60 Minutes - 10/17/2021: Robert Gates, The Green River Drift, Whither Ye Olde English Pub

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

On this week's "60 Minutes," Anderson Cooper talks to former defense secretary and CIA head Robert Gates, who touched on several other topics -- including the rise of China and the limits of America's military. Bill Whitaker reports on the Green River Drift, where ranchers push thousands of cows along the same 70-mile route their ancestors pioneered 125 years ago. And Jon Wertheim travels to Great Britain to report on the future of England's pubs -- after the coronavirus pandemic closed them to close their tabs for more than a year. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Robert Gates served under eight U.S. presidents, ran the CIA, and oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Presidents Bush and Obama. Given the rising tensions with China and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, we thought it worth hearing what he thinks about how President Biden is doing. It's time for American troops to come home. And the biggest challenges facing the United States. It's an American story. Cattle ranchers in Wyoming, who every spring,

push thousands of cows along the same 70-mile route their ancestors pioneered 125 years ago. The Green River Drift is the country's longest running cattle drive, and as we saw, it's filled with sensational sunrises. There's that sun. It's gonna peak out full of the hill. Hard, dusty days. All of it worked on horseback.

In a changing Britain, nostalgia can reside at the bottom of a glass. In the oh-so-English village of Aldworth in Berkshire, you'll find just a cricket green, a church, a few houses, and a pub resistant to time. The Bell Inn has been in the family of Heather McCauley for 200 years. We've talked to some pub owners who've said they felt this pressure to evolve and they're trying gourmet food and DJs and technology. Well, I don't even have a mobile phone.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Few people know more about the depth and complexity of America's national security than Robert Gates,

who spent nearly three decades at the CIA and National Security Council before running the Pentagon under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Given the end of the war in Afghanistan, tensions with China, and deep divisions in this country, we thought it'd be worth hearing from the only Secretary of Defense to serve under presidents from different parties. Gates is 78 and lives in Washington state, where he says he moved to get as far away from Washington, D.C. as possible. He told us watching the chaos of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan on television made him feel sick. about the way it had ended, if you will. And I guess the other feeling that I had was that it probably did not need to have turned out that way. President Biden said any withdrawal is messy.

Certainly the military considers the withdrawal the most dangerous part of an operation, but they really had a lot of time to plan, beginning with the deal that President Trump cut with the Taliban. So that was in February of 2020. Robert Gates, who oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2006 to 2011, told us President Trump failed to plan properly for the evacuation of Afghans who'd helped the U.S. fight the Taliban. And Gates also believes President Biden didn't act quickly enough after announcing in April he was pushing back President

Trump's deadline for the U.S. withdrawal by four months. It's time for American troops to come home. Once President Biden reaffirmed that there was going to be a firm deadline date, that's the point at which I think they should have begun bringing these people out. You'd have to be pretty naive not to assume things were going to go downhill once that withdrawal was complete. So the former president and President Biden both share some responsibility in this? Absolutely. As for the collapse of the Afghan government and security forces, Gates believes he and others before him made critical mistakes in how the U.S. built and trained the Afghan military.

I bear some responsibility for this. It had started before I got there. But I think that we created an Afghan military in our own image, and one that required a lot more sophisticated logistics and maintenance and support than, say, the Taliban. The Taliban didn't have years of training from foreign advisors. They didn't know how to read. We were teaching Afghan troops how to read before anything else. Well, they needed to know how to read in order to operate the equipment we were giving them. Instead of being light and tactical and basically self-resourced as the Taliban were,

we created a logistics-heavy, sophisticated equipment-heavy military. And when you pulled that rug out from under them, and you add on top of that the corruption of the senior military leaders and so on, it's not a surprise to me that the Afghan army collapsed. We will maintain the fight against terrorists in Afghanistan. President Biden has given assurances that the U.S. can still target terrorists in Afghanistan. We have what's called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground,

