The Daily - Bob Woodward on Trump, Nixon and Anonymity

Episode Date: September 11, 2018

Bob Woodward’s reporting on the Nixon administration pioneered an approach to journalism that drew from anonymous sources and has been widely used since. He has deployed that form of reporting in his new book to tell the story of the Trump administration. Guests: Mr. Woodward, author of “Fear: Trump in the White House,” speaks with Michael S. Schmidt, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, Bob Woodward's reporting on the Nixon administration pioneered a form of reporting using anonymous sources that has reached unprecedented levels in news coverage of the Trump administration. Now, Woodward has deployed that form of reporting to tell the story of this administration in his new book, Fear.

My colleague Mike Schmidt spoke to Woodward about his process. It's Tuesday, September 11th. from the most serious man in American journalism, Michael, to the least serious person in American entertainment. You're undermining your own judgment already. Yeah. How could we do that? What we wanted to do was start with you reading the note to readers. Oh, okay.

Because we think it gives very important insight into how you did what you did. Good. Let's go. Ready? Okay, this is the note to reader for fear, and it's very short. Often these notes are long. And it says, Interviews for this book were conducted under the journalistic ground rule of deep background. This means that all the information could be used, but I would not say who

provided it. The book is drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand participants and witnesses to these events. Nearly all allowed me to tape record our interviews so the story could be told with more precision. When I have attributed exact quotations, thoughts, or conclusions to the participants, that information comes from the person, a colleague with direct knowledge, or from meeting notes, personal diaries, files, and government or personal documents. President Trump declined to be interviewed for this book. So in many ways, you're talking about anonymous source reporting and anonymity. And that is an issue that is in the news right now with your book, with the recent op-ed, The Times ran by an anonymous administration official. But what people may not realize is that you started this type of reporting at the beginning of your career with Watergate.

Why did you first turn towards anonymous sources? You know, first of all, the sources are not anonymous to me. I know exactly who they are. So I think it's, in a sense, the wrong phrase. They are deep background or background sources. background or background sources. And back, what, 46 years ago in Watergate, Carl Bernstein and I turned to using unnamed sources because you can't get the truth. You won't get the straight story from someone if you do it on the record. You will get a press release version of events. And in Watergate, we wanted, because it was criminal, because it was under the radar, people had to be protected.

So this was driven by necessity. What necessity, though? Necessity to get the real story. If you want to position yourself with reality, you can't go up to somebody and say, hey, oh, you're the bookkeeper for all the secret Watergate funds. What happened? Where'd they go? You're going to get a door slammed in your face. When you look back on that reporting, when was the first time that you either realized that you needed it anonymity or that you did it? When did you dig down and find these folks and start using them?

Well, interesting. A couple of days after Watergate, a reporter at the Post, Gene Poshinsky, found out that two of the Watergate burglars had the name of Howard Hunt or H. Hunt W. House in their address books, it was pretty clear W. House was the White House. And I called the White House and got Hunt on the phone and said, why was your name in these address books? And he hung up and left town. And there was a kind of, I am packing my bags quality to his voice, which made me suspicious, but I can have your name in an address book and go do something nefarious, and you may or may not have the connection. the connection. So then I called a man named Mark Felt in the FBI, not named, used him as a deep background source, and asked about these address book entries and Howard Hunt, and he said he's in

the middle of this. That's not in the story anywhere, but it's a kind of backstop to the evidence that was in address books. And Mark Felt turns out to be who? Deep Throat. So what you're describing is a unique journalistic moment in which you're reporting on the highest levels of power, and it was extraordinary in many ways, and this was your best tool. Yes, and there's no alternative. I mean, suppose there'd been no address book entries, and just Mark Feltz saying he was involved was not enough, and so you want to get as many sources for any story as you can. And without anonymity, do you think Nixon would have survived? You know, that's a great question. We wouldn't have got the most important stories about what

