"We have become willful members of the political dynamic rather than try to call it down the middle, trying to deal with facts," Bob Woodward tells an audience at Virginia Commonwealth University. (Photo by Jay Paul)
If past is prologue, perhaps no one is better suited to address the present than Bob Woodward, an investigative journalist whose reporting with Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Woodward's work contributed to another Pulitzer in 2002 for the Post's coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Woodward spoke to an at-capacity crowd in Virginia Commonwealth University's Singleton Center for Performing Arts auditorium Tuesday in a talk about “Truth, Freedom of Expression, Democracy and the Age of the American Presidency,” two weeks after the release of his book, “Fear: Trump in the White House.”
He is the author of 18 nonfiction books, and has written about nine presidencies (a full 20 percent of office-holders to date). Woodward, who is now an associate editor at the Post, has been on the paper’s staff since 1971. Here are five takeaways from his talk.
1) BEWARE THE DEMON OF POMPOSITY
Woodward begins with an anecdote from “Fear” widely reported before the book’s formal release, in which economic advisor Gary Cohn takes papers off the president’s desk to derail what he considers a potentially disastrous global trade decision. Woodward invoked this scene as a transition into a broader point on leadership: “The leader has to know what’s going on.”
To illustrate this, Woodward revisits a conversation he had over lunch in the early 1970s with then-Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Woodward was 29 years old then, and he and Bernstein had not yet upended Richard Nixon's presidency with the publication of the Watergate revelations.
In fact, Nixon had such a devout base supporting him — he had just won reelection by a wide margin — that the paper was suffering in no small part because of the investigative duo’s work delving into the darker corners of the administration.
“It was January 1973, and Carl Bernstein and I had written all these stories about the Nixon reelection committee, the Nixon White House, the overseeing and the funding of the Watergate operation and the espionage and sabotage operation of the Democrats,” Woodward explains. “... and she asks me the killer CEO question: ‘When’s all the truth going to come out?’ ”
Woodward contextualizes this by noting that at the time “we were not believed,” and the FCC television licenses, which were very valuable, were being held — by Nixon supporters, they later learned — so the stock at the Washington Post “was in the toilet with its reputation.”
And, with the present circumstances he and Bernstein faced in mind — doors were being slammed in the duo’s faces upon interview requests; the burglars who had broken into the Democratic headquarters were being paid for their silence — he replied, “Never.”
“And she — when I looked across the luncheon table — she had this pained, wounded look on her face, the look you never want to see on your boss's face, and she said, 'Never?’ Don't tell me never,' " Woodward recounts. “But what she said was not threatening — this is what's so important — it was a statement of purpose.”
“She said, 'Why do we do this?' " before she answered her own question, Woodward recalls. “She said, 'Because that's the business we're in.' And it's a brilliant, typical answer, because it says, 'Look, this is what we signed up for.’ She's willing to take the risk and absorb it all herself.'”
Later, Woodward tells the audience, after his and Bernstein’s reporting led to Nixon’s resignation from office, Graham sent him a letter — this time with a word of advice: “Beware the demon of pomposity.”
2) THERE’S A WAR ON TRUTH (AND PRESIDENTS SHARE A COMMON DISEASE)
In detailing nine presidents, Woodward has certainly developed a better picture of the presidency than most others have. In his reporting, he says, the word "destiny" always seems to pop up with regard to being elected to office.
“There’s this certitude,” Woodward explains. “There’s a kind of self-validation when you’re elected president … [but they] all have this disease of isolation, too.”
He points to “the treacherous curtain of deference [that] falls down," despite even the best of intentions when a person sits before the president in the Oval Office — and it’s this curtain of deference that he says is in part to blame for the president not always getting the truth.
He revisits another widely reported anecdote from “Fear” in which former Trump attorney John Dowd goes through a "practice" interrogation session, where Dowd poses as Special Counsel Robert Mueller III, questioning Trump. After some time littered with falsities, conflations and plain-and-simple lies, Dowd concludes on Jan. 27, 2018, that “You’re not capable of telling the truth.”
This is a significant departure from past presidencies, Woodward notes, going on to emphasize that truth is the foundation of how we debate and make decisions, and now — suddenly, in this new era — the truth is no longer something to be taken for granted.
“Literally, incapable,” Woodward emphasizes. “[Dowd] didn’t want to insult the president, but his conclusion was ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ ”
The assertion was met with a brief respite followed by scattered applause.
“Well, I see there are at least a few realists in the audience,” Woodward retorts.
Bob Woodward speaks at VCU two weeks after the release of his book, “Fear: Trump in the White House.” (Photo by Jay Paul)
3) LEARN TO SHUT UP
But the finger points both ways.
Woodward recounts a recent interaction with a Republican senator, in which he confided to the senator that he worries about “my business — the news media,” and the future of it in this new age of "fake news" and a different curtain of deference.
”And he said, 'Oh don’t worry about your business, everyone knows — Republicans, Democrats, left, right, center — that the news media is just another form of politics,’ ” Woodward says, “and unfortunately, there's too much truth in that. We have become willful members of the political dynamic rather than try to call it down the middle, trying to deal with facts.”
He circles back to the 1970s in elaborating on his reporting recently on Trump. He says he is and was reminded of a lesson imparted upon him years ago during Watergate with regard to showing up where there are windows of opportunity — even if they’re not at the front door.