or very few if needed. But Robert Gates is skeptical. The military refers to it as over the rainbow. Because it's a fantasy. This notion that you can carry out effective counterterrorism in Afghanistan from a great distance, it's not a fantasy, but it's just very, very hard. As evidenced by the botched drone strike in Kabul in the final days of the withdrawal, the U.S. military claimed they'd killed an ISIS terrorist and turned out to be an Afghan aid worker and seven children. If you don't have the kind of sources on the ground

to have kind of real-time intelligence that allows you to target people, it's very complicated. If they can't get that right a few blocks from the Kabul airport, how are you going to get something right over the horizon? Exactly. When he was Secretary of Defense, Gates would write personal condolence letters to the families of fallen service members. We wondered what he would say to them now and to all who fought in Afghanistan. I would say that you accomplished your mission.

There has not been a terrorist attack, a successful foreign-based terrorist attack on the United States since we went into Afghanistan in 2001. What happens now that we're gone remains to be seen. Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Gates spent nearly 27 years at the National Security Council and the CIA, which he ran under President George H.W. Bush. Gates and President Biden have crossed paths for decades, as he wrote about in 2014. You wrote, Joe Biden was a man of integrity. Still, I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. I think he's gotten a lot wrong.

You're talking all through the years as vice president. He opposed every one of Ronald Reagan's military programs to contest the Soviet Union. He opposed the first Gulf War. That list goes on. Now, I will say that in the Obama administration, he and I obviously had significant differences over Afghanistan. But he and I did agree in our opposition to the intervention in Libya, and frankly, on issues relating to Russia and China. But do you think he made a mistake in Afghanistan in the way he handled the withdrawal? Yes.

Do you think he believes he made a mistake? I've worked for eight presidents, Anderson. I've never encountered a single one of them who ever said, well, I really blew that one. Really? Is that really true? Never. They just don't do that. You know, deep in their heart, they may know it, but they will never say it. Do you think it would be better if they did? Yes. I think it would make them more credible.

What's happened in Afghanistan has been devastating for President Biden domestically. Can Biden recover? Oh, I think so. I think that the submarine deal between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, I think is a great strategic move. It sends a powerful message all around the world. To China? All around the world, including to China, that the United States still has a lot of arrows in the quiver and that we will remain a force to be reckoned with in the Western Pacific. That deal to help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines comes as China is increasingly threatening Taiwan. If China moves on Taiwan, is that a field

that the U.S. would fight on? There are two strategies that we need to focus on. One is deterrence, strengthening our own military presence in the region. And the second piece of the strategy is to strengthen Taiwan's ability to defend itself. Internationally, Gates sees China as the preeminent military and economic threat to the United States. I think this is a place where President Trump got it right. He basically awakened Americans, and I would say especially the business community, to China that the assumptions about which we had gotten wrong. And the assumption for 40 years was that a richer China would be a freer China. And that's clearly not going to happen.

But there's another piece of this puzzle with China, and that is the economic side. Chinese now manage something like three dozen major ports around the world. They are the biggest trading partner of more than half of South America. They are everywhere. And what are we doing in these non-military arenas to compete with the Chinese? Robert Gates has always considered himself a Republican. But while he agreed with some of President Trump's policies, he remains highly critical of the former president. Do you think the former president will run again, President Trump?

I hope not. Why do you hope not? I'm a strong believer in institutions, whether it's the intelligence community, the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department, the FBI. He disdains institutions. And I think he did a lot to weaken institutions. You called him a thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip-and-lip, uninformed commander-in-chief. Too great a risk for America, you said. I would not edit that at all. What do you think the greatest threat to democracy is in this country right now? The extreme polarization that we're seeing. The greatest threat is found within the two square miles that encompass the White House and the Capitol building.

When you watched the insurrection on the Capitol. What did you think? The attack on the Capitol was the first time armed enemies of democracy had been in the Capitol since the War of 1812. I mean, seeing somebody parading through the Capitol carrying a Confederate flag, that never happened during the Civil War. What's worse, the event itself, or even now, all these months later, to have members of Congress trying to rewrite its history? I don't understand such a denial. And these same people who were terrified on January 6th

and whose lives were in danger to now basically say, well, these are just normal tourists. The whole of our society seems to be coming unhinged. And there's just, I've never seen so much hatred. The continued propagation of former President Trump's big lie about the election, how big of a national security threat is that for future elections? It seems to me that it underscores the theme that China is sounding around the world, that the United States political system doesn't work, and that the United States is a declining power.

