‘Rage:’ A conversation with Bob Woodward

[Music] cap times ideafest 2020 is made possible by the generous support of our sponsors presenting sponsor the burst group at ubs a financial services firm with global access and a local focus to pursue what matters most for its clients major sponsors are healthx ventures backing entrepreneurs who are creating value with digital health solutions exact sciences pursuing earlier detections and life-changing answers in the fight against cancer quartz health plans built with you in mind and madison gas and electric your community energy company whose goal is net zero carbon electricity by 2050. co-sponsors are epic systems and the godfrey khan law firm other sponsors our wisconsin alumni research foundation home savings bank unitypoint health meriter cargo coffee and the forward theater company media partners are the wisconsin state journal and madison.com wkow channel 27 and hinckley productions please consider becoming a cap times member learn more at membership.captimes.com hello i'm paul fanland editor and publisher of the capitol times and i'd like to welcome you to cap times idea fest in this very special session featuring bob woodward interviewed by his longtime friend and colleague david marinus this is our fourth annual event but the first we are presenting virtually our theme this year is 2020 changes everything given the local and regional impact of covet 19 the resulting economic damage and the impact of the black lives matter movement there's a lot to talk about we think this year's lineup is our best yet we believe ideafest has grown into a signature event on the madison calendar it is also an important showcase for the capitol times our locally owned and century-old journalism brand if you're not already we hope you'll consider becoming a cap times member as a member you'll have access to special idea fest programs plus benefits throughout the year you'll also be supporting an independent and trustworthy local media source at a time when that has never been more important learn more at membership.captimes.com i'd like to thank the burst group at ubs which is the presenting sponsor of ideafest and has been with us since the start andy burrish and jason moss have built their asset management firm's stellar reputation by effectively investing for madisonians but also for investing in madison their generous support of idea fest is but one example of their community commitment the burst group is the session sponsor of this visit with bob woodward again thank you and welcome hello wisconsin and cap time's idea fest viewers everywhere this is a very special occasion for me i've known bob woodward for 41 years and this is the first time i've interviewed him in public at all one part of it could not be easier i really don't even have to introduce him because you all know him for what he's done over the last half century he reports on people in power especially presidents and our rights about them for the washington post and in ground breaking books his latest book rage rips away the curtain of today's chaotic white house and takes us deep into the troubling mind of donald trump bob and i have had countless conversations over the decades that have been marked by two things above all else the first is that we both honor a search for the truth and the very hard work it takes to get there bob has taught me more than anyone i know about the need to go back and back and back once more in pursuit of what really happened other people pontificate and postulate bob does the hard work of extracting information secrets documents piece by piece to become invaluable to the public welfare the second thing about our conversations is that we push each other and sometimes disagree not on the facts but on the meaning of those facts their context i think that that's what true friends do in our profession and i always learn from talking with bob also bob's another midwesterner born in wheaton so first of all bob welcome and thanks so much for doing this thank you one thing about the trump era is that there's always something always something new another trapdoor that opens uh something shocking and surprising the latest being the president himself getting kovin 19. in your conversations with him and the people around him what did you learn that can help explain his actions that he's had since to getting it first hiding it from the public and his staff having doctors be less than transparent and saying what they did and then diminishing its dangers yesterday you said you catch it and you get better how do you explain that yeah and and yesterday he said getting the virus for him was a blessing from god and uh he had said earlier in the week uh went so far as to say don't be obsessed by this don't let it get you down all of this uh idea of well we can just move on and uh i think the core part of him it goes back to he doesn't understand the job of being president and the responsibilities that uh when the first interview i did with him for this book was december 5th 2019 last year so 10 months ago and went into the oval office took my little olympus tape recorder out plunked it down on the resolute desk and said this is all going to be on the record it's going to be for a book to come out in september or october and one of the things in that first interview i asked what do you think the job of the president is and he said oh the job of the president is to protect the people actually the conduct of president trump has been always to protect himself and work in that narrow world of what is his interest and uh it is a tragedy that