Comparing Nixon and Bush, by Carl Bernstein of Watergate history

Carl Bernstein on Nixon vs. Bush
Editor & Publisher

Wednesday 14 February 2007

New York - Part one of the new PBS "Frontline" four-page series on the media debuted last night, mainly looking at the Plame affair. As usual, only snippets from dozens of interviews will make it on the air, but PBS.org is helpfully putting complete transcripts of many of the interviews up on its Web site (as we note in a separate article).

Here is a brief excerpt from the interview with Watergate sleuth Carl Bernstein. The interviewer is Lowell Bergman.

Q: Finally, I just want to get your reflections on the [famously contentious] relationship of Richard Nixon and the press.... How does that compare to George W. Bush and the press?

Bernstein: First, Nixon's relationship to the press was consistent with his relationship to many institutions and people. He saw himself as a victim. We now understand the psyche of Richard Nixon, that his was a self-destructive act and presidency.

I think what we're talking about with the Bush administration is a far different matter in which disinformation, misinformation and unwillingness to tell the truth - a willingness to lie both in the Oval Office, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in the office of the vice president, the vice president himself - is something that I have never witnessed before on this scale.

The lying in the Nixon White House had most often to do with covering up Watergate, with the Nixon administration's illegal activities. Here, in this presidency, there is an unwillingness to be truthful, both contextually and in terms of basic facts that ought to be of great concern to people of all ideologies....

This president has a record of dishonesty and obfuscation that is Nixonian in character in its willingness to manipulate the press, to manipulate the truth. We have gone to war on the basis of misinformation, disinformation and knowing lies from top to bottom.

That is an astonishing fact. That's what this story is about: the willingness of the president and the vice president and the people around them to try to undermine people who have effectively opposed them by telling the truth. It happened with [Sen.] John McCain in South Carolina. It happened with [Sen.] John Kerry. It's happened with [Sen.] Max Cleland in Georgia. It's happened with many other people. That's the real story, and that's the story that [the press] should have been writing....

It's very difficult, as a reporter, to get across that when you say, "This is a presidency of great dishonesty," that this is not a matter of opinion. This is demonstrable fact. If you go back and look at the president's statements, you look at the statements of the vice president, you look at the statements of Condoleezza Rice, you go through the record, you look at what [counterterrorism expert] Richard Clarke has written, you look at what we know - it's demonstrable.

It's fact. Now, how do you quantify it? That's a different question.

But to me, if there is a great failure by the so-called mainstream press in this presidency, it's the unwillingness to look at the lies and disinformation and misinformation and add them up and say clearly, "Here's what they said; here's what the known facts were," because when that is done, you then see this isn't a partisan matter. This is a matter of the truth, particularly about this war. This is a presidency that is not willing to tell the truth very often if it is contrary to its interests. It's not about ideology from whence I say this.

It's about being a reporter and saying: "That's what the story is. Let's see what they said; let's see what the facts are." ...

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Frontline: Full Interview With Carl Bernstein
Frontline

Wednesday 14 February 2007

How important was protecting sources for the Watergate story?

Absolutely essential. We did not name a single significant source in the first 150 stories that we did in the first year of Watergate. In fact, we never did. The only people who were identified by name more often than not were telling lies, because they were spokesmen for the Nixon White House. In terms of real sources of information, they were all confidential, every one. It would have been totally impossible to have done the Watergate reporting and identified our sources.

When we wrote All the President's Men, we went back to all of our sources, and we asked them, could we identify them? Some of them said yes. Hugh Sloan, the bookkeeper for the Committee [for the Re-election of] the President [CRP], said yes. The treasurer for the Nixon re-election committee, some others - Mark Felt, the individual known as Deep Throat - said no. We kept that secret for 33 years because we believe in the confidentiality of sources.

I know of very little important reporting of the last 30 to 40 years that has been done without use of confidential sources, particularly in the national security area.... What we know about the last five, six, seven presidencies, we know through the use of confidential sources. If we had relied on the information from this president, from this secretary of state, from this secretary of defense, from this vice president, we would know almost nothing of the truth of [the Iraq war]....

But with the use of confidential sources, certain things are incumbent on the reporter: to represent a kind of responsibility and refuse to be whipped around by a source, to be led astray by a source. There's a responsibility, if possible, to identify the particular orientation of a source. For instance, if it's a story involving fund raising in the Republican National Committee, and the source is a Republican fund-raiser, it would be very significant to identify that person as a Republican fund-raiser. If it were a Democrat off on the sidelines, it would seem to me you would have to say that the source is a Democrat and then explain how he's come into information and why it's credible. So it's a tricky question how you present it.

Weren't you subpoenaed during Watergate for your sources?

Yes.... There was a civil suit brought by the Nixon re-election committee against the Democratic National Committee for the purpose of trying to find out how they were getting their information to us, among other things....

[When we] knew that the subpoena had reached the building, I went to [then-executive editor of The Washington Post Ben] Bradlee, and I said, "Look, I just got a call from the guard downstairs that there's a subpoena with a piece of paper with my name on it." And he said, "Look, go see a movie while we figure out what to do."

So I went to see a movie; in fact, the movie I saw was Deep Throat. I came back to the office, and by then the strategy had been gone over with the lawyers. Our notes, my notes, were transferred to the custody of Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post. Therefore, if anybody was going to go to jail, she was going to go also. As Bradlee said: "Wouldn't that be something? Every photographer in town would be down at the courthouse to look at our girl going off to the slam." And Mrs. Graham was ready to go to jail because she understood the principle. I accepted the subpoena, because by then, the custody of my notes had been transferred to Katharine Graham.

And so what happened? You didn't go to jail, did you?

They backed off.... They didn't want to take on Katharine Graham. They took on Katharine Graham by trying to take the licenses of The Washington Post television stations away, which was the real money-making ability of The Washington Post Company at the time.... It paid a lot of the bills....

"I know of very little important reporting of the last 30 to 40 years that has been done without use of confidential sources, particularly in the national security area."

Today we see the further economic pressure through subpoenas because stockholders don't want to see their companies embroiled with the federal government in a big suit that might hurt the value of their stock. So that now has become a consideration, as it was I believe in the case of Time Inc. in the Valerie Plame case.

But unlike Katharine Graham, [then-Time editor] Norm Pearlstine gave up [reporter] Matt Cooper's notes.

He did. And I think it was a very difficult call. I think that it's still being sorted out, whether it was the right thing to do and whether they really gave up anything....

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