Robert Gates doesn't believe America's power is declining. But after serving under eight presidents and seeing up close what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, he's come to accept the limits of America's military might. You said one of the enduring lessons of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union is that lasting change in a country will come only from within. I find that to be an extraordinary statement from somebody who ran military interventions in countries. You're saying that in the end, from the outside, you cannot change a country. I believe that. And I think that there are a handful of exceptions. Germany and Japan

after World War II are examples. But we had essentially destroyed both countries. Total defeat. Foreign policy at the end of a rifle doesn't work. You know, one of my favorite quotes is from Churchill. Democracy is not a harlot to be picked up in the street at the point of a Tommy gun. And I totally believe that. I'm not sure he could get away with saying that today.

I don't think anybody ever accused him of being politically correct. That's for sure. Is there a Gates doctrine? I am very much a believer in the importance of military power and in the United States having predominant military power. I also am firmly convinced that the use of the military should be the very last resort in dealing with any international situation because no matter why and how it starts,

no one can predict what will happen. Podcasts are great because they help us make the most out of our routine. Thank you. A credit card that can get you unlimited free grocery delivery and the most PC optimum points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World's Elite MasterCard. The card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit PCFinancial.ca for details. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history.

I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast. Chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. The cattle drive is an enduring symbol of the American West. The image of tough cowboys pushing huge herds of cows across the open range is stamped on our imaginations. But by the 21st

century, with Western states growing and changing fast, most horseback cattle drives have been run off the range by suburban sprawl, government regulation, lower beef consumption, and the return of protected predators. But there's a group of stubborn men and women in Wyoming who every spring push thousands of cows along the same 70-mile route their ancestors pioneered 125 years ago. This throwback to the Old West is called the Green River Drift, and it's the longest running cattle drive left in America. Just after dawn one Saturday in late June, I'm trying to help Wyoming rancher Albert Summers and his team move hundreds of cows.

Most of them mothers with new calves in a cloud of dust toward high green pastures where they'll graze all summer. And if you feel inclined, Bill, you can whistle, you can yell. I can do anything. This is like cowboy's therapy. You get to voice everything out. Come on, Indy. I do the best I can. Come on, cows. Move, cows.

But it's not quite as good as little Shad Swain, the son of Albert's ranching partner, Ty. Shad is five years old? He is. Shad, if you can do this, I can do this, okay? Shad got to do it with a sour apple lollipop in his mouth. All of us, with the help of some fearless herding dogs, move cattle over hills, across creeks,

through shimmering groves of aspen, along what cowboys call driveways, and across highways north toward those distant mountains. How long does it take you to get them to the summer feeding area? So it takes about 13 days from when we start to when we get up there, where we want to be. We travel up to about 60 to 70 miles. Albert Summers is one of 11 ranchers who work together to drive more than 7,000 head of cattle on the Green River Drift.

Those 11 ranches all lie in Wyoming's Green River Valley, south of Jackson Hole. Here, the Wyoming Range is to the west. The Wind River Range is to the east. The valley between is part bone-dry high desert and verdant river drainage where Native Americans once hunted buffalo. Today, the Green River runs through Albert Summers' ranch. And your family's been doing this how long? My family's been doing this since about 1903.

Albert's neighbor, Jeannie Lockwood's family, has been at it even longer. This was my granddad's ranch. He homesteaded this in 1889. Her ranch is about 20 miles south of Albert Summers' place. We joined her on horseback before dawn the day she started moving her cattle north. There's that sun, it's going to peak up over the hill. Along the same path, her family has trekked for 125 years.

