Transcripts For CSPAN3 40th Anniversary Of Nixon Resignation 20140811

Democratic party for the presidency through espionage and sabotage that would be the weakest opponent of Richard Nixon. When we wrote that story, we thought, ah, now it makes sense. Now after 40 years it all makes much more sense about this huge criminal enterprise. And, ken, you have probably we were talking about this earlier. We have probably spent more hours listening to more president ial tapes than any human being in america. Youve been immersed in not just nixon tapes but lbj takes. Whats your take, leaving aside your 10yearold self, on what we knew now, what we know now about nixon that we didnt understand at the moment of his resignation . First off, i just want to talk about how honored and what a surreal experience it is for my former 10yearold self to be sitting here between woodward and bernstein talking about watergate with all of you. But that said, in between then and now, i have listened to an awful lot of tapes. And i think the biggest thing that ive learned about watergate from the tapes is that nixon had little choice but to launch a coverup. Once the watergate burglars who are rested and the investigation went to the socalled masterminds of that breakin, nixon had to obstruct the 2icx3r investigation because the investigation of the crimes would lead back to his own. The white house hired liddy to i be part of this secret illegal unconstitutional special Investigations Unit that nixon ran out of the white house. He had put it together, we now know, for illegal reasons. One to engineer a breakin at the brookings institution. The think tank not too far from here, to gather information about his enemies in the Antiwar Movement in the Democratic Party through illegal processes, through the grand jury investigations of the pentagon papers leak and use that information illegally to destroy his critics. So people say, you know, its not the crime. Its the coverup. Nixon had too much criminality to really allow any sort of investigation to go forward. And why dont you just take a moment to tell us about the chennault affair and what that was and the role that played in the criminality that resulted in watergate. Which is your new book. Which is for sale outside. Thank you, all. The chennault affair occurred during the closing days of the 1968 president ial campaign. A close race between nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Less than a week before election day, Lyndon Johnson ordered a halt to the bombing of the north vietnam. The public knew that in return for that, he would get the peace talks to begin involving the north vietnamese and the South Vietnamese will be able to take part in those. He had two military conditions as well, which were that the north vietnamese had to respect the Demilitarized Zone dividing vietnam and refrain from shelling civilian populations in South Vietnam. The chennault affair was the Nixon Campaigns attempt, a successful one, to make sure that those peace talks didnt start before election day. Nixon feared the beginning of peace talks would help Hubert Humphrey and possibly ruin nixons last chance at the presidency. So through a republican fundraiser named anna chennault, the Nixon Campaign transmitted messages to saigon saying, hold on, were going to win. Well do better by you once were elected. Lyndon johnson found out about what chennault was up to for a variety of reasons. The National Security agency was intercepting cables from the south Vietnamese Embassy to saigon. The cia had a bug in the president of South Vietnams office, and imagine that. What a surprise. When i said it a few years ago, there would be a few gasps. Now we know. And Lyndon Johnson had the fbi put a wiretap on the phone in the south Vietnamese Embassy. November 2nd, three days before the 1968 election, and chennault calls up the ambassador of South Vietnam and says, i have a message from my boss. Hold on. Were going to win. So johnson knows that the republicans are interfering with this peace talks but he doesnt have the goods on nixon. He calls the Senate Minority leader everett dirksen. Goes into a tirade. Sort of implies he has the goods on nixon. The next day he talks to nixon and nixon kind of gives him an evasive assurances that he would never do that. And make a long story short, nixon never really knew how much the federal government had collected with regard to the sabotage on the bombing hall. J. Edgar hoover at his meeting following the 68 election said to him, not only did we have a tap on the south Vietnamese Embassy phone. We had a tap on anna chennaults phone with the fbi requested, and a bug on your cam pan plane for the last two weeks of the campaign. So nixon if that had been true, then any interference that nixon personally did with the peace talks would have been in the fbi file. So nixon takes office obsessed with getting his hands on the file. He has h. R. Haldeman work on it. Houston says, weve looked at the bombing. It doesnt make johnson look good. Doesnt make us look good. Huston comes up with a strange story in which he says theres a complete bombing halt report with all the documents from the time at the brookings institution. And it was prepared by Clark Cliffords defense department. His top aides. And this is exactly the sort of thing we need. Probably going way longer than i should. If you want to know the rest, read the book. There, thats fair. Elizabeth, one of your dispatches you wrote about a time in which the unfolding story, quote, began to take on the characteristics of a russian novel. Someone we had never heard of suddenly emerged as an agent in activities that were almost inconceivable. And that really resonated for me because i was always unable at the time to keep any of these characters straight but, of course, the main character was Richard Nixon. And complex and impenetrable and not understandable but youve done about as good a job as anyone of trying to understand the kind of tortured mind that led us to this national crisis. And to look at nixons activities even post watergate as a way of interesting him. So tell us a little bit about nixon and what compelled him to do these things from your point of view. Some talk about when did watergate begin . Was born in this little town in yorbalinda, california, where he was born. I think he was trapped in his own personality, in his own hangups. And hangup is too light. But i dont do any psychobabble. This is a man who all his life felt that everybody else was getting a break and they all had more advantages than he did and he had to show them that he was going to be he went out for football. He couldnt run or throw. He didnt care how much he got banged up. High school, he rebelled against the most important distinct classy fraternity and started his own. He was always resenting and feeling that others were having advantage over him, and he had to show them. And he was going to get even in some way. Its not hard to see how this evolved when you get into the oval office and you have all of this that you are controlling. By then it wasnt he confused political opponents with enemies. His idea of Foundation President s or University President s or Newspaper Publishers or anybody who wasnt for him, not his opponent or his critic, his enemy. And he felt you could use the instruments of government. And watch president ial candidates or certain governors. Do they use the instruments carefully with boundaries . With these people, there were no boundaries. They said somebody testified that they put the houston plan away. They didnt. It was never really put away. The breakin at the watergate was one in a series. But the coverup had to happen because things that happened before. They had broken into this is the big one. The psychiatrist. Daniel ellsberg who leaked the pentagon papers. They went berserk on the pentagon papers. He ordered the study n these two people had worked on the study. Their understanding was that two chapters were still sitting in the brookings institution. And you hear nixon on the tape saying go in there and blow it up and get that safe. And fire bomb the god damn place he says. I want it done on a fevery basis, he says at one point. Go in and get the files. He is one of my favorites because he was always doing something extremely stupid. Theres questions whether he got stopped by a guard. They had no files. They had no papers, nothing but these things grew up in their minds and they had to act on them. When the burglars were caught in the watergate, what haldeman and nixon talked about was, oh, theres all those other things they did. And it was really worried. Nixon was more worried, the way i read what they said and talked to people about the breakin at the psychiatrists office. Nixon had standards. He knew that was such a blatant violation of the constitutional right. Fourth amendment. Right to privacy in your home and place. To go in and get somebodys psychiatric files, well, once again, there were no files. One thing that might have saved us all is the burglars, the cubans, the plumbers. They messed up everything they did. Thats how they got caught. They actually had been in the Watergate Office building as you two know, memorial day weekend before then. They got in but they put the tap on the phone wrong and the pictures were blurry. They took it to john dean and John Mitchell, the chairman of the Reelection Committee is supposed to have said, i doubt thats the word he used. Go back in. Now i dont know how stupid you have to be to go back in. The tape comes out you put it up. They tried four times, okay . The first time they were going to they gave a dinner. They did a banquet in the watergate. They were in the building and got caught in an elevator. For the night. Then they got up there and, oh, we dont have something to undo this lock. So one of the cubans went down to miami to get the right thing to do the lock. Then they got in it was like the marx brother goes to a constitutional but my real point was it wasnt a constitutional crisis. Was deadly serious. It was nervous hilarity while this is going on because you couldnt believe it. What was going to happen next and who were these characters. But it was whether a president will be held accountable to the courts, to the congress and really to the people. And they did everything they did they could to not only avoid that but to defy the other institutions. And the other part of it which carl talked about was to interfere with the inner workings of the Opposition Party to try to maneuver who their nominee is going to be. And i exaggerate not when i wrote these are bully boys. Not quite the ragstown fire but in that area of immorality. Was a very scary and still is, the system where there was a lot of cowardice that went on. Also a lot of greatness. It was not clear, really, until the end. You can look back and say, obviously, he was going to get caught but it wasnt obvious at all. I want to pick up from that point. And imagine a kind of thought experiment of what if we had Richard Nixon today. What the watergate story would have been like. And i want to do this in two stages. Im just going to throw it open to anybody who has thoughts about that. The first is, you guys might have noticed, in fact, the room that you are sitting in used to