december of this year, you will be 80. guest: christmas eve, yeah. host: why are you still writing a couple of times a week for "the washington post"? guest: i love doing it. i am doing it for an institution i love and for people i love working with. i think when i first started out, i belonged to a generation went into reporting to try to change something. and i have been lucky enough all of these years to be freed most of the time to write what i want to write and to try to make things better. host: what are your arrangements, what is your title? guest: i am a reporter. i am also -- a consultant to the corporation. because it is part of a tradition -- ridiculous background.

i was once half-owned by cbs or nbc and work on television. host: what kind of consulting do you do? guest: i talk to the editor the other day about how the paper is going and what maybe we can do better. i talked to the publisher and occasion to talk to don graham about things i think we might be able to do better. host: so as a columnist, do you call yourself a columnist? because you do give your opinion sometimes. guest: well, i have been a reporter so long -- yeah. i have written a column for the last three years. it is at different category. i still occasionally tried to write news stories, but everybody is worried i give my opinion too much.

the column gives me a kind of freedom that i haven't had before and it lets you build on the past. host: how many different newspapers have you worked for? guest: i started as a copy boy on "the new york times". i was in a training program after i get out of the army for "the wall street journal". i quote for free. i was a washington correspondent for three small n.c. papers. i worked for the "washington star." ben hired me in 1966 for "the post." then for four years or so, i try to start a newspaper, which failed, but it was a great experience. then i was the executive editor of the new republic for several years. then marty came along and i

came back to the post. host: i have a stack of your columns from the last three- four months. before i read some of this, what you consider your beat? guest: i think it's what i call national security, but it is national security is not just the pentagon and the intelligence agencies, cia, but the hill and the public at large. it is spread all over the place. i'm focused on national security. host: when did you start law school? guest: i start of law school in 1992 -- i started law school. no i started in 1995. host: why?

guest: ben bradley and kay graham both retired at 70 at "the post." both of my parents lived to 95. my father ran a company, and he retired at 62 and lived for 33 more years. and so i figured i had after 70 a lot of years left. i had cover the law a lot. i liked the law. i have a lot of friends who are lawyers. i have an oldest son. so i thought i would get a law degree in practice law. -- and practice law. host: did you? guest: i graduated in 2001. i flunked the bar. which came right after kay graham's funeral. we were ushers. that was my excuse. the war had kind of started.

and don graham said i could stay as long as i wanted. host: what did it feel like getting a law degree and flunking the borrower? that happens to a lot of people. -- flunking the bar? guest: it was strange. i had not taken almost 10 courses on the bar review, the d.c. review. i went to bar review in the morning and went back to work in the afternoon. all of the kids were busy studying. i don't know. i was disappointed. i had a couple of offers from law firms. but i think they wanted me to do to p.r. i love the law. i have a bunch of experiences that did not turn out to be what they were supposed to be, but you learn from all that.

it took me six years going part-time and still working, but it was a great experience. host: undergraduate at yale at 54? 1954. in 2001, a aw degree from georgetown. june 27. "the state department is planning to spend $115 million it to upgrade the u.s. embassy compound in baghdad. already its biggest and most expensive in the world, according to pre solicitation notices published this month. you said, remember it has spent 3.5 years since american diplomats moved into the $700 facility and only four months after the state department talked about trying to cut back the u.s. presence there." why did that get your attention?

guest: one of the things i focused on because we are in financial trouble is the way we have spread money around, not so much in foreign aid, although aid in iraq and afghanistan is much too an extensive, but building things that we know we are not going to need five or 10 years down the road. there is a big story today in the paper of what we have done in afghanistan. hundreds of millions of dollars of construction that these people cannot possibly sustain it. it is a lesson that was hammered home during the iraq period and yet we keep doing it. host: why? guest: we do it because we think we are giving something to the people, but we do not understand. you're trying to make them like us and do things that we would want done.

