- [Announcer] This program was funded by the following: Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and Family, BP America, and also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(dramatic orchestral music) - The greatest national security threat we have right now is how poorly we are educating our kids in pre-K through 12.

- We are reinforcing democracy.

We are the ones who get to choose our future.

(dramatic music intensifies) - Democracy is a fragile thing that has to be defended, and it always has to be defended.

(dramatic music intensifies) (bright music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our times.

Now, we bring those conversations straight to you.

In this series, we'll explore America in all its complexity, what our extraordinary but often tempestuous history says about who we are as a people and the formidable challenges we face today.

Tonight's episode is part two of my conversation with renowned reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose explosive investigative journalism from the Washington Post on Watergate ultimately led to the resignation of Richard Nixon.

We talked about the scandal that rocked America 50 years ago and how they see our politics and our nation today.

Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, welcome back to "Live from the LBJ," which we're doing from the Harry Ransom Center, which houses your archive from your Watergate investigation 50 years ago.

So welcome back.

- Good to be with you.

- Yeah, we talked in last episode about Watergate, and Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford.

But, I'd love to talk about the other presidents that you've covered through your esteemed careers.

And Carl, I wanna begin with you.

I learned from a conversation that you and I had some years back that you knew LBJ, and not only did you cover LBJ, but you were with him the night that he announced to a shocked nation that he would not run for reelection, March 31st, 1968.

Can you talk about that experience with LBJ?

- Well, first, I didn't really know LBJ.

I had in passing covered some of the events in the Johnson administration, particularly dealing with civil rights, some other matters.

But on March 31st, I happened to be at a premiere of a movie that had an intermission.

And in the intermission I went to listen to Johnson's speech to the nation, which presumably was gonna be about Vietnam, and instead he announced he was not going to run for reelection.

- I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

- So instead of seeing the second half of the movie, I ran down to the Washington Post because I knew that there would be stories that needed to be done.

And Ben Bradlee saw me run in and I had on a tie, and the paper had already been put together, with, put out and ready to go with a story about Johnson based on a text that he presumably was going to give, but did not, in which he talked about Vietnam.

Bradlee said, "Bernstein, go to the White House and help out down there with our White House reporter."

And I got down to the White House and there was an announcement in the press room over the PA system that the president would meet with a pool of four reporters, including from the Washington Post in a few minutes.

And the White House reporter said, "I gotta write this story.

Bernstein, you go up and meet with the president."

And so I went up to the yellow oval room, and there was, Busby was there, and Clark Clifford was there.

Those were the only two members of the administration who were there.

And Lady Bird Johnson came and graciously served us tea and soft drinks and said the president would be there in a moment.

And he came in about 10 minutes later.

He had on a blue turtleneck, and he was spooning tapioca (chuckling) into his mouth.

And he had a big smile on his face.

And he looked at the four of us from the networks and the newspapers.

And he said to us, "Fooled y'all, didn't I?"

(laughing) And then we sat down with him for the most remarkable hour conversation, I think I, certainly I'm aware of that ever I've had with a President of the United States, in which he talked about how he reached this wrenching decision not to run for reelection.

How he had carried around in his pocket at various speeches he gave, including the State of the Union, this announcement to be made that he would not run for reelection.

That only Clifford and Lady Bird and a few others knew that he was planning not to run.

He got emotional, tears were visible.

It was an extraordinary moment.

And I went back to the paper and wrote a long memo because it was all on background.

It was not on the record.

- Carl, why do you think, it's always been a mystery, as to the real reason that LBJ, this great creature of power, this great creature of Washington, opted not to run for another term, which he was certainly able to do constitutionally?

Many think it was the fact that he didn't think he would win the Democratic-- - Bobby Kennedy was about to run for president.

There are any number of factors.

I don't think we know definitively.

There have been great historians from Doris Kearns Goodwin to Robert Caro who are writing and have written about this decision.

I think only Lyndon Johnson himself knew all of the elements of this decision.

- Have you a view based on what you saw that evening as to what his motivation might have been?

- No!

Do I think that the country was part of his motivation?

For sure.

The country was divided.

Thousands and thousands of people were demonstrating in the streets against the conduct of the war in Vietnam, yelling, "LBJ, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?"

He was a figure who had been a great, great president in terms of his domestic accomplishments, and here it was all coming apart because of this war that seemed interminable and that we could not get out of.

But would I be presumptuous enough to be in Lyndon Johnson's head at that moment?

No, even though I listened to him.

My assumption would be any number of human political, emotional reasons all jumbled together in this singular moment of American history.

- Bob, you have written 20-plus books on every president from Richard Nixon forward.

Who do you think, of the presidents that you have covered, who do you think history will most favor?

- Well, certainly each one's different, but I wrote three books about Trump and did an audio book of years of interviews.