So you're going to be doing this for the next two weeks? Yes. Getting up at four o'clock in the morning? Or three, or 2.30. Or Or two thirty. Yeah. Those early starts barely compare to what old-timers endured when cowboys stayed out under the stars all night and the sun all day until they got the herd to high pastures. Well I think we can go home. What do you think? Today they go home after each day's drive. The next morning, they trailer their horses back to where they'd left the cattle, round up those that have strayed, and move them out again before dawn. The old chuck wagon? It's been replaced by a cooler and the tailgate of a pickup truck. But compared to what your grandfather did, this is easy. Yeah, we have it easy.

Only ranchers would call this easy. Driving cattle is hot, dusty, demanding, and they'll be lucky to make a $50 profit per cow when they finally send them to market. Jeannie's daughter, Haley, and son-in-law, France, help wrangle the herd. Her husband, Milford, shuttles the horse trailers. They all left regular jobs and moved back to the ranch several years ago

after Jeannie's brother, who had been running the place, died in an accident. It takes all of us to do it, it seems like. Jeannie was a librarian. So what is it about this place that makes you give up regular, normal American jobs and come back here to do this really hard work? Well, first of all, it was home to me,

and it was hard work for my parents, and I know it was hard work for my parents, and I know it was hard work for my grandparents, and I just couldn't see letting it go. Labor of love, it's called. Where's the emphasis? Labor or love? Love. Love might sustain the Green River Drift, but it was born in crisis. The winter of 1889-90 is really what started the drift.

Clint Gilchrist is an historian who grew up in this valley and has written about that harsh winter. And it killed off the vast majority of the cattle herds that were here because they weren't prepared for a bad winter. Nobody had prepared for a bad winter. White settlers were not prepared. Native tribes, which the U.S. government drove off the land to make room for homesteaders, knew that winters in the Green River Valley could be merciless. The Shoshone Indians and the Crow Indians were one of the dominant tribes in these areas, and they didn't winter here. They wintered over on the other side of the mountains where it was, you less elevation after that brutal winter ranchers realized they had to move their cattle out of the valley long enough to grow a crop of hay

so while the cattle are up in the uplands you're able to grow hay right and that feeds them all winter long right and so that was the genesis of what we call the drift. The drift, Albert Summers says, because when the first fall frost chills the mountains, the cows instinctively head for home. Just on their own, turn around and start coming back. Turn around and start. We open gates. Drift back. And they drift back.

In the spring, we drive them. In the fall, they drift. When the drift began 125 years ago, there were no regulations, no subdivisions, just wide open range. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! Today, the 11 ranches drive their cattle to lands controlled by the U.S. Forest Service, the largest grazing allotment in the country, 127,000 acres of the Bridger-Teton National Forest. They pay the federal government $1.35 a month for every cow and her calf. Murdoch! Summers! Price! Murdoch!

How much each rancher will owe is tallied at a place called the counting gate. It's Jamie Burgess's job to read brands or ear tags and call out which cows belong to which ranch. Price. Price. While his wife Rita adds up the totals. When the cows finally reach mountain pastures, they're handed off to range riders. Bring them. Like Brittany Heseltine,

whose job is to watch over them all summer. And you're up here by yourself? Yes. Just me, my horses, my three dogs, and a cat. How long altogether? It'll be about five months. Every day for those five months, Brittany is out at dawn to check on the 600 or so cattle in her care. First thing in the morning, you come out on a rise, and especially in the fall, the elk are bugling and just talking to each other.

Brittany earned her degree in veterinary science in 2019. This is her third summer as a range rider. It's really hard work. What's the attraction? What's the draw? Something about it speaks to my soul. I really can't describe what, but all winter long, I'm like, oh, a couple months more, a couple months more, and then I'll be up at home.

Her home for the summer is a small trailer in an isolated camp, off the grid, no running water, no cell service. Ah! At the start of this summer, four of the five drift range riders were women. You told us that you thought women made the best range riders. Why would that be? They're hard workers. And I can't say that they're, you know, the men aren't good.

But the women don't go to town. And as much as some of the men kind of have a tendency to. Visit the tavern? Yeah, they'll go on the other side of the mountain. So what happened to the cowboys? I don't know. Maybe they're just not cut out for it. There's beauty up here and danger too. Since listed as endangered species, wolf and grizzly bear populations have exploded in these mountains.