as i have thought back over time, i keep going back -- i worked for fullbright twice. i went back in 1969-1970, investigated the war in vietnam. the lessons he taught me stick with me now. one of the things he told me and the first years was if he did not understand the domestic problems of a country you are dealing with, you cannot have a good foreign policy. it is all foreign policy -- all foreign policy is domestic, including ours. so we do things that people here think ought to be done and we do not think enough about what the people we are dealing with want done. what their leaders are facing. and it's not done evilly. it is done because we do not think enough. host: "the united states has spent united $100 million on all police college facility, having build living quarters, a

dining facility, an office building, a new gymnasium... at year's end, the facility will be turned over to the iraqis because state did not get land rights use for more than one year." guest: the state department people were upset about that. literally what was said in the document i talked about -- there is an argument about whether they had land rights. the thing that got me was we build a facility that our police would want. it is nothing like facility the afghan police are used to, nor that they. would they host: how do you spend $100 million on a police facility?

guest: they have security around the whole thing. you got to build a guard post. i am amazed at the amount of money we spend a broad and how little we spend here. it has become an issue politically in this country more and more as we have to cut back. but this is money that is poured into the pentagon to do things that you could not do in any domestic program, because people look harder at it. the defense budget is so big. my favorite is, we spent $1.5 million per year on military bands. we just build a $4 million facility for the army materiel command band that had to move from belvoir down to huntsville, alabama.

host: ft. belvoir? guest: they built a facility for the band, which is about 40 people. it has separate rooms for everybody. if you spent $4 million on an elementary school that is too much. host: this is a column from july 2. "why doesn't the iraq government seem to like us? why won't the prime minister give a better treatment to the government officials whose military freed the country from saddam hussein and whose employees are trying to make this country better? why are we giving more than $1 billion next year mostly to the military, which, while its oil income has soared putting the baghdad regime in surplus?"

guest: i mean, this is part of my -- i get worried. i sound more and more conservative or isolationist. this is where the understanding that having created in iraq, we are not popular. -- created a democracy in iraq, we are not popular. maliki to hold on to his support cannot be too pro- american. even though we did all that for them. it is this something we have to understand, but we then keep putting money in. less money now. but it's to try to make people understand an effect that money does not by you support. you've got to understand the politics of that country.

and in a lot of countries in the middle east, we were not like before. we are not like now. although, we have helped them. and part of it has nothing to do with our help. as to do with their politics and the underlying a lot of the middle east is the arab-israeli problem. and our siding with the israelis. host: is anybody watching this expenditure? guest: a lot of, when it comes to defense, very few people. there is an argument about, they have actually cut $487 billion over 10 years but that is a reduction for one year. nobody has analyzed the cost of this army we have created which is all volunteer. and it has cost an enormous

amount of money. host: july 2, column. u.s.a.i.d. guest: agency for international development. host: plans to spend $263 million next year to support anti-corruption programs. the bulk of fiscal 2013 money, $911 million, is in a new foreign military financing fund run by the state department to continue pentagon programs that developed iraqi army professionalism and logistics capabilities. the state has $850 million for fmf in fiscal 2012 money." what was that about? output to some -- building up from the ground up the iraqi army. they are now are sort of military allies and a lot of people said, they are buying american equipment, so this is a

program that helps american industry, a military-industrial complex, sell weapons. i have mixed feelings about building up armies in the middle east that you have no control over. and you have no control and eventually over those weapons. and what happens to them. the anti-corruption thing is very funny. we have a series of prosecution's going on in this country for our military who made deals, kickbacks on some of these programs. and then we talk about other countries being corrupt. but we call them corrupt, the iraqis saw what our people were doing. we did not set a great example.

host: what was your position on going into iraq? guest: i guess i wrote that i thought it was -- i was a reporter in those days. and this so-called famous piece was two days before the war started, writing a piece that raised questions about whether there was wmd's in iraq. because people, both in the pentagon and the agency has told me they weren't sure. but the intelligence was cherry pick. the bush administration wanted to go in. and if that was an excuse, they would have found another one. host: if you were inside the oval office in those very private conversations, what do think there reason was? guest: i think, like all white

houses, there is no one reason. in this case, there were several different reasons. you had a president who i think felt he needed to do something dramatic. people forget where we were politically. at that point, president bush had previously made a big thing about catching osama bin laden. that hand't been done -- hadn't been done. and this became an alternative and they had very subtlely been selling the idea that somehow there was a connection between saddam hussein and 9/11. which still was then and still is a big thing in this country. host: when you hear conspiracy theorists say it was oil. any truth to that? guest: no.

