point which people should understand is, we're now thinking about whether she is going to run for president, whether she should be president. you say that hillary in a way is her own worst enemy because she's misrepresented herself, that she has so caught up in the ho politics, the secrecy of things that the better side of her, which is religious -- am i right? >> yeah. >> somebody who has a really large heart and cares about these issues has been masked by the way she presents herself. if you look at that book, you look at -- pardon? >> finish the point. i wanted to go back to a few watergate points. >> okay. but that's -- this is watergate. this is watergate. the question is, what is the

standard we're going to make our judgements on? is it good information? is it solid? is is it well reported? is it balanced? is it fair? or is it a bunch of sound bites in a bunch of tweets. >> the aftermath of nixon's experience, no same president will ever -- we will not have lbj tapes, tapes, we will not tapes. people are scared to keep diaries. >> we have different technology. >> we have reporting. >> will we be able to know either in real time or after the fact what we were dealing with? >> that's why we need more in-depth reporting. >> that's it. if you go -- i just was looking at something -- i hate to come back to something the two -- i was looking at one of bob's books. [ laughter ] or elizabeth's books, actually.

in fact, if you look at what elizabeth has reported through these administrations, which is a very different take than the conventional wisdom of this town, read her new yorker pieces, read her pieces in the new york review of books and you see that the conventional wisdom of this town is so far off the mark, so consumed by questions of who is in and who is out as opposed to what the real story is. that's where i'm trying to go here. look, what woodward and i -- let's take a look at one of the greatest pieces of reporting of all time, the boston globe did on the catholic church and pedophiles. >> our editor here was the editor of the globe at the time. >> that's right. this is one of the greatest pieces of reporting of all time.

and to penetrate the institution of the catholic church as well and the secrecy of it. it's doable. that's the point. it is -- we don't have enough editors, publishers -- there's plenty of great reporters out there. but the reporting is getting lost, one, in this can-- it's n our priority among the so-called serious news institutions. the cable networks, the network news. you are down to a couple newspaper institutions in america that really are concerned about reporting. we have some alternative sites and some alternative things. you don't need tapes. it's great if you have the

tapes. this is generous what we learned and accidental. you need reporters and you need to be asking the right questions and banging on the doors. that's what this whole conversation is about. >> i agree that we need reporters, especially like these two. but i want to get back to ruth's point. [ applause ] could it happen again? could we do it today? 40 years ago the system just barely worked. it took heroic efforts from people like this and people on the hill and people within the executive branch. and while it succeeded then to an extent, the tapes show that to another extent, nixon was able to get away with a lot. the worst abuses of power that nixon engaged in had to do with foreign policy, a field in which he was extremely well respected

and is respected to this day. he prolonged the vietnam war because he knew he could not win it. if saigon fell before election day 1972, it would take his second term down with it. so he made a decision. he was going to continue the war to aid his own re-election campaign. >> 25,000 american soldiers died in the interim. they say no one died atwat w watergate. >> it is one much his latest offenses. >> wait a minute. >> maybe i misphrased that. >> the foreign policies are debatable. there's evidence on the tapes, you are right. to say he is -- his crimes were in a significant -- his significant crimes were in foreign policy, i think -- look, this was an assault on the

constitution. this was go to the tapes again, nixon sits there and says, well, we will do this, we will break not just random citizens but the democrats, the big democratic contributors. he said, i want -- on that he got the secret service to bug the telephone of his renegade brother. could y you have argued to be president had you to have a renegade brother. that's no longer the case. >> you have a half brother out there somewhere. running around pretty good. >> okay. up. >> i can cut everybody off? i'm cutting you off to get in audience questions. we have microphones in the room. if you would raise your hand and

wait for the microphone. i'm going to try to go this way. i will go all the way to the woman in the pinkish sweater over there with your hand up. thank you. >> i think in all the president's men there's a line, follow the money or something like that. the campaign finance laws or lack of them. i was wondering if you could comment about then versus now. >> i think elizabeth drew is the best person in america to answer that. >> the best person is in front of me in the front row. would you like to answer? >> watergate brought to a head the issue of -- the idea that big globs of money floating around and people like howard hughes could write big checks or give a suitcase of hundred dollar bills and -- then they didn't match and it was all very strange. after that, a good campaign

