nothing, but they can feel it, it’s the communication. That power to communicate obviously is amplified in television and if you look at Clinton on television, that skill with the eyes – you know, most people in conversations, eyes wander all over the room, they don’t use them. Clinton has trained himself to use his eyes. Why waste something that you’ve got? So he drills people and he’s learned how to almost appear as if he’s going behind your eyes. And he does that with the television campaign. Certainly the most powerful television communicator, way beyond in my view, the skills of even Ronald Reagan, that’s part of the reason. I could go on all night talking about why I think Clinton won, but some of the answers have to do with money and organization and Dole’s weakness, but the power of his personality and communication skills has a lot to do with it. To return to the news media for a moment. The news focuses all too often and too much on spectacle, mystery, and conflict. A wise journalist wrote, "There is in America today a distinct prejudice in favor of those who make the accusation." The passage comes not from Bill Safire in the New York Times or George Will in the Washington Post, but from the well-known journalist Walter Lippman writing in 1914, 83 years ago. The essay is titled "The Themes of Muckraking." The current environment of suspicion and cynicism that we live in is not new. I would stress the continuity with the American past, scandal, muckraking, and accusations have a long, rich history. Watergate was a milestone. The evidentiary purity of Nixon’s tape recordings and his eventual self-impeachment with his resignation gave the scandal two unusual qualities which really define scandals today. First, the Nixon tapes gave such clarity to the scandal. When the Republicans heard the smoking gun tape at the end, they all turned against Nixon. It was perfectly clear. Second, Nixon resigned and gave the scandal closure, even though he fought to redeem and rehabilitate himself afterwards, he had in the sense given up and resigned. It was an ending and something of a final judgment. Though the media and public searched hard, the scandals today following Watergate tend to blur. There’s not clarity. There is not closure. There’s nothing equivalent to the tapes. You can ask questions about the scandals after Watergate endlessly. Did Ronald Reagan know about the illegal diversion of funds in Iran-Contra? What about Billygate, the scandal involving President Carter’s brother? Did Newt Gingrich do something illegal or improper or was it just what politicians do? Was he a victim of a witch hunt? There’s little agreement or consensus, no clarity, no closure. In all these stories one common theme is heated official denial and then often acknowledgment as there is an investigation and new evidence. I don’t think Watergate has been bad for journalism. It’s just been very sobering. A significant reminder that there are few straight lines in any story or reality and no real follow lines defining the precise rules of American politics. Another change in the media since Watergate is the attention given to journalists, especially television reporters and anchors. Many work under a spotlight. This is a big, big change. There’s so many examples of what this change is where working under a spotlight alters behavior. There is a story that I want to tell which had really kind of seared itself into my mind about several years after Nixon resigned. David Frost, the journalist, did a series of well-publicized interviews on network television and during the course one night, I was watching these each night, David Frost asked Nixon about Carl Bernstein and myself. He said what do you think about these reporters from the Washington Post? And Nixon said, well, you know, they work for the Washington Post, it’s a liberal newspaper, they’re liberals, and this is Washington politics, really, and by the way, what they write is trash and they’re trash. And I was jolted watching this and I needed some relief. So I called my mother, who was living in Florida at the time and I said, "Mother what did you think? Have you seen this interview?" She said, "Yes, I saw it." I said, "What, you know – trash. Ouch." She said, "Don’t worry at all, son, it’s just Washington. It’s just politics. I’m not worried at all." Then a long pause and then she said to me, "What’s this about being a liberal?" I was worried about my future in journalism, she was worried about my political soul. Monica Crowley wrote a book in 1996 called "Nixon Off the Record." She was the young woman who was Nixon’s personal aide in the last years of his life and true to form she kept a diary and wrote down everything Nixon told her. In the book, she recounts how in October 1992, before Clinton was elected president, when he was going to beat Bush in the month before, she writes that she had sent Nixon a copy of an article that I had written on President George Bush’s failed economic policies. And Crowley writes in her book the following, after she gave my article to Nixon: "Nixon threw it at my feet. ‘Woodward,’ he said, ‘as if I would read anything by him. The point is that Bush showed no leadership on the economy then and little leadership since. I don’t need that asshole to tell me that,’ Nixon exclaimed. ‘Put it in your file if you want, but please keep it away from me.’" As you go through some of the record