some people may have thought that. there were groups -- paul wolfowitz, who is deputy at the pentagon. who going back to the original gulf war had wanted to go and knocked saddam hussein off even then. i've written once or twice about a presentation he made to the house budget committee in february before the march invasion, in which he said, unlike afghanistan, if you go into iraq, you would get all of these benefits. first of all, they had oil. they could pay for anything that happened. secondly, they are the most educated people in the middle east. it would become democratic. of course, he was talking about

the sunni minority, not the shia majority. he said it would become a democracy, and democracies do not attack each other. therefore, they would not attack israel. it would change its approach to israel. host: go back to this embassy in iraq. are they committed to spending $115 million more? guest: their argument -- i talked to the deputy secretary. host: of state? guest: and what's happened is, partially because of the security situation, they had to bring more people who would be out in the country, in consulates and elsewhere, into baghdad. and therefore, they are crowing to be more people there than the originally expected.

and so they had to expand. host: so $815 on the embassy in iraq, the large as we have built anywhere in the world. and no one questioned this? guest: i think people along the way questioned it. but there was so much else going on. it's a big -- it's become such a big government. it will eventually come around to the media not doing what it ought to do. and that is keep track of all of these things. we spend a lot of time and space covering press conferences and what people say, and we spend not enough time in my view, on what is going on. host: how do you do it? guest: reading documents.

a huge amount of public material. it's put every day out in the public record. people do not read it. the key to the column, whether it is could not, is the documents. i try to base every column on something i read, a transcript, a report, a hearing, whatever. host: do you try to be different than anybody else? guest: i started out with an extreme north carolina paper, so i had to compete with the wire services. so you are always looking for things other people are not doing. so i have never, lucky enough. i've never been a beat reporter. i have always been able to go on my own. host: you write in "the washington post," most people read it here, will everybody take your phone call?

all the people in government? guest: yeah. the other part of doing what i've been doing for as long as i have been doing. it is another part of the new culture. when i started off, old people talk, when i started off, there were a bunch of young reporters, we used to meet once a month and have dinner with somebody in government. and meet them outside the arena, so that you got to know people who were in government in a three-dimensional sense, rather than just the person who stands at the podium or at a press conference. and then, if you do it as long as i did it, you -- as an example, i met george tenet

when he was a legislator for the a senator from pennsylvania. i met less aspin when he went to work for medicare. -- mcnamara in the kennedy administrators. host: he went on to the secretary of defense. guest: geoorge became cia director. i met leon panetta when he was a congressman. i met donald rumsfeld at oeo. he became defense secretary. host: office of economic opportunity. guest: we stay in touch. unlike lawyers and doctors and other professionals, what we do is right out there. they see what you've done. some people i got to know very well. i got in terrible trouble. after the trouble was over --

host: name someone. guest: the deputy director of operations at the cia. i wrote the story that got him indicted and he was eventually convicted. had a re-trial. everybody was talking to him, and he never answered a phone call. and when the rest of the press went away, i introduced myself. and he said, six months after this is over, give me a call. and so he was convicted, and he was pardoned in december. june i called him up and we had breakfast at the shoreham and became good friends. host: what did he do wrong? he was pardoned. guest: he was pardoned by george bush along with everybody else in iran-contra.

he had not told what he knew about the payments to get the hostages out of iran. he knew it. he was at a hearing. they asked him about it and he did not say it. so he was convicted for withholding information from congress. host: here is a column, june 20. "after 11 years, a few minutes of public discussion of a tax to pay for the fighting, but that would be for the next war." how was it -- did we fight the war in iraq and afghanistan without paying for it? guest: this is, to me, one of the worst things that happened associated with the bush war in iraq, and that is not only the family to pay for a record first war in the american history where there was -- there were tax cuts. they instituted a tax cuts.