Watergate was about. And the whole theme of our reporting in Watergate was it's not about a burglary, one isolated event. It's about a massive campaign of sabotage and espionage directed at the Democrats by the Nixon re-election committee in the Nixon White House. And that opened it up to not just one incident. And it turned out that, of course, Watergate had all these components to it of dirty tricks, fundraising, lying, cover-up, denials that were put forth with great passion. I remember, and it gets your attention, when the spokesman for the leader of the free world, Ron Ziegler, Nixon's press secretary, called Carl and myself character assassins. The original fake news? Yeah, the original. Well, that's, yeah, that's an interesting parallel. I mean, it's the same concept that the president employs now. It's not that different. And it's the same strategy of let's make the conduct of the news media the issue rather than the conduct of the president.

How do you think that the outcome of Watergate shaped the public's view of anonymous sources? That's an important question. Eventually, Nixon resigned, not because of our reporting, but because we started a process of the government looking more intensely at what had gone on. But it ended the sequence in Nixon's resignation. And so then that gave a stamp of approval to deep throat Mark Felt. And, you know, I think that was a good thing. I think you just made an incredibly important point about how your reporting fits into Watergate. It's that by writing the stories you did at the beginning, you brought the public's attention to an issue that the government may have ignored otherwise, kick-starting a process that leads

to the downfall of Nixon. Is that right? Yes. And what happened, I remember Sam Ervin, the senator who set up the Watergate Committee before he did it, called me up and said, come see me. And he wanted to know our sources. And I said, I just can't do that. And Senator Ervin, to his great credit, said, I understand that, but we're going to launch an investigation anyway because I think there are lots of important unanswered questions here.

And as you know, the Senate Watergate Committee was the gold standard of congressional investigations. They got testimony from everyone. I mean, it went on for weeks. I mean, the network stopped doing soap operas and ran the Senate Watergate hearings back to back. So I think that there was a sense that you can go from journalism to government action. So, do you think that had the outcome of people coming to believe that sometimes anonymity is an absolute necessity for reporting at the highest echelons of power? You know, I hope so. But look, I understand the skepticism and the regard I have for your work. When I read one of your stories and you haven't named the sources, I believe you're right, but I don't know you're right. And if you had documents and testimony and FBI reports and photographs and so forth, it would be more powerful, but you're not going to get that. I can only go with what I got. Yep. When you're coming out of the Watergate experience,

how do you define this form of anonymity that you created? And what were the best ways that it could have been used? Well, I think the best ways is it gets at the truth. And in doing books on President Clinton, President George W. Bush, President Obama, I found that particularly with Bush and Obama, I could work for months or even a year and find out what happened from deep background sources and then go to the president and say, I want to do this interview on the record.

And I did 12 hours of interviews with President George W. Bush on the record. And I did 12 hours of interviews with President George W. Bush on the record. I was able to ask him questions. And the same with Obama on the first book about the Afghan war. At the end, he said to me, you have better sources than I do, which of course is not true. But what that was was a validation of the method. I got the information I asked him about from people who worked in the White House and the Pentagon and the CIA and the State Department and elsewhere. And I always thought that was very important for him to say, you have better sources than I do, BS as it was, it was, ah, you couldn't do that if I didn't have these deep background interviews. We'll be right back.

In the moment we're in now, in the media, we've seen anonymous sources used probably more than at any time in a previous administration, right? Do you think that's a fair? I think that's true. Why is that the case? Well, because things are more hidden, because it's the only way to get at the truth. to get at the truth. After the information and fear started breaking last week, one key person who's in office called me and said, everyone knows what you've said here is true. It's 1,000% correct. And then this person has said some public things that contradict that. And I'm not happy, but I have a smile on my face because the truth in all of this is going to emerge.