of the back story here, you see that some of the animosity never died. In writing about presidents, trying to understand presidents or reading or just watching them on television, I think it’s very useful to recall what we now know from modern psychology and that simply is the character is often the organization of inner conflict rather than their final resolution. In Nixon. In Carter. In Reagan. In Bush. In Clinton. These conflicts still rage and the job of the journalist is to figure out how and why and put them in some sort of context to come at it…and we sure need to look at ourselves and our business, but I am struck and astounded when you go to the record of behavior, particularly in scandal that this official denial is the theme. I just want to end on the note of the publishers of my book, Simon & Schuster, the chairman some time ago was needling me about get the next book going, because publishing has become a marketing business and they want more product. He was under, he put me under a lot of pressure and I said I don’t know what I want to do and he kept hammering on me until I finally said, okay, my next book is going to be on the publishing business in New York City. He smiled and said I have a great title for you. Well, there’s no great title anywhere and he said, no, this is really a great title. He said your book on the publishing business in New York City will be called "My Last Book." I’m done. [Applause] What I’d like to do is answer questions as long as you would like, but imagine doing a book on the New York publishing business, the official denials that would flow from the people I was working for. Yes, sir? QUESTION: I’m fascinated by the fact that there has been no real newspaper investigation of Filegate and I would like to argue that if a Republican administration were at the White House – WOODWARD: This is the existence of 800 raw FBI files in the basement of the Clinton White House – QUESTION: – and you made the point, didn’t you, that President Nixon had used, one of his crimes was to use the CIA, in this case the FBI. Now if those files had been in a White House with a Republican president, I would imagine there would have been a lot more investigating than there has been on Filegate. Imagine– WOODWARD: If we only had President Clinton, on sodium pentathol and asked him the question about how easy the press has been on him, I think you would see that people have looked at that, but let me try to answer. If you look, and this falls in my theme of official denial, when it turned out these files existed and I think it really is a very serious matter, Clinton said it was a bureaucratic snafu. And it just kind of went away. I’ve wondered, it’s kind of like the dog that didn’t bark. Why Clinton, who’s a civil libertarian at heart and has to be horrified about the idea of raw FBI files going to the White House of the political opposition, why didn’t he go on national television and say this is an outrage. Why didn’t he say all the people who were involved are gone and I’ve written a personal letter of apology to everyone. He didn’t do that. He just called it a bureaucratic snafu. It’s one of the things that people are looking at. It’s one of the things that is serious and it’s one of the things that we have no clarity, we don’t know really what happened and there’s no closure. Over here. QUESTION: If you could look into the White House over the last 27 years with, well, some sort of, as if you had x-ray vision, and see and listen to what the presidents since Nixon have said, would you expect to find anything substantially less horrifying or of concern than you did find? WOODWARD: Absolutely a fair and important question. You don’t know what you don’t know, of course, but in the case, and I spent a long – go immediately to President Clinton, in reporting the agenda, reporting the book, "The Choice," I spent a lot of time talking to people in the White House and Nixon was a hater, Clinton is not a hater. As people say, he’s a lover. That if you find in moments of rage, which he has, he goes after people close to him or himself, and at one point he said, and I reported this in the agenda, somebody’s asking him about his enemies and he says, I don’t even remember the people I’m supposed to hate. I think that’s true. I think in the case of the other presidents you would, whether you liked them or disliked them or agree or disagree, the thing you never heard in the Nixon White House, the dog that really didn’t bark – and I’m waiting for one of these tapes to come out; you never hear Nixon saying, "Let’s do what’s good, let’s do what’s right." It’s always, "Let’s settle the score, let’s get some political advantage." I don’t see that in the characters of the presidents, certainly of Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter or Reagan or Bush or Clinton, so I think it’s unique. If you, any of you have a chance to go listen to the tapes, I tell you it is truly chilling. It’s what you would expect in the back room of a bar in some city of a bunch of small-time pols. It is small and it is not just the language of vengeance and anger and hate, it is the action of, "Okay, let’s set this in motion to do the following." So absent the page from the Clinton White House or the Bush White House and something comparable, I think Nixon is unique. Yes, ma’am. QUESTION: Twenty-five years, around 1973, there were a bunch of student