have presses. We literally in the good old days when had newspapers, hot literally off the presses down here from upstairs to the fifth floor newsroom. Times have changed. Journalism has changed. What would watergate have looked like in an age of twitter and the internet and 24 7 cable news . Would it have simply evolved more quickly or would it have evolved differently . You hear some of the folks here during the watergate era talk about the good old days when they couldnt wait to get to thr end of the driveway to pick up the Washington Post. You make it sound like were dinosaurs. We are dinosaurs. Were still here. The dinosaurs arent. To get the latest chapter in this unfolding story. C just talk for a minute, whoever wants to tackle this, what it might have been like if watergate were happening today. Let me try one thing, and i dont believe that if history works incident. Theres an aspect of the journalistic part of this that gets ignored too often. Yes, we have twitter, and yes if this story were covered today there would be a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. There would be we had the advantage in this building. And the support of maybe the greatest puppet show of our time and we were not out there alone. We had an institution that systemically was brave, courageous and conservative. About what would go in the paper. And we had to be right. We made some mistakes, but we had to be right. And i think in todays atmosphere, you dont need watergate to see how much information out there every day it gets an the evening news. Its on twitter. ]vvenylc6o5kwcyj its no longer predominantly for the best obtainable version of the truth. Its for partisan and ideological ammunition to reinforce what they already believe. Their political beliefs, religious beliefs, ideologies. So we have to look at a different country where the citizens themselves are not open in the same way to the truth that they were at the time. Real quickly on that, obviously, the internet environment is driven by impatience and speed and when we were working on this story, carl and i could work for two or three weeks on one story. We would write it on things some of you may remember. Typewriters. And there would be paper that produced six copies and the drafts would go to the editors. They would look at it. They would say, well, what about this or get more sources. Work harder. Dig into it. Ben bradley, the ultimate editor was a carl is right. Certainly probably the greatest editor of the last century, but it wasnt just for what hed put in the paper but what hed keep out of the paper. And there was a kind of patience and real quickly, tell the story about Catherine Graham who is the publisher and the owner in january 73 after carl and i had written this series of stories that essentially said, as carl points out, is a criminal enterprise in the nixon white house. One of the problems we had, most people did not believe it. It was thought inconceivable that nixon or the people had conducted this espionage and sabotage operation that there was all this illegal money. 700,000 in a safe in cash for undercover activities. At the time that was lots of money. And so Catherine Graham invited me up for lunch one day. It was a day when carl had to go to a funeral. And i remember walking in. She had supported the publication of these stories. We knew her a little bit. And she when we sat down, she started asking me questions about watergate and blew my mind with what she had followed and read. I think at one point she read something about watergate in the Chicago Tribune and i remember thinking, why is she reading the damn Chicago Tribune for . No one in chicago does. Worlds greatest newspaper. I read as a child. And she had absorbed all of this and it was a kind of management style of mind on. She had intellectual control of what was going on but hands off. She didnt tell us how to report, the editors how to edit. And then at the end, she, like a great ceo, she had the killer questions. She said, well, when is all of the truth going to come out . When are we going to find out what really happened . Or when are we going to find out that weve got it right. And i said to carl and i was there was an active coverup going on there was not a strong investigation to say the least by the federal government that they were paying the watergate burglars for their silence. The answer is never. I remember looking across that luncheon table and she had this expression on her face of she said the following. Never dont tell me never. I left the lunch a motivated employee. Let me add something. But she was not im sorry this is a long anecdote, but it captures the essence of what she was doing and what she said with that was, look, we are in the newspaper business. We are if it is a moment of peril and were not believed and one of the secret strategies of the Nixon Campaign was to challenge the very valuable fcc tv licenses that the Washington Post company owned, but she said, look. Keep at it. This is the business we are in. And i was 29 at the time. I remember walking out thinking, its great to have a boss who understands the business were in, is supportive of it and it doesnt get wobbly when the pressure in the denunciations were visited upon us as they were. Carl quickly and then elizabeth. Hes made the point of what was at stake with the licenses. Theres another part ill tell later on. These guys did a fantastic job of summoning the tenor at the time. You had the luxury of observing and reporting an a weekly basis which seems amazing now. I want to but nobody has really done the thought experiment that i asked you to do. Of imagining in the age of in the age of twitter, would this have all come crashing down and nobody would have been able to be diligent enough to get it out or what would have happened . I think im very glad we didnt have that. Now we have what seems like a stately pace but then you had the morning paper, the radio, an awful lot of, did you hear . Did you hear . You wont believe this. Theyve lost two tapes. They erased 18 1 2 minutes. Something was always going on. But at least it wasnt being made excessive amount about. I think it was carl who said, the country came along. That didnt just happen. And theres a very underreported, underestimated chapter of this. What happened when they the question went to the house of representatives. It was this is very important to understand. It was a long time before impeachment . You dont impeach president s. Nobody had been impeached since Andrew Johnson after the civil war and then he wasnt convicted in a sense. This was a really rare, frightening thing to talk about. Remove a president from office . These people, they are talking about removing people from office. Its a whole different thing. They very much cheapened and undermined the rather, very important constitutional concept. And it wasnt just about crimes. What the constitution says is, you can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. That house judiciary led by peter. He had just been elected. Short italian from new jersey. He must be mobbed up, but he never was. As a jersey girl, im trying to think whether i want to take offense at that or not argue with the premise. That was white house stuff. They put that junk out there. What happened was this ordinary group of people in this Judiciary Committee and they hired a Committee Counsel john dore. Then Bobby Kennedy was civil rights hero. Nobody could question his fairness. And another person named Francis Obrien who was 27 and was rodinos administrative assistant. Nobody knew how to do this. There was a book. But it didnt say, how do you impeach a president . Nobody knew. So, look, for the country to accept it, they kept their eye on the ball. It could not be partisan and it cannot appear to come from one way or another wing. They pushed it out. The very far right that way and the very far left members over that way. Sorry, were not going to have something about the cambodia bombing because thats a political question and were not going to impeach on a political question. And they took a long time. They had hearings, and thats what brought the country around. By the time that committee voted, people thought, yes, this is fair. And it came from the committee. There were some democrats and republicans who formed a coalition at the core, at the center of this committee and if you listen to john dore, you know this was no lynch mob guy. It was carefully done. Interesting communications that went on there, ruth, which was mr. Obrien who thought of everything at 27. I dont want cameras, all the television cameras. I want all the people to be able to see this. He made the networks go outside the room and open little holes in the wall. Open holes in the wall. They could put their cameras through. Then to go back and try to remember that it was just us and you and the country watching on Television Without these instruments and things in between. It had a very interesting effect. But you knew they were serious. They voted the first article of impeachment on a saturday neat. Cspan is running these now. Its fascinating. Very slow. Very deliberate. Nobody was i went out on the white house lawn of the capitol and cried. It was such a dramatic thing. There was no, oh, we got him. Article 2, this is important. Youre right. There was criminal enterprise. But they went over and above that and said the president is accountable for these things. You do not have to prove. Howard bakers question was a minimizing question. He was trying to narrow the question. He was working with the white house. I hate to disillusion you but thats the truth. If he says you have to prove the president knew and when he knew it, probably we still dont know what he knew. It doesnt matter. We know that this all happened under his aegis with people he hired and he set a tone and had goals of destroying the enemy and there were no boundaries. Thats how it happened. This was all drawn together and the public accepted it. Nixon would have been impeached had they not found this little piece of taper later. Let me pick up on that, if i may. And thats about the republicans and about the difference today. That is in fact, my next question. When i say the system worked and where it didnt work. Had to be a smoking gun which was absurd. Pardon me . That was also because the republicans didnt really want to have to vote early on. No, at the end. Let me just go through what the republicans did and how heroic many republicans were. First of all, the Senate Watergate committee was and think of this today. It was created by a 770 vote of the senate. Imagine the 770 vote in the senate today for anything. Post office. The post office. You couldnt get a post office. Then you had a judge in the district u. S. District court who had been appointed by a republican president. Who had been reading our stories and forced in his courtroom from the watergate burglars their confession that they, indeed there was a coverup going on. But they were being paid for their silence. And then you have the Watergate Committee in which republicans and shes right. Howard baker originally was a kind of white house plant almost on the committee. As the evidence accumulated, he, too, was open. Not mere ideology or party. He was open to the truth. And