the basic he does not understand and so we now see go you don't have to go far back during the debate with biden he literally said he's not going to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power uh if he uh loses i guess you know and just said it categorically now the basic responsibility of the president is to ensure the continuation of the democratic process david i mean you know this so can you think of anything more central to the constitution and the idea of us having one person who's vested with all these executive powers well since george washington when he decided he wasn't going to be king of course that's at the center of it all right yes it is and trump's failure to understand uh his failure to get beyond this idea of himself you know we are all our prisoners of ourselves and one of the things we need to learn from childhood on is to figure out how others feel how they're reacting what uh they want to do and this this basic part of human relations is missing from donald trump you know i'm glad you mentioned that first interview we're going to talk about that in detail later in the interview because i focused on that chapter in the book chapter 26 i think um but uh just getting to to you know going back to your your book your first book fear when you were talking about that after it came out um you said i just hope to god we don't have a crisis and so you you know i i could see that as you started to approach um trump for all of these interviews that was one of the things you were getting at did he understand the consequences of that job do you think he ever realized that the pandemic was the greatest test of his leadership i i talked to him about this i kept saying this is you have it you have to guide and define the national interest in this pandemic and he just never would get it for instance and this rests on examples to a certain extent he kept going talking about boeing oh boeing is in trouble they have uh the max plane which has not worked they have this problem can you believe what happened to boeing and i said now wait a minute this isn't about boeing this is about you leading the country and i literally said to him at one point your problem with the virus which is a pandemic which is just decimating this country is 10 000 times the problem that boeing had and he was just like oh well but look at boeing and what's happened to them and uh i think there is even you almost have to i'm gonna go a little further with you david because you and i that you need a basic test before you become president that you almost have to take a uh test about the constitution about the obligation and then and let's go to the heart of it the the president has a moral obligation to the people in the country not just a political one not just a practical one not just to take care of people but he has a moral obligation and he has no concept of that secretary of defense mattis i quote in the book saying he has no moral compass and uh trump has no moral compass unfortunately and it's it's all about him and so uh the idea historians are going to be writing about this for years that um how did he get elected what happened in 2016 that he was elected and i've talked to him extensively about that because i think there was a situation in the country that the democratic party the republican party both failed to understand what was going on i would say in our business david the media we didn't understand what was going on how alienated so many people felt how many uh people were looking for somebody who was a disruptor they love the idea that he has no decorum at all he will say anything and do anything and there are millions of people in the country just cheering that on oh yes that's right stick it to the elite stick it to the establishment and he saw that the old order now intellectually i don't think so intuitively yes he saw the old order was dying going away and he captured that and i talked to him he captured history's clock and he did and anyway i agree with that i think one place where we differ slightly is i think that race and racism played a much deeper role in this than anything else um the reaction to obama uh the sort of the make america great again was all sort of evoking a past where white males dominated everything and i think that was a large part of it along with the discontent i i agree with you now looking back on it i don't think in 2016 there was a way to know that do you i mean repertory i thought i knew it but anyway yeah okay well but that's not that's not the point of our conversation no no but it's important to you knew that just intuitively oh i went out in the country and spent uh two months reporting on the election and that's where i came back saying that um this is not an essential question and it's not you know a reporter goes out and tries to get every interview they can and you know however they come but why do you think he talked to you and why did he talk to you so much uh it started the 2018 book i did fear uh i've said uh openly in the book that the uh not only did we have to worry about a crisis but that the executive branch that trump led for the first two years of his presidency experienced a nervous breakdown and he didn't talk to me for that book i tried through every means you know you talk to friends you talk to press secretaries you talk to key cabinet people and then when the book came out he denounced it said it was uh a pack of lies and i was a democratic operative and [Music] what what was so stunning about it a couple of people who worked for him went to him and said you know by the way it's all true