Brittany keeps track of the calves they kill. If it was actually killed by a predator, then there will be bruising on the hide on the inside. And it's very obvious. You know, like last year, we lost 24 calves. Didn't come home. Now we lose between 10 and 15 percent of our calves. It sounds like a lot. It's a lot.

It would break us if it weren't for a compensation program by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. So you get paid for every animal you lose. We do. Predators aren't the only threat to these ranchers. A growing chorus of critics argue cattle shouldn't graze on public lands at all. Consumption of beef is declining, and so is the number of ranches on the drift. There were more than 20 in the early 1990s.

Today, just 11. The Green River Drift is so iconic that the cattle drive has earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. These remaining ranchers are determined to see that it's not just relegated to history books. So what does it mean to you to be doing what your father and your grandfather did on the same land. That's hard to talk about.

It means a lot. It means a lot. Albert Summers has no children, so to preserve this land and its tradition, he's set up what's called a conservation easement. Preservationists have paid him to agree that his ranch will never be developed or subdivided and to allow the public to use the land for recreation. That agreement

will also apply to his partner, Ty Swain, as he takes over and to his son, Shad, when and if he picks up the reins. So with the conservation easement, this land will not change. It will stay the same. It will stay the same. Well, no land stays the same, but this land will not be developed. And I will go to my grave peacefully with that knowledge, but just not tomorrow.

Many traditions have left their mark on this land. Native Americans were forced to give way to fur traders, pioneers, and homesteaders. Today, it's the cowboy way of life that is fighting to hold on. It's tied every year. I mean, we're down to the last dime at the end of the year. It sounds like you're not in it for the money. No, sir. No, we're not. You know, and if somebody says, you know, you're a rich rancher,

only rich in the fact that we get to do what we do and we live where we live and we get to see the sun come up over those mountains, that's the rich part of this job. It's not the money. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month.

With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. We were nearing last call on the grandest of British institutions, the pub. After enduring for hundreds of years as centers for schmoozing and boozing, pubs were going the way of morning newspapers, afternoon tea, and the whole idea of empire. A range of factors, which we'll get to later, undercut the kind of neighborhood joint where everyone knows your name. Then came COVID, which kept most British pubs closed for more than a year. But this past

summer, the UK reopened, and not unlike an over-served patron, the pub story started to stagger and lurch in an unexpected direction. And maybe it's not quite closing time after all. 1,200 plus years old. Yes. A man walks into a pub. Of course he does. In this case, it's a very old pub. Ye olde fighting cocks in St. Albans outside London. Its landlord, or publican, is Christo Tofali. So your pub is one of dozens in this country that claims to be the oldest ever. Yeah, absolutely right. Make your case, make your case.

It turns out there's a bit of a misconception as to which one's the oldest and what the oldest pub is. So we're the oldest pub. The first brick was laid in 793 and the oldest inhabited building in Europe. Vikings invaded England in the same year the first brick was laid in 793. I suspect Vikings would like this place. They would love this place.

Before we go further, let's define our terms. We're not talking about mere bars or, for the love of God, sports bars. These are pubs, short for public houses. They exist as much for conviviality as for what's on tap, cold lager, and to the shock of first timers, warm ale. They've been cornerstones of the culture here for centuries. The writer slash comedian Al Murray believes the value proposition goes well beyond beer. It's a community place. It's a communitarian place in a way that sitting in your front room watching television just isn't. What is it about this culture that has such appeal to you? To sound sort of idealistic about it, princes and paupers are equally welcome in here.

And given that Britain is such a class-ridden society, there are very few places where, you know, you stand at the bar and your money's as good as anyone else's. You sound like a pub romantic. I am completely romantic about the idea of pubs. There is something genuinely beautiful about the idea of somewhere where anyone can go at any time and sit in a corner with their own thoughts and a drink, and it's a beautiful notion. You don't go to Turner's Old Star for quiet contemplation. One of the last of the so-called boozers in London's East End, it's the heartbeat of the proudly working-class community here.