journalists in Stonybrook where I went, state university [who were] very inspired about what happened and the Watergate case, and many of them went on to be journalists. I would say by personal count 15 or 20 in that group around the newspaper that went on to a career in journalism and we were very excited and we tried to emulate, to some extent, not that we would have done a story like that, but the whole atmosphere was with us. When you went to a place like Newsday, they had the investigative reporting units, had investigative reporting units, that was the climate of the time. I just wonder if you could comment to the young student journalists who are here now on the current, you’ve commented on it a bit before, what can they do, what are some of the, perhaps, prescriptions that you would have, is it to go on the Internet in some new kind of media or some other way to get back at more digging, taking more time because the current economics some times prevent it. WOODWARD: Well, I mean, what you’re saying is that journalism has changed, which indeed it has. And I think the bottom line for journalists is can you present quality information that’s new and fresh to your viewers or readers or listeners. It will rise or fall by that. If the information is new, high quality, well sourced, well documented, and relevant to people’s lives, we’re going to be fine. If it’s jabber and nonsense and some of this stuff that’s on talk radio and talk television and so forth, I mean, people may listen to that and look at that for entertainment. I think people are pretty serious at heart. Most people are. And they dismiss that. And if we absorb that into the newspaper culture, we’re finished. QUESTION: This is just a quick follow-up question and in the pressure of time in some of these places to compete with CNN, do you see that as perhaps– WOODWARD: Okay, the pressure of time is real. I once said in an interview with somebody at CBS, I said something that a lot of reporters have put up, the quote, on their desks. And it says the following, "All good work is done in defiance of management." And there is a truth in that. That when somebody says you can’t have time for that, you just have to say no, I need time, I must have time, you have to show progress, but you can do it. Now my daughter got a hold of that sign and put it up in her room and I said what the hell is that doing there and she said around here, you’re management. Yes? QUESTION: You say that a major problem in the past 25 years has been official denial. However, as your colleagues, David Broder and Haynes Johnson, know in their 1995 book, "The System," in recent years the focus on political infighting has shifted attention away from how issues affect the people toward how Washington operates. Now my question is, if the press is supposed to act as this bridge between government and the people, how does this focus on the players as you seem to have done in "The Agenda," in "The Brethren," in "The Choice." How does this help draw attention from the players towards the policies? How does this affect– WOODWARD: Well, it’s often about the players, but the players make policy. Take the Supreme Court or the White House or the Congress. You may be writing about individuals in some of the political fights, but they’re determining – so I have no problem in explaining the inside workings of the Supreme Court and saying okay, they decided Roe v. Wade, the abortion case. Let’s find out what was really going on, what the stakes were, what the debate was, what the hidden agenda of some of the justices was and so forth and I think that all is relevant. Yes? QUESTION: I have two questions because I don’t think you’ll answer the first one. When will we find out who Deep Throat was, is my first question? WOODWARD: Not tonight. QUESTION: That wasn’t my question. My question was when? WOODWARD: Not tonight. Not tonight are you going to find out when. QUESTION: Second question. I am somewhat concerned about the future of investigative journalism and given "My Last Book," that you referred to as a segue to that, I’m concerned about the takeover by the Murdochs, the Disneys and what’s happening at the L.A. Times in terms of the financial concerns of the paper. What do you think is the future of investigative journalism vis-a-vis the financial– WOODWARD: I share your deep concern about it, too, and I think we need more independent news organizations that are not part of businesses that do other things than news. Happily I work at the Washington Post which is owned by the Washington Post Company and they do news and they know the importance of it and they have proven that making a quality product pays, that it is good business to have a good product. And some of these people, not naming anyone, who come along from other businesses and look at news and say somehow if we can take the quality out of it and devote less time and space to it, we’re going to make it better, I think is nonsense and I think we’re going to pay a great price and I hope people who are considering such moves will look at organizations that have made high quality news very profitable. Yes? QUESTION: There was a book that came out last year on impeachment that’s gone relatively unnoticed. It was called "Without Honor," by Jerry Zeifman, and he was the chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings. And the book’s subtitle is "Crimes of Camelot and the