then when nixon would not turn over his tapes and the saturday night massacre occurred and he fired the attorney general of the United States. And the Deputy Attorney general resigned because they wouldnt carry out nixons orders on the tapes he was trying to with hold. The question eventually went to the Supreme Court of the United States. Nixon expected the chief justice was going to save him. And yet whatever reluctance berger may have had, he also was intent that there be a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court that nobody, including the president of the United States was above the law. N then at the very end when nixon did not want to resign, a delegation of republicans, this is after everything is known and nixon thinks that he might be able to survive and win in a senate trial where you needed twothirds, a vote of the senate to convict, Barry Goldwater, 1964 nominee of his party, the great conservative, leads a delegation of republicans to the white house and sits down across from nixon and nixon asked Barry Goldwater how many votes do you think i have in the senate . And goldwater looks at him and says, well, you dont have mine, mr. President. And indicates hes going to losd and thats when nixon really, w realizes he cannot survive and will resign. So this is the ultimate thought experiment, right . Its not knowable but its never stopped us from speculating before. What if we had watergate today and the age of darrell issa and ted cruz instead of Barry Goldwater. There was Newt Gingrich in 1996. Weve been there. And that was the stepping that was when impeachment got cheapened and ruined. But that was but impeachment cheapened and ruined whatever you think about president clintons activities and what level that they rose to. If we had a world in which there was nixonian conduct, do you think the political parties, whatever the Opposition Party is, could summon the statesmanship and outrage . Heres the point. Peter rodino made it possible for the republicans to be by push aside political questions. And departisanizing it. It didnt just happen. He had to make enough of them comfortable in voting for the articles of impeachment. By narrowing them, keeping them inarguably the case and the big one was to say, you dont have to prove he was in on that crime or this one. He was accountable. That was article two, which was the big one. I agree with you. This wasnt just valor on the part of the republicans. They didnt want to go through this trial. Nixon still had a base, 30, 35 . Something in there. And they were very strong for him. You had the midterms coming up. Theres always a midterm. And they were terrified, rightly so, because the republicans just got washed out to sea. 70something watergate babies coming into the house as democrats. So there was greatness and cowardice. It was a mixture of not wanting to really confront it. Just get it out of here. A lot of republicans talked to me that way as i kept my journal. I just talked to people all the time and then divide it up into sections, seasons and periods. They just wanted to be done with it. They hated it. Theyd go home. How are you going to vote . And his people would turn up. It was not the obamacare of the time, but it was unpleasant and they were scared and just wanted to get him out of there to save their own skins. This is not a knowable the answer to this question isnt knowable so you may imagine with the rest of us. Whats central and unique to watergate are the tapes. And carl and i spent some time looking at transcripts, listening to tapes, taking the work that ken hughes did. Has done at the miller center. And what expelled nixon from office, carl is right, was the republicans, but they listened to those tapes and heard the transcripts and there was a kind of rage in nixon. There was a sense of he said it in a very selfrevealing moment the day he resigned. That speech elizabeth was talking about which was very strange. I mean, he was sweating. He had called all of his senior staff, cabinet officers and friends into the east room. Had his this was published this was broadcast on Live National television. And nixons closest friends were worried that nixon was going to be the first person to go stark raving mad and bonkers on Live National television. I mean, he was just talking about his mother and his father. But at the end, in a moment of clarity, he kind of waved his hand like this is why i called you here. And he said the following. He said, always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you dont win unless you hate them and then you destroy yourself. And thats exactly what happened. The piston in the nixon presidency is revealed particularly on the tapes is hate. It is the driving force. And he realized at that moment hes leaving that the hate in hating others he destroyed himself. And it is precisely what happened in this case. Did you have anything talked about that later, too. I want to shift to the second half of whatever the motivation was, the baker formulation, which is why does what we now know about watergate matter. In other words, the question i want to think about is this. Is watergate a matter when i say mere historical curiosity, its one of the central episodes of American History. Or does it also tell us something about the political system Going Forward . So, carl and bob, you guys wrote that watergate was a brazen and daring assault led by nixon himself against the heart of american democracy, the constitution, our system of free so anybody in the panel can take off on this. Do you see this as an event thats capable of repetition or was nixon a one off, a figure si bizarrely gifted and tragically flawed that we dont have to worry about his like again for some of the reasons of hatred. The tapes are so important. When i was doing one of my books on president obama, i went in to interview obama and broad two tape recorders, because i didnt want to have an 18 1 2 minute gap. His press secretary said, yeah, tapes, oh, you know, we know a lot about tapes. [ laughter ] i reminded them that if you go to the next on library, they have a little doll house mockup of the oval office and it says, press a button here and a red light will go on everywhere theres a microphone. Press the red light and the oval Office Lights up like a christmas tree. There were five maybe six microphones on nixons desk. There were microphones in the chandeliers in the oval office. So i mentioned this to obama. Obama said, i better get somebody to check those chandeliers. [ laughter ] but then he said he turned to his press secretary and he said, can you imagine if everything we said in here was taped . My thought was, i hope so. [ laughter ] and if you get to this its exactly the right question that ruth is asking about, where does this fit in . And it clearly is unique. What is ken is the expert on the tapes. What always struck me is nixon as elizabeth said is resenting anyone who had any privilege, oh, yeah, the moment theres a tape which you gave us where nixon discovers that somebody in the his white house is meeting with all the Ivy League President s. He goes bonkers. He just says, what . Who is meeting with those Ivy League President s . And then he goes into one of his rages. He said, they will never again be in this white house, never, never, never. From there to the jewish Ivy League President s. Thats a little redundant, right . He said jews were all psychiatrists. Lets take about what you are asking about now then. As i said, i dont think we can know about if history what we do know is, one, that it was the accident of that breakin at the watergate that enabled us to know what we know. The second accident was the discovery of the tapes. Otherwise, forget about it. What all of this shows is how we need to know about what happens in our government and our president s. And if you want to go to the day and look at twitter dominated news and look at the 24hour freeforall, what is so apparent is we are not learning whats really going on. And its particularly true of the presidency. Take a look at bobs work. In watergate, what happens here, our books and continuing in bobs other books about the presidency, if it hadnt been for those books, we wouldnt know much about the succeeded president s. We would know very little about the truth. And i dont want to i did a book on Hillary Clinton and discovered that, oh to understand the clinton presidency, you had to understand everything about her and her role. You didnt see that reflected in the coverage. I think just to pick up on this, that to find out whats really going on takes time. Thats right. It takes months or years. If you take carls book woman in charge about Hillary Clinton, it is long, exhaustively reported. If you read that book, as i have, it is at the end in the final chapter im sorry. Hes my pal. I love him. But this is a wonderful book. And it is so relevant right now, because i think Hillary Clinton is in the news every now and then. Really . At the end of the book you quote one of her associates who is a supporter who says, you know, i think about hillary running and, you know, bill as the first whatever he would be, the first husband. And this person says, im not sure i want the circus back in town. [ laughter ] and i think thats a question everyone should ask. The clintons, both of them, have very strong points. But it gets mutilated by the news system we have. You dont get the details. And the point carl makes in this book at the end, which sh incredibly balanced account, goes back to her childhood, the difficulty she has dealing with the truth and reality. But in the end, you make the point which people should understand is, were now thinking about whether she is going to run for president , whether she should be president. You say that hillary in a way is her own worst enemy because shes misrepresented herself, that she has so caught up in the politics, the secrecy of things that the better side of her, which is religious am i right . Yeah. Somebody who has a really large heart and cares about these issues has been masked by the way she presents herself. If you look at that book, you look at pardon . Finish the point. I wanted to go back to a few watergate points. Okay. But thats this is watergate. This is watergate. The question is, what is the standard were going to make our judgements on . Is it good information . Is it solid . Is is it well reported . Is it balanced . Is it fair . Or is it a bunch of sound bites in a bunch of tweets. The aftermath of nixons experience, no same president will ever we will not have lbj tapes, we will not have tapes. People are scared to keep diaries. We have different technology. We have reporting. Will we be able to know either in real time or after the fact what we were dealing with . Thats why we need more indepth reporting. Thats it. If you go i just was looking at something i hate to come back to something the two i was looking at one of bobs books. [ laughter ] or elizabeths books, actually. In fact, if you look at what elizabeth has reported through these administrations, which is a very different take than the conventional wisdom of this town, read her new yorker pieces, read her pieces in the new york review of books and you see that the conventional wisdom of this town is so far off the mark, so consumed by questions of who is in and who is out as opposed to what the real story is. Thats where im trying to go here. Look, what woodward and i lets take a look at one of the greatest pieces of reporting of all time, the boston globe did on the Catholic Church and pedophiles. Our editor here was the editor of the globe at the time. Thats right. This is one of the greatest pieces of reporting of all time. And to penetrate the institutiox of the Catholic Church as well and the secrecy of it. Its doable. Thats the point. It is we dont have enough editors, publishers theres plenty of great reporters out there. But the reporting is getting lost, one, in this its not our priority among the socalled serious news institutions. The cable networks, the network news. You are down to a couple newspaper institutions in america that really are concerned about reporting. We have some alternative sites and some alternative things. You dont need tapes. Its great if you have the tapes. nr this is generous what we learned and accidental. You need reporters and you need to be asking the right questions and banging on the doors. Thats what this whole conversation is about. I agree that we need reporters, especially like these two. But i want to get back to ruths point. [ applause ] could it happen again . Could we do it today . 