Woodward & Bernstein on Jan. 6 & Why Watergate Still Matters

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Well, many are drawing parallels between these hearings and those from Watergate. This year marks 50 years since what seemed like a simple break- in revealed a scandal that ultimately brought down President Richard Nixon.

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NIXON: To continue the fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the president and the Congress, in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issue of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home. Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

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GOLODRYGA: That stunning moment came after dogged reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two junior “Washington Post” reporters at the time. They broke news about a president’s attempt to undermine democracy. And with Donald Trump’s actions now in the spotlight, both Woodward and Bernstein joined Walter Isaacson to reflect on Watergate and its enduring legacy.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CORRESPONDENT: Thank you, Bianna. And Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, welcome to the show.

CARL BERNSTEIN, AUTHOR, CO-AUTHOR, “ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN”: Thanks. Good to be here.

BOB WOODWARD, CO-AUTHOR, “ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN”: Thank you.

ISAACSON: It’s been 50 years since Watergate. You got a new addition of “All the President’s Men” out with a new foreword to it. Let me start with you, Bob, though, and ask — people are saying, what did we learn from Watergate? I got a different question. What have we not learned from Watergate?

WOODWARD: Well, that’s important. As we point out, it was George Washington in his farewell address — only you, Walter, the historian, would understand this — in 1796 warned — Washington warned the country in his words and said, democracy is fragile, and we need to worry about unprincipled men taking and seizing power and using that extraordinary power. And, of course, we had Nixon, and now we have Trump. And so, has that lesson been learned? Probably not sufficiently.

ISAACSON: He says that it’s got to be cunning, ambitious, and men who are interested only in their own self-interest in that speech. Carl, is that why Trump is like Nixon?

BERNSTEIN: It’s part of the reason. Both of them are criminal presidents in the United States. Trump is taking it farther. He is the first seditionist president in our history. He tried to inspire, foment an insurrection against the very government of the United States, something like Jefferson Davis did, who was a seditionist. But Jefferson Davis was not the president of the United States. One other aspect to this that we need to think about in terms of parallels or what’s not there that you just raised is the role of the Supreme Court in — there are two elements. One is the role of the Republican Party. And Nixon was pushed from office because courageous men and women in the Republican Party said he could no longer be president because of his criminality, and they voted for articles of impeachment. They would have convicted him in the Senate. We don’t see that with Donald Trump. But, also, the Supreme Court in Watergate, by unanimous decision, ordered Nixon to give over his tapes. And there was a chief justice that he had appointed himself who was part of the opinion. And we now have for the first time perhaps in our history the question of whether the Supreme Court has been compromised by the wife of a justice on the Supreme Court who is perhaps a principal in a conspiracy here. We don’t know. But I do know that one of the things the January 6 Committee is looking at very seriously is the role of Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas’ wife, justice of the Supreme Court, in this conspiracy and whether or not she may be part of it.

ISAACSON: Bob, would you compare and contrast what’s happening now with the January 6 hearings to the Watergate hearings and why these January 6 hearings aren’t having the same type of impact?

WOODWARD: Well, it’s obviously a sharp, jolting difference. But just to kind of get the history straight here, what turned the corner in the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, Nixon first said that he was going to invoke executive privilege. Then — and this is one of the themes of Nixon, this delusion he had, well, if his closest aides, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, testified, they would defend him. But in the testimony, they started fighting. John Mitchell memorably started talking about the White House horrors. And this whole unraveling of what happened really began with Nixon’s self-inflicted, but I think legal, decision that you can’t invoke executive privilege in this case of the Congress having a legitimate role in trying to figure out what happened in Watergate, which is — but they’re not prosecutors, but they’re fact- finders. And it turned out to be the gold standard of congressional investigations. Now the House January 6 Committee has that responsibility.

ISAACSON: Carl, both in “All the President’s Men,” then in the foreword to it, and in “The Final Days,” the other book that you and Bob did together, you talked about Goldwater, going to see Goldwater, and how Goldwater led a delegation to see Nixon. Tell us that story, Carl. And then I’m going to ask Bob to think about, well, what has happened to Republicans now that there aren’t people like that?

