Journalist and author Bob Woodward will give this semester's Richard E. Snyder's Presidential Lecture today in Cohen Auditorium. Woodward began his career as a journalist for The Washington Post in the early 1970s, where he gained acclaim for his coverage, alongside fellow journalist Carl Bernstein, of the Watergate scandal.
Woodward's relationship with Richard E. Snyder dates back to the Watergate days. Snyder was the head of publishing house Simon and Schuster in 1972, when Simon and Schuster purchased the rights to the book that became "All the President's Men" (1974), the seminal account of the Watergate break-in and ensuing cover-up scandal.
"He was the gutsy publisher when it looked like people didn't believe — lots of people didn't believe — what we were writing about Watergate," Woodward told the Daily. "But he bought the book and believed in it, believed in us, and was always a magnificent publisher."
The Daily's Amelie Hecht and Martha Shanahan spoke with Woodward last week to discuss his career and the state of journalism today.
Martha Shanahan (MS): What is the role for investigative reporting in an age when it seems everything is already "out there" on a blog or website?
Bob Woodward (BW): It's what's not already out there that we're missing. In other words, sometimes the best information, unfortunately, is secret, is hidden, and the job of the investigative reporter, or the in-depth reporter — I frankly prefer that term — is to dig in and discover what is not out there. I guess kind of my summation is that there's way too much secrecy, unnecessary secrecy in government and particularly in government. The government works for the voters, and the voters should know what's going on. And with the business problems newspapers and news organizations are having, we have less in-depth reporting, and that may be a serious problem and may be a tragedy.
MS: Do investigative reporting techniques need to change?
BW: Techniques, no. I don't think it's a technique problem. I just think it's just a matter of commitment and money in the news organizations.
Amelie Hecht (AH): You said there is too much secrecy in the world of politics. What do you think of WikiLeaks? Do you think it is helpful or harmful to investigative journalism?
BW: The important question is whether it is helpful or harmful to the people who read these cables, and I think by and large it informs. Releasing them without vetting them makes no sense. Vetting them to see if it would name somebody who is a secret source who might be killed — you shouldn't do that. But the WikiLeaks cables are mid-level classification secrets, and they rarely get to the White House or have standing in the White House. Some people have claimed that these documents tell us how the most important, biggest decisions were made, and that's not so. They are revealing, but the White House has higher-level classifications on intelligence data that provide more … authoritative information.
MS: While writing your book, "Obama's Wars" [2010], you were granted unrivaled access to people within the Obama administration. What, over the course of your career, have you found to be effective ways of getting influential people to talk to you?
BW: You have to take them as seriously as they take themselves. You both know Washington — people take themselves very seriously, sometimes too seriously, so when you go in to interview somebody or if you ask to interview somebody, you have to know their background. If they've written something for Foreign Affairs magazine 30 years ago, you should read it, ask about it. The key is to spend lots of time, come back, show an interest, not be impatient. Make it clear you want to reflect their point of view and experience …
MS: There is a lot of discussion going on right now about whether or not there is an Obama doctrine. Given your unique perspective on the Obama administration, in your view, is there a clear Obama doctrine?
BW: There are features of an Obama approach to foreign policy. By and large there are two strategic cultures in American foreign policy: the crusading, moralistic approach … [and] the other is a more realistic, kind of a semi-isolationist point of view, if you know what I mean — let's stick to business at home, let's focus on what's going on at home. And he blends the two; the two are roommates in his mind, and so you see he compromises, comes down the middle. [In] the Afghan war when the request was for forty thousand troops, Vice President Biden's alternative was for twenty thousand and what did Obama pick? Thirty thousand, right in the middle. Not [29,500], not [31,500], thirty thousand.
In Libya you see the crusading, moralistic strain or approach: "We're going to prevent a humanitarian disaster." And then on the other side you see the "Let's limit the war, let's not send ground troops … let's not us the military to overthrow [Qaddafi]." And so it's limited. … Part of what somebody who's interested in focusing in business at home would do, but at the same time there is this crusading moralistic side of, "Oh, we have to do something because lots of people might be killed in Benghazi."
AH: Obama has been resistant to having his approach be considered similar to the Bush Doctrine. Do you see elements of the Bush Doctrine in the Obama Doctrine?
BW: Well, there are three Bush Doctrines, and you don't want to hear them all. The main one is that we will act early; we will pre-empt somebody who seems to be a threat. Obama does not take that approach, as best I can tell. But Obama is not doctrinaire — very practical. What he did in Libya is down the middle. Now, it may work, it may not work, it might blow up, it might turn out to be very effective. The same with the decisions he made in Afghanistan.
AH: Your talk at Tufts later this month will be called "Nixon to Obama" — can you give us a more specific idea of what kinds of topics you'll be discussing?
BW: Well I don't want to give it away, but it's about … the investigating, writing about all the presidents since Nixon … who they were. … When I write a book about Obama, or George W. Bush, it's the question you were addressing, you know, what happened in a certain area, what was the action, but you're driving at the question "Who is Barack Obama, "Who is George W. Bush," "Who was Richard Nixon." So what I'm going to do is tell some war stories about covering and trying to understand those presidents, and give an account of some things that worked out and some mistakes I made also. … Obama — I've lived my last eighteen months, two years, trying to figure him out. So I'm going to describe some of that. And I'm not going to talk too long, spend more time trying to answer questions.
MS: For someone who may have the same worries as you do and who may want to go into journalism today, what advice would you give someone who wants to get into the field?
BW: In a real practical sense, get a job reporting, editing at your school newspaper, get a job and work twenty to thirty percent harder than everybody else. Twenty percent additional time commitment, you can double the quality and quantity of your work. You will in the end do twice as well.
AH: What are you working on now?
BW: Probably another Obama book. I'm not sure where the center of gravity is, so I'm working on figuring out what I'm going to work on.