40 years ago the system just barely worked. It took heroic efforts from people like this and people on the hill and people within the executive branch. And while it succeeded then to an extent, the tapes show that to another extent, nixon was able to get away with a lot. The worst abuses of power that nixon engaged in had to do with foreign policy, a field in which he was extremely well respected and is respected to this day. He prolonged the vietnam war because he knew he could not win it. If saigon fell before election day 1972, it would take his second term down with it. So he made a decision. He was going to continue the war to aid his own reelection campaign. 25,000 american soldiers died in the interim. They say no one died at watergate. It is one much his latest offenses. Wait a minute. Maybe i misphrased that. The foreign policies are debatable. Theres evidence on the tapes, you are right. To say he is his crimes were in a significant his significant crimes were in foreign policy, i think look, this was an assault on the constitution. This was go to the tapes again, nixon sits there and says, well, we will do this, we will break in here, we will get the irs not just random citizens but the democrats, the big democratic contributors. He said, i want on that he got the secret service to bug the telephone of his renegade brother. You could have argued to be president had you to have a renegade brother. Thats no longer the case. You have a half brother out there somewhere. Running around pretty good. Okay. The moderator is saying, shut up. I can cut everybody off . Im cutting you off to get in audience questions. We have microphones in the room. If you would raise your hand and wait for the microphone. Im going to try to go this way. I will go all the way to the woman in the pinkish sweater over there with your hand up. Thank you. I think in all the president s men theres a line, follow the money or Something Like that. The Campaign Finance laws or lack of them. I was wondering if you could comment about then versus now. I think Elizabeth Drew is the best person in america to answer that. The best person is in front of me in the front row. Would you like to answer . Watergate brought to a head the issue of the idea that big globs of money floating around and people like Howard Hughes could write big checks or give a suitcase of hundred dollar bills and then they didnt match and it was all very strange. After that, a good Campaign Finance bill was passed. I believe it was limited contributions. It limited spending. I have this to shock you with. The Supreme Court in the major decision on that did not say money equals speech. They did not. And you now have these Supreme Court decisions since then based on this mythical sense of what they said. 4j and they didnt. That serves of the purposes of people who want to get the regulations off. So what buckley says, you cant put limits on what people want to spend on their campaigns. Now what you have is a Supreme Court determined to we had mccain fine. Mccain understood then. This was a different mccain. He understood it and those of us involved in Campaign Finance understood. Rolling reform, of course, if you put these regulations, somebody will figure a way around it. Then you plug that and you move on. Its really very broken down now. There are limits on individual contributions but not really. Citizens united and an associated decision and then last year . Anyway, they deconstructed. They were redoing things including finance reform. They upheld and two years later they unupheld it. You have a political thing. I dont think theres a now money has gotten so big and so important, i dont think there will be a move in congress to reregulate this. They have gotten dependent on the system as it is. Good luck with that. Lets try to get in another question. The gentleman in the blue right there. Then im going towards the back of the room, because i dont want to disenfranchise you guys. Mr. Bernstein and mr. Woodward, i was impressed tonight of the far reaching implications of this. I didnt think that it went back that far. Is there something that nixon could have done that would have stopped this whole thing besides no. Again, go back to what ken was talking to a moment ago. We wrote about him undermining the free electoral system through political espionage and sabotage. What ken is talking about before he was president he was doing the same thing. This is about a mindset. As elizabeth has pointed out. One of the things that it is we come back to nixons hatred. If you read the final dates about his last year in office that we wrote, you will find its a very empathic book. Its a human story on many levels and about what nixon is suffering as this is all closing in on him. When i hear the tapes its a little historic asteric. Im always hearing nixon go back to hiss. Those goddamn jews. What nixon knew that most of the rest of us didnt was that he was right about hiss. He was a spy. We know it now from the cryptography and other things. But he felt maligned this is not to excuse anything. But its just an interesting thing. Comes up how many times does he talk about hiss . All the time. And he talks about in the context you are mentioning. He thought it confirmed what he thought about jews and ivy leaguers. Hiss wasnt jewish. He was establishment. He was worse. Nixon said, hiss might have nixon said, hiss might have been half a jew. He did, yes. Lets try to go to the gentleman in the white shirt right in front of the cameras there. Thank you. I want to question ken, who i think is under utilized tonight. Having listened to all of these tapes. Do you think the fact that no president will ever, ever record things like that hurts our perspective on the past because were unable to fully understand how certain things come into being as a president , how they make decisions and who really is saying one thing on meet the press or cnn or fox news but in a closed room maybe saying something very different because thats what they really want to get accomplished but they cant say it publically . My motto is tape them all. I think you are absolutely right. Certainly, listen to the nixon tapes has been a perspective expanding experience for me because for once in history we have this time machine that allows us to be in the past with the president as he is making these very fateful decisions for himself and the nation and the world. The lack of that troubles me. We would like to point out that all of us most of us are carrying in our pockets more sophisticated recording devices excuse me, the one that i just broke. No. Than the one that nixon had in the white house. I used to say with confidence after nixon nobody would tape. But the technology has gotten to the point where a certain amount of taping might take place without our full knowledge of it. There might one day be employment for somebody like me with regard to another administration. Im going to make one very short point on your question which i think is a terrific question. The tapes i find more interesting in some sense than the nixon tapes are the lbj tapes. In the lbj tapes, you dont see a terrible, corrupt, tortured mind railing about people and failing to think about the good of the country. You actually see a president being a president , using the levers of power. That is the sort of thing i think we really will as a big a believer in reporting though not as good a reporter as bob and carl, but thats the thing that we will really miss from not having that again. Another question. Yes, maam, right here in the black. Lady in black instead of man in black. Whenever i think of watergate i also think of snowden and his revelations. I was wondering if you would comment on i realize hes not a reporter. Comment on what has happened in government, what do we expect and why are some of us not shocked that Something Like that has happened . One, you are not shocked because we have known it has been reported for years that an awful lot of this has been going on. It came out in 2006. Theres been too much shock. And a lot of things taken out of context over this whole debate about is he a hero or is he a traitor or all or else. It seems what we have terrorism has changed our world. It is a real threat, and to pretend otherwise is nonsense. Its more of a threat than nation states are in many respects or most respoekts. Respects. Its the new method of warfare. It affects us all. So obviously, were going to use as we have in the past these capabilities that we have because its the most basic tool of learning of getting intelligence. Signals intelligence, human intelligence. This is the signals part. Were going to do everything we can. What we have learned is that bill sapphire, many years ago in the New York Times was the first to say we are heading in the direction where privacy is over, where this huge capacity of the government to eavesdrop is becoming more and more problematic. So we have a conflict of civil liberties. The necessary protection of the country and ourselves. But snowden is it informs people of in detail in a way that clearly we did not know. The massive nature of it and i think particularly our paper, the post, has been responsible and aggressive in presenting that information. There are no grand juries, to my knowledge. There is apparently no crime. This is a policy discussion which is going on which is goin president obama himself has said its good were having this policy discussion. So i think this is about informing the public in a very important way. It is not the criminality of watergate. One quick think, and that is what snowden has really done is shown how insufficient the oversight of this is in the courts that have been established to look at this kind of intelligence gathering and the congress of the United States. In that, he has performed a great service. Elizabeth . You said something that pulls together the question that ruth keeps asking us and we keep not answering. [ laughter ] im a