Put in a day of work, you work hard, you come in and then... Yeah, absolutely. You work hard all day and then you kind of like, it's just like having a mental shower after a hard day's work, just to kind of wind down. It's like a real-life cheers, I guess, you know? That makes you feel welcome. You feel welcome. They're family. They're family. Paul and Bernice Drew have run the Old Star for 17 years. They met across the street, got engaged here. They live upstairs. The pub is their living room.

The regulars, their oldest friends. When you say regulars, though, these are really regulars. Oh, yeah, everybody. Everybody. Everyone from 0 to 90 enjoys their self. There's a core of people, I suppose, 10, 15 people, that come in every day, regardless, winter, summer, whenever. They all come up, have their couple of beers, have a laugh, chew the wag, as they say, and slag everyone off.

They're always having a go at each other. I hear you say with a real pride, this is proper pub. It is. It's my pub pub. That's what we call it, don't we? No, it's a proper pub. It is. It's my pub pub. That's what we call it, don't we? No, it's a pub pub. We call it our pub pub. For centuries, pubs have been as much salon as saloon,

as they've taken a stool and watched history and myth unfold. In London's Soho, the French House was where Bohemians would rub shoulders with resistance leaders. After Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Charles de Gaulle, in exile, is said to have written his famous speech to the French Free Forces here. A little further east on the River Thames, legend has it that the 17th century Judge Jeffreys would watch those he sentenced hang as he lunched and sipped ale at the prospect of Whidbey. And then there's the cholera epidemic that gripped London in 1854, killing 550 people in two weeks.

A local doctor, John Snow, figured out the problem. Contaminated water from a well was spreading the disease, and simply removing the handle from the pump effectively ended the epidemic. John Snow wasn't knighted, but he did receive what might be the next highest British honor. Christening a pub after someone is an exception. Many pub names read like drunken mad libs, random adjective plus random noun, often an animal, The ape and apple. The snooty fox. The drunken duck. The black dog. For Pete Brown, Britain's leading writer on beer and pubs, these names offer a clue to every establishment's story. What's going on here? It's become one of the quirky aspects of the British pub, but it starts off in a very practical way, which is that most of the population who went to pubs

until recently were illiterate. So you couldn't put a name sign up. You had to have a pictorial sign. So you'd pick a picture of something that had some resonance with people. But then some of the ones that you just mentioned, I think it's kind of the pub self-satirising itself. And it's not just pub names that veer toward the colorful and eccentric.

Just behind London's Law Court, and then behind the bar, you'll find the owner, chef and star performer of the Seven Stars pub, the talented Mrs. Roxy Beaujolais. Your husband is American? Yes. How do you explain what you do to his family? Well, when I was first introduced to them about 30 years ago, his mother asked me what I did, and I said, I'm a publican.

She said, what? And my husband dove in and said, no, no, no, no, no, Mama. Not a Republican. A publican. A tavern keeper. But what is it about this job that clearly feeds something in you? I'm good at it, darling. I mean, I'm good at it.

You know, I caulk. You know, I have a passing interest in the product that I sell myself. You know, I love it. For the last 25 years, comedian Al Murray has loved playing the figure behind the bar. His alter ego on stages, a head-shaved, over-opinionated blowhard he calls the pub landlord. We're sensible people in this country, aren't we? Down-to-earth people. Yeah, we never put a man on the moon.

Nah, the moon was never going to be part of the British Empire, was it, by chance? There's no one to give it back to once we're done with it, is there? So what is it about that archetype? He's a know-all who knows nothing. It's a guy who has power but no authority. It's a guy who is writing intellectual checks he can't possibly cash. Well, my wide-eyed... It's the whole swirl of what happens in a pub. The publican is the conduit, the confessor, the sort of, you know, high priest in a space like this.

So all goes through him. It's all good fun, but as his character suggests, pub culture is, if not eroding, undergoing considerable change. For generations, the number of British pubs has been declining, from 65,000 to fewer than 50,000 in the last 25 years. The causes of death are many. High beer duty, a smoking ban, cheap supermarket lager, people drinking less. Perhaps the biggest culprits? Venture capitalists and developers more interested in a pub's real estate than what's on tap.

