Say, my boyfriend, you know, asked me what i was playing in this and i said, zero disuse, brutus and said i played that, christ. What is going on here . I think it is important to have an all female production throughout history. They get murder yo buried in history like a lot of Family History does and not just that famous brutus that went to brooklyn, it is much more. Rose politics from the 2012 election to a new production of Julius Caesar, when we continue. Funding for charlie rose was provided by the following. This summer we got the ball rolling. In cities across the country, cocacola joined with communities and local leaders to roll out a summer filled with activity. From atlanta to la, people all over found that getting moving can be fun. In fact, it can be it is part of our commitment to inspire people everywhere to rediscover the joy of being active. Now lets keep it going all yearlong and make a difference together. Rose additional funding provided by these funders. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Our first order of business is to recover all the jobs and wealth that was lost in the crisis. And we have made strides in the last three and a half years to get that done. But beyond that, we are here to reclaim the Financial Security that has been slipping away for more than a decade. The decade before i came into office your incomes and wages generally werent going up. Rose one year ago president obama scored a landslide victory over mitt romney, to secure a second term in the white house, the new book double down is a behind the scenes account of the 2012 campaign. It is in some ways a sequel to game change, the best seller that told the story of the 2008 election cycle, i am pleased to welcome my friend, the authors, John HeilemannNational Affairs editor for new York Magazine, Mark Halperin is editor at large and senior political analyst for time magazine, i am pleased to have them back at this table. Welcome. So you have done it. You have told the story of 2012. How does it compare to 2008 . Well, both elections were, obviously, feature barack obama as the main character. Both elections featured the clintons as very important figures, quite obviously, and i think this election in some ways feature higher sex, and, stakes and a greater question about the outcome, so both of them are at a time when the country is really searching for meaning, lot of books about politics are about macroeconomics or about social trends of demographics, our books, both this book and game change are about the high human drama of what it is like to be running for president and be married to someone running for president and in that they are very much the same. It involves real people who are human and real pressure. Rose what is the difference between this book and teddy white in 1960 . Oh that is such an unfair question. Charlie because you breathe in company of such an iconic figure. You know, we take and look at teddy whites books and Hunter Thompson and Richard Ben Cramer and look as icons and models that we try as best we can to stand on their shoulders and get somewhere close to how good they are but they are all models for a certain kind of thing which was deconstructing, taking people behind the curtain and showing people there is a public facade of campaigning, which has grown more elaborate and more moreful in the sense that more and more is concealed from the public than the art of manipulation are more advanced now than they were in teddy whites times but all of those books and authors were trying to do the same thing which is try to strip it down and say this is actually what was going on. Rose i would think the opposite of that because when teddy did it first and now we have so, we have so many ways to dig into the whole process and so many more devices that it would be so much more possible to cover the story and tell more. Well, yes and no. I think there is an irony there is certainly more coverage than ever before because of more outlets. Rose daily journalism. Right and minutebyminute journalism and the irony is, because there is so much and the candidate are so wary of it you dont have anything like the access if you are a daily reporters even the Television Reporter with a lot of access you dont have anything like the access people had in teddy white day. Even at the beginning of my career, 1992 i would fly in a small plane with governor clinton and talk, so much access to bill clinton on that campaign there were nights on the charter where he would come back to talk to us and we would pretend to be asleep because we spent the day talking to him but now the theeld is so absolute, 500 long interviews, not short interviews and part of why we were able to get stories that dont come out during the campaign is because it takes a lot of interviews and a lot of matching up interviews and going back to people and crosschecking to get the kind of behind the scenes, so it is not cash it is not possible to, impossible to get little bits of it but if you want to tell the whole story you need time doing it and that is not possible with the demands of daily journalism. Rose is it easier because you have done it before and they say here comes halperin and heilemann and they know the book will get a real reception and they want to make damned sure their story, their perspective, their side of the story is told . You know, we worked on the last. Rose and not report it the next day. Well there is that, we worked on the last book and we did we worked on it for a shorter period of time and did fewer interviews with fewer people because we did it for a shorter period of time. This was for three years. In both instances we wanted to talk from candidates to spouses, high level, mid level staffers, low levels, the caddies and the drivers and talk to everybody top to bottom and in both cases only a handful of people that we wanted to talk to wouldnt talk to us in both cases. That doesnt mean it was easy in both cases, in fact it took an he for mouse amount of time and effort and we had to beat stories down sometimes but in both case it is truth is, basically people want to tell their stories. Rose