and oh it's all true and when he discovered i was doing a second book he said okay now i'll talk to him and the process of talking to him i could get him on the phone almost anytime day or night i had a number to call he called me seven or eight times unexpectedly just out of the blue and so i had to run around the house with the tape recorder that i could put him on a speaker phone and record uh because as you know i mean you're the best practitioner of this in journalism you have to prepare your questions you have to uh make the questions relevant to what you're doing but they need to be relevant to the person you're interviewing they need they need to be thinking or saying hey those are good questions though i mean my summary uh line is in this you need to treat some take somebody as seriously as they take themselves and that means yes preparation time and the idea that somehow you needed to appeal to the president of the united states to prove to him you're taking him as seriously as he takes himself as you know in the media crush of the day it's always what happened today what's news and i would go back and ask him questions that dealt into his frame of mind and he could and he said to me and some of this is bs but he said oh those are good questions i like those questions and they are calibrated to really get him to think about things he might not have been thinking about you do this all the time right well it's yes but the notion of taking someone as seriously as they take themselves is a bit of a stretch with donald trump i mean he what he doesn't take anything seriously except his image right i mean well no i mean he but but it's not just his image he takes seriously he takes himself seriously wants to be a winner wants to win reelection and so uh as much as i can dig into him and if there's no i don't think it's manipulative at all i think you won't say hey look i take you seriously and these are the questions i have and he would let me push him and come back to issues uh that we had dropped uh like race relations i mean he said that when i said you know do you understand the pain and anger that black people feel in america were white white privileged males trump and myself and we have a special responsibility to understand that i as a reporter he is president and he just bought we played the tape of this he's just mocking me david he's saying oh wow you drank the kool-aid on that you've listened to yourself what'd you think of that right yes um you know uh i want to broaden it a little bit here and because we're dealing in an election where there are two uh important candidates you wrote in your obama books uh quite a bit about joe biden and how he dealt with republicans during the the budget discussions and other things what impressions what were the larger impressions you came away with about biden during that research i did two books on obama when biden was vice president of course the first obama explorers about the war in afghanistan and uh responsibility for dealing with that initially obama handed off to biden he was very active in uh working on it up to to the end and was very much of an advocate for not sending a whole lot of additional troops he thought we were you know it would be vietnam's very smart about it i thought and on the budget negotiations uh it was totally turned over to him until the end by obama and i think uh quite honestly obama you know this so well obama has a real ego and i think he's done biden a disservice by not going out there i mean obama supports biden there's no question about that but he should have gone out there should go out there now and let me tell you what joe did and his involvement in these issues uh was absolutely incredible particularly the budget negotiations which obama turned over to biden so biden negotiated with the republicans for a year and set the strategy directed the meetings dealt with john boehner who was the uh republican speaker of the house at the time and there might be you know this but there's something in obama where he's got such an ego that he kind of won't let go and really say and he says nice things about biden generally but he won't get out and say for an hour let me tell you all the things joe did for me as vice president and the good advice he gave me and the management of a very delicate process uh in foreign affairs in the afghan war and the budget negotiations well maybe i tend to agree with that i think maybe after hearing this you might do that but uh you're right he has a reserve there and it is uh in part due to his ego um you know in all of your interviews with trump he was constantly disparaging other people nancy pelosi obama many times what sense did you get about what he thinks about biden is he more afraid of biden than the others well he was always talking about biden and not being steady not being uh you know dropping not just hints but saying you know he at one point i'm talking to trump and trump is saying because i'm asking about the virus said well you know it hits old people really badly and it uh and asked me how old i was and i was 77 and uh trump at that time i think was only 73 and he said well this uh uh this uh impairment is hit biden and he always put it in the context of biden's uh impaired uh he slowed down and uh obviously in the debate trump was trying to emphasize that i think they will continue to emphasize it uh for the remaining weeks of the campaign and uh there's a you know look biden has lost a step don't you think so is trump i mean yes no no there's always a transference with donald trump you know what he says about other