BERNSTEIN: Well, Barry Goldwater had been the 1964 nominee of the Republican Party to be president of the United States. And by the time, a decade later, of the denouement of Watergate, he was something of the conscience of the Republican Party. And he led a delegation of Republican leaders of the House and Senate to the White House two days before Nixon’s resignation. And he — Bob and I went to see Goldwater for “The Final Days.” We went to his apartment. He gave us each a tumbler of whiskey. And he poured himself a really big one, pulled out a diary, and started to read to us what his diary said had happened in that historic day. He and the leaders, the Republican leaders, went to the White House, sat — and Goldwater sat right across from Nixon. And Nixon said to Goldwater: “Barry, how many votes do I have in the Senate to be acquitted in a Senate trial?” assuming that Nixon would be impeached by the House, which he would have been. And Goldwater, knowing that Nixon thought he might have somehow sufficient votes, Goldwater looked at Nixon and said: “Mr. President, right now, you might have four to six votes for acquittal in the Senate, and you don’t have mine.”

ISAACSON: And the next day, Nixon resigned, right?

BERNSTEIN: He announced his resignation, because he realized that he — because of what Goldwater had said, it was hopeless, that he had to resign. And let’s look at one other essential difference between now and then. When Nixon resigned, he did that speech in the East Room. And then he went out on the South Lawn and got in the helicopter. He did not try to stage a coup to stay in office.

ISAACSON: Bob, you wrote a book about sort of, I’d say, the final part of the Trump administration. What happened to the Republicans? Were there any Goldwaters there who were ready to tell him the truth?

WOODWARD: No, unfortunately for the Republican Party and for the country. And if you recall this, Carl discovered that there were — and literally on the air listed 21 Senate Republicans who had more than disdain for Trump, though, publicly, they were standing with him. And then, later, a senator called Carl and said, no, there are actually 40. So this is below the waterline in Washington. These people actually have this contempt for him, but Trump is such a powerful figure, as we know, in the party. And Carl rightly talks about Trump on January 6, then after, attempted a coup, but, of course, he had lost. He had lost the election. It turns out that two of Trump’s biggest supporters, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, undertook private in-depth investigations of Trump’s claims. And they discovered, they — this is not Nancy Pelosi making this discovery. It’s the Trump supporters concluding there is no evidence. And both of them, Senator Graham and Senator Lee, went to the Senate floor when the Senate was voting after January 6 — or literally just counting the votes. And they both — and as Graham put it so eloquently, count me out. There’s nothing here. There’s no evidence. So it is a stunning political situation which I suspect historians are going to be going through for decades. Trump has duped his supporters into believing that the election was stolen, with zero facts to back it up.

ISAACSON: Bob and Carl, this book “All the President’s Men” and your coverage of Watergate, without exaggerating, I can say may be the greatest feat of sustained reporting in our lifetime. But how come they kept you all on the story? Was there a movement to give it to the more senior political people?

WOODWARD: Well, there was, but I got called that Saturday morning by Barry Sussman, who was the city editor. I had only been working at “The Washington Post” for nine months. I was the lowest paid reporter because they wouldn’t give me credit for working at a weekly paper for a year, and sent me to the courthouse. And this is one of those moments where you are sitting there in the courthouse and they bring in the five burglars who were wearing business suits. Now, I had — I was the night police reporter for the nine months I have worked at “The Post,” and I had never seen a burglar in a business suit. In fact, I had never seen a well-dressed burglar. So, immediately, the alarm bells go off. Who is this? What’s going on here? And then McCord, who was the leader of the five burglars, was asked by the judge where he worked. And, reluctantly, McCord said, well, he worked at the CIA as the head of security, as Carl and I learned the next day. And we did our first story together. And we really didn’t know each other. But there was an instant matchup here. And so I know Carl and I both have stories about where the leadership of “The Post” gave us, in a sense, our backbone.