I mean, this was a remarkable moment because I'd done the first book, "Fear," which he didn't like because it essentially showed, as I concluded, that the presidency had gone through a nervous breakdown.

And so I thought there would never be a chance to talk to him directly, but then he agreed to it.

I could call him anytime for a whole year of 2020.

He would call me when he wanted, and that's in one of the books, the second book I did, "Rage," and in the audio tapes.

But who is he?

What's going on?

- Hmm.

- Is the question that has to be, at least there an attempt at answer.

And what I found in specifics about the Coronavirus, which dominated our lives for so long in 2020, that he was warned early in January, January 28th, 2020, by his National Security Advisor, Deputy National Security Advisor, Matt Pottinger, who'd been a Wall Street Journal reporter in China for years, and said to President Trump, "This virus is coming.

I have contacts in China in the medical community, the political community.

It's gonna be like the 1918 pandemic that killed 600,000 people."

So he got this warning, and in additional interviews and what he was saying publicly, he brushed it off.

"Oh, it'll go away, don't worry."

At one point I asked him, "What's the job of the president?"

And he said, "To protect the people."

- Hmm.

- And he failed to do that utterly.

And as the virus got worse in the summer, he would call me, I would call him.

And you know, "How we doing with the virus, Mr.

President?"

And he said, "Oh, it's gonna go away."

These audio tapes are out.

I think my voice is really one of disbelief and not kind of the reverence you would try to show to a sitting president.

I said, "Mr. President, 140,000 people have died of this.

And what's your plan?

What are you gonna do?"

And yet to my utter astonishment, he said, "Don't worry, it's under control and I will have a plan in 105 days."

And I went, "What the hell?"

And that turned out to be election day.

He's so in infected with the impact on him, - Um hm.

- the virus, politically, he would just brush it off.

And if you lay it all out through his own mouth and the mouth of the other participants, it's the most clear indictment of...

I mean, it's not literally a crime, but it really is a moral crime to know so much and do so little.

- If I can add, it would be really negligent homicide that we're talking about by the President of the United States on a scale of hundreds of thousands of people.

And again, we talked to everybody, you look at the Nixon presidency, and I don't think we see that.

- But here's the paradox.

You two are emblems of journalism.

You brought down the 37th president.

- We did not bring him down.

- Yes, that's-- - I mean, this-- - Let's-- - Let's clear the air on that.

- Fair enough.

- We wrote some of the stories that started the process of really finding out what went on, discovering the tapes and the Supreme Court saying, "No, these have to be turned over in a criminal trial."

This is damaging to journalism to say, "Oh, we did these stories and it brought down--" Not True.

- Fair enough.

But it was the reportorial process that led to the investigation that led to the resignation of the 37th president.

Now that's a fair distinction.

But what I'm getting at here is here's Trump who regards the news media as the enemy of the people.

He understands your, might not have an eye for history, but understands your role in it, and yet decides to talk to the great Bob Woodward who ends up getting tapes which are incriminating to the 45th president.

Why would Donald Trump agree to talk to you?

- Yeah.

One of the reasons Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina, very close to Trump, told Trump that I would not, if I did interviews, I would not put words in his mouth, which of course is the case.

But Trump had this view that people in our business put words in his mouth, and that just isn't the case.

I mean, it's what he says.

- Yeah.

- And so he was willing, I mean, this was a bizarre year for my wife, Elsa and I, because he could call anytime.

So the phone would ring.

You know, is it one of our daughters?

Is it a friend?

Is it a robo call?

Or is it Donald Trump?

And it would often be Donald Trump.

And so, and in the end when I told him I'm doing, I knew I was doing a book, "You're not gonna like the book," instead of being angry, he literally said, "Maybe I'll get you on the next book."

Other words, there was this kind of optimism that, "Oh, okay," you know, a bad golf shot and you know, "I'll get out of the woods next time."

So, but the core issue that journalism needs to address, and now the public is, can he look out for...

I mean, the job of the president is to figure out what the next stage of good is for a majority of people in the country, in my view.

Not party, not class, not wealth.

And that is not on Trump's mind.

What's on his mind is himself in a crippling, sad, sad way.

And you know, when this is looked at, no matter what happens in this election, I think historians are gonna say, "This is just a man who was unsuited for the job and for some reasons of power and ego and so forth, he went for it and got it once, and now he's looking for it again."

It's astonishing because if you had the average voter go to Trump and say, "Mr. Trump, what's in it for me?

What are you gonna do for me?"

He'd have some answers, but they wouldn't connect with the driver inside him.

And you know, presidents, you know there's always a driver inside, and you want that to connect with the needs of people in the country.

And there's a massive disconnect.

- Carl, why did the January 6th not lead to the downfall of Donald Trump?

When you were covering Nixon, it was the Republicans who went to Nixon before his resignation and said, "You're going to be impeached in the House.

You're likely to be convicted in the Senate.