in that same period, they withdrew the last remaining excise tax that would help pay for the korean war. telephone tax. you know, there were not going to put a tax to pay for the war because congress would not have passed it. host: where were the democrats? guest: the democrats were as afraid as everybody else was. because of the aura that have been created about the threat from saddam hussein. the only people that raised the issue was the congressional black caucus, about going to war. the democrats were worried, the first gulf war, they opposed it and it turned out to be the

right thing to do. host: the iraq war started in 2003, larry lindsey said it will not cost $60 billion. it will cost $200 billion here the other was eric shinseki who said it would take more than 150,000 troops. they both lost their jobs. guest: this was a huge -- i mean, the miss judgment on all of that by the bush of ministration. -- administration. as i said, going back to wolfowitz before the house budget committee. they totally misjudged what they're getting into because they did not understand iraq. they did not understand that saddam hussein represented a minority that had been running a country, beating down the shia majority and that this was going to open up a huge can of worms.

and we have been wrong. we push elections on all of these countries. in almost every case, the people we want to win the elections do not win. because we do not understand enough about what we're getting into. host: you said in that column on june 20, "how quickly would congress have voted in october, 2002, on the eve of elections to give the president authority to force -- to use force if the resolution had contained a provision to raise taxes?" guest: they wouldn've have voted for it. host: june 6. another column. "let's start with cost overruns. does any other branch of government get away with having their programs balloon the way the pentagon weapons systems do?" what triggered you to write that?

guest: i had a long talk with a retired admiral who, i had read somewhere that there was a program as part of developing new weapons system. you had to make estimates on what the cost would be. and he had told me that there was obviously a game that everybody underpriced things. and then you have a problem with contractors who underprice to win the bid. then you have the problem that the pentagon itself for years would make changes in weapons systems, which take years to build. and every time you make a change, the cost goes up. host: let's go back over that again. how can a contractor underprice something to win a bid and get paid for the cost overrun? is it not built in?

guest: they built it. they have tried over the years. they have a new one now. ash carter is the deputy defense secretary, but when he was running procurements, they tried to remedy all of these programs. but it's hard to put your finger on who's major at fault, because particularly in the new weapons, which have these extraordinary electronic elements within them, that business is changing so fast that if you have a system that takes five years to build, maybe three years into it, there is a whole new technology you want to integrate into it to make it better. everybody wants to make the perfect weapon. and so that -- if you have ever built a house, you decide you want a bathroom on the second- floor and you did not plan for it, it costs -- the whole thing

goes way. host: what is your personal philosophy about war? guest: i think it is a bad idea. host: always? guest: not always. again, i grew up with senator fullbright whose view is war is failed diplomacy. and diplomacy is reaching some consensus in which neither priority claims victory. and it is harder and harder to do in societies where there is a form of democracy where your opponent can demagogue you. i was involved in a discussion the other day about iran. and an iranian said, had offered things and got no response. i said between now and the

election, president obama could not make any agreement short of your government leaving and democracy taking over. anything short of that would be used as a failure by the republicans. democracy has got some weaknesses in an age of instant communication. host: let me ask you about something that i know you have thought about this. i have seen it for all the years i have been here. you speak positively about senator fullbright. and for those who do not even know the name, i know you wrote recently about his fullbright international program. who was he? guest: a senator fullbright was from arkansas.

he was a lawyer, a roads scholar, went into politics when he was very young -- a rhode scholar. the fullbright program, which pays for a lot of exchange -- scholarship and exchange programs are around the world came out of an idea of reducing the excess money that came out of the second world war owed to us by other countries to pay for this scholarship program. but he was in the house. then the senate. and worked his way up and became chairman of the senate foreign relations committee at a time when the committee was much smaller than it is now, and the staff was 16 people. and he studied foreign policy, and he went out of his way to talk to leaders that we disagreed with.

