>> charlie: welcome to our program. tonight we begin with politics. mitch dan yells is out of the race. we'll talk about what the republican field looks like with al hunt of bloomberg, tom defrank of the daily news and mark halperin of "time" magazine. >> i think we know a fair amount about the political limits of mitt romney and tim pawlenty. they've been out there. we've seen it. i think huntsman based on what i saw this weekend and based on his record i think has the potential to be the one who the white house would be and should be the most worried about. the potential to be that. >> charlie: we continue with martin smith and his investigation into wiki-leaks which is part of a front line documentary on pbs tomorrow night. >> what wiki-leaks has brought to the table is this ability using the internet to be a conduit for what our industrial scale leaks that we haven't seen before.

leaking has always been with us. now the sheer quantity of this changes it qualitatively. >> charlie: we conclude with "too big to fail," first a book and now an hbo film. we talk to sorkin and two of the stars, billy crudup and james woods. >> the hardest part about compressing the story is that it is a human drama in the book of so many different characters with so much build-up and history about each character so that by the time you actually get to the action, you know so much about them in advance that it explains a lot of the things later. because we had to compress not only time but character, it really was left to the actors to develop that character and to develop it quickly in the short amount of time that they had on screen. >> charlie: the race for the presidency, wiki-leaks and "too big to fail" when we continue.

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captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> charlie: we begin this evening with a look at the 2012 predential race. on sunday former indiana governor mitch daniels announced he would not run in a statement overnight he said that family concerns made the differen. hiexit sharpens and focuses the contest betwn three former governors: mitt romney of massachusetts, tim pawlenty of minnesota and possibly john huntsman of utah. pawlenty formally declared his candidacy in the battle ground state of iowa. >> it's time for a new approach and it's time for america's president and anyone who wants to be president to look you in the eye and tell you the truth. >> charlie: former u.s. ambassador to china john huntsman has not made a

decision yet. he toured another key state new hampshire this past week. >> i have lived overseas four times before and don't worry, i have a u.s. birth certificate. but every time i've lived in a foreign place, i've learned something new about america. on returning this time, i'm finding how pessimistic many americans are about this country's ability to adapt to the future. they point to global economic trends, the lack of jobs, the incomprehensible debt, the bitterness in washington, the wars that seem to never end, the environmental and natural disasters. >> charlie: though mitt romney has not formally entered the race he's been busy raising months. for months house speaker newt gingrich has thrown his hat into the ring. others urging governor chris christie of new jersey, congressman paul ryan of

wisconsin and former governor jeb bush to run. none have indicated they will and seem to say they will not. michelle backman and former vice presidential candidate sarah palin have yet to make up their minds. we talk about all of this this evening with al hunt of bloomberg news and mark halperin of "time" magazine and tom defrank of the daily news. tell me the significance of mitch daniels deciding not to run and why. >> i'm a big mitch dan yells fan. i think mitch daniels would have been a good president. i don't think he would have been as formidable a candidate as some people who wanted him to run thought he would be. i found it difficult to see how mitch could have gotten the mike nomination in contrast to mike huckabee who i could have made a case for. i don't think it really changes the race that much. i think th possible entry of john huntsman, the probable entry i think of john huntsman and of michelle backman actually shapes the race more.

>> charlie: we will have no more entrants unless something changes? >> i don't know that but my impression is that jeb bush, paul ryan and chris christie are not going to run. that's the way i would bet today certainly. >> charlie: and that's what party types are saying. is it not? they think that what you see now is what the race will be. >> yeah because to run for president is hard. that's the one thing that i think a lot of these people have realized when they get up close to the starting line. to be dragged into it late when you haven't thought about it as much, jeb bush is a little bit different. he understands the terrain better than most. but to do, you're putting yourself through a lot. mitch daniels, mark and i were talking beforehand, mitch daniels' personal situation which i think actually reflects quite well on him. his wife left him and married someone else and then came back to him and the four daughters.

