The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
WHAT DRIVES BOB WOODWARD?
Legendary journalist coming to Elm City Tuesday
Legendary journalist Bob Woodward has a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, and his Watergate coverage with Carl Bernstein helped bring down a lying and conniving president. His latest book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” is a brisk read about another president who has issues with the truth.
Cut to New Haven, where Woodward will appear on stage Tuesday at the College Street Music Hall to talk about the chief executive who dominates most news cycles in America.
But it was not at Yale in New Haven, where Woodward graduated in 1965, that Bob Woodward first was inspired to expose the secrets of the rich and powerful.
“When I was in high school, I was a janitor in my father’s law office,” Woodward said via phone from a vacation recently. “And I started looking at the papers on his desk and his partner’s desk and realized there were lots of things that were not known publicly about people in this town, Wheaton, Illinois.”
Eventually, as kids will do, he went up to the attic and read through disposed files — “looking up the family names of classmates, and discovered there were tax cases and assault cases and so forth. And this was (a town) where Billy Graham went to college, Wheaton College. There was that veneer that ‘everyone’s good and there are no secrets’ and, of course, when you looked at the disposed files you dis-
cover that almost everyone has a secret.”
Woodward spent five years in the Navy after college, including his final year in the Pentagon from 1969 to 1970 and “saw the top-secret bombing reports showing that it wasn’t really working, to say the least” in Southeast Asia, while military and political leaders were saying it was effective.
“There was a disconnect between perception ... what people are seeing, and a harder reality,” said Woodward, who went on to work in journalism at the Washington Post, where he still has the title of associate editor.
Asked if President Trump has righted the White House ship since Woodward’s meticulous reporting on the book, he said, “Actually, I think you could argue it’s consistent. What the book shows thematically is: Trump makes lots of his decisions based on untruth. For instance: Trade deficits are really bad, and ... as Gary Cohn and others tried to show him, they’re not bad, and the money is not being lost. And a lot of this trade is good for the American economy, even with China.”
The president tweeted in November that we’re losing hundreds of billions in helping the military in other countries and in trade deficits, “and that’s just not true,” said Woodward.
Woodward has written 18 books, including “All the President’s Men” (which Time magazine called “Perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history”), “Bush at War,” “Wired” (about John Belushi), and “Obama’s Wars.” All are examples of solid reporting in book form — published not so long after the newspapers’ daily “first draft of history.”
While Trump critics get hyperbolic about him, Woodward said it’s important for “people in our business to be as unemotional as possible about him and try to report factually. And I had the luxury of time and could take a year and a half and just withdraw and not do stories for the Post. Stay off television mostly...”
Woodward agreed that with a few key turns, Trump could win a second term. He said the scandals of Stormy Daniels and the Playboy model “are unsavory, to say the least. Almost unbelievable, but I doubt if they’re illegal. And if they’re illegal, they may be campaign violations, which aren’t going to drive him from office or get him impeached, as lots of his critics and detractors are hoping for.”
Will lawyer Michael Cohen’s testimony get to the president? Wait and see, Woodward said.
“People in our business, people in the country have become emotionally unhinged about Trump, and jump to conclusions. And every little thing is a bombshell in people’s minds,” he said. But with a predecessor of the Nixon case, the lesson is “you need a lot of time and you need evidence that’s incontrovertible. The Nixon tapes show Nixon regularly ordering criminal activity. We haven’t seen that yet with Trump. Maybe we will; maybe we won’t.”
Woodward, speaking with the Register during the holidays, said as he’s looked at the Trump news since the book came out in September, “it’s so much more of the same and I’ve come to the view that Trump doesn’t even know what his own self-interest is. He’ll contradict himself; he will say things and do things that don’t help the Republicans or don’t help him.”
Some have described the Trump
White House as chaotic, but Woodward said “Chaos is not the right word; it’s just inconsistency, incoherns ence, contradiction and ... I think it’s a governing crisis. I think maybe (Robert) Mueller is gonna find information that will create a constitutional crisis. But in the meantime, we have a governing crisis."
And that was before the recent government shutdown over a border wall.
Woodward said he’s been traveling around a lot doing talks about the book, such as the one in New Haven. “and it’s stunning the diversions in the country. I mean, there are just people, somebody told me in a bookstore, (who) would come in and take my book and turn the display around," he chuckled.
In the book “Fear," Woodward quotes top officials calling the commander-in-chief a “moron" and "a professional liar.” We asked Woodward if anything similar happened in