failure as a moderator. Context is everything. Yes, it has been driving me crazy, too. We knew about this gathering of phone calls in 2006 revealed by usa today. Why didnt it cause a big fuss then . George bush was president. Had you midterms coming up. You had the wars going on in iraq. People were afraid. They didnt really want to carl rode was ordering up ads showing a threepart amputee, showing his picture next to hussein next to bin lauden or hussein. These people were playing tough. People didnt feel they wanted to go at it then. So snowden does it later. Shock. Horror. It had really been there. There was more detail. This is why we cant answer your question, ruth, because context is everything. When this was going on, a great mentor of mine, he said the next time this happens, it wont be people like this. They will very cool they will be very ivy league looking, very respectable. They wont be these kinds of thugs that we were seeing. It will be different. Im not as discouraged as marvellous as your books are, we cant wait for them. With Hillary Clinton, for example carl did a great book. But people sort of gone on to her in 2008. People pick it up. They smell things. Its happening now. You cant always get at everything. But theres a lot of stuff that gets out into the atmosphere. If its defined in a responsible way, which a lot isnt, thats my problem with all this. Its there. So im not as we need their books, but we also cant wait for them. Theres a really interesting parallel between the usa today report and snowden and the tapes issue, which is because i was confused when the snowden report came out because i thought we did know this. But i think its the actual the its like nixon and the tapes that propelled that story and Additional Information and information about scope that came out. Lets move on to another question. Sir, in the vest back there. Thanks. I just wanted to know if anyone on the panel has any thoughts about whether the abuse there is abuse of a Constitutional Authority involved in every presidency. [ laughter ] no, no. There are matters of degree. At some point we kept dealing with this with nixon. There are matters of degree that become substantive. It doesnt make up for the grand assault on the constitution or across the board manipulation of Government Agencies to suit the agenda of the president and how he wanted to get reelected or those who he wanted to get the goods on. I want to destroy this or that. Were not going to have anything like that. So there are degrees. These are not of the gravity of the depth of what went on. Theyre not close. Thats whats so tragic, i think about this cheapening of the idea of impeachment. But what i think one of the questions imbedded in this is what should we be worried about. Everything. My answer is, secret .  government. That there is an incredible concentration of power in the presidency now. I think you could argue that president obama has more power than the most recent president s, the ones that preceded him, at if we are caught up in this talk to a reporter who covers the white house, any of them of a number of them i have talked to. They say they file a story and then they have to do two blogs and nine tweets. They never understand anything. They acknowledge that, because they are on to the next. You have got these message managers in the congress and in the white house, you call the white house and ask them about something and if they dont like the questions, they will say, why is that a story. They can stop the press. What we need to do is reconfigure ourselves to make sure that we have that we are devoted to get to the bottom of things. If we dont get to the bottom of things, there are going to be things from nixon, which is certainly the most serious case, to things that people are uneasy and uncomfortable about, to say the least, then nsa programs that we have written about. There are so many people chomping at the bit here. Sir, right here. Seems one of the legacies of watergate was to create this idea of a scandal which all our scandals would be measured in the years to come with a gate following as a suffix. You talk about the need for great reporting, which the two of you did. The idea of getting to the root of government abuse of power. And i look at the stories of today and wonder why there arent people like the two of you reporting on the irs abuse of power, this lois lerner idea of losing emails today in an age of servers and backups. Why isnt somebody at the post doing Something Like you did back then to see why we dont have that kind of coverup . If there isnt a coverup, lets find out why not. I dont buy that there isnt great reporting going on out there. Early on, there was very good reporting on the irs. About the Cincinnati Office, etc. , etc. I agree with you, we need more reporting on whats happening at the irs. I think also we need in this case a real congressional investigation, a bipartisan investigation instead of a witch hunt. You cant get one now. But i think the reporting is happening. I have a feeling somewhat from our discussion that were in a sealed chamber here. We are looking at the political system, we are looking at journalism divorced from the rest of the culture. Neither is divorced from the rest of the culture. We have all kinds of problems in the culture about people telling the truth. We have all kinds of institutionally, we have all kinds of problems that people are not interested in the truth, that they have been, as i said earlier, wrapped up in this eye ideological debate. The reporting that bob and everybody up here is talking about, its not just about the political system that we need. I go to the example of what the boston globe did. People in the culture today, the way we look at the disintegration of the congress of the United States and the lack of truth telling by members of congress, you can imply that to many institutions in this country. All im trying to get at is that this is all part of a larger texture. We needed it in business. We need it looking at sports. We need to find out whats going on about all of these things. We also still have this problem about all of these things about an audience that is less interested in the truth. Elizabeth has something she wants to say. I really want to respond to your question, because i think having done a lot of reporting about even though im a columnist with opinions, about the irs matter, i do have an opinion about that also, which is its a very serious question about misuse of the irs and suggestions that political groups were being targets because of their politics are very serious and legitimate questions. But my knowledge of the factual developments suggests nothing that is comparable in any way to the abuses that nixon has engaged in. I think there is a real flaw in our kind of understanding and the instinct as you say the gateization of every scandal. I dont think there is a lernergate, that history i feel confident that history will not tell us that there was an Obama Administration drive to target political opponents that is in any way comparable to what nixon did. I may end up being proved wrong. I was going to make that point. That i was going to end up being proved wrong . Thank you, bob. I should have just practiced law. You have a point of view. Its a reasonable one. I know you are a terrific at digging things out. If carl and i were 29 years old, we would be on our knees to the editor saying, let us go to cincinnati for two weeks. The editor would say to carl, just dont rent a car and leave it in a parking lot. Which he did. Im all for two weeks. Im not arguing about reporting first and coming up with the opinion later. Thats sort of what i believe. Im all for sending you to you can have three weeks in cincinnati, as far as im concerned. Im just sort of giving you my best assessment of the evidence so far based on the reporting i have done. We have elizabeth, carl, ken hughs we already know. What is it . I did some of the reporting. Because i have the only part do i know, but i got to somebody who has been in the irs for a long time. I was for cincinnati. Who has begun to explain some of this to me. There is more to the story. You are absolutely right, we need more reporting. But thus far, the facts at least as far as i could find out talking to a few people, including that there is no evidence whatsoever, as ruth suggests, that this goes to the heart of the Obama Administration or presidency. But there is a question of whether in that Cincinnati Office some things were interpreted as a license and at the same time, it would appear that the New York Times did a good story on this. The whole question of investigating political groups so they can get a Tax Exemption is at the heart of this. Maybe you can talk about this. I can talk about this until the end of time. Im going to let elizabeth talk. They got the Tax Exemption. Thats the scandal. Thats what shes right. [ applause ] including democratic groups. Exactly. Here is the point. Its true. If you reported it all that week, there was one week there where we had the irs and we had do you remember the the Justice Department is going after the ap and it was the end of the freedom of the press. It was one week. Bill sapphire was very clever. He started this business of putting gate at the end of everything to diminish watergate. They all do it. Its all the same. It was anybody who does this now, i wont shoot you, but i will be very unhappy with you. You are falling for this trick that he did. It diminishes the horror, the important of what watergate was. That was exactly what bill was after. If you look for a minute that week, if you talk to people at all, you knew they were also doing this liberal groups. People went out of business because they couldnt get Tax Exemption in time. Why did it not make sense . Suddenly all these groups, you enter code words, because thats how you will find them. Nobody was denied their Tax Exemption. Whats going on on the hill is they are trying to weaken the irs. They have done so. Theres a question of proportion here. This is highly shocking thing to say. One problem with watergate is were so scandal prone. If its not a scandal, its not interesting. The thing that we went down the path of not spending whats the word im looking for . Thats very big thing thats happened to politics, to our country. Its a president maybe that wasnt such a good idea. I didnt come up with the word. This happens to me all the time. A scandal is something. But theres about governing and what goes on on the hill thats not going to be a scandal but its terribly important. We should not get in the fire engines so quickly. I would say that one of the things of nixon was that for very good reason he instilled in many of us a capacity to believe the absolute worst about our leaders. He had done so many truly evil, corrupt, terrible things that we really imagine a democratic president or a republican president , a president of any sort capable of because we saw it. It happened. Its not that we shouldnt be very suspicious when suspicious things occur, its not that we shouldnt spend as many weeks in cincinnati as we need to, but we have lost the capacity to believe in the fundamental decency in politicians might not be the right words to put together. But theyre not all entirely completely corrupt. They have all descended to nixonian levels. Your assignment would be to go out and find decency . I found it. Im all about getting as many page views as he can get. It doesnt sell. Because i think were getting a little off track and were kind of thinking, get to the bottom of these things. We understand them. We can do a little reporting. This was 30 days after nixon resigned. Ford was president. It was september 1974. Some of you may recall, he went on television early on a sunday morning announcing he was giving nixon a full pardon. He went on television early on a sunday morning hoping no one would notice. [ laughter ] well, it was noticed but not be me. He was asleep. Carl called me up and said, you have heard . I said, no, i was asleep. Carl, who then and still has the ability to say what occurred in the fewest words with the most drama [ laughter ] said, the son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch. [ applause ] [ laughter ] happy to report, i figured it out. [ laughter ] we thought from that moment on, its the pardon is the final perfect corruption of watergate, that the guy nixon, who instigated it all, gets a pardon. 