You should resign for the good of the country."

And that was his own party saying that.

Trump's party has stuck by him.

He reigns supreme in the Republican party even after January 6th, why?

- Fear and craven, craven attitude by members of the Senate in the United States, Republican members in particular, I did, who voted not to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Those Republicans who went down and talked, led by Barry Goldwater, nominee of his party to be president in 1964, went down and said to Richard Nixon, they would not support him.

They would vote for his conviction in a Senate trial.

And that convinced Nixon that he had to resign because he would be convicted otherwise.

You had the opposite occur through the Trump presidency.

I did a story on CNN and on the wires that said, and I named 21 members of the U.S. Senate, Republicans who in private were disdainful of Donald Trump, despised him, thought he was a danger to the country, had said so to each other, and yet that said not a word in public, supported him in those impeachment proceedings.

And I named these senators, not a one of whom denied that story.

And so I think the example is that there were Republicans in both the House, on the Senate Watergate Committee, on the House Judiciary Committee, which voted Articles of Impeachment against Nixon who were willing to do the right thing.

The country had also undergone in previous months a real shift in public attitude toward Nixon because of those tapes.

People knew what Nixon had done.

They were aware of his criminality.

So the system really worked.

I think if you look at the Trump situation, we're not talking just about the magnificent reporting in Bob's books.

We're not talking just about Trump himself.

We're talking about the people of the country who have the facts about Trump in front of them.

- Right.

- Because of the reporting that's been done, because of what Trump himself does and says.

He has obviously connected with a huge percentage of the people in this country who are willing to support the terrible things that we've been talking about here.

- Yeah, yeah, but, but what-- and people in the country are angry, too.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, but you know what, what is going on here also is that Trump has a hold on lots of people in the Senate, and in the House, and in the public.

And so there is almost this religious devotion to him by the people who believe.

And you ask the question why and what's going on?

And I think as we approach the election this year, people have said and indicated want a strong president.

They want somebody who will be tough.

You can be tough without being a criminal.

You can be tough without disregarding the interests of the public.

- When Gerald Ford took office after Nixon's resignation, he said, after being sworn in to the presidency, after declaring that the long national nightmare of Watergate was over-- - Our constitution works.

Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.

Here, the people rule.

- Does our system still work?

Are we still a nation of laws in America?

- Oh yeah.

I mean it does.

And it's obviously gonna be tested.

Stephen Breyer, who served 28 years on the Supreme Court and two years ago resigned, was giving a talk at the 50th anniversary of the Saturday Night Massacre when all of the, Archibald Cox and so forth, were fired by Nixon in this Saturday Night Massacre.

And he made a very interesting point.

He had a little copy of the Constitution and he was saying, "You know, this works."

This worked in this case, we don't know," he's talking about the Nixon case, "We don't know whether it's gonna work again.

And obviously there is some doubt."

But he said something very significant.

"One thing that's not in the Constitution is the character of people, and the character of people really matters."

And people, voters are observers of the character of people.

And I thought he struck a note when he said, you know, "This is something that is going to play out in terms of election."

This isn't just what party, or what issues or what policy, what's the character?

I think when we make friends, when we do things, we make character assessments.

I think voters do the same.

- You two have earned a place in history.

How do you wanna be remembered?

(laughing) - It's such a grand statement (laughing) that you've made there.

Look, we've had enormous opportunity.

We've had awful lot of luck.

We were asked 50 years ago, "What is it that you guys are doing on this story?"

And we came up with this formulation, the best obtainable version - Um hm.

- of the truth.

And I think 50 years later, certainly that's how I look at it.

And I think Bob's work speaks for itself in those terms.

But we had this amazing experience of being at the right place at the right time.

- But I think it's also important to realize where you fit in, and we fit in as reporters.

- Yeah.

- That's what we are.

- Um hm.

- Katharine Graham, the owner publisher of the Post, after Nixon resigned wrote us a letter on yellow legal paper.

And you have the original.

- I do.

- And I have a copy and it says, "Dear Carl and Bob.

Now Nixon is gone.

You did some of the stories."

Quote, "Don't start thinking too highly of yourselves."

(laughing) Very important.

(laughing) Then she said, "Let me give you some advice."

And the advice is, "beware the demon pomposity."

"Beware the demon pomposity."

And I think what she's also saying that pomposity is something no one likes.

No one wants to be pompous, we hope.

But that means stay in your lane.

- Hmm.

- You really are reporters.

And in a sense that is not downgrading, but it's not upgrading, also.

It is, this is what we do, this is where we fit, and we're not gonna go be something else because it doesn't work.

And she's right.

You know, don't start thinking too highly of yourselves.

- What you have done, you have done superlatively.

Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, thanks so much for being with us.

(intense dramatic music) (dramatic music fades) - [Announcer] This program was funded by the following: Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and Family, BP America, and also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

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