BERNSTEIN: I want to give you a quick example. There came a time not too long after the break-in where I got a call with my desk from the guard downstairs at the entrance to “The Washington Post.” And he said: “There’s a subpoena server here who wants to get your notes. He has a subpoena for your notes.” And I said: “Well, keep him down there. Don’t let him in the building. And I will get right back to you.” And I call Ben Bradlee. And I went into Bradlee’s office and told Bradlee what was going on. And he said: “Well, just make sure the guy doesn’t get upstairs. I’m going to go talk to Katharine,” Katharine Graham, the owner of “The Washington Post.” I went back to my desk. Bradlee comes back to me about 10 minutes later, and he says: “Look, Katharine says they’re not your notes. They’re her notes. And if anybody is going to go to jail in this, it’s going to be Katharine, not you.” What does that tell you about the owner of “The Washington Post,” her relationship with Bradlee? They knew what to do at the most perilous moment, perhaps.

ISAACSON: Carl, and rereading “All the President’s Men,” looking at your forward thinking back to Watergate and watching the January 6 hearings this week, I was struck that the personalities of Donald Trump and of Richard Nixon share a lot. There was a conspiratorial mind-set, a feeling of enemies, a sense of worrying about the hatred that everybody felt. Can you compare the two of them in terms of the psychology that led to both Watergate and to what happened on January 6?

BERNSTEIN: Well, first, both of them had criminal minds to get what they wanted at any cost. So they shared that. But they also shared this quality of hatred. And we see it in Nixon. You listen to his tapes, and he says, hate the press, hate the opposition, hate the anti-war movement, hate the professors. He was running on hate. Much as fuel for an automobile, his fuel became, to a large extent, hate. It was the piston of really what propelled him forward. And you see it throughout the tapes. And, with Trump, it has been a lifetime of hating those who would stand in his way, his contempt for them. And, again, any time someone, for instance, did the right thing and opposed Trump in his business, what did he do? He hatefully went after them and filed suit against them to try and ruin those people. It is a lifetime of hatred with Donald Trump, and he brought that hatred to the presidency.

ISAACSON: In your new introduction, you have a sentence that really struck me, which is: “We believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and succeed in undermining democracy.” Why were you wrong? Why did it happen?

WOODWARD: I remember in one of my interviews with Trump in 2020 — this is the year he’s running for reelection of, staking everything on reelection. I asked him, what’s the job of the president? And, quick, he came and said: “To protect the people.” Well, protecting the people, I think, is a good definition of what the job of the president is. But he didn’t do it. Everything was designed to protect himself, including the failure to mobilize the country when the COVID pandemic struck. Trump had the warning from the experts, and he failed to protect the people. And this is why I think Carl and I conclude in this foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of “All the President’s Men” that Trump was the one who violated, stepped over the line so many times in a criminal way and in a moral way. There was a moral responsibility that Donald Trump had. Nixon had this moral responsibility. He ignored it. He did not — he was only interested in himself again, his political standing. But, as Carl was pointed out, Nixon left. He got on that helicopter. Trump stayed. And we now have the high possibility that Trump is going to be running for president again.

ISAACSON: Carl.

BERNSTEIN: Well, first of all, we have the essential difference in Watergate and today, in that the system worked to a large extent in Watergate. Just the opposite has happened in the presidency of Donald Trump. At no point has the system been able to stop it. He was impeached twice. The facts were there. The leadership of the Republican Party was craven, refused to look at the facts, supported him down the line. So, Donald Trump, who is the Most Undemocratic Of our presidents, perhaps, he stages an attempted coup, the kind of thing you would expect by a junta in South America. It’s extraordinary. And the fact that the Republican Party has been captured by Trumpist forces means that we need to look at the country, not just at Donald Trump, because the country at the time of Watergate had gone to a majority — all the polls showed a majority of the people, 57 percent, 60 percent, at the time of the end of Watergate believed Nixon had to go. We don’t have that situation today.

ISAACSON: Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, thank you so much for joining us.

WOODWARD: Thank you.

BERNSTEIN: Good to be with you.