people um can be applied to himself so many times fair point but uh the biden i knew because i interviewed him extensively for the two obama books uh he's slowed down a little bit he's he's hesitant on some things uh i don't necessarily agree with you about trump trump is never hesitant he just goes right for the throat of an opponent or says something uh outrageous now what well that's a that's an animalistic instinct i don't think that he can parse a english sentence in that sense i think he's slowed down yes and but that's the way he uses talking points he has things now i've done more for black people in america than any president except lincoln and i would say to well how about uh lyndon johnson how about and you know it's just that's his talking point yeah and he's gonna he's gonna stick to it you know i'm sure you've thought about the irony or paradox of the role that tape recorders have played in your career you know 47 years ago the secret nixon tapes and now these tapes are not at all secret you know what donald trump talking to you about them um using those tapes as a starting point how do you compare them these two men their flaws and egos and brains and narcissism all of it yeah you could write a three volume book on that question first of all nixon was a criminal and a provable criminal no one has pinned a crime on trump all the investigations and so forth and a crime as we know requires premeditation almost all always particularly political crimes you have to plot trump doesn't plot he doesn't he doesn't premeditate it's all the impulse i i was pretty confident when mueller did his investigation he wasn't going to find the the smoking gun because trump doesn't think and act that way i think the same way in the impeachment inquiry certainly what trump did with uh with zielinski and ukraine and so forth was uh improper did it rise to that level of impeachment i think we got in our minds from nixon and clinton uh impeachment has to be something very clear and unambiguous there was some ambiguity in what happened uh with ukraine and trump but trump had had that grip on the republican senators which he still has to this day it is how do you explain that i explain that as shame on the republican senators i know some of them and the last line of my book is in summary trump is the wrong man for the job i know senators republicans who will say that in a private whisper but they won't go public with it when i got to the end of the book and it reached that conclusion as you know you type along and you've got information and ideas and i wrote that sentence and realized that was the obvious conclusion from the evidence he is the wrong man for the job but more importantly as i talked it out with my wife elsa and my assistants evelyn duffy and steve riley i realized that i had an obligation to say that because that was my conclusion if i was silent like the republican senators i would have failed in my job as not just a citizen but a reporter i had all this evidence i reached that conclusion you can take and look at the evidence and reach another conclusion that's fine let people do it but i'm going to share mine and i'm not going to join the ranks of the silent and i think in journalism we often think uh look as you know david we know each other as you say for over 40 years i mean that's a long time spent a lot of time interacting formally informally and one of the things you you learn at least my point of view is this these aren't partisan judgments people will say oh you've reached a partisan that's not a partisan judgment because trump is a republican it is a conclusion based on evidence if he was a democrat and that was the evidence i would say precisely the same thing and it's just not partisan but i was not going to i suspect you maybe you were surprised that i would say that or maybe you saw you see the reasoning of not participating in some sort of uh silence that you know but i want to say to all of everybody watching this that that bob just gave the perfect encapsulation of why he's so valuable he doesn't base his opinions on anything other than what he's reported himself and that reporting goes very deep and that adds to the weight of what he concludes we're going to take a break here and when i come back i'm going to talk in detail about chapter 26 trying to take bob through it piece by piece and then talk about his wife else and some other things so stay tuned cap times ideafest 2020 is made possible by the generous support of our sponsors presenting sponsor the burris group at ubs a financial services firm with global access and a local focus to pursue what matters most for its clients major sponsors are healthx ventures backing entrepreneurs who are creating value with digital health solutions exact sciences pursuing earlier detections and life-changing answers in the fight against cancer quartz health plans built with you in mind and madison gas and electric your community energy company whose goal is net zero carbon electricity by 2050. co-sponsors are epic systems and the godfrey khan law firm other sponsors our wisconsin alumni research foundation home savings bank health meriter cargo coffee and the forward theater company media partners are the wisconsin state journal and madison.com wkow channel 27 and hinckley productions please consider becoming a cap times member learn more at membership.captimes.com so um trump in the oval office december 5th 2019 i sort of became obsessed when i was reading that interview because it it showed so much about him just in that one setting and about how you do your work so i'd like to sort of take