Ari Melber starts by asking Woodward about the “first principles” of journalism, what drew Woodward to journalism, how he balances cerebral and emotional aspects of the work.
(1:19 – 2:11) AM: Starting with first principles, throughout your career, when somebody says, they have a journalistic approach, what does that mean, what is that premise?
BW: It should be fact-based, what really happened, ideally firsthand sources, witnesses, participants, contemporaneous notes… it’s magnificent to have contemporaneous notes and documents so you are on as solid ground as you can be. You learn quickly, as you so well know, that you never get the whole story in the first year or the first book. There’s still stuff coming out about Nixon 50 years after he resigned.
…
(4:45-10:20) (Woodward describes getting his first big story from what his editor called his “vagrant thought,” meaning a suggestion to check out.)
AM: So it starts with a tip, an assignment? And then you have to go do the work.
BW: Yes, but it’s expansive… ‘vagrant thought,’ meaning it’s not somebody who sent something in, or who had a tip. It came out of the editor’s head, a very experienced knowledgeable editor, Roger Farquhar at (Montgomery Sentinel). It stuck with me, yes, you want journalism to come from the outside, what’s going on, what’s happening, you can follow what you can confirm, but journalism is also a cerebral activity. You need to think about, “Where’s the follow? What don’t we know? Are we sure?”
At the Washington Post, under Ben Bradley, when we were doing Watergate or later, Ben was the genius at giving people running room. “I want you to not follow even… (his own) instructions. He, as an editor, can’t do the reporting. (Bradley would say to his reporters:) “Go.”
AM: Bob, you’re talking about caring – right? – you care about a potential story, the stakes, the import, in that case, maybe a potential injustice, but you’re always bound by the facts, which are cerebral or objective, even though caring about it might make you a better reporter, and that line has been debated throughout journalistic history. I have a quote from you…
BW: uh-oh…
AM: … where you said in thinking about Vietnam: “I saw the senselessness that pervaded everything we were doing out there. I hated the war. I hated the idea of dying. I hated the idea of killing. I think back to 1970 as why I became a reporter. It was probably because of Vietnam more than anything else.” (6:55)
#1, Is that still how you remember it now because we are decades out and #2, how do you then navigate your strong feeling that something is wrong, but if you’re reporting on Vietnam, you’re going to use all those cerebral, factual tools and not let that hate corrupt your work? (7:15)
BW: I had that experience my last year in the Navy. I was assigned to work for the chief of naval operations, Admiral Moore (Vice Admiral Thomas Moore) as a communications aide and I saw the top-secret traffic that showed in bombing Vietnam, they’d send out 500 sorties and 3 of them would hit targets. Then you’d hear on the news Admiral Moore, the Defense Secretary Laird, the President Richard Nixon say, “Oh, it’s just going great. It couldn’t be better.”
So you saw the lie and I didn’t have the knowledge, the experience or quite frankly, the courage to blow the whistle, to be a whistleblower and say, “Hey, look, they’re not telling the truth.” (8:15)
AM: And that feeling that you describe as hate, how did you prevent that from affecting your coverage of people who were involved in running the government, executing the war.
BW: Well, it’s one thing to hate a war; it’s another thing to hate people, and I’m talking about hating the war. It just seemed that it was one of these lies, and it was very disconcerting to see that and realize your own inadequacy to do something about it.
AM: And did that make you feel that you were on the inside of something powerful but you don’t exercise power. Did you see journalism as a way to be a rectifying force?
BW: In journalism, having done this for 50 years, I never remember an instance where an editor at the Washington Post or for books I worked on – 22 books – ever say we can’t touch that, don’t look at that – that’s too sensitive. Sometimes, we would contact people in the government and they would say, ‘Oh my God if you run that… you’re going to… like one CIA director told me “You’ll start a war, if you run that.”
That gave me pause, but it can be done honestly. The whole ethic at the Washington Post under (Ben) Bradley and since, is: Find out, don’t get people killed, don’t damage national security, but tell people what’s really going on, and what is really going on, as we know, is often hidden – hidden intentionally.” (4:40-10:20)
MSNBC’s Ari Melber interviews Bob Woodward for his “Summit Series,” Nov. 13, 2023, full interview: 1:25:21
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