On Tuesday, Bob Woodward addressed Missouri's Boys State on the campus of the University of Central Missouri.
You can find what he said and a transcript of his first twenty minutes on Show Me Progress.
It is very revealing for what kind of journalist he is and what he revealed about certain topics.
His first story was about being seated next to Al Gore at a conference.
Now whether you agree with Gore or disagree with Gore, I'm telling you, sitting next to him at dinner is taxing. [laughter] In fact, it's unpleasant. [laughter] And if you know anything about Gore's, uh, biography before he went into politics he was a journalist and practiced journalism. And it turns out he thinks he invented that also. [laughter] [applause] And so it was really a rough dinner for me.
OK, he went for a cheap laugh, but it reveals something very important about his view of journalism.
This is how he continued that encounter with Gore.
And, uh, he started, this is two thousand and five, I'd written two of my Bush, four Bush books on Bush's wars. And, uh, so, Gore said, well, why don't you come out against the Iraq war and against Bush, and, uh, like you did with Nixon when you and Carl Bernstein wrote about Nixon? Uh, you condemned him and the crimes of Watergate. And I said, No, actually, uh, that's not the case. The job of a reporter is to be empirical and get the facts and not take a position. And, uh, he said, words to the effect of horse manure. [laughter] It was a little stronger than that. And, uh, he said, uh, look, uh, I read those stories that you and Carl Bernstein did and I said, I wrote those stories. [laughter] And it did not move the needle of self doubt on, on Gore's part at all. And, uh, his reading was more, uh, important than our writing of what those stories said. [laughter]
OK, So, the sainted Bob Woodward is an "objective" journalist -- one whose job "is to be empirical and get the facts and not take a position."
So, Mr. Objective Journalist makes a joke about Al Gore inventing the internet which, as we all know here, is a LIE.
There is another anecdote in the address which reveals more about his practice of "objectivity" that prevents him from taking a positions on Presidential decisions.
I want to go through some of the discussions with presidents, some of the things I think, uh, I've learned or that can be learned from how they tried to work their will or fail to work their will. Uh, but each time you do one of these things, uh, there's surprises. And, uh, I want to take, uh, one clear example, uh, which was a real cold shower for me, uh, a, uh, humbling experience. This goes back to a month after Nixon resigned as president in August of nineteen seventy-four. Gerald Ford, uh, who had been vice president, uh, became president and a month after, uh, the, Ford became president he went on television early on a Sunday morning announcing he was giving a full pardon to Richard Nixon for Watergate. And I think he went on, uh, television early on a Sunday morning hoping no one would notice. [laughter] But it was widely noticed, uh, but not by me, I was asleep. And my colleague Carl Bernstein called me up and said, have you heard? And I said, I haven't heard anything. And, uh, Carl, who truly has the ability to, uh, say what occurred with the most drama and the fewest words, and I'm gonna quote him here, it's not my language, it's his. I said, well, what happened? And he said, uh, the son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch. [laughter][applause] Sorry, I understand, uh, that's not Boys State language [laughter], but you live in the real world, right? [applause] So, at the time I thought the, the pardon is, uh, the ultimate act of corruption. And there was an aroma, there was really an aroma that there was a deal between Ford and Nixon on this that, uh, Ford would, uh, get the presidency if he guaranteed, uh, a pardon for Nixon. Was some evidence of it, it was unclear, there was lots of suspicion, there was the question of, which hopefully all of your lives you will deal with, and that's the question of justice. What's fairness in the system?
Mr. Objective Journalist now tells how he found out the answer to his question.
And, so twenty-five years later I undertook one of my projects, a book that, uh, became, uh, called Shadow, about the legacy of Watergate in the presidencies of, uh, Ford through Clinton. And I called Ford up, uh, wanting to interview him about this, being pretty certain he would not talk, uh, and say, you know, I have a golf tournament or something like that. And, uh, but I called him and he said, oh sure, I'll be happy to talk to you. He was in New York at that, uh, first call. So I went up to New York, he was at a board meeting, and interviewed him about the pardon and the sequence, his motivation. Uh, I again with the luxury of time, I had, I had two assistants who read all of the newspaper magazine coverage of the pardon. Got, went to the Ford library, got the legal memos. I interviewed everyone who was involved, uh, who was still alive. Interviewed them again. Uh, went to the Ford's house in Colorado, interviewed him there a couple of times. Interviewed him three or four times at his main house in Rancho Mirage, California. Doing drafts, asking that question, what really happened here behind the scenes? What was the driver? What was the motive? And in the last interview with Ford I remember asking him, why did you pardon Richard Nixon? And, uh, he said, well, you keep asking that. And I said, well, I don't think you've answered it. And he said, okay, I will answer it. And these, I tell you, these are the moments you live for in my business. When somebody's kind of worn down and they say, I'm gonna tell you what really happened. And Ford said, you've got to back to that time in nineteen seventy-four. The economy was shaky it was the middle of the cold war, uh, it was not, uh, it was a very dangerous time, the Watergate special prosecutor sent Ford a letter saying that Nixon now is a private citizen, was going to be investigated, certainly indicted, tried, uh, almost certainly convicted 'cause there was such overwhelming evidence, testimony from his aides and his, uh, secret tape recordings. Uh, and so Ford said to me, he said, so we were gonna have three or, two or three more years of Watergate. And he said, the country could not stand it. We had to move on and he said in this very plaintive, uh, I believe, truthful way, I needed my own presidency. We needed to move on. And so then he said, he pardoned Nixon, not for Nixon, not for himself, but for the national interest. He said, I had to, I was sitting in that seat with that constitutional power, we needed to move on, we needed to get beyond the Nixon presidency.
So, I wrote in, uh, Shadow, that in fact, uh, what this being a corrupt act, uh, was a very gutsy thing that Ford did.
Remember Woodward is an "objective" journalist and condemned Gore for challenging him on why Woodward did not condemn Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq. However, Mr. Objective Journalist can decide that Ford's decision to pardon Nixon was "gutsy" because Ford told him he needed his own Presidency (a "gutsy' reason?) and "we" (you and me and Ford?) needed to move on.
Woodward is not exactly the first "objective" journalist who reveals a very selective view of "objectivity."
"Horseshit" is not even close to what he shoveled to Missouri high school boys this week.