finance bill was passed. i believe it was limited contributions. it limited spending. i have this to shock you with. the supreme court in the major decision on that did not say money equals speech. they did not. and you now have these supreme court decisions since then based on this mythical sense of what they said. and they didn't. that serves of the purposes of people who want to get the regulations off. so what buckley says, you can't put limits on what people want to spend on their campaigns. now what you have is a supreme court determined to -- we had mccain fine. mccain understood then. this was a different mccain. he understood it and those of us involved in campaign finance understood. rolling reform, of course, if you put these regulations,

somebody will figure a way around it. then you plug that and you move on. it's really very broken down now. there are limits on individual contributions but not really. citizens united and an associated decision and then -- last year? anyw anyway, theydeconstructed. they were redoing things including finance reform. they upheld and two years later they unupheld it. you have a political thing. i don't think there's a -- now money has gotten so big and so important, i don't think there will be a move in congress to reregulate this. they have gotten dependent on the system as it is.

>> good luck with that. let's try to get in another question. the gentleman in the blue right there. then i'm going towards the back of the room, because i don't want to disenfranchise you guys. >> mr. bernstein and mr. woodward, i was impressed tonight of the far reaching implications of this. i didn't think that it went back that far. is there something that nixon could have done that would have stopped this whole thing besides -- >> no. again, go back to what ken was talking to a moment ago. we wrote about him undermining the free electoral system through political espionage and sabotage. what ken is talking about before he was president he was doing the same thing. this is about a mindset. as elizabeth has pointed out.

one of the things that -- it is -- we come back to nixon's hatred. if you read the final dates about his last year in office that we wrote, you will find it's a very empathic book. it's about what nixon is suffering as this is all closing in on him. when i hear the tapes -- it's a little historic asteric. i'm always hearing nixon go back to hiss. those god-damn jews. what nixon knew that most of the rest of us didn't was that he was right about hiss. he was a spy. we know it now from the cryptography and other things.

but he felt maligned -- this is not to excuse anything. but it's just an interesting thing. comes up -- how many times does he talk about hiss? >> all the times. and he talks about in the context you are mentioning. he thought it confirmed what he thought about jews and ivy leaguers. hiss wasn't jewish. >> he was establishment. he was worse. >> nixon said, hiss might have been half a jew. he did, yes. >> let's try to go to the gentleman in the white shirt right in front of the cameras there. >> thank you. i want to question ken, who i think is under utilized tonight. do you think the fact that no president will ever, ever record things like that hurts our perspective on the past because we're unable to fully understand how certain things come into being as a president, how they make decisions and who really is

saying one thing on meet the press or cnn or fox news but in a closed room maybe saying something very different because that's what they really want to get accomplished but they can't say it publically? >> my motto is tape them all. i think you are absolutely right. certainly, listen to the nixon tapes has been a perspective expanding experience for me because for once in history we have this time machine that allows us to be in the past with the president as he is making these very fateful decisions for himself and the nation and the world. the lack of that troubles me. we would like to point out that all of us -- most of us are carrying more sophisticated recording devices than the one i just broke. no. than the one that nixon had in the white house. i used to say with confidence

after nixon nobody would tape. but the technology has gotten to the point where a certain amount of typing might take place without our full knowledge of it. there might one day be employment for somebody like me with regard to another administration. >> i'm going to make one very short point on your question which i think is a terrific question. the tapes i find more interesting are the lbj tapes. in the lbj tapes, you don't see a terrible,xx= corrupt, torture mind railing about people and failing to think about the good of the country. you actually see a president being a president, using the levers of power. that is the sort of thing i think we really will -- as a big a believer in reporting though not as good a reporter, but