in the cold war, he regularly talked to the russians, the chinese when nobody else would. and he said if you have to understand the other side's point of view. and he had a committee that was understanding and bipartisan. i mean, both subcommittees' i worked with -- one with a republican and the other with senator akin, a republican -- agreed with everything. the first investigation, it was right after the dictator of the dominican republic got assassinated. and i went down there.

this was investigating four and lobbying -- foreign lobbying. i came back with a whole bunch of material that showed he was paying money off to all sorts of people in this country and giving campaign contributions to both democrats and republicans. and we made it all public. the one thing we did not make public when i found it was material that showed that igor cassini, jackie kennedy's dress designer, had been hired to get -- the brother of jackie kennedy's dress designer, had been secretly hired to get the the sugar quarterback for the dominican republic. -- the sugar quota back for the dominican republic. i give it to the senator, the chairman, and we reached agreement that we would give robert kennedy, the attorney

general, six months to investigate and do what you had to do or we would hold a hearing. now, you would never get away with that now. one of the great days i ever had was fullbright called me and said, " bobby kennedy said he will be there at 3:00 the next day. he wanted to see him alone. i went to the office and i knew bobby and he walked in without saying anything and at 3:30, fullbright opened the door, bobby had left and said, "we talked about the poverty program for 25 minutes and he looked up at the clock and said, igor cassini is being indicted right now."

got up and left. i was 29. he -- you remember those things. you cannot do that today. host: what i wanted to ask you about, though, tell me where i'm wrong, but the media in this town really like fullbright because of his anti- vietnam stands. why then did they give him a pass, having signed the seven manifesto? -- the southern manifesto? guest: they actually did not. i used to have to go up to new york and defend myself all over the place. he was then considered anti- israel. which was partly my fault, because part of the investigation was a jewish agency for israel which was doing all sorts of things they're not supposed to do. it was a great lesson for me about, you know, that you cannot have everything. i forget who the congressman was who did not sign the manifesto lost the next

election. host: we ought to stop and tell those who have never heard of the manifesto, 19 democratic senators signed it. what was it? guest: it was against the civil-rights bill and that the government ought to stay out of amending all of the terrible jim crow laws and education differentiation in the south. host: they were against brown versus the board of education decision. they did not want schools integrated. i remember reading something whereas said, we all get along in the south. we do not need to bring them together. guest: and it -- the senator

fullbright made all long speech about what we have to do is increase education for african americans. there were not equal. there were separate. but they ought to be equal. that was his argument. if you did not sign the manifesto, you would lose your seat. so which is more important? one senator who was doing that, and he felt it was more important for him to stay in the senate. host: but where is the courage there? he is courageous thing against vietnam, but he is not courageous to bring his people together in arkansas. guest: the two races he ran. i watched one of them. i agree to come back after he was reelected. he was considered weak on civil rights.

he was attacked by -- a total racist. he was not considered strong. you look around today, and take a look at the moderate republicans. and they're all gone. so, i mean, democracy has its issues. you cannot be perfect. he understood it. there are a bunch of things that i disagreed with. -- he did that i disagreed with. you make decisions in life. is not perfect. i thought what he did in foreign policy was good enough for me. and important to happen there. host: back to a july 4 column. "on the way to brac savings, a legion of cost overruns. and the latest, in the 2005 brac program --

guest: it is the program congress passed to reach agreement on closing military bases. a very complicated thing in which the defense department picks out areas they want to close. they put together a commission to make, to see and comment on the recommendations. in congress has to vote on them. host: and they have to vote for the whole thing. let me read this. "in its latest review of the 2005 brac program, the largest and most complex, the gao found that the estimated cost of $21 billion to implement the program had grown to $35 billion by september 30, 2011." that's in six years. what they told us it was going

to cost to shut those bases down. -- it almost had doubled. why? guest: the example i picked was that the replacements. once congress passed it and everybody forgot about. and so two things happened. one, as time passed, they underestimated the cost of the replacement just by the cost of living. but then, as i showed in one case, moving a school for people at west point, grew by 400%, because when they decided to move the people at west point wanted a much grander facility than the facility the left. and nobody paid attention. host: have you ever seen a time when one of these comes in way under budget. we see over budget almost all the time.