it scene by scene um first you you come in and he says he has something to show you what does he want to show you oh yeah these are the pictures of him and kim jong-un the north korean leader when he met with him and he i mean they're almost sacred tablets and he says you know the no one's seen these before well they're they've been on the internet for years but he thinks they're unique yeah yeah he calls them iconic pictures right and uh yes and says he likes kim and kim likes him um you know that sort of establishes right there this what we all know about how he seems to be attracted to autocrats in various ways uh murderous ones um and then you say you want to talk policy because with presidents that policy is what matters and then what happens in his response well i didn't i say policy is the spine of the presidency and he agreed and i forget precisely what happened next um well immediately he gets vague and doesn't talk about policy yeah he doesn't know how to talk about it that was the impression i got from that um then you mentioned uh barack obama and how does he respond to that oh well he hates obama and i've you know when the i can't separate the interviews but he i don't know whether at this point did he actually say that obama isn't a good speaker he said he's not very smart yeah not very smart and then compared him to himself and he said he oh he's so smart because and and is this where he goes back um the uncle who was at mit right and how there's some sort of genetic transfer of intelligence from his uncle to him and then the uh deputy press secretary interrupts the meeting says trump has another appointment and how does trump respond to that oh we said we'll keep going uh you know because why oh boy because i find it very interesting and i love this guy yeah yeah about you yeah what did that mean well that meant you know the the uh seduction was on and uh that's that's okay there's a picture i put in the book of uh trump's there at the desk and uh pence is there standing and the chief of staff mulvaney is standing press secretary standing and kellyanne conway and i'm sitting there and trump not only is he selling those pictures of him and kim jong-un he's got there a binder of his letters the exchanges you know 27 of them between kim and himself right and he's got the formal judicial appointments there is if you know the pictures the exchange letters and then the sacred judicial appointments sitting there i i make the point if interviewing other presidents in the oval office it's always down at the other end where you sit in the couch uh president sits in the president's chair there and there are no props right you you've entered like obama did he have a prop when you interview no props it is a little bit um he's hot his jar is higher than the reporters so he's looking down a little bit but they're not behind the resolute desk ever and it's much more uh informal than that yeah and it's maybe it's not informal but it's um there's something he's not trying to impress he's not making you know you know i've got pictures of me and so and so and i've got here all the things the judicial appointments i make and so forth and uh then at the end of the interview that's when i asked him what's the job of the president he said to protect the people yes um as you're starting to realize i'm conducting this part of the interview the way you'd conduct your interviews piece by piece of what happened right so um then you ask him uh what the trump pen strategy is yeah and he doesn't have it he doesn't know he doesn't even answer right and then you ask him um to give for him to give you his taxes and then you say no seriously um so at that point i have a question for you bob about that um you know from the time i first met you one of the mantras that that my friends and i always say when we're pretending we're bob woodward is you've got to get the documents right so um obviously asking someone for the documents is one way um also just trying to get them some other way is what you've normally done throughout your career was this the only time you attempted to get these taxes or by just asking him directly how important did you think that was to understanding him oh i think it was important and it's one of the things i failed on to get his taxes i met with jerry dillon who was his tax lawyer in washington and uh made a pitch in 2016 to get the tax returns and you know saying naively well they're gonna come out and uh i will look at them and do them you know in a come back with questions and try to do it in a very responsible comprehensive way and of course i got no no no the the audits going on so he can't do that which of course people realize i hope is total bs it's i mean he could do exactly he could release that but i think sometimes asking like i asked for the letters from kim jong-un and the ones he sent and i eventually got them yes and uh so a frontal request i think is a useful approach and obviously a more uh repertorial one talking to aides and other people who may have access to documents to get them that way also right and of course the new york times got a lot of that information which is important for us at the washington post to acknowledge that you know that it's the there's a big press corps out there and whoever gets important information from the public more power to them in the end in sort of um explaining what's really going on in this world yeah but you know the new york times story was good and you they need to get credit for it but they didn't have the tax returns they had the information that somebody had provided for doing the