Bernstein, Woodward says, taught him something very important early on. Despite the door-slamming and threats of arrest if they showed up at the White House, the pair would go knocking on doors elsewhere — people’s homes, for example — and they found there were in fact a great deal of people who were willing to help unearth the Watergate scandal.
“I learned, and was reminded, I was not going to get the answers in the White House,” Woodward says of his reporting on the Trump presidency.
After repeated stalling and excuses in response to interview requests, Woodward turned to “the startling intimacy of the telephone” to give a White House source a ring on his home phone. Once again, the source put off setting a time for an interview, so Woodward said, “Well how about now?”
“‘Now? It’s 11 p.m. ….’”
“So I said, ‘I’m four minutes from your house,’” Woodward says with an impish grin, adding, “That really unnerves people — swinging down from the vines like that.”
Nonetheless, Woodward says, he departed the source’s home at an hour nearing dawn.
He invokes another recent example: While working on his book about the George W. Bush presidency and "war on terror," he was repeatedly stonewalled by an instrumental four-star general.
“When’s the best time to knock on the door of a four-star general?” Woodward asks the audience, greeted by a thick, rhetorical silence.
As it turns out, knocking on the door of a four-star general at 8:17 p.m. on a Tuesday worked well for Woodward, who was greeted at the door by his reluctant, soon-to-be source.
After a pause, Woodward recounts, the general said from the threshold of his home, “Are you still doing this shit?”
When the laughter from the audience subsides, Woodward adds: “Method is really important.”
“Learn to shut up,” he says emphatically. “It's amazing how if we just quiet a little bit, just shut up — the demon of pomposity is the enemy because it keeps you from being quiet.”
So he tamed the demon and opted to wallow in the brick of silence between them, pokerfaced. After a moment, the general invited him inside; they interviewed for nearly two hours.
“Why?” Woodward asks the audience rhetorically of the general’s reluctant cooperation, “Because somebody showed up. You’ve got to show up. You’ve got to meet people, you’ve got to go out there, we have to show up.”
4) IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP
Woodward contends that in the Trump White House, there is no damage control mechanism to deal appropriately if disaster strikes.
“God help us if we have a crisis,” he says, pointing to multifaceted dysfunction running rampant through the West Wing.
He notes that Trump was elected on the basis of disruption — so it should be no surprise that his presidency has been a disruption to the norms of past and present, although there is danger in normalizing this disruption as the new status quo.
“The old order — whatever it is — there’s a new order taking its place and it’s not yet defined,” he contends, and the idea is one the president agrees with him on. After multiple ignored attempts to interview the president for “Fear,” Trump called Woodward after the book was set for print.
“I said, ‘We’re at a pivotal point in history,’ ” Woodward recalls. “And he says, ‘Right. We’re at a pivotal point in history.’ ”
5) PARDON THE PAST (TRANSGRESSIONS AND ASSUMPTIONS)
After concluding his roughly 45 minute talk, Woodward took questions from the audience.
One young man asked Woodward what his reaction was when he learned of President Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon for the Watergate scandal.
Woodward says he learned of the pardon — which Ford announced on a Sunday morning — when Bernstein called him and simply said, "The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch,” and Woodward was — as he recounts the story — proud to have immediately, and accurately, interpreted what his colleague meant.
At the time, Woodward says, he found this to be the final scene in the Watergate saga — a fitting one, too — a story of rampant corruption concluding in one last corrupt act of covering-up and whisking away.
It wasn’t until a quarter century later, when Woodward sought to pursue Ford for a book he was working on in the 1990s, that he was exposed to a side of the one-term president he never expected.
“I thought he’d say, ‘No, sorry, I’ve got a golf tournament for the rest of my life,’ ” Woodward says jokingly, noting that this was his second wrong assumption about a man he had judged to be another perpetrator of the Watergate scandal. Instead, he found Ford to be one of the most open folks he’d ever interviewed.
After hours of recordings and transcriptions and notes, Woodward says he couldn’t get past the question of the pardon from so many years ago. So he posed it once more, prompting Ford to tell him the whole truth — after all, the “tape records were going for history.”
What Ford told him was monumental. He had been offered a deal: Nixon would resign, granting Ford the presidency, if Ford would agree to pardon his running mate. Woodward was shell-shocked, or, as he puts it,"sitting in my seat, very active,"’ for this was it — this was news, there had been a deal! But Ford interjected, “Let me tell you what happened. I rejected the deal.”
But you pardoned him, Woodward insisted.
“He said, 'I became president and there was so much destruction in America ... the economy was in trouble, the Cold War was real at that time, and every story was about Nixon — what's going to happen to him?” Woodward recounts, explaining that the special prosecutor had contacted Ford at that time informing him that now that Nixon was a private citizen, he would be prosecuted as such and would likely go to jail. In other words, Ford told Woodward, there would be two more years of Watergate, and “the country could not stand that.”
“And he said in this plaintive voice which I remember to this day, he said, 'I needed my own presidency, and we needed to move on. So the only thing to do was to preempt the process, get Nixon a pardon and send him into the history books and off the front pages of the newspapers.’ ” For Woodward, the revelation was a “cold shower.”
“I had to sort of face the music,” Woodward says. “In 1976, I saw it as the ultimate, last corruption of Watergate … but 25 years later, I realized it was the ultimate act of courage — that act of self-sabotage.”
The self-sabotage, of course, being that Ford lost his bid for the presidency in 1976 to Jimmy Carter, who famously promised the public, "I’ll never lie to you."