guest: i think there are things that, under budget but that is our dealing with it. we are looking for the controversy. we are looking for the one that did not work. and so we promote it -- that. the best example, which i always throw in, is the cia which gets beaten up for all of its failures that it publicized and you never hear about things that work. host: i have seen you criticized for being the cia's inside reporter at "the post." fair criticism? guest: probably. once you -- again, in this long period of time, i've met a lot of those people. it is the most extraordinary life. they have given up, particularly the people who are in operation, they have given up normal life for what they are doing for the country.

and the cia, works with the president, whoever the president is. and they get whipsawed when they do something as they did in central america for ronald reagan. and the democrats come in and they take it out on the agency. so you have that side of it. and to know the people. i know some of the people caught up in iran-contra, and all of these issues. they were doing what they're told to do. i know people who were involved in the interrogation. and the number of times they went to the bush administration to make sure they were doing something that was supposed to be legal. and they were continually reassured.

and then, of course, when it was over, they all got investigated. host: you said you knew george tenet. have you talked to george tenet since he left the cia about why he told the president their weapons of mass destruction? guest: he was very upset about some of the pieces i wrote, raising questions. his agency was split. and he went with the people who sort of took the dark side of it. and -- host: did he say why? how is he today? guest: well, i think george, if he had his druthers, would like to be in public life. instead, he is in private life, doing very well, working for allen and company. but i think he would have much

rather have been in . public in -- been in public life. host: so, let's pretend that you are at your desk and you get two phone calls. given what you have told this is your own feelings about issues and war, and one of them is from somebody that is anti- afghanistan. they want to leak your information. the other is pro. and they want to lake information. -- leak information. which side do you take? guest: not to be difficult. people do not call me up and tell me things. i read something and i call people up. i talk a lot about leak. -- leaks. the column tomorrow is about leaks. leaks are part of government. i teach a course called oversight of government and the

media. not too much oversight of government by the media. -- the course is called oversight of government by the media. what i teach them now more and more is that we are now in an era of government p.r. people leak things that is going to help their cause. the journalists who receives the classified document has to make a bunch of decisions. one of them is, is it true? they always involve the government, so you have to go to the government. most people do not understand we do that when somebody leaks. you go to the government so they get a chance to say something. then you have to decide whether it is newsworthy or not.

every secret is not newsworthy. and then you have got to put it in some kind of context. in the process of doing all that, you get a sense of why somebody's giving it to you. they are not doing it because you are the greatest questioner in the world, or you are wonderful person. they want to get even with somebody. they want to give the other side of the story. they want something. but you really have to decide the first three things before you decide whether to print it or not. all: battling ied's is about subcontracting. the army awarded a contract for our counterinsurgency contract targeting intelligence and operations support in afghanistan and iraq. over three years, that contract could be worth more than $176 million. the contractor would not replace

military personnel by integrating contract employees based on their skill sets -- you go through a lot of stuff in this column. "bet your head is spinning now. there are so many deals and dollars flying about." that is a july 9 column in case folks want to look it up on "the washington post." guest: the idea of contracting out the war in iraq and afghanistan was a step taken because the bush administration wanted to underplay what was going on. you mentioned a general shinseki. he needed more people. this is what was going on. this was one way to get around

it. what he created was an industry of people who used to do something in service or working at the pentagon, leave that job, go to a contractor and end up in exactly the same post with higher pay. with no guarantee of whatever their future is. and so that's now a big industry there always used to be a concern about military people going into military contractors and helping. we now have a lot of companies started by military people. and doing the same thing they did while they were in service. host: by the way, how much did you have to do with the valerie plame story? guest: [scoffs] a whole other -- lucky i went to law school. i wrote a story, raising questions about weapons of mass destruction.