And then in March 2020 came the hammer blow. COVID-19. What was it like when this closed for the first time? Soul-destroying. I mean, in business terms, lethal. I still haven't got any words for it, John. We have a passion to open the door every single day. This wasn't just change the sign on the door.

This sounds almost existential. It's terminal for a lot of pubs. Even in the worst of times, the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish flu, pubs did not close. Despite the bombings and the Blitz, Churchill insisted that pubs remain open. How bad can things be if we can still pull a pint? But this is just a little story to show that the spirit of the pubs is excellent. The house is bombed, they carry on outside.

The lockdown gave Britain a glimpse of a future without pubs. For months, the cobbled streets where Dickens once walked, silent. The taverns where Chaucer or Shakespeare might have drunk, empty. Millions of barrels of beer literally down the drain. What does this country stand to lose if pubs diminish? Part of it's identity. We celebrate our nationality in a very quiet way, in a very modest way. And the pub is a perfect example of that.

We're proud of the pub. And if it was taken away from us, I think we'd lose something of what defines us as a nation. It's not flag-waving jingoism, but coming in here is sort of an act of patriotism, you're saying. It's just coming in and just going, yeah, I'll have another pint,

thank you. Coming out of lockdown, the pint-wielding patriots believed more than ever that the pub is an institution worth saving. Saving the traditional pub, is that nostalgia for a Britain that may no longer exist? Oh, there are so many Britons that may no longer exist, but the one that's worth saving is the pub, surely.

I mean, you know, we don't need a navy anymore, do we? We need pubs. In a changing Britain, nostalgia can reside at the bottom of a glass. In the oh-so-English village of Aldworth in Berkshire, you'll find just a cricket green, a church, a few houses, and a pub resistant to time. The Bell Inn has been in the family of Heather McCauley for 200 years. She was born in the pub and now, at age 85, runs it with her son Hugh. And would you like fresh onion and tomato on the side as well? How many generations in these 200 years? We go as James and Hugh and Thomas and Ronald and then me, five, I suppose.

We've talked to some pub owners who've said they felt this pressure to evolve and they're trying gourmet food and DJs and technology. Here, no. We are plain, simple. That's how we survive. That's how we're going to survive. I don't think we'll ever be putting TVs in here somehow. Oh, no, no. No.

Well, I don't even have a mobile phone. Pubs like the Bell Inns and the Old Stars have done what they've always done, served their communities. But where does the rest of the country fit in? Nigerian-born Clement Ogbenaya is proud owner of the Prince of Peckham in South London. He has taken the magic of the pub and adapted it to multicultural 21st century Britain. You hear the word pub 20 years ago. What are you thinking? I'm thinking I'm not going there.

So play that out for me. You walk into a conventional pub and what happens? Think of Clint Eastwood in a Western movie. It's like everyone looks at the door swinging. Who's that guy? That's how I felt in some pubs I walked in. Piano stops playing. Absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. Four years ago, Clement bought up a neighborhood joint destined to be turned into an apartment block or a mini market. Pubs play a massive part in representing the communities,

representing the underrepresented, the marginalized, and giving them a space, giving them somewhere where they can actually be. They can congregate. They can share ideas. When kids today hear the word pub, what do you want them to think? I want them to think that's a space for me. That's a space where I can be. That's a space where I can celebrate.

That's a space where I can hang out, I can laugh, I can mourn. That's what you're going for when you open this place. Yeah, I just love seeing the melting pot that is London reflected in this pub. And herein might lie the key to the pub's survival. Cater to an evolving and ever-changing Britain, and beer and good cheer might well flow in equal measure. Those pints, after all, aren't going to drink themselves. Next Sunday on 60 Minutes, Michael Keaton, an actor who won't be typecast. He's been Batman, Birdman, Beetlejuice, and dozens of other characters.

Comic, heroic, dark, and tragic over a film career of more than 40 years. If you talk about range, there's, you know, it's flattering, but range doesn't really, range schmange. I'm John Wertheim. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.