Woodward, Kemp, and Co.

Last night the editorial staff from my paper had the chance to go an awards banquet, where our 25-year mayor was honored for his public service by the Marsh Institute for government and public policy at Shenandoah University.

The awards ceremony was a neat event, and a real honor for the mayor: also honored were two state figures (Mary Sue Terry: first female to hold statewide office as Attorney General; Robert Baldwin: Executive Secretary of VA Supreme Court) and former Congressman, HUD Secretary, and Vice Presidential candidate Jack Kemp.

Past honorees have included such notables as former Federal Reserve Bank chair Paul A. Volcker, former Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Energy James R. Schlesinger, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and former U.S. President Gerald Ford. The Marsh Institute is named for the Honorable John O. Marsh, Jr. who has spent time as a Congressman in the House of Representatives as well as Secretary of the Army and Assistant Secretary of Defense.

My table, with the family that owns our newspaper, was only a few tables away from the honorees and the head table with Woodward and Kemp. Not far away was President Ford's biographer and former ambassador Jaime de Ojeda from Spain.

The night's keynote speaker was Bob Woodward, one of the two reporters responsible for exposing the Nixon Watergate scandal.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to read any of Woodward's books, so I don't know how many new thoughts he shared in his presentation. Here's some of the points I found interesting:

• Mark Felt's public admission that he was the secret Watergate source surprised Woodward, who said it was "something I did not think would happen." Woodward expected Felt to carry that secret to the grave.
• Woodward's book, Deep Throat, about Felt's role was already written and waiting until Felt passed away to be published.
• On the importance of the regularly-released Nixon tapes: Woodward said semi-seriously that would-be citizens should be required to listen to them.
• Woodward has a dry sense of humor. When talking about Nixon, he told us that the President had his "renegade brother's" phone tapped by the Secret Service. Then Woodward paused and said that having at least one renegade brother should be a requirement of the presidency.
• In preparation for his book, Plan of Attack, Woodward interviewed people from soldiers on up to the highest levels of military and intelligence about the decisions to go into Iraq. After that, he sent a 21-page memo to President Bush detailing what he'd learned. Condi Rice then contacted Woodward, confirming that the journalist would publish his book with or without an interview with Bush. He got an interview with the president the next day. Woodward had three and a half hours over two days to interview Bush, and anything was fair game. As far as anyone knows, it's the longest private interview on one topic with a sitting president. Woodward was able to ask 500 questions in that time.
• Woodward acknowledge that Bush gave concise, direct answers to his questions. The journalist said that if he'd done the same interview with President Clinton, he would have gotten to ask four questions.
• When Plan of Attack came out, Woodward felt that he'd reached the proper objectivity when both the Bush and Kerry campaigns recommended the book. Woodward's wife brought him back to earth by telling him that it just meant that nobody had read the book yet.
• In the Bush interview, Woodward was frustrated that Bush couldn't remember consulting with his father about entering Iraq, since the elder Bush had faced the same tyrant. That Bush didn't seem to do that appalled the journalist.
• While prodding Bush for a memory of such a father-son chat, Woodward got the line about Bush consulting a higher father. Woodward was very matter-of-fact about such spiritual issues being natural to Bush. He said that Bush talked with full credibility of the importance of prayer. When pressed about the "higher father" statement in a debate, Bush went from uneasy to natural talking about prayer, according to Woodward's viewpoint. When Kerry fielded a related question, his answer was decent, according to Woodward, but the journalist could tell that religion was not at "the spine of his being."
• Woodward believes courage is the most important trait in a president. They may need that to make a tough decision and go it alone. Something such as Iraq could be great or horrible in hindsight, Woodward said.
• When President Ford pardoned Nixon, Woodward thought that was the wrong thing to do, but now looking back he sees that it was "exactly the right thing" because the nation needed a new president instead of reliving Nixon's presidency in the judicial system. It gave Ford his own presidency.
• Woodward closes his book with him asking Bush how history will judge the Iraq war. Bush shrugs and says that we'll never know, because we'll be dead. That kind of shocked Woodward, but he also sees the truth in that.
• At some event, Hillary Clinton approached Woodward and told him she should be paying royalties for as many times as she quoted Plan of Attack. At first Woodward didn't understand, but it quickly dawned on him that she was talking about the "fatalistic" Bush approach at the book's close. Hillary is running for president, Woodward says, and if she's ever faced with such an interview question about history's judgment of her decision, Woodward says her response would be "I'll write it."

I went in to the evening expecting Woodward to be more partisan toward the liberal side. I still think he is, but I was impressed with how level-headed his approach was to covering the federal government. But even the Republican Kemp, when he spoke later in the evening, thanked Woodward for "restoring liberal democracy" through his reporting.

Kemp (as usual?) kind of rambled, but the point of his speech focused on the power of one person to make a difference. He's involved with multiple efforts to help restore hope in the Gulf Coast.
I was surprised to hear the free-market "witch doctor" economist condemn the poverty seen in the aftermath of Katrina.

He said the country can't survive with that level of poverty within its ranks, but he offered no real solution. Instead, he said we have to show the world that democracy does work by dealing with that poverty. Does that involve government handouts? or private enterprise? or the religious community? None of that was answered.

We're trying to build democracies around the world, but in Kemp's mind, the hurricanes have shown that democracy failed the poor of the Gulf Coast. (Or, as I wonder, was it the corruption?)

Kemp closed to a standing ovation.

"Without a vision, the Bible tells us, the people perish. We've got to make this work ... there's a lot of people watching this," he said.

Posted by JRC at October 6, 2005 01:53 PM | TrackBack