and thats why the book and they think what they are involved in is important to history and important to, they worked hard on it and they want the story told and they want it told accurately and fairly and i think they trust us to do that. Rose so who wouldnt appear . Who wouldnt talk . We talked, we cant talk to who we dont talk to but it is a very small subset and it is really like pushing on an open door to sit with people, because we sit with people for a long period of time, i mean, many cases after the action is over and we sit with them and say tell us your yo your stories, i know you come with, we dont come with an agenda and we come with open arizona. Rose there is this woodward and bernstein they had very different skill sets, do you two have different skill sets. We do everything together and part of why it worked as a collaboration is because we recognize that two people in the room doing interviews, two people outlining chapters and two people writing chapters all of that is better when you have two people doing it we generally see eye to eye editorially we dont have a lot of disgeeps about who to interview and what to ask but on the margins having a second brain involved in the process is great, and just to go back to the interviews, we are talking about people cooperating and, you know, we both love to interview people. It is the most interesting part of the process but these are not adversarial interviews, with few exceptions. Rose because you get more information that way. But also because it ised just not the style of the book we are doing but as i said, we generally in the interviews, rarely you rarely have something that the other was. Going to ask the same question. Rose so the thrust of most of the giewfs is tell me what happened and why . And to piece things together, we are trying to tell a story that involves people. You know, people in campaigns are very busy people and so you can ask somebody what happened a week ago and they will say, i have no idea, so finding the people who remember, who are credible, and then crosschecking everybodys story who has knowledge of something, it is a long time and a lot of work but again the ability to have people know us, trust us, understand what we are doing and to cooperate so that if we say to someone, everyone else in the room remembers it this way you are the lone hold out how do you explain that, to be able to assess dissenting voices because the way we write the book on the only nicialt, omniscient voice, but we have to find a consensus. If i use the word gossip would you accept that . No, because and we sort of you know, bridal at that a little bit. Really . Not that it is something unconfirmed, everything in this is reported to the standard both of us have learned and used over our entire profession and we dont put in things to titillate but to illustrate the high human drama of what it is like to run for president. If we wanted to write a gossipy book using low standards and things that were just titillating we would get a ton of attention. Rose and you couldnt put them in because you couldnt confirm them. We can butt them in gossip but not confirmed fact. Rose what is the rule. The rule is a normal journalistic rule. Rose sources lets say we did this book in 1972 and president nixon said to us, i am very concerned that theeingly is going to hurt my chance of reelection. No, in that case you wouldnt need a second source, that president nixon was concerned about the economy if he said it to us in an interview, so two sources in many cases. Rose you were there and somebody in the room said this happened, then a and somebody else said it did not happen then we keep going back and try to figure it out. Live is not a consensus we dont put it in the book. Is that right . Yes, we leave a lot of stuff out that people using different standards may put it in. I mean a lot of the book has these books both have very novelistic qualities and the truth is there are some cases where good source is good enough, attesting to what their thoughts and feelings are, one source is fine in some cases, a fact, two sources are thing, if the hinge is documented in an email or audio recording again one source is enough. If we are reconstruct ago scene seven sources is what it takes to make sure we have the dialogue in the given scene. The standard, we try to apply the deliberate professional standards to what any given situation requires, sometimes it is one source and sometimes two and sometimes six. But there is nothing in the book if you look at the definition of gossip there is nothing in that book that is unverified. Rose what is the narrative here . It is a narrative nonfiction and in some sense it is not that different from what a lot of writers that you and i and mark all admire and have been doing for a long time in business coverage and Technology Coverage and sports coverage, we are not doing anything here, we are reinventing the wheel you can look at all of those areas in the last 40 years from the time in the mid sixties journalist started writing like novelists like dialogue and scenes and recreating things and we cite all of the antecedents going back but those doing this in a reliable way, famous people have been doing this for the last four decades and we feel we are continuing in that tradition and when we be it the stuff in the book we feel that we need to be able to be 100 percent confident that no one in the room is going to stand up and say it didnt happen that way and so our standards of caution are just extremely high. Rose all right. This quote from peter hanby in the washington post, the Halperin Heilemann method, a number of those set for interviews told me, he would invite a subject to a private room at a restaurant or a plush hotel suite, ply them with booze and let the stories flow but the alcohol was unnecessary the wild sblg of the first volume guaranteed that insiders would talk this time, indeed in a summers worth of casual conversation with veterans of all the campaigns, it was difficult for me to find anyone who didnt consent to an interview with the pair. Well rose what do you any of that . I will cherry pick on