and joe wilson with the clinton administration became critical of the bush policy. nick krisof wrote a column saying an american ambassador had checked out whether saddam hussein is trying to buy uranium from niger, found out it was untrue, had been part of the bush argument about saddam hussein. it took me a month or so to find out who the ambassador was and to tell his story. i agreed to tell it as a news story. and i did. and i was following up on that

story and was raising questions to the white house about something going on associated with it, and in the midst of a conversation with ari fleischer, george bush's press secretary, "why do you keep writing about joe wilson's trip? it was set up by his wife." who works for the agency?" i did not know that she worked for the agency. in doing a story, i had talked to scooter libby about cheney's role in all this, and he had never mentioned anything about valerie plame. and i put it in the back of my mind. at some point, bob novak wrote a column.

it became a big issue. and a point after that, the democrats and joe wilson himself raised the question about whether disclosure of her name had violated the law, which talked about disclosing the name of agents that were undercover publicly. and i looked up the law. and i decided it did not. but then in the fall, congress started to investigate her. and it went to the cia and the cia sent it to justice. at that point, i co-wrote a story in which i said, "the

washington post" reporter had been contacted but didn't think it broke the law. so when the special counsel started investigating the leaks, he had the wrong reporter originally but then he came to me. luckily my son is probably one of the best lawyers in town and i used him. and we decided it was not a first amendment issue. this was a criminal case. through a group of met nations with the lawyer and my son, -- machinations, i said i would only disclose the name of my source if he came forward. at a certain point, fleischer

went to the prosecutor and admitted he had talked to me. and at that point, i laid it all out to the prosecutor. lawyer'sleischer's approval to talk to the prosecutor. then i was subpoenaed at trial. again fletchers' lawyers agreed i could testify. the only issue was i testified that he had told me about valerie plame. and he had said he hadn't. he said he learned that he had told other people. that is where it stands. host: we are out of time. it is a lot more we could talk about. one last question. do you get -- do you have a book about your life? guest: i have a wonderful editor that i promised years ago

i would write a book. i went on a trip and wrote an outline and got 1/3 of the way through. she wants me to finish it. and maybe i will. it is hard to find -- i write all the time. you need extra time to do things like that. host: walter pincus, since 1975 with "the washington post," writing columns and stories. a law degree from georgetown. undergraduate degree from yale. thank you very much. guest: thank you. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> for a dvd copy of this program, call 1-877-662-7726. for a transcript or to give us your comments about this

program, visit us at q&a.org. "q&a" programs are available as podcasts. >> in seven days, what to gavel- to-gavel coverage of the republican and democratic and then -- conventions, live here on c-span, your front row seat to the conventions. next, live with their calls and comments on "washington journal." then at 10:35 a.m. eastern, a new hampshire town hall meeting with republican presidential candidate mitt romney and vice presidential candidate representative paul ryan. then, live coverage of the republican national committee platform meetings in tampa begin at 2:15 p.m. eastern. >> now, i know that there are those who criticize made for

seeing complexities -- and i do. because some issues just aren't all that simple. saying there are weapons of mass destruction in iraq doesn't make it so. saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn't make it so. ad proclaiming mission accomplished certainly doesn't make it so. >> three days after september 11, i stood where americans died, and the ruins of the twin towers. workers in hard hats were shouting to me, what ever it takes. a fellow grant made by the arm and said, do not let me down -- grabbed me by the arm and said, but not let me down. i woke up every morning thinking about how to protect the country. i will not relent defended america, what ever it takes. >> every minute from every major party convention since

1984 and the countdown continues with a week to go until a live gavel-to-babble coverage of the conventions. live on c-span, c-span to video and online c-span.org. starting next monday with the gop convention with new jersey governor chris christie with the keynote address, also 2008 nominee senator john mccain and former governor of florida jeb bush. democratic imagines speakers include san antonio mayor delivering the keynote address, plus the first lady michelle obama and former president bill clinton. >> this morning, "weekly standard" writer and editor william kristol looks at the 2012 political race and the political climate. then andrew guice kimble talks about her soon-to-be published copies in "for affairs" are giving america is under-taxed. thenad