Impeachmant of President Nixon." Now in the book he outlines a series of allegations against people like Bernard Nusbaum and Hillary Rodham and other justice department lawyers that they blocked, they obstructed the true causes and nature– WOODWARD: Allegedly in this book. I have not examined all of it. I’ve looked at some of it, though. QUESTION: I encourage you to do so because she makes some interesting comments about your background and what your role in all of it was and I’d be interested in knowing what– WOODWARD: Go ahead, what are those. If anybody’s an open book, it’s me. Go ahead. QUESTION: I don’t think Mr. Colodny, the co-author who wrote "Silent Coup," would agree with that. Do you want to include out of your comments whether or not you had an intelligence background in the Navy, whether or not you were placed in this role? You seemed to come on to the scene very timely, your relationship to, no, I’m just telling– WOODWARD: No, no, this is a fair question. There are, that book, the book, "Silent Coup," I’m intimately familiar with, which has been just discredited up and down and the allegation is that somehow when I was in the Navy I worked in Naval intelligence which I did not, which there are records of. I worked in Naval communications. I had nothing to do with that. There is an allegation, I mean, this tells you about how some reporters, these guys– QUESTION: But Jerry Zeifman isn’t a reporter. He was a liberal Democrat. WOODWARD: Okay, I’m sorry. I have not read that book about me. I’m just saying if you go to the records you would find I was not in Naval intelligence and I did not brief people at the White House. QUESTION: More important for this group, I want to know what role Hillary Rodham played in blocking Watergate. I mean, he makes a very convincing argument that as a House Judiciary lawyer, she was part of the team that didn’t want the truth about the Kennedy assassination to emerge and so she was– WOODWARD: This, I’m not familiar with those details. Hillary Rodham worked on the House Judiciary Committee that investigated the impeachment of Nixon and I’m sure you’re not suggesting that that was blocked because it went forward– QUESTION: Yes, Jerry Zeifman who was the House Judiciary– WOODWARD: Okay, let’s talk about that book. I mean, I’m not familiar with it, the audience seems not to be either. Yes? QUESTION: A follow-up on– WOODWARD: Are you Jerry Zeifman? I wanted a little truth in labeling, that’s all. Go ahead. QUESTION: A follow up on the prior question. Last week there was a riveting program which was narrated by Studs Turkel that had to do with investigative reporting, but that by and large, indicted the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, ABC, the major media and documented this for both suppression and distortion of information. And indicated with– WOODWARD: What information did we suppress? QUESTION: Well, for example, on the New York Times, there was a series on the insurance industry which apparently was suppressed because it was felt that this was hurting some of the advertisers. That was one specific example. WOODWARD: How about the Post, what did we suppress? QUESTION: On the MacNeil/Lehrer– WOODWARD: We’re not well known for suppressing things– QUESTION: I don’t remember all the details. On the MacNeil/Lehrer show there was a program on Ward Valley and the guy who was asked to do it indicated that it came out totally distorted. Anyway, the point is that there was a series of these and then the board, the interlocking boards of corporate America and each of the newspapers and of the broadcast media were published, and the implication was that there were serious impingement upon the news because of these and I wonder what your comment is. WOODWARD: Well, I don’t know the specifics and I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about. I mean, there are sometimes people who think something should be a story and it turns out not to be. I get in the mail, regularly, packets of information, people phone me, people write in and say I have a story bigger than Watergate. And often it turns out that the bigger-than-Watergate is of the following variety: When you get them on the phone and the heavy breathing stops and say what’s this about and say well, you won’t believe it, it’s so much bigger than Watergate, well what is it. My father’s social security check was late two months in a row, that it’s of that variety. You’re getting back up. QUESTION: Are you suggesting that GE has nothing to do with what happens on ABC? WOODWARD: NBC. NBC. NBC. No, there certainly is– QUESTION: There they did show a specific person who is committed to Good Morning America or one of them who was pulled off because she was critical of GE. WOODWARD: Yeah, if that happened, that should not happen and it is a big worry, as I said earlier, about these corporations who were in other business getting in the news business and thinking that somehow you can manage the news or suppress it. I do not favor that, but I didn’t see that program, I’m sorry. Yes sir? QUESTION: I have a few questions– WOODWARD: A few? QUESTION: Just a few. WOODWARD: Let’s do one. QUESTION: Well, okay, then, most, I’m going to ask this for a reason. I was listening to 60 Minutes recently and they said a majority of the American people feel that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy and I’d like to know how you feel about that