tax returns and i thought um there was possibly what our old boss ben bradley used to call the extra squeeze i thought the new york times said some things took an extra squeeze on conclusions from the information they have which may be valid may not be valid uh for example they make the point that he's uh 400 bill uh 400 million dollars in debt right to others and it's unclear what the debt is and that's true because that's not shown on tax returns but for somebody in the real estate business if he's worth two billion dollars or four billion dollars it's possible it's also possible if you really looked at it if he's not worth much or maybe even anything but if he's worth 2 billion or 4 billion for somebody in the real estate business to be have that level of debt is not that unusual sometimes people in the real estate business will have as much debt as they have assets so i thought there was a kind of uh oh there's there's something uh mystery there is indeed something mysterious about it there's much to be explained but i i think when all that gets sorted out it's not going to be clear that that was uh some nefarious lever that somebody or some groups of people or russians had on trump it may turn out to be but not necessarily well nefarious we can't know but what you can know is that he's that much in debt and he's the president of the united states and he owes it to somebody yes exactly in and of itself is problematic oh yes and uh is uh significant in in the context of his failure to disconnect himself from the trump organization and i mean all of that is but what always has surprised me about this david is uh no one ever really found anything criminal in this mueller or the impeachment investigation at this point there is there in which goes back to what we were talking about my theme of trump doesn't premeditate he doesn't think he doesn't plan and so maybe he did some things that were criminal quite likely but it in a way it doesn't surprise me that no one has nailed him like nixon was nailed saying you know take the money and pay forty thousand dollars for some one of the watergate burglar silence clearly criminal clearly obstruction of justice where in trump we don't see that well that chapter hasn't been written yet and most likely won't be until he's no longer president i would argue and that is the you know what comes out um more likely in terms of his finances than his presidency in a sense yes and the over all point of this is critical and it reflects on his failure to understand what the presidency is the presidency is a sacred trust it's not just a constitutional office it is a sacred trust and the if you're going to run for the presidency and take the office and take that very important oath you have an obligation to disconnect yourself from your past particularly your financial past where the interests may not overlap with those of being president and the failure to understand that is part of the moral and constitutional catastrophe of the trump presidency now you said something earlier you said about my opinion and i wonder when i reached the conclusion that trump is the wrong man for the job uh is that an opinion or is that a conclusion based on as i say from overwhelming evidence what what is an opinion um that's a semantic question and i meant as i said before we went to the break that that your conclusions our opinions are based on evidence yeah so you could say that's a conclusion but it's also um someone could debate it so to that extent it's an opinion yes that's exactly right um and you know what you were just talking about is interesting to me because i'm also um sort of interested in your first session with him at mar-a-lago um where um you start talking about impeachment and he calls himself a student of history right i like learning from the past i can't think of anybody who's learned less from the past but what was that all about well you know that's one of his uh lines about himself and unfortunately you know this this is this goes to another question about introspection and self-knowledge and you need to know your strengths and your weaknesses right and any business particularly the presidency and for uh him to say that of course is absurd uh but that see he's locked into this view of not who he is but what maybe he should be at least he's understanding enough to to think oh yeah the president should be a student of history so i'll say i'm a student of history but that's as far as it goes because there's no history there's the statement i i'm a student of history because maybe he thinks that's uh high church high road stuff and it is but the failure to understand that see where we're at this what is it october 9th right and what's going to happen the next three or four weeks or next two months in this country we are in for a kind of a constitutional battle legal battle moral battle party battle human against human and trump is locked in his mind that he's superior to joe biden now one of the things you have to do when you're in a competitive world anyway i mean let me just you know journalism is competitive right that i know and have seen this for for you are a much better writer than i am you comprehend trends and you can talk to people and put big picture stuff with little picture stuff and connect it in a very very significant way i'm not i hope i'm not deluded to think that i have that capacity i don't have that capacity and it's something you have and okay i'm going to yield that territory to you and i'm going to try to do what i think i can do as well as anyone or better than me as well no no no see you know