There's too much evidence, too many witnesses. And you know this, you have to smoke them out. You have to do stories to get stories. Was getting inside the room more difficult or easier in this book compared to previous ones? Good question. I really don't know. I mean, because some people were quite concerned, I think once you got the ball rolling, getting their participation, it was easier. But I discovered, lo and behold, you have to get into people's homes. And I tell this story about calling somebody from the White House at 11 o'clock at night saying, you know, when are we

doing that interview? Oh, yeah, we'll talk. Yeah. And I said, how about now? Now it's 11 o'clock at night. And I said, well, I'm four minutes away. How do you know where I live? That's the easy part. Okay, come on over for a while. And it was not dawn, but it was getting close to dawn when I left. And I was on the verge at 11 o'clock at night saying to myself, God, screw this. I'm 74 years old. I've done this enough. Go home.

And I'm not sure why, but I instead made the phone call. And if I hadn't made the phone call, my understanding of what has gone on in the Trump White House would be a lot less. So let's talk about some of the stories that you turned up in your reporting. What's the one that felt the most illuminating to you? I think perhaps a National Security Council meeting December 19th, and I'm going to get the notes of the meeting. May I quote from them? Is that too? Of course.

Let's see. Which one was the—see, this is the problem when you get so much, so many notes and documents. At this NSC meeting, the issue is South Korea. And the president says, why are we spending so much money on keeping these troops in South Korea? We have 28,000 troops, costs about $3.5 billion a year. And he said, I just don't understand that. And why are we spending all this money on, say, Taiwan, protecting Taiwan? And finally, Secretary of Defense Mattis says, look, we're doing all of this because we're trying to prevent World War III. Now this, I was really jarred by this, that the Secretary of Defense has to remind the president that part of the job is

preventing World War III. And Trump goes on about, you know, we're stupid. We could be making much more money. He's obsessed with money on all of this. And it's misplaced because not only Secretary of Defense Mattis, but they're all saying these are the best national security dollars we spend, that we should spend 10 times as much money in South Korea if we got these benefits. So that was jarring to me. Did you feel that there was more of a motivation amongst the folks youlogue to the book when he's stealing a draft letter off the president's resolute desk in the Oval Office. He said, got to protect the country. He discovers that there's a draft letter to withdraw from the South Korean trade agreement on the president's desk and that the president might sign it and take this action. And so he just took it. And as he told an associate, I did this to protect the

country. And Trump won't let go of this issue. And so finally, Gary Cohn calls in Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, says, you have to talk to the president about this and say, we're spending all this money for our intelligence partnerships and operations and protecting the country. And we can shoot down a North Korean missile in seven seconds because of the capacity that we have. And this is at risk. And it is one of those moments, and this is where I conclude that there was a kind of nervous

breakdown of the executive power of the United States. What do you mean by a nervous breakdown? A nervous breakdown that you can't have the president who solely has the executive authority under the Constitution have staffers deciding, well, no, not this one. We're going to take some of that away. At the same time, people deemed it sufficiently dangerous to act. To me, this seems like one of the most pointed conclusions you have ever made about an administration. Is that true? You mean that it's, that there is a nervous breakdown? Well, you basically say that the administration is teetering on a catastrophe or a collapse. Well, I provide the evidence of it, and it's just supported by fact, I believe. It's not a partisan position. This isn't about Democrats or

Republicans or left, right. It's about the stability of the country, and it's not something you can read and feel comforted by. Do you ever look at the coverage today and think that the anonymous sources are overused? Sometimes, but maybe they're underused. And I will tell reporters, I say, you know, anonymous sources, they're not anonymous to you. Somebody who really knows something that's important that they can't possibly put their name to in public but think the public needs to know. You know, you call them anonymous sources. I think they're background or deep background sources. Or firsthand witnesses are an excellent path to what's really going on.