that's the thing that we will really miss from not having that again. another question. yes, ma'am, right here in the black. >> lady in black instead of man in black. whenever i think of watergate i also think of snowden and his revelations. i was wondering if you would comment on -- i realize he's not a reporter. comment on what has happened in government, what do we expect and why are some of us not shocked that something like that has happened? >> one, you are not shocked because we have known it has been reported for years that an awful lot of this has been going on. >> it came out in 2006. >> there's been too much shock. and a lot of things taken out of context over this whole debate about is he a hero or is he a

traitor or all or else. it seems what we have -- terrorism has changed our world. it is a real threat, and to pretend otherwise is nonsense. it's the new method of warfare. it affects us all. so obviously, we're going to use as we have in the past these capabilities that we have because it's the most basic tool of learning -- of getting intelligence. signals intelligence, human intelligence. this is the signals part. we're going to do everything we can. what we have learned is that -- bill sapphire, many years ago in t"the new york times" was the first to say we are heading in

the direction where privacy is over, where this huge capacity of the government to eavesdrop is becoming more and more problematic. so we have a conflict of civil liberties. the necessary protection of the country and ourselves. >> but snowden is -- it informs people of -- in detail in a way that clearly we did not know. the massive nature of it and i think particularly our paper, the post, has been responsible and aggressive in presenting that information. there are no grand juries, to my knowledge. there is apparently no crime. this is a policy discussion which is going on which is going to go on for a long time. president obama himself has said it's good we're having this

policy discussion. so i think this is about informing the public in a very important way. it is not the criminality of watergate. >> one quick think, and that is what snowden has really done is shown how insufficient the oversight of this is in the courts that have been established to look at this kind of intelligence gathering and the congress of the united states. in that, he has performed a great service. >> elizabeth? >> you said something that pulls together the question that ruth keeps asking us and we keep not answering. [ laughter ] >> i'm a failure as a moderator. >> context is everything. yes, it has been driving me crazy, too. we knew about this gathering of

phone calls in 2006 revealed by usa today. why didn't it cause a big fuss then? george bush was president. had you mid-terms coming up. you had the wars going on in iraq. people were afraid. they didn't really want to -- carl rode was ordering up ads showing a three-part amputee, showing his picture next to hussein -- next to bin lauden or hussein. these people were playing tough. people didn't feel they wanted to go at it then. so snowden does it later. shock. horror. it had really been there. there was more detail. this is why we can't answer your question, ruth, because context is everything. when this was going on, a great mr mentor of mine, he said the next time this happens, it won't be people like this.

they will very cool -- they will be very ivy league looking, very respectable. they won't be these kinds of thugs that we were seeing. it will be different. i'm not as discouraged -- as marvellous as your books are, we can't wait for them. with hillary clinton, for example -- carl did a great book. but people sort of gone on to her in 2008. people pick it up. they smell things. it's happening now. you can't always get at everything. but there's a lot of stuff that gets out into the atmosphere. if it's defined in a responsible way, which a lot isn't, that's my problem with all this. it's there. so i'm not as -- we need their books, but we also can't wait for them. >> there's a really interesting

parallel between the usa today report and snowden and the tapes issue, which is -- because i was confused when the snowden report came out because i thought we did know this. but i think it's the actual a-- the -- it's like nixon and the tapes that propelled that story and additional information and -- information about scope that came out. let's move on to another question. sir, in the vest back there. thanks. >> i just wanted to know if anyone on the panel has any thoughts about whether the abuse -- there is abuse of a constitutional authority involved in every presidency. [ laughter ] >> no, no. there are matters of degree.