that i mean let's get this on the record no no it's um i told this story but it's important to repeat it here i think uh after nixon resigned 1974 catherine graham the owner of the post the publisher wrote carl bernstein and myself a letter uh on yellow legal station a yellow legal pad not all the stationary she had said dear carl and bob uh now that nixon's resigned you did some of the stories now don't start thinking too highly of yourselves and let me give you some advice and the advice is beware the demon and the pomposity pervades every institution in politics academia journalism science you name it and pomposity is that sense of i really know what i'm doing and i think you have to kind of operate on a daily basis of okay i have a method but i really don't know where all this is leading where it's going to go and uh the the atmosphere of pomposity that pervades too much in the country i think is a giant problem i think it's a problem in journalism and that we need to come down and be self-critical introspective and i think it ought to there ought to be a banner across the newsroom with the washington post if we ever can get back there after the pandemic that just says beware the demon pomposity catherine graham 1974 i think that you've proved that for a half century that you don't have that pomposity you've kept working at it and every conversation i've had with you has started without presumptions it started with curiosity and you wanting to know and try to figure something out and not sure where you were going with it but knowing what you wanted to try to find out or what the questions were and that's why i've always said you know to anybody who might question you i always say let bob woodburn be bob woodward because he does it so well and and you have a great understanding of what your talents are and they're of enormous importance to this country that's all i gotta say about it because i don't want you to argue with me about it but okay but i will argue with you you know and um that the uh the savior is the method yes and the message i agree with you yeah and um and you can't you can't uh take a shortcut on the method oh i i learned uh if if you bear with me on this in the first week i worked at the washington post full time after i'd failed tray out try out work for a weekly paper for a year and i was hired essentially because i had some stories in the weekly paper that they wish they had and so let's let's hire this guy and i learned in a single day you can talk it's possible to interview 16 people and many stories as we know are just two or three people or sometimes you can get away with four or five you can get away with a but you literally can if you decide i'm going to talk to 16 people today about something that's going on or the same subject and what we have to do is ratchet up the inquiry that we need to i would you know you just have to keep going back and and back at it and so when trump opened the door uh to is that of an alarm it's time to wake up no no no no somebody calling me i forgot to deal with the phone so anyway let me return to your questions i'm talking too much no no you're not how could you this is your thing um so uh but you mentioned coming to the post what was in 1971 uh what was what tell me about the sights and sounds of the newspaper back in that archaic age yeah it was it was uh great there was a real feeling it was after the pentagon papers and and that was uh there were two components to that that were important it reaffirmed the right of the press to publish secret documents and that there could be no prior restraint but on the pentagon papers the new york times was led the charge and we were second and ben bradley hated being second so he uh there was this idea of were liberated to look at anything but he didn't want he didn't say this to my knowledge but the whole atmosphere was uh we're not going to be second we're going to be first and so we can go and uh look at anything do anything i remember the city editor my first week at the post september 1971 took me out to lunch and said now you have an unlimited expense account essentially this was a long time ago you can take people to dinner lunch and so forth you can travel do whatever and you can talk to anyone in fact you can call the white house if you want and but just let the white house reporter on the national staff know that you're doing it and so there was that sense of the world is ours and i loved it like i know you love journalism i mean it's it's the best job in the world so i had nice police beat from 6 p 6 30 at night to 2 30 in the morning and i loved the police speak getting to know the cops and what their experience was and how they did their job and then i'd go sleep for six or seven hours and come in and do a day story because there were always follow-up stories uh there was always much to do and so the morning of the watergate burglary which was june of 72 it was a beautiful saturday morning and the weekend editors kind of say well we've got this strange burglary at the democratic headquarters who would be dumb enough to come in and they immediately thought of me not kidding he'll do anything so they called me and woke me up and sent me to the courthouse and that's when i heard uh the league burglar in his business suits say finally after prodding from the judge that he worked for the cia and i blurted out holy and went back to the paper and said you know this guy worked for the cia then the next day sunday two people came to work on the story follow-up carl gruenstein and myself and we then started working together and i learned so much