40 people go to jail. If you look at the history of this in 1976, ford lost to carter perhaps because of pardon and the suspicion about it. 25 years later, i undertook one of the book projects about the legacy of watergate in the presidencies of ford through clinton and called ford up, who i had never met, never interviewed and said, i want to talk to you about the pardon. He said, fine. I interviewed him six or seven times in new york, his home, in colorado, his main home. In rancho mirage. I had two assistants, have the luxury of time. What happened . Why did you pardon Richard Nixon . I kept asking him that. It was only in the sixth or seventh interview in his home why did you pardon nixon . He said, you keep asking the same question. And i said, i dont think you have answered it. And then he said, okay, i will tell you. These are the moments you live for in journalism. And he said, what happened he said, al hague, nixons chief of staff, came to me and offered me a deal. It would have been illegal if i had said i will accept the deal. In fact, i rejected the deal because what he said, if nixon resigns, you get the presidency and nixon needs to know he will be pardoned. Ford convincingly said, look, i rejected that deal. I pardoned nixon not for nixon, not for myself, but for the good of the country. And then he laid out his reasoning, which was very compelling, i thought. He said, look, i had a letter from the watergate prosecutor leon jaworski, saying nicks son is a private citizen. He will be investigated. Will be indicted, tried, probably convicted, go to jail. Ford said, have two or three more years of watergate. The economy was in trouble. The cold war was still on. He said, the country could not stand it. And he said, very plaintiffly said, i needed my own presidency. Convinced me and i think convinced carl and many people that this was an act of courage rather than the final corruption. Looking at that 25 years later, it makes you real humble. It makes in fact, to a certain extent, its humiliating that we were so sure in 1976 what it was and then its subjected to a neutral indepth inquiry 25 years after the fact and what looks like that looks exactly the opposite. I believed him at the time. It made a lot of sense. That would have been the story for the next couple years. He wouldnt have been able to govern. As he said, the x years of watergate is enough. We were tired. The country was tired of it. We had to move on. It was a wise decision then. One could imagine you being forgiven a little bit of paranoia, after suspicion and questioning after what you had seen and after what he had done. You knew what president s knew what nixon was capable of and you knew what president s were capable of. But im glad we kind of came to an agreement on decency. We were looking for the decency. Now you are going to make fun of me until the end of time. Right here in the red. Given all that we have talked about today about nixon and having been old enough to live through working for kennedys election and the reelection against nixon, why did nixon get more or less not just pardoned but forgiven to the point that all the expresident s went to his funeral and we dont i know that the republicans want to do that. But why do we forgive him . Thank you very much. Ruth mentioned this earlier and i didnt get to it. After his presidency, i added a 10,000 word section to my journals of time. I wrote it this winter about nixon give the guy credit. How low could you have been brought . Again, he was not he was going to come back and he was going to show them. They drew up a plan called the wizard plan. That section shows how he would have adored his funeral. It was what he was looking for. He set himself out to be respected and be considered a statesman. It didnt work. Its not true. It worked in his terms. It worked. He got accepted by the establishment in new york. He got five president s to his funeral. It worked in terms of what he wants. Of course not. But what he wanted, he got. President s. He made president s ask him about foreign policy. He got himself invited to the state dinner for the chinese. Nixon got the chinese. He was on the cover of time and newsweek and publishers he spoke to the publishers and editors and he predicted politics. He was dead wrong and they gave him standing ovations. There was a period in which people wanted to say, okay, we beat up on him enough. He blackmailed clinton into consulting. He was a very, very careful planner. For what he wanted, it was a success. Do we love him now . No, that wasnt the point, but thats the answer to your question. No, no. Its not the answer. Look, the fifth war of watergate after the press, the else ellsburgs, the democrats, the political enemies was a war against history. Nixon conducted it assiduously as youre saying. He didnt win. We wouldnt be here today having this, ken wouldnt have written the book he wrote that in fact, look, there is always going to be, in a huge body of people, some who are going to believe what they want to believe. I answered the gentlemans question. Carl, excuse me. You are talking about different things. They accepted him because he worked at it. Youre right, he was a swell guy. No, my point is its a judgment, that he did not succeed. At what . Yes, there have been momentary periods in which some people thought maybe he is rehabilitated, he was accorded some respect. Theres a debate about him. Yet, the overwhelming totally overwhelming judgment is of his criminality of him. We have just a few minutes left. He succeeded in his plan. He was on the cover of the magazines, got awards. Most popular man in america. And here we are talking about him, which probably in ways that probably arent making him all that happy as his funeral might have. I want to do two things, which is ive been avoiding eye contact with this side of the room, which i promise to get to. I also really want to thank two audiences. First the guests in the overflow room who were watching it on tv but not here. Thank you very much for sitting through it. I hope it was as fun there as it was here. Second of all, to thank folks who are watching this streaming live or who will watch it live. Hopefully tens of thousands of you in the future will have persisted all the way through to the closing moments here. Lets get in one last question. Sir, in the blue shirt. This is for bob and carl. I understand and appreciate the conservative journalistic standards of the post. I wonder if you could say whether there came a point in time during your watergate reporting when each of you became convinced that nixon was personally involved and responsible for this even though the post wouldnt print it . If so, what were the facts that caused you to come to that belief . Its a great question and here is the answer. Five floors up here woodward and i would get together every morning before we were going to write a story, get our ducks in a row. We had a Good Cop Bad Cop routine. Guess who was the good cop, who was the bad cop. We would present to the editors so that we could get in the paper what we thought belonged in the paper. This was a conservative pull toward making sure that everything was safe. Sometimes we thought they were a little too conservative. Within ten weeks we found there was a breakin. There had been a secret fund that paid for the bugging watergate and other undercover activities against the political opposition. And it was controlled by, among others, John Mitchell the former attorney general of the United States and nixons former law partner. We were about to write that story. As ben bradley said, you are about to call the attorney general of the United States a crook. Theres never been a story like this before. We were in there bradley said, you better be right. Youd better be right. So we would get coffee upstairs in a little vending machine room off a little newsroom floor. I put a dime in the machine, which is what coffee cost then. And i literally felt a chill go down my neck. And i turned to woodward and i said, oh, my god, this president is going to be impeached. And woodward turned to me and he said, oh, my god, you are right. We can never use that word in this Newspaper Office ever unless somebody think we have an agenda. It occurred very early that this once that mitchell thing, that connection let me tell one more mitchell story that what happened the next night. Which was we wrote the story. As usual, the white house we called for a comment and the assistant press secretary, we told them what the story was, John Mitchell controlled these secret funds, and we wanted to know what the white house had to say about it. He got back and said, the sources of the Washington Post are a fountain of misinformation. That was his response or the white house response, because it was always to make our conduct the issue and watergate not that of the president and his men. I wrote that and typed that out on the typewriter. I said aside from that, is the story true, did mr. Mitchell control the funds . He repeated the sources of the Washington Post are a fountain of misinformation. Aside from the guiser in our backyard, is it or is it not . I had a phone number for mitchell. I called him. He answered the phone. I identified myself and said we had a story in the paper. And i would like to get his response. He said, go ahead. I began to read. I got as far as john and mitchell while attorney general of the United States controlled a secret fund mr. Mitchell said jesus. [ laughter ] then i got a little farther into the first paragraph by which the story was unmistakable. Mr. Mitchell said, jesus. I got to the end of the first paragraph saying he controlled the secret fund and what it paid for. Mr. Mitchell said, jesus christ, all that crap, the publisher up youre putting it in the paper, if you print that, katie graham, the publisher upstairs will get her tit caught in a big fat ringer. I jumped back from the phone worried about my own parts more than mrs. Grahams. Then he said, what certainly is the most chilling moment in my years in journalism and i think bobs as well, when this campaign is over, we