that. We wouldnt to have the first interview to have interviews conducted over meals. And a nice beverage. I would say i can think of a few of dozen in the 500 interviews that involved any alcohol whatsoever and it was futzer than a dozen a glass of wine or two into sure. We had a lot of cooperation, but it didnt come easy in one sense as john said before but it does in a sense as i said, we have known almost all of these people a long time, we are very respectful of their time and very respectful in terms of preparation, so that we, the interviews are productive for them and people finally like to tell their story, but want to be part of what a lot of them think will be pretty one of the definitive accounts of the campaign. Rose if before this book was published and they came to both of you and said, what is the onestory in here that you think is the most interesting, newsworthy, what would you say. That intervention with the president on the eve of the second debate, which involves a look into the mind of barack obama as a person, as a politician, as someone running for reelection that we think is as illuminating about him as any scene anyone has written. I totally agree, what do you any . I would never want to dissent from the two of you. There is a reason why it is right there on the cover of the magazine. Rose new York Magazine by the way. Rose but there was so much talk about that polling about hillary, i just thought it was just silly, i thought. The only question i have about it is did they tell the president , did the president sign off on in and was this something he was interested in the answer . I dont know the answer from your piece. Look, to talk about that and then to get to intervention, i think when the white house chief of staff and people like david enough and axelrod say this presidency is in real peril the president may not get reelected lets consider bringing in Hillary Clinton and bill clinton to join the ticket i think that is news. Rose but did they say that or we just have to test everything . Did they say lets really consider bringing in. Lets test it and see. Rose lets test it and see and consider bringing in poll comes back that it didnt show much of an impact and the poll say it in helped the president 12 points in the race and widen the gender gap. Rose they would have said lets consider that. But rose . We are not we are no charge of all of the coverage of our book so it is not like we trumpeted that above Everything Else in the book. Rose somebody did. Jonathan martin wrote about it in the New York Times and decided it was newsworthy, look the story rose it was not the biggest story. The story had been rumored for a long time. Rose right. And widely denied by the white house and i will say that, you know, in the course of the reporting of the book, this was not the easiest hinge to confirm, because they considered it a big secret. Rose yes. Now, whether we both, all agree there are much more powerful human interesting and newsworthy stories in the book, in our opinions, but people inside the Obama White House at the highest level considered that a very closely guarded secret and they did it for a reason. Rose because they didnt want to offend the Vice President. Maybe and because it also attached i think as bill daly said publicly just how low the president s political standing was in the polls and it was one of the things that the people a popular morning program. It is one of the things. Rose a popular morning program. It is one thing that people forget that really comes through in reading the book is just how much the president s people, you know, when the election was over, everyone, you know, especially some people hooked back and said oh this was all in the cards from the very beginning, the economy was beginning to approve the Approval Ratings were not that bad and when they say that to us and thats not what the president s people thought, including the president in the fall of 2011, at the time when the Hillary Clinton testing took place they thought they were at best a 5050 gamble and possibly the underdogs at that point, given the president s ratings and where the bad economy was and there is a a drama, even embedded in that story the context of that hillary, biden story, it tells you something about just how bad off the president and his people thought he was, not that far out from reelection. We are extraordinarily proud of the reporting of the intervention. Rose and you should be. I tell you why, because that was another story no one wanted us to get. Rose there ask something about dash there is a more interesting story than the polling, because it reveals something about the president. A president we think is the most confident person we have ever seen. You. You asked in the beginning what the difference was in the two books we had an an incumbet and one challenge about writing about the democratic is president s get covered a lot so we had today, what could we say about barack obama that would be new and different and revealing in the context of the campaign, and this scene on the eve of the second debate when the whole country, when the whole and the president s werent until he had a collapse of two days before the debate when he is practicing with john kerry standing in as mitt romney, the events leading up to that conversation, at that practice session and after when they do an intervention with him, the day before the second debate, again, the people should read it and see, it is extraordinarily revealing about how the president thinks and feelings, which with this president is hard to get at normally. Rose what did he say and what did he think and what did he feel . He had been struggling, charlie, with two different problems throughout the whole period of debate prep up to before the first debate and in the second which were, you know, on one hand he was he thad this longterm historic, we discussed this on the program on more than one occasion, disdain for the they at cal at this and the showmanship of politics for a person who was as extraordinary, whose performance skills carried him as far as Barack Obamas did he distrusted political performa