Search for truth still propels Woodward

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/03/2020 (2019 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Sunday morning June 18, 1972, Bob Woodward, then a 29-year-old reporter for The Washington Post, was summoned into the office to contribute to a story about the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. At about 2:30 a.m., the police had arrested five men who had been attempting to plant electronic listening devices in the offices of party officials. Another contributor to the Post’s article was 28-year-old reporter Carl Bernstein, rougher around the edges than Woodward.

In the weeks that followed, Woodward and Bernstein would make the Watergate story their own, doggedly pursuing every lead and eventually linking the five burglars to the re-election campaign of president Richard Nixon and to the president’s men inside the White House.

Woodward and Bernstein, who published two books about the Watergate scandal and were immortalized in the 1976 film All the President’s Men — in which Woodward was portrayed by Robert Redford — thereafter personified investigative journalism. Woodward has said one of the secrets of his success is to keep quiet and listen to the person he is interviewing. In that way, he lets “the silence suck out the truth,” as he has put it.

Woodward rose up the ranks of the Post to become associate editor, a position he holds to this day. He has authored (or co-authored) 19 books, including bestsellers about 9-11, the U.S. Supreme Court and the CIA, and shared two Pulitzer Prizes.

In 2018, at the age of 75, he published his most recent book and bestseller, Fear: Trump in the White House. Somehow he got White House staffers to talk to him; from those many interviews, he relates the unvarnished truth about the chaos unleashed by Trump on a daily basis and the efforts of those like Gary D. Cohn, Trump’s former chief economic adviser, and Rob Porter, Trump’s former staff secretary, to withhold documents from the president lest he do something impulsive.

He also describes a telling, if not disturbing, scene of a meeting of the National Security Council convened at the White House on Jan. 19, 2018, in which Trump continually questioned why the U.S. spent so much money maintaining military troops in various locales around the globe. “What do we get by maintaining a massive military presence in the Korean Peninsula?” Trump asked pointedly.

After several more minutes of back-and-forth arguing about this issue, an exasperated James Mattis, then the secretary of defense, finally said, “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III.” Everyone around the table was silent. “It was a breathtaking statement,” writes Woodward, “a challenge to the president, suggesting he was risking nuclear war.”

At a recent gathering in Palm Springs, Calif., Woodward related the story of that meeting not so much to disparage Trump — he firmly believes journalists must remain as impartial as they can — but rather to emphasize that Trump has no idea of the true role of the U.S. president.

In Woodward’s view, a president’s essential duty is to see the “big picture,” to “figure out what the next stage of good is for the majority of the people.” It is about devising strategies to solve the many uncertainties facing Americans. At the moment, that list includes national security, particularly dealing with China and Russia, and confronting the realities of the coronavirus. Instead, Trump is consumed on a daily basis with promoting himself and his personal interests at all costs.

Despite the clear anti-Trump attitude among a majority of the members of the Palm Springs audience, Woodward was careful not to condemn Trump during his hour-long talk. His objective, which he says he will elaborate on in his next book (due out in the fall), is to understand and explain Trump’s 2016 election and how the U.S. has become so divided.

(Woodward’s legendary status as one of the most famous journalists in U.S. history is not without its perks: while Trump and his key advisers angrily dismissed Woodward’s book Fear as “a con,” “pathetic,” and “fiction,” he seemingly has no problem finding high-ranking White House officials or former Trump appointees who want to tell him everything they know about the president and the failures of the Trump administration.)

At the same time, Woodward states with some concern that the concentration of power that Trump now wields — owing in part to the subservience of Senate Republicans — is “staggering.” Trump, says Woodward, has figured out how to manipulate the American Constitution, ignore congressional oversight of the executive branch and “seize the communication channel.”

Woodward does not dispute the impeachment of Trump, but suggests that the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives did it hastily, in a partisan way that was bound to fail in the subsequent Senate trial.

Trump’s next test will come in November, when Americans judge him in what Woodward states will be the most consequential election held in the U.S. in more than 150 years, since Abraham Lincoln faced off against Stephen Douglas. Trump’s defeat is not impossible, but he will not surrender power easily; Woodward predicts as nasty and brutal a political campaign as has ever been staged.

Americans desperately need courageous leadership and truth-telling — again, what Trump does not provide, concedes Woodward. After nearly 50 years of trying to figure out “what the bastards are hiding,” Woodward remains cautiously optimistic that the “truth will emerge,” to quote his late boss, legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.