Spent an interesting couple of hours last night in a Beverly Hills synagogue listening as John Dean interviewed Bob Woodward. A group called The Writers Bloc sets these up, mostly around authors on book tours. They get one famous person to interview the guy hawking his new tome and if you go, you can hear the interview and buy a signed book or two.
Dean is a good interviewer and he gave Woodward a bit of a hard time, starting with the intro: "On this, the occasion of your third book on George Bush, I'd like to welcome you back to the world of Journalism." The audience cheered and Woodward defended himself saying, in effect, that his two previous books had been full of criticisms of Bush and especially of Donald Rumsfeld. (Both Dean and Woodward have a pretty low opinion of Mr. Rumsfeld, not only as the current Secretary of Defense but just as a human being. Dean told a story of Bob Haldeman calling Rumsfeld "sleazy" back in the Nixon era and explaining that Rumsfeld was being installed at the top of the Department of Health and Human Services in the hope that, first of all, his management would destroy a government department that Republicans didn't like. But at the same time, the job would look good on Rumsfeld's résumé and help him run for the Senate in Illinois.)
(And I should mention that I am nowhere near as good a reporter as Bob Woodward or even Jimmy Olsen, so I forgot to take along a note pad. All quotes herein are from memory and therefore approximate.)
Dean and Woodward agreed on many things but disagreed on some. Woodward was somewhat more negative about George W. Bush than I've seen him be on televised interviews but he declined to second Dean's view that the current administration's doings are, as per the title of Dean's book, Worse Than Watergate. Dean argued his estimation saying, "I was in Nixon's office several times when he was discussing the Vietnam War and My Lai. I can't imagine he would ever have authorized torture." Woodward also disagreed with an audience questioner who suggested that Bush's mouthings of certain motives, religious and otherwise, were a charade. "He may be misguided, he may be incompetent about how he pursues things," Woodward announced. "But the President really does believe that Democracy will free people and that he has a destiny to try and bring that about."
Woodward was on the defensive for much of the interview but did not seem uncomfy in that position. He has an interesting tendency to start each response with, "That's a good question," which is usually what people in public life say when they have no intention whatsoever of giving a straight answer. But for the most part, perhaps because he's had many of his interviewees duck questions, Woodward did give direct responses, most of which included the phrase, "I cover that in the book…" or "As you'll see if you read the book…"
One audience member asked him how Journalism has changed and Woodward spoke about computers and how, in the "old days," if you came across the beginning of a story, you had several days to work on it, to make calls, to explore different aspects of it and to fact-check. "These days," he said, "a half hour after you start on the item, someone comes to your office and asks, 'Can we have it up on the website by 9 AM?'" Currently, he and Dean agreed, the only real investigative journalism is being done in book form because that's the only venue in which a reporter will have the time to properly work a story.
There were other interesting things said and if I remember more of them, I'll post a follow-up here.
After the program, Woodward fled to a waiting limo and another appearance. (The signed books that were sold had been signed earlier.) But John Dean stayed around and even though I already had a copy of his latest work, Conservatives Without Conscience, I bought another one just so I could get him to autograph it and perhaps chat a bit. As it turned out, I was the last one so he gave me about five minutes, during which I thanked him for all he'd done for the country and told him how much joy and satisfaction his testimony before the Senate Committee investigating Watergate had given my father. I need to tell that story here someday.
As I think I've mentioned, I am not the biggest fan of the post-Watergate Bob Woodward. I think he's a very good reporter who plays his cards so close to the vest that we sometimes never know what's in his hand. (That's not the best analogy I've ever come up with but I think you can figure out what I'm trying to say.) He's survived a long time in one of the most competitive lines of work in the world, perhaps in large part because of that caution. Still, I found myself wishing that the occasional moments of (apparently) raw candor I heard last evening were the norm, not the exception. And not just out of him but out of everyone who does what he does for a living.
You can order his book, State of Denial, from Amazon. You can also order John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience from Amazon. Or you can skip the boring political stuff and just buy my book about MAD Magazine. They all deal in some way with The Usual Gang of Idiots.