that's been given curse sorry attention in the state of indiana. that would have been a story for days and it would not have been a particularly pleasant experience so it's a tough thing to do. you've hit memorial day of the year before and you're not in, it's pretty tough to do. very few window wookees left. >> charlie: a pretty good candidate or not? he was a guy that went from wall street to running for president. there was this about, did his wife... do you assume that's the story that mitch daniels says the family doesn't want me to run. therefore i'm not running. he was leaning that way but he decided in the end when the family voted no to say no. >> i don't know what happened in the final days of conversation. i do know every time i spoke to governor daniels in the last two months, which was three times. >> charlie: you interviewed him recently. >> i did. i saw him at the grid iron dinner. every time he would bring up the family considerations. it was obviously something that was painful and also quite clear i'm not sure how

his wife came down although i suspect she had reservations but his four dauers were not thrilled. >> charlie: anything you want to say about the mitch daniels' decision? >> i agree with al that he didn't have as formidable a candidacy potentially as some of his backers thought. i do think it changes the race. i think maybe a bit more than al does. dominant in this process even in a tea party era is the people who raise money and the governors and the members who raise congress. daniels would have been a strong consensus candidate. where they go in the wake of his departure is as big a dynamic as there is in this race. >> charlie: the argument by some today is many of them will go to pawlenty because he's a governor, policy is.... >> i don't want to pre-pre-judge that. i think all three, pawlenty, daniels and romney and huntsman all have potential. i think a lot of them had a chance to be tim pawlenty

before. most of them don't want romney to be the nominee. they had a chance to be for tim pawlenty. >> charlie: coming right to you in a second, tom. >> most of them passeded. i'm not sure now that he's going to be able to go to a large number. they say they can. i'm not sure he'll be able to go to a large number of those daniels' people and scoop them up. i think huntsman has the biggest potential. >> charlie: what's the impact of mitch daniels and how it shapes the field for the future? >> well, i think it narrows the field to three real contenders, all of woman we've been talking about here. and then everybody else. i think it also forces the bundlers of the bush family, thbush dynasty to 41 and 43 bundlers to make up their minds. i was talking with one of the more prominent fund-raisers for the 43 crowd last week who said we want to go with mitch but if mitch decides not to run, and i don't think he's going to run, i'm going for romney. maybe a little relucntly but

i'll g with romney. i know a lot of my colleagues will do that as well. we've got time see how that shakesut. but i think we really have three candidates here: huntsman, pawlenty and romney. >> charlie: isn't this good for huntsman? all of a sudden he's come back as ambassador from china. all of a sudden saying he's one of the three in competition. >> it's a pretty incredible thing. he may not live up to his potential. most of the coverage in thinking that the press plays a big role in raising nak i.d.and creating expectations and raising money. most of the stories talk about a three-person race. the fact that this is a guy just off the plane from china a couple weeks ago, hasn't done much, first trip to new hampshire. first retail politics trip this past week. he's in there and i think has a pretty good chance to be the nominee if he lives up to his potential. >> charlie: here's what you said on the morning show this very morning. as impressive as any couple i've seen-- and they're not perfect-- i think he'll grow

as a candidate. given that he's never done this, given he's been immersed in u.s.-china relations over the past two years i was pretty blown away by our effective he was. >> new hampshire and iowa play a role. candidates have the deal with all sorts of situations not just showing themselvess to the voters of that state. showing themselvess to the press and then eventually to the wider country. they had never done this before in that context. out of their home state, they were both really strong retail candidates. he went to a v.f.w.hall and played some pool there. he walked in and he said to the... they saw some guys playing pool. he said rack 'em up. he went to a harley shop and a gun store. in every one of those settings he was very strong. then he gives a speech at a town hall wolfboro and uses the word vis tudz twice in one speech. he is a great retail candidate >> charlie: and his wife?