from him about reporting i'll never be able to thank him enough he just he would say well we're gonna go knock on the door tonight of the bookkeeper and i'd say we are and he'd say yep that's what we're doing interesting so that was more carl than you oh yes much much more i didn't realize that yeah i did well the holy mantra has been part of the post uh ethos ever since and you know mostly for the better or almost always for the better yeah but it it puts us you know where we lean forward and uh i in particular made mistakes and leaning forward and you know that's uh that's what we i talked to trump about this in fact because you know he always says everything's fake news and he was denouncing uh the book that uh rucker uh and carol lennox did and uh i said i said um wait a minute he said they make things up i said no they don't make things up they're excellent reporters they have good sources and he just couldn't believe that and i said i'm telling you they have good sources sometimes all of us get something wrong and i said to him i said i think you're making a big mistake by with a blanket denunciation of the media as fake news because it now of course politically it serves his purposes oh yeah he has no rational thought about it i mean he denounced your book as fake news right yes after talking to you 18 times well yeah initially you know but again this is the confusion in his mind the second book the one we're talking about rage he said oh it's a political hit job and then he claimed he read it in one night right oh yeah he said this publicly and he said it's very boring but then a fox news anchor to his credit ask said is it accurate and trump said okay it's fine and then he went out publicly and said i say some great things in that book and my re somebody said uh well what was your reaction to that and i said that i always said i would let him have his say and i did let him have his say in a very uh as comprehensive a way as possible so he again realizes uh that the book is true assuming that he really did read it which i'm not willing to assume no nor am i uh we might have read a one-page synopsis of it or whatever you know they always joke about what's on trump's bedside table and it's the tv clicker um bob you know you're married to a extremely talented journalist elsa walsh i might be wrong but it seemed to me that she played an as big or bigger role in this book as any that you've done yes she really did she added six times she was always prodding me you she'd read transcripts of interviews uh you know go check this out get another source on that a continual and quite honestly and she knows this it was sometimes unpleasant to have your wife kind of say you know why are you sitting here having dinner you know get your ass out of the chair and get back to work both might say the opposite most wives say the opposite no no because she was totally committed to this and i she had access to all the information she you know would i've introduced her to trump on the phone and a couple of times he called like the first time and he said is bob there and and she said uh who's calling and he said donald trump which is three and uh i said that's the right response who's calling yeah exactly and uh so her lev level of engagement on that and the other i know we're out of time understanding she and jamie gangel of c had is the importance of releasing the audio of these tapes and i quite honestly had no plan to do so and they said you've got to release the audio and so under their goading and pressure i did and they were so right and part of it is the distrust this is one of the things we need to confront in our business we are distrusted people don't trust the media and you can say something in a book or a newspaper article but when you have the audio of the president of the united states saying oh yeah i always played down the pandemic because i didn't want to it's much different than what's in the book so for me it raises a really interesting question of what do we do to rebuild trust because i think we have the responsibility and one of the things is to present the best obtainable evidence and of course when you can present the best obtainable evidence of the president talking for nine hours and 41 minutes on all of the issues of the day the virus the race relations the economy the supreme court you have a body of evidence that you presented to the public that you normally don't have i think the best available evidence is uh could go on your tombstone someday not anytime soon okay okay thank you good seeing you thank you for inviting me david oh it's terrific thank you cap times idea fest 2020 is made possible by the generous support of our sponsors presenting sponsor the burris group at ubs a financial services firm with global access and a local focus to pursue what matters most for its clients major sponsors are healthx ventures backing entrepreneurs who are creating value with digital health solutions exact sciences pursuing earlier detections and life-changing answers in the fight against cancer quartz health plans built with you in mind and madison gas and electric your community energy company whose goal is net zero carbon electricity by 2050. co-sponsors are epic systems and the godfrey khan law firm other sponsors our wisconsin alumni research foundation home savings bank unity point health meriter cargo 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Channel: Cap Times

Views: 6,262

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Id: _8iWxvNz2g4

Length: 65min 49sec (3949 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020