at some point -- we kept dealing with this with nixon. there are matters of degree that become substantive. it doesn't make up for the grand assault on the constitution or across the board manipulation of government agencies to suit the agenda of the president and how he wanted to get re-elected or those who he wanted to get the goods on. i want to destroy this or that. we're not going to have anything like that. so there are diegrees. these are not of the gravity of the depth of what went on. they're not close. that's what's so tragic, i think about this cheapening of the idea of impeachment. >> but what -- i think one of

the questions imbedded in this is what should we be worried about. >> everything. >> my answer is, secret government. that there is an incredible concentration of power in the presidency now. i think you could argue that president obama has more power than the most recent presidents, the ones that preceded him, at least four or five of them. that power, as carl pointed out -- look at this century. 9/11 has defined this century in many ways. the power -- the secret power that the intelligence community has is vast, overwhelming. we need to know what's going on. the people with really good intentions and good faith can do

things that make absolutely no sense. so it needs to be watched. the point that carl and i are making and elizabeth and ken is, what's the mechanism to find out? the mechanism we have is the media. if we are caught up in this -- talk to a reporter who covers the white house, any of them of a number of them i have talked to. they say they file a story and then they have to do two blogs and nine tweets. they never understand anything. they acknowledge that, because they are on to the next. you have got these message managers in the congress and in the white house, you call the white house and ask them about something and if they don't like the questions, they will say, why is that a story.

they can stop the press. what we need to do is reconfigure ourselves to make sure that we have -- that we are devoted to get to the bottom of things. if we don't get to the bottom of things, there are going to be things from nixon, which is certainly the most serious case, to things that people are uneasy and uncomfortable about, to say the least, then nsa programs that we have written about. >> there are so many people chomping at the bit here. sir, right here. >> seems one of the legacies of watergate was to create this idea of a scandal which all our scandals would be measured in the years to come with a gate following as a suffix. you talk about the need for great reporting, which the two

of you did. the idea of getting to the root of government abuse of power. and i look at the stories of today and wonder why there aren't people like the two of you reporting on the irs abuse of power, this lois lerner idea of losing e-mails today in an age of servers and backups. why isn't somebody at the post doing something like you did back then to see why we don't have that kind of coverup? if there isn't a coverup, let's find out why not. >> i don't buy that there isn't great reporting going on out there. early on, there was very good reporting on the irs. about the cincinnati office, etc., etc. i agree with you, we need more reporting on what's happening at the irs. i think also we need in this case a real congressional

investigation, a bipartisan investigation instead of a witch hunt. >> you can't get one now. >> but i think the reporting is happening. i have a feeling somewhat from our discussion that we're in a sealed chamber here. we are looking at the political system, we are looking at journalism divorced from the rest of the culture. neither is divorced from the rest of the culture. we have all kinds of problems in the culture about people telling the truth. we have all kinds of -- institutionally, we have all kinds of problems that people are not interested in the truth, that they have been, as i said earlier, wrapped up in this eye

delod -- ideological debate. the reporting that bob and everybody up here is talking about, it's not just about the political system that we need. i go to the example of what the boston globe did. people in the culture today, the way we look at the disintegration of the congress of the united states and the lack of truth telling by members of congress, you can imply that to many institutions in this country. all i'm trying to get at is that this is all part of a larger texture. we needed it in business. we need it looking at sports. we need to find out what's going on about all of these things. we also still have this problem about all of these things about

an audience that is less interested in the truth. >> elizabeth has something she wants to say. i really want to respond to your question, because i think having done a lot of reporting about -- even though i'm a columnist with opinions, about the irs matter, i do have an opinion about that also, which is it's a very serious question about misuse of the irs and suggestions that political groups were being targets because of their politics are very serious and legitimate questions. but my knowledge of therzl developments suggests nothing that is comparable in any way to the abuses that nixon has engaged in. i think there is a real flaw in our kind of understanding and the instinct as you say the gate-ization of every scandal. i don't think there is a

lerner-gate, that history -- i feel confident that history will not tell us that there was an obama administration drive to target political opponents that is in any way comparable to what nixon did. i may end up being proved wrong. >> i was going to make that point. >> that i was going to end up being proved wrong? thank you, bob. i should have just practiced law. >> you have a point of view. it's a reasonable one. i know you are a terrific at digging things out. if carl and i were 29 years old, we would be on our knees to the editor saying, let us go to cincinnati for two weeks. the editor would say to carl, just don't rent a car and leave it in a parking lot. which he did. >> i'm all for two weeks. i'm not