>> he was clearly a successful governor by most measures and he left with a very high approval rating. >> charlie: i want to come back to huntsman but romney. what's the feeling in th party about romney? >> charlie, let me try that. i think the one thing that unifies the republican party, although it's all over the map at the moment, is disdain for president obama. the unifying item there is the health care plan. obama's health car plan, obama re, whatev you wan to call it. i still think-- and i'm obviously not the first person to make e int-- i still think massachusetts romney-care is something that romney has still not been able to deal with effectively given the base of the republican party. >> charlie: romney? >> i agree. another potential candidate at one time was asked about how much of a problem if mike huckabee ran the pardons that

he had given a bunch of people went on to kill people. he said i would rather defend mike huckabee's pardon than mitt romney's massachusetts health care plan in the republican party primary. that's how lethal it is. mark and i differ slightly. i happen to think that john huntsman is every bit as attractive and the potential is there but i think obama's ambassador to china will be almost the equivalent. >> charlie: do you really? ambassador to china even though it's not a political job. >> it's obama. they hate obama. the true believers in that republican party. secondly, a smaller group but not insignificant hate china. you put the two together and i think it's going to... i think it will clearly be a liability. >> charlie: someone said to me, smart in politics, that he has no natural constituency in the party. john huntsman. >> well i think that's true. he transcends constituency in the sense that he's a very attractive fellow, as mark

said. i think he will do very well on the stage with all the others. i would add one thing. i agree with everything that tom and mark said about the three most likely nominees. i will be shocked if either michelle backman or sarah palin don't play a major role in shaping this race. >> charlie: because of what they'll do in iowa. >> for starters, yes. i think they will be very, very strong candidates in iowa. they're very important. for tim pawlenty to win this race to get beaten by a michelle backman in iowa would be a real setback. they'll affect the dialogue. they will be... they will drive the dialogue a little bit more to the right. i think michelle back man is underestimated. first of all, i think she... an authentic palin, if you will. she may have views that some people think are zany. she has a tremendous fund raising list. i think she raised more money than anybody else in the house last time. she is a more formidable

figure than the caricature of her. >> i agree with that also. but i think michelle bachman isn't very quick on her feet. she doesn't think very well in an unstructured situation. but i do think she she will be very formidable. i think she'll run and i do believe she'll be a more formidable candidate than palin who i do not think will run. i think she's just teasing everybody. >> charlie: she is one person who could make a late entry, sarah palin and be effective. >> because of her name recognition and all of that, she's probably got a lonr window to decide. in the end i think she'sgoing to decide that she likes those hundred thousand dollar speeches and a the other things that come with it, thanks to john mccain. i'm betting that in the end she won't run. >> charlie: what about newt gingrich? nobody is giving him what? >> i still think under a certain scenario he could be a nominee. i'm in a pretty small group who thinks that still. >> you and callista.

>> he's in a category with bachman and palin. he could have a real impact on this. i don't think either huntsman or pawlenty will be particularly inclined to or be particularly effective at going after romney on romney- care. gingrich i think, despite what he said recently about individual mandate, i think he could end up playing that role. i think he will be still be a pretty formidable fund-raiser and have table-stakes. >> i mean, newt gingrich has become a joke. he's become a travesty. he had the rollout that is the worst nightmare of any candidate in history. this is after two months ago he said he had those extra marital affairs because he cared so passionately about his country. >> he's a joke in washington. look, there's no one in this race... of the big three, of the big three candidates there's not one who is a clear social conservative, religious conservative candidate. >> neither is newt. >> he could be. >> he changes. he's adaptable.