are going to do a little story on you two boys, too. And he hung up the phone. We were 28 and 29 years old. We knew whatever it was that he was going to do that he meant. What it really was was indicative of his attitude towards a free press. I called bep bradley up at home and told him what mitchell had said in response to this story, and bradley said, he really said that . And i said, yeah. Bradley said, touf good notes . I said, yeah, ive got all of my notes. Its all there. He said, well, put it all in the paper but leave her tit out. Which we did. The next day mrs. Graham came around to me and said, carl, do you have anymore messages for me . Well, i think we can all go home now. Thats pretty incredible. Do we have a minute for one more question . Right there. Thanks. Im going to turn the tables a little bit. Im going to turn the tables a little bit and say one of the probably most brilliant political moves in the past few years was embedding reporters in iraq and probably the biggest failure in journalism was to embed the reporters in iraq. Im wondering what yall might think of that and wondering if the rise of social media and online media is because of the institutional reporters that were embedded and didnt report what we all know now which is there were no wmds there. I dont think the wmd question came up with the embedded reporters. I think thats apples and oranges. If im correct ann, i think the embedded reporters did a really good job in reporting what action was taking place. And i dont think it i mean, what the soldiers were doing and the Service People on the ground is executing the policies that had been decided by president george w. Bush supported by 3 4 of the members of congress so i dont i think the reporting that embedding worked in varying many ways, and i dont think it connects to the social media. The reporting that was terrible or lack of reporting was in not doing a more skeptical job, particularly at the New York Times, particularly at the Washington Post, major institutions that could have perhaps i mean, its a very difficult story also because there are serious intelligence people who did believe that he had weapons of mass destruction and he had evidence that he wanted those. But i put myself just in fairness on the list of the people who did not dig hard enough into that story about wmd and i fault myself mightily for not being more aggressive on it. In fact, ran a story on the front page of the post before the war saying theres no smoking gun intelligence that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. Its one of the many cases in which i should have read what i wrote because when you say theres no smoking gun intelligence, that means you dont have hard evidence, and if you dont have hard evidence, you really dont have much, and i in particular who was reporting on that in detail should have been much more aggressive in doing it. And i think thats kind of one of the lessons were talking about. Youve got to take some subject and drill down total immersion reporting. It takes time and it always calls on the patience of the editors and the people who run the news organization. Great. If we have time, well take one more. One more. One more. Sir, in the vest right there. Do wait for the microphone or else people wont be able to hear you. There was a question is this on . Yes. There was a question that you brought up before that i dont think id answer. Really . Yeah. That i wanted to hear their answer on, and that is imagine that we had another president who had the ethical construct of mr. Nixon, not necessarily his whole personality, but his willingness to violate all the laws, misuse all the government, all the things he did. Is there any reason to believe he wouldnt be be as successful today as nixon was back then at doing all the bad things that nixon was able to do . Well, i go back to this notion that history doesnt work. I think we dont know. What we do know is that there are some pretty terrific repo reporters around, that we have a media configuration that is a mess in terms of some of that reporting getting through and getting out there, that we have a situation with people receiving the information who to much too great an extent and different in watergate than i mentioned earlier are more inclined to put it in boxes of left, right, democrat, republican, catholic, jewish, whatever instead of having an open mind. We have a different culture so i dont think in this culture, journalistic, whatever culture, would he can know this. Anybody else want to take a crack at it . Yeah. Quickly, i think im optimistic about that. I think the news organizations, if i may say, this one, we have a new owner whos putting money into expanding, just talking to marty baron our editor. He said this year hired 60 new people in the newsroom. [ applause ] that is a great thing, and there is a sense of lets drill down and position ourselves so if Something Like that happens in the white house or the irs or wherever it might be, we will send people who will have a method and a procedure to talk to people and listen. It was carl when we were working on watergate said these people wont talk in their office. Lets go see them at night. Lets knock on the doors without an appointment. I asked a group of reporters the other day, how many of you have gone in the last five years to somebody you wanted to talk to and knocked on their door at home without an appointment . Zero hands went up. It when i was working on the george bush book there was a general who would not talk. Emails, messages, intermediaries, nothing, and so i found out where he lived, the bernstein method. When do you go see a four star general at home without an appointment . I think 8 15 on tuesday is the time to go because its not monday, its not the end of the week. 8 15 he probably hasnt gone to bed. You know he has had his dinner. So i knock on the door and he opens it and he looks at me and he says, are you still doing this shit . [ laughter ] and i didnt say anything because i knew he was sincere. And he looked at me and he got a disappointed look on his face, and then he kind of went, come on in. And sat for two hours and answered not all but most of the questions. Why . Because someone showed up and said, i want to listen to your account of what occurred. And he went from a firm no to maybe. 2 seconds to maybe a yes and in one second just because somebody was there. Whats the lesson . I dont know what you do, but 23i want to find out and you wont talk, im going to be knocking on your door even at 71 years of age. [ applause ] i want to say this is the most fun ive had in ages. Thanks to all of you, bob, ken, carl, elizabeth. This has been just an absolutely terrific event thanks to your thoughtfulness and knowledge and memories of this amazing moment that is amazingly 40 years ago. So we can be back and revisiting it ten years from now and hopefully 20 years from now. Thank you all very much. [ applause ] president obama is at mar a Marthas Vineyard for vacation. He is still working there. He issued a directive for 10 million in emergency Pentagon Spending to help fighter or lists in northwest africa. He wrote to the secretaries of defense and state that hes determined and an unforeseen emergency exists in africa. It is an emergency. Members of congress are on recess through september. Heres a look at what some of them are doing while theyre on break. North dakota senator heidi high camp said on my way to the north dakota museum. Connecticuts chris murphy writes heading out to pick corn. I kind of feel like ray leota and he shared the link to the movie field of dreams. And arizona senator john mccain tweeting from jakarta. Coming up here on cspan 3, we turn to programs normally sign on cspan 2s book tv programs. Jo becker, the author of forcing the spring, inside the fight for Marriage Equality. Well talk about the start of the gay marriage movement. Then marion barry, mayor for life. The incredible story of marion barry jr. Then edward clean, his book on blood feud clintons versus the obamas. Tonight on American History tv in primetime at 8 00 eastern, a look at the early American Republic beginning with author william crystal on advice from the founding fathers. Then at 9 00, yale professor Joanne Freeman discussed alexander hamilton. 9 30, university of North Carolina greensboro professor is teaching. Then at 10 30 eastern a classroom lecture on alcohol use in colonial america with alan taylor all tonight on American History tv in primetime. Tonight cspan in primetime spotlights Veterans Health care. Including the testimony by dr. Christian head, a Veterans Affair Department Official who told a House Committee that retaliation by whistle blowers has slowed reform. I think the va has a potential to be one of the finest institutions in the world. Weve seen certain aspects that the pharmacy cannot be matched. Its one of the best in the world. Very efficient. There are many things that are efficient within our system, but what we should ask ourselves, when someone came out with the idea of seeing a veteran in 14 days, that was actually sounded like a good idea, veterans would be seen promptly. What we should be questioning is if we made a mistake and somehow overloaded the system, how come peoples names disappeared off lists . How come hundreds of thousands of veterans electronically no longer existed . That should be the question. Retaliation exists because theres a culture. This culture retaliation, thats really the cancer to the veteran administration. Most physicians and nurses and people who work in the hospital are disgusted. Morale is extremely low. People come up to me all the time and say, did that happen here . People care. The physician its when i heard some of the testimony i heard from the phoenix va, it was gutt wrenching. I couldnt sleep. And i believe theres a lot of people within the va system that feel the same way, but there exists a cancer within leadership, a few individuals that perpetuate this idea that we should be silent, that we should stand up and do the right thing and be honest. Everyone makes mistakes, but when you make a mistake and you try to conceal it, that is really the question we should be asking. Who are these individuals who would alter data and hide the truth and prevent patient care . You can watch more testimony before the house Veterans Affairs committee tonight on cspan in primetime. Highlights from other issues and last weeks Veterans Health care signing with president obama all beginning at 8 00 eastern. All week watch book tv in primetime. Tonight at 8 30 p. M. Eastern and tuesday through friday at 8 00, book tv features a wide range of topics including foreign policy, law and legal issues, iran, coverage of book fairs and issues from around the country and the best sellers from this year. Call us at 2026263400 or you can email at comments cspan. Org. Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. Next Pulitzer Prize winner jo becker, forcing the hand. She looks at history of gay marriage. This is 1 15. Good evening. Not a movie so we can start a little late. I want to start by thanking a couple of people. I want to thank not people, really. I want to thank the Concord Monitor for sponsoring this event. I want to thank red river theater for this terrific concord venue for a place to hold this. And i want to thank Michael Herman from gibsons for turning out. He had books in the lobby. J jo is going to stick around to sign some afterwards so you may want to take advantage of that. I want to thank jo for coming a little bit off the main circuit that Book Publishers put you on to come to concord. Of course, she also came to see old friends. Thats one of the things that hans happens as you work as a reporter in concord. You meet a lot of people and they stay friends for a long time. So, i want to say just in an introduction, i think probably youve read a little bit about this in the monitor, but i want to say by way of introduction, just talk a little bit about jo and my experience with her when i was editor of the monitor. At some point during that time she decided that she wanted to leave the monitor. She had a nice offer from the st. Petersburg times but but t to tell you of all the reporters i had, i dont think anyone struggled with that decision like jo did. She had such a loyalty with concord and the monitor. We were used to reporters coming here, staying a few years and moving on to larger papers, but jo came in and talked to me about this two or three times before she decided to take the offer from saint petersberg times. And then two or three years later after she had won all kinds of awards for investigative reporting at st. Petersburg times she called me again and said she had an offer from the Washington Post and what did i think . Should she take that or should she stay at the saint petersberg times . She felt loyal. They treated her right. She had gotten to do many great stories. Should she take this job at the post . A couple years after that she got an offer from the New York Times and she didnt call me. She just took the job. So, shes done wonderful work there. Along the way, of course, i think some of you know she won the Pulitzer Prize for a series on Vice President cheney, investigative reporting, investigative profile of the Vice President of the United States. And maybe later on, were here to talk about another subject, but maybe later on we can ask her a little bit about dick cheney since hes back in the news recently for evaluating president obamas iraq policies. So, what were here to talk about is a book called forcing the spring which is about the Incredible Movement toward Marriage Equality in the United States. And i say incredible because, you know, in all the time ive been in the news ive never seen a civil rights issue move so fast. Never seen an opinion change so quickly. It was just a remarkable thing. And my job tonight is to ask a few questions and get the conversation going and then were going to turn the questioning over to you. So why dont i just start by getting jo to explain why someone with a great job as an Investigative Reporter at the New York Times takes a whole bunch of time off to write a book. So i actually was in between two big investigations, and i picked up the paper one day and our San Francisco bureau bure New York Times francisco bureau had a story about the lawyers who fought each other over the presidency in bush v. Gore joining together to file this case. It was the first constitutional challenge we cant hear you. Is this better . Okay. Sorry about that. It was the first challenge, federal challenge, to samesex marriage bans, and i thought to myself, however ted olsen, this conservative that, you know, liberals love to hate because he, of course, had won bush v. Gore, you know, how he came to take this cause. Thats got to be a good story. And i went to my editor and i said, look, i know this isnt sort of my normal fare but im really interested, id like to do it. Im in between projects anyway and, besides, im the only person that ted olsen would probably talk to at the New York Times because he hates it, and i had gotten to though him over the year. I had covered bush v. Gore. Did i all the backgrounders on the Supreme Court nominee and he figured in this interesting way in the cheney series. He was one of the few lawyers that was willing to stand up and tell cheney and his lawyer, addington, you cant go to the Supreme Court and tell the Supreme Court they dont have a right to review your detainee policies and these people cant even have lawyers, and that was really interesting to me because ted olsen was the only person who lost someone, his wife was on board one of those flights. And so i called ted. I said i want to do this story. I did the story, and i couldnt let it go. It was this it was a really audacious thing they were doing. It was a controversial thing that they did. There was a lot of people who believed at that time that the country was not ready, and more importantly that the Supreme Court wasnt ready, and, you know, i describe in the book this lunch scene where they plan this lawsuit in secret, and they finally kind of let in some of the they invited some of the lawyers, movement lawyers, who had been working on this issue for many, many years, and they kind of let them in on the plan, and it was like and it was at rob reiners house. Rob reiner was part of this group that brought this lawsuit. He was really instrumental in getting the funding to bring the lawsuit, and the lawyers were it was like, you know, you dont know how to count to five, and at one point one of the lawyers threw down the dossier on the dining room table and said, if you do this, if you go forward with this, you know, were going this dossier on ted olsen and every conservative cause that hed ever championed is going to be made public. Were going to take it to the media, and the guy who was sort of the architect of all of this, a Young Political consultant, his name is chad griffin, hes now the head of the human rights campaign, the largest Gay Rights Group in the world but at that time was sort of an operative out of hollywood and he would cut his teeth in the Clinton White house, chad and his Business Partner christina who together they were really they were the one that is came up with this idea, said do it. Thats great because if someone like this, as conservative as ted olsen, is willing to take this cause on, you know, that has really the potential to change the conversation. So anyhow, i just once i started following this, i wanted to know. I got to know the four plaintiffs at the heart of the book and the lawsuit and i wanted to know how this would all turn out for them. And how in the world did you get one of the Amazing Things about the book is how close in you are with the all the major characters in the book. How did you get that access . I actually i went to them after i had done the story and i said, you know, writing a book is its, you know, its scary to be honest. Youre sort of its a big endeavor and so i kind set the bar really high thinking that theyd probably say no and then id be kind of off the hook are you still having sorry about that. Anyhow he is this better . Why dont you trade mikes . We can do that. This is much better. I forgot where we were. How did i get the access . I went to them and i said, look, i would really like to do this book. Id like to follow it, the case all the way through, but, you know, you would have to id have to be in the rooms. I mean, id have to be there as the lawyers are debating strategy. I have to be with the plaintiffs as they wake up and drive to court. I have to be in the political war room because this case was it was litigation, but it was also this accompanying Public Education campaign and a political campaign, and so i want to be in the war room while, you know, my colleagues are being pitched on stories. I thought that they would say no because its a kind of a crazy thing. If any of you are lawyers out there, you know that privilege could be waived and so lawyer client privilege if someone knew i was in the midst of all this. So we didnt announce the book, we didnt do a lot of big fanfare announcement, and i agreed, of course the only condition was that i was not going to publish before the case had resolved itself, and that was it. That was the only condition. Nobody had the right to preview or veto, and so you sort of ask yourself, why did these people agree to that . And the answer is actually, you know, if you think back on it, now it looks like people are saying, oh, they were there to have you theres been some critique of the book that its all the greater glory of this group that brought the case, but if you go back at the time, there were only two states that allowed Marriage Equality. The majority of the country was opposed, and so these guys could have been the people that invited me, a reporter, and a film crew because theres also an hbo documentary that came out today, in to document how through sheer hubris and ignorance they set back the movement by losing at the Supreme Court. So no one had any idea of how this would turn out. But, you know, the lesson of harvey milk, the first harvey milk was in San Francisco. I hope some of you saw the movie milk, but harvey milks lesson was come out, tell your story. Telling your story matters. Telling your story can change minds. And they believed, they agreed to all this because they believed that if people could get to know the four plaintiffs, if they could see what they went through over the course of these five years, that win or lose, it would educate people. Win or lose, it would move people and make them see this issue in a different light. How hard was it for the attorneys to choose the plaintiffs in the case . Normally you think, well, theres a couple people that want to get married and they hire a firm. This idea was it was the opposite. You had essentially chad griffin, who is gay, sitting watching the election returns come in on election night, and barack obama is makes history. You know, hes the first africanamerican president elected. Chad is a democrat. He wants to celebrate, but hes watching on his computer screen as the prop 8 numbers roll in, and proposition 8 was the ballot Voter Initiative to essentially strip gays and lesbians of the right to marry in california. They had briefly enjoyed that right after the california Supreme Court said that it was a matter of state constitution. So the voters then were asked to change the constitution and they did. And so they were a few days later chad and his Business Partner christina and their friends, who happen to be rob and michelle reiner, are sitting at the polo lounge in hollywood, which is a very kind of ritzy place, a kind of meet and greet place, and they are talking about, you know, what are we going to do . If we cant win in california, they were over 30 at the ballot box at that point, if we cant win here, where can we possibly win . And by circumstance a friend of the reiners stopped by and heard what they were talking about, fast forward says, you know, you really ought to talk to a friend of mine, my exbrotherinlaw actually. Hes a constitutional lawyer, and i think hed be on your side in this. And they said, well, who is that . Well, ted olson. Rob reiner, his jaw dropped. He was with Vice President gore, he and chad, on the night that bush v. Gore was decided. They were in the naval observatory. They both drove down to the Supreme Court and it was just this terrible night for them, but they sort of immediately kind of saw