and secondly, the relationship between Kennedy and Nixon started out as one of relative amicable basis and over the years– WOODWARD: Well, they ran for president against each other in ’60 and that tends to dull the friendship. American politics is a contact sport. On the Kennedy assassination, there are all kinds – I’ve looked at some of it, I haven’t looked at it extensively. I don’t believe it was a conspiracy. I’ve not seen the evidence of that. There are very dramatic inconsistencies, when you put the spotlight on certain parts of it, things that cannot be answered. This is happening with Watergate, where people come along and they say, well, it turned out to be a moment in history and let’s look at how it occurred and then somebody gets hold of some cockamamie information that I might have been in Naval intelligence and I might have known somebody who knew somebody and they build this web and in the case of myself, it has no connection with reality. And lots of these things involving the Kennedy assassination just lead to inconsistencies and unanswered questions. Often many of those are very dramatic, even stunning, but if you know from your own life there are always things that you can’t figure out or that you can’t put together or that are unanswered. Any time anyone calls me about the Kennedy assassination, I say bring me evidence about who else was involved. I don’t want another story about inconsistencies and contradictions. Let me go over here. Yes, sir? QUESTION: In your remarks, you focused in part on the fabric of denials, . . . and lies in the Clinton White House. Arguably, what’s even more important is something that you described at great length in "The Agenda" and that’s the cynicism and lack of principle underlying the formulation of public policy in the Clinton administration. Do you have any comments on that? WOODWARD: Well, you know, "The Agenda" is about Clinton’s first 18 months in office when he came out and how he made his economic plan that, interestingly enough, and you need to give him credit for this, that led to the good economy that we now are all enjoying. We are. And it is a story of the making of sausage which is often not pretty, and there was a lot of uncertainty and doubt. A lot of people read the book like you and were very critical of Clinton. A lot of people have read it and said, well, he’s new, he’ll learn. Some people would argue that he has learned. Again, you do this as a reporter, as a neutral observer, believe it or not. Only by doing it as a neutral observer can I go back to those people and say, okay, now I’m working on a story on the following. Will you help me? Can I get some information on this and so forth? And you maintain your credibility by doing that. I think you can read "The Agenda" a thousand ways and people have read it 100,000 ways. Yes, sir? QUESTION: On a different note, I’m just really interested to know if you could sum up your motivation or your drive throughout your life to do the work that you do and whether or not that has evolved or changed through your experiences? WOODWARD: Are you my psychoanalyst? It’s a great question. And I could attempt to answer it. It might be easier to describe the creation of the universe, though, for me because, you know, what the motive is just real briefly, I think I kind of got started in journalism when I was the janitor in my father’s law office. And I, the first week I was there, I would go in at night and sweep up and clean up the cigarette butts and the cigar butts and it’s when I learned to hate smokers because 90 percent of the mess was from the smokers. But I looked at the papers on my father’s desk the first week. The second week I looked at the papers in the drawer. The third week I looked at the papers on his partner’s desk. And the fourth week I looked in the drawers of his partner. And by the summer I was up in the attic looking through the disposed files. I was raised in a small town, Wheaton, Illinois, outside of Chicago, in the Bible belt, very fundamentalist area. It seemed, it was like "Winesburg, Ohio": Everything is fine, everyone is perfect, everyone is moral. All you had to do was go to the attic of my father’s law office and look at the disposed files – and they were in alphabetical order and I looked up all my classmates and their families, and there were IRS audits or divorces or grand juries that did not lead to indictment and it was a cold shower to see that the disposed files contained the secret lives of many of the people in this perfect town and showed they weren’t perfect. So in a sense, it was a very important lesson and journalism is, one of its goals is to find the disposed files on people and what’s underneath and so that’s kind of a short answer to your good psychiatric hour question. Yes, sir? QUESTION: Yes, in January of this year the Clinton White House released a 330-page report entitled something like the Conspiracy Commerce and the news media food chain. This documented the British control of the attacks on the Clinton White House, i.e. all the stories that you mentioned, Paula Jones, Whitewater, and you know, my question to you is given that this is actually the reality of the situation, because I am with Lyndon Larouche who has exposed that this is the operation going on – WOODWARD: Well, I’ve looked at this – QUESTION: Why are you involved in this? WOODWARD: Am I involved in this? QUESTION: Why are