i agree. he doesn't have a history. >> i'm not saying he's likely to win but i think after bachman and palthe next most likely to shake things up and play a role and ron paul as well. >> charlie: tom, how many republicans are not running because they think this is not the year to run they wait for four years. >> i think most of them who are not running are making that calculation. >> charlie: that would be jeb bush maybe or paul ryan or chris christie? >> chris christie, that's for sure. especially bush. jeb bush and chris christie. i think the smart political money, the could be convenienceal wisdom which is often wrong but at the moment it sounds right. it's obama's to lose. he and a bad economyould lose it. but at the moment it's not shaping up as a great opportunity for the republicans even though as we all know obama is a polarizing figure in the country. >> charlie: is it about health

care? he's polarizing because of health care or what? >> well, i tnk to a lot of republicans who hate him no matter what, it's his agenda generally. but i think even with independents, health care is a problem for obama. no doubt about it. >> charlie: who could beat the president if they could get the nomination? who is the most likely republican to be able to run the toughest race? >> i think all three of the big three can beat him. and i think there will be a correlation as a lot of republican strategists say. people say the field is weak. if someone wins this tough and strong and manages the narrative of how they did it and talks about the economy, i think all three of them could. >> charlie: talking about obama 2008. >> that's right. today i think we know a fair amount about the political limits of mitt romney and tim pawlenty. they've been out there. we've seen it. i think huntsman based on what i saw this weekend and based on his record i think has the potential to be the one who

the white house would be and should be the most worried about. the potential. >> i do. i think he's going to have a very hard time getting the nomination but i do think he would probably be the toughest general election candidate. i think the white house thinks that. proof of that, charlie, is the fact that they are forever talking about what a wonderful ambassador he was. >> charlie: our man in beijing. >> no, we have never had a more supportive ambassador. we appreciate all those wonderful things he said. >> charlie: at the grid iron the president said i'll go to iowa. and tell the people of iowa what a great ambassador he was. so, the issues. what's the debate within the party? >> i think there is one clear and defining point. i think it's one that the top three are going to have trouble dancing around but they will. that is, is the focus... is there a laser focus on the economy and jobs? that's what voters real he'll care about. but the republican base cares

a lot more about that. they do care about the social issues and the cultural issues. that's why i think a michelle bachman or conceivably a palin, though i agree with tom, will play a role in shape inning race, in driving it perhaps more to the right. i think if you left it to john huntsman and to mitt romney and even tim pawlenty. he's a little bit different, but they would want to spend most of their time talking about jobs and the economy. i'm not sure they're going to be able to do that. >> charlie: what does the economy have to be at in order to put some safety for the president. >> i think we know pretty well what the range is of what it's going to be. i think it's not based on one condition. if there's a republican who gets over the commander in chief threshold and has a compelling narrative and argument for the country, a theory for how to create jobs. if there's such a person who is the republican nominee, i'm pretty confident the economy won't be good enough for the president to be home free. >> charlie: ton and the problem is.

>> none of these three guys have done that yet. they have time to do it. >> charlie: it's surprising romney hasn't been able to do it. >> he's been laying low. he's pursued a totally unorthodox strategy and one that normally doesn't lead to raising millions of dollars. he rarely does public events, doesn't do interviews, doesn't do much tv. he's laid low and hasn't tried >> charlie: when he did something which was to defend and distinguish the massachusetts health care from the obama health care, he didn't do so well. >> he didn't do well. it was a canary in the coal mine for them as far as i'm concerned about how much the press is against him. one thing that huntsman has going for him, i'm quite confident he will be the media's candidate. >> charlie: john mccain of 2000. >> or the george bush of 1999 when he was the press candidate. the press candidate does pretty well in the republican party. >> the guy is good. i told mark the story beforehand. at the white house correspondents' dinner up went up and introduced myself to john huntsman. he said i met you in 1991 when

i was the ambassador to singapore. i felt flattered and also small. >> back to your question. the white house line is that what's important about the economy a year from now is the trajectory. everybody knows the numbers are going to be anemic if obama is lucky, sluggish if he's lucky. but they're going to be bad. i think obama will be running for re-election with the worst unemployment than any incumbent president since franklin d.roosevelt. that's a lot of baggage. the whitehouse said we know that. itoesn't maer as long as people feel likeit's getting better. it's the old right track/wrong