But only part of it, but a vital part. When you saw the Times op-ed last week by the anonymous administration official, was there anything in there that you would have allowed or used from an anonymous source? To be honest with you, because I know this is the New York Times, if that person had come to me and said, this is what I want to say anonymously as a kind of appendix to your book or in your book, I would have said no,

because I would have said, what are the specifics? What happened? When? What was said? What was done? What were the motives? Those are the building blocks of journalism, not a kind of generalized condemnation. Let me ask you the hard question. What would you have done if that person had come to you as a reporter? had come to you as a reporter? I think that as a reporter on this story,

you would try and build off of it as much as possible. With specifics? Correct. You say, who's this person? Is it somebody who works in the National Security Council in the White House, somebody in the Pentagon, somebody in the CIA? What do they know? And if they were not participants or witnesses to specific decisions and actions and discussions, I don't know what validity they have. But based on your reporting,

can you understand why someone would feel that way and take the extraordinary measure to do something like that? Certainly, but these things have to be measured by the quality of the information, and the quality of the information didn't pass my test. Now, I don't know who it is. If it turns out it's somebody who's a key person, that would alter my perspective on it, but I still would have insisted on specifics. But again, you've got three people here at the New York Times who know who it is, and maybe it is somebody who has sufficient credentials and experience that they decided to run this, credentials and experience that they decided to run this, and the truth emerges. Why does it matter to you how much stature or the position the person has in the administration?

Not about stature, but it's all about position, because what are they a firsthand witness to, firsthand source? But it can be a vicious cycle where these sources are used and then the president attacks it and uses that to undermine it and it gives him ammunition. Well, I'm not sure it undermines it. I remember during Watergate, once we joked, we had a good story and we said, all we need is a White House denial now to give this credibility. The president has attacked you on Twitter. Do you see that as the modern day validity? No, no.

I mean, look, people have said, oh, how do you feel? I said, look, he has a right to say what he wants. He has First Amendment rights. And I feel really comfortable with the picture I've presented and the evidence. Hello, Bob. President Trump, how are you? How are you? How are you doing? Okay. Real well. I'm turning on my tape recorder. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I don't mind.

I feel like you had masterfully gotten the conversation you had with him recorded. It enabled you to show the lengths you went to to get him to. Well, it wasn't particularly masterful. I just said, I'd like to record this, Mr. President, when he called. And he said, OK. So I turned on the tape recorder. Who did you ask about speaking to me? Well, about six people. They don't tell me. But the release of that showed your work. It showed what you had done. But are you naming names or do you just say sources? Yeah, well, it names real incidents. No, but do you name sources? I mean, are you naming the people or just say, you know, people have said?

I say at 2 o'clock on this day, the following happened, and everyone who's there, including yourself, is quoted. And I'm sorry I didn't get to ask you about these. I mean, you do know I'm doing a great job for the country. And it also showed the president praising you for your previous reporting. I've always been fair. You've always been fair to me. You know I'm very open to you. I think you've always been fair. But we'll see what happens.

Well, that was last month. That was last month. Now he's got a new line this month. I believe in our country, and because you're our president, I wish you good luck. Okay. Thank you very much, Bob. I appreciate it. Bye. Give him credit when I said, I want to record this.

He said, fine. And I said to him, we are at a pivot point in history. And his response was right. But why? Why is it a pivot point? Because Donald Trump is president. But being president is about the exercise of power. And when he told Bob Costa and myself, you know, real power, the real stuff is fear. And I've said this, it was almost a Shakespearean aside. It's almost like Hamlet turning to the audience and saying,

this is what it's all about. What did you understand him to be saying? He said that you have to scare the daylights out of need to know today. Today, on the eve of September the 11th, I want to deliver a clear and unambiguous message on behalf of the President of the United States. The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court. His first major speech as national security advisor, John Bolton leveled a harsh attack on the International Criminal Court, which has the authority to prosecute genocide and war crimes, saying its very existence violates U.S. sovereignty. We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. and we certainly will not join the ICC.

The Trump administration is furious that the international court, which the U.S. helped create but never formally joined, is considering an investigation into U.S. military action in Afghanistan that could result in the prosecution of American soldiers. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us. In a statement, one of the court's founders, David Sheffer, said that Bolton's speech, quote, isolates the United States from international criminal justice and severely undermines our leadership in bringing perpetrators of atrocity crimes to justice elsewhere in the world. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.