you involved in this? WOODWARD: Involved in what? QUESTION: In the attack on the president. WOODWARD: Well, I am involved in reporting on the president and the job of the reporter is to look at all of these things. I’ve looked at that White House document and there are some things that started out in the so-called conspiracy media and made their way in to the mainstream media, but the issues that I’ve discussed and reported on, there are legitimate questions raised and I think that part of the job of the reporter – you don’t get loved in this business, to put it simply, and you go ask hard questions of people. I’m able to do that, people will talk to me and give answers. Sometimes those answers are adequate, sometimes they are not. Sir? QUESTION: In an earlier reply you seemed to have great trust in the American people and their seriousness, but I see the American people in elections changing on 30-second commercials rather than position papers and I see the media catering to that. Instead of just reporting on the news, you can vote on each issue, you can vote on how trials end up. What gives you this confidence that the Washington Post is going to win out over "Hard Copy"? WOODWARD: Oh, that’s a great question. I guess natural optimism and a sense that – a sense in traveling all around the country and all around the world, seeing people, that basically most people have good sense and can sort things out. And I think people look at "Hard Copy" for entertainment. There was something I want to talk about real quickly in the New York Times on Saturday, a news analysis after Senator Thompson suspended his hearings on campaign finance and the summary of the news analysis and the news analysis inside the paper, but the summary on the front page also said that one of the reasons these hearings were supposedly were a failure, which I do not agree with, I think they added volumes of information about the campaign finance system and the behavior of Democrats and Republicans, the New York Times said one of the reasons these failed is that the hearings failed to "score a direct hit on President Clinton." And I read it and kind of gasped for our business and thought why, is this the Christians and the lions, that nothing happens unless somebody gets eaten, that you have to score a direct hit? That’s not what congressional investigations are about and if somebody would take the time to look at the documents and sort through the information that investigation put out, it adds to our knowledge about the whole process, the individual behavior. It is a textbook investigation in many ways, but the entertainment "Hard Copy" value, the failure to score a direct hit, makes people think, well, this is a sporting event, and no one got hit. Well, that’s absolutely crazy and wacky. When I see things like that, in the New York Times which I have a great deal of respect for, then I lose some of my natural optimism and say that the newspapers are going the way of "Hard Copy" and in thinking in terms of who’s up, who’s down, who scored some sort of direct hit. I mean that’s not, believe me, that’s not what congressional hearings are about. Last question here from you, sir. QUESTION: Well, my question is why you think people should believe your sincerity. In going after Clinton, as was mentioned earlier, I mean, one of the worst episodes we had in this last decade was the George Bush presidency. There’s this whole Iran/Contra, crack cocaine operation that has come up– WOODWARD: I missed that. The Iran/Contra crack cocaine? QUESTION: Yes, this was, there was this series of articles– WOODWARD: Oh, in the San Jose Mercury, which they kind of retracted. QUESTION: It was Bush, it was Oliver North, and it was, you have this Paula Jones case, for instance, came directly from the Hollinger Corporation press, the London Telegraph and then it came into the American– WOODWARD: Let me try, can I try to answer this because I see where you’re heading. If you were to go back and look at the things that I wrote about the Bush presidency and what went on there, the thing I sided on was Bush’s failed economic policies where Nixon said I don’t need to read that asshole to know that. That when you were a reporter, you were writing, you were trying to explain what goes on in Republican and Democratic administrations and I think the Washington Post and lots of news organizations do that, and you are not going to be loved. In the case of Paula Jones, my answer on the Paula Jones case is it’s one of the very few things in American politics where we really don’t want to know the answer. QUESTION: The reason why this thing is being brought up, what the effect it’s having is to weaken the presidency at a time when the world is not in great financial shape like you were trying to say. The world is in very dire situation. WOODWARD: Now, that’s a fair point, but remember the Supreme Court of the United States said that the Paula Jones’ case can go forward, they looked at all of the legal issues and the tests and they said, this shall proceed while Clinton is in office. So that, you know, it’s not as if somebody just came into– QUESTION: Well, just because the Supreme Court said something doesn’t necessarily– WOODWARD: No, it doesn’t, but it does determine the law of the land. And on that note, the authority of the Supreme Court, thank you. [Applause] |
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