by CKR
What happened to Bob Woodward?
It’s a question that has been asked of other baby boomers who’ve given up their seventies bell-bottom thinking to become buttoned-down businesspeople. Some of us become more radical as we age, some less.
But it’s a comedown to hear one of the hero-reporters of Watergate say that keeping secrets is his first responsibility.
Things have changed since Watergate. That’s the theme of one of Woodward’s books, Shadow, subtitled “Five presidents and the legacy of Watergate" and written in 1999. I haven’t been a fan of Woodward’s books, so I didn’t read this one until I saw it in my favorite second-hand bookstore a few weeks ago, just as Woodward was being called to Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury. A book that would tell me why (or at least how) the aider and abetter of Watergate leaks, the bringer-down of a president, would become the tame pet of the White House!
It’s never that easy, of course. But the book does provide some clues. Early on, Woodward gives us some of his thoughts.
Ben Bradlee, then the executive editor of the Washington Post, and Woodward met with Jimmy Carter, who leveled with them, off the record, about CIA payments to King Hussein of Jordan. Carter then went on to give congressional leaders a different story and chastised Woodward for writing a story based on their meeting.
… I was left with a feeling of distaste. I had a sickening sense of foreboding, of here-we-go-again with another president. I had seen firsthand that Carter had not been straight at all. Yet the off-the-record agreement about the meeting prevented me from writing a full account. Although he had given a distorted version of the meeting to congressional leaders, I didn’t see how I could give ours without launching open warfare. After Watergate, frankly the last thing I wanted was strife with the new president. I decided to turn to another subject, the Supreme Court. [p. 52, emphasis added]
Three years after Nixon’s resignation, Woodward had misgivings about the result of his Watergate reporting.
Bringing down a president is no small thing and shouldn’t be taken lightly. It probably wasn’t what Woodward and Carl Bernstein had in mind when they started working the story, probably not even when they acquired “Deep Throat” as a source. But possibly the president’s actions had something to do with that, too.
We look at presidents now through Watergate-shaded, Gulf-of-Tonkin-tinted lenses. Presidents lie, which most adults would have admitted if pressed pre-Watergate, but they tried not to think about it. We now consider Woodward’s secrecy, the fragments of information about the actions of the people he knows in the leak of Valerie Plame’s name, and we can’t help but wonder if the pattern of presidential culpability will reemerge.
Woodward also gives us an epilogue with what he thinks (or what he wants us to think) are the lessons of Watergate.
First, if there is questionable activity, release the facts, whatever they are, as early and completely as possible. Second, do not allow outside inquiries, whether conducted by prosecutors, congressmen, or reporters, to harden into a permanent state of suspicion and warfare. [emphasis added.]
There are other lessons, too, that Woodward doesn’t choose to put in his epilogue, although he calls some of them out in the text. I’ll add in four more lessons that Woodward might have included in his epilogue.
Like Nixon and all modern presidents, Ford was worried about leaks. This fear is one of the clearest legacies of Watergate, I realized, causing presidents to work with a small, trusted circle of advisers and often to make decisions with undue haste. [pp 37-38]
Leaks can come from opponents of the administration too. In the Ken Starr investigation of President Clinton, leaks frequently were attributed to “souces in Starr’s office,” or “prosecutors,” or “sources close to Starr.” [p. 398]
Third: Leaks can be used to manipulate the press from both sides. They are extremely hard to avoid, so there is a temptation to beat the opposition to the manipulation.
There was a flurry of talk, when Lewis Libby was indicted, that Bush needed a new and trusted advisor to sweep out the trash and do a “Nixon to China.” Shadow documents that that’s harder than we may recall. During Iran-Contra, Reagan tried to persuade former Tennessee Senator and Majority Leader Howard H. Baker, Jr to be his chief of staff. Baker was the right person, with experience from the Watergate hearings, to bring credibility and competence to the job. But Baker didn’t want it. He wanted to run for president, and he was wary about stepping into an unresolved and unknown situation.
”Mr. President,” Baker said, “if I do this job I’ve got to have access to everything. I’ve got to know what’s going on. I cannot let myself be taken into a situation I don’t understand.”…. “Number two,” Baker said, “I’ve got to have my own lawyer.”
….Third, Baker said he wanted to bring in his own communications person, spokesman.” [pp. 124-125]
Baker intended to stay only until the job was done. Reagan agreed to all his conditions.
Bill Clinton, as the Whitewater investigation heated up, wanted Lloyd Cutler to be the White House counsel. Like Baker, Cutler demanded time limits, autonomy and full access to people and documents. Clinton agreed
Fourth: The right people to respond to an executive scandal will drive a hard bargain. Cleaning up the mess is risky.
Bert Lance, Jimmy Carter’s budget director and close friend, ran into financial troubles.
”So I think you ought to just let me resign,” Lance said. He could go back to Georgia, straighten the bank out, fix the problem and come back to Washington if Carter wanted. [p. 56]
After Lance’s troubles became public and the press and Senate came down hard, Carter stood by his friend.
”My faith in the character and competence of Bert Lance has been reconfirmed. I see no other conclusion that can be drawn from my objective analysis of these findings,” the president said. With a giant smile, Carter turned to Lance, who was at his side, and said, “Bert, I’m proud of you.” [p. 59]
George H. W. Bush kept John Sununu too long as his chief of staff. Sununu’s use of government airplanes for personal trips was investigated by a special prosecutor.
Fifth: Loyalty is a balancing act. Throw old friends overboard, and people will work for you only on their own terms. Keep them too long during a scandal, and you will be damaged. This lesson predates Watergate, of course: Eisenhower had the same problem with Sherman Adams.
Sixth: Anything can eventually be found out and made public.
Woodward also cites the special-prosecutor investigations, almost continuous since Watergate, as “the use of criminal processes in policy disputes” [p. 214], “evil” institutions with “unlimited resources” [p. 235], and “the politics of personal destruction” [p. 496], although he uses the words from other people’s mouths.
The last four lessons all bear on Woodward’s current role as White House confidant and chronicler: His job is controlled leaks, he is a part of that scandal-plagued organization, his job depends on loyalty given and received, and he controls what the public finds out. That’s not to attribute sinister or unworthy motives to Woodward; not including these lessons could simply be a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees.
In his epilogue, Woodward asserts that the five presidents after Nixon didn’t understand his two lessons. I’d extend that to the sixth president and the four additional lessons. Woodward suggests that the reason for this blindness is
They have become victims of the myth of the big-time president. As successors to George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt, the expect to rule…The myth of the big-time president persists, the longing for someone with heroic energy, someone who can take the air out of a room, who can define an era worth living in. That is not only what these presidents hope to see in themselves, it is what the public wants and what the press holds up as the standard against which they will be judged. But the post-Watergate conditions have made the emergence of such a leader increasingly unlikely, and the presidents, in frustration, have been in rebellion.
Woodward gives Watergate most of the credit for these changes. But technology and the state of the world have also been changing. White House and Congressional staffs have been getting larger. All this makes it harder to keep secrets. Ask Mikhail Gorbachev. And, by the way, he could tell you about another very large change in the world.
People’s lives and jobs are much less hierarchical than they were in the 1950s and even the 1990s. Power is diffused among those staffs. Perhaps we no longer need a “big-time president.” Perhaps those seeking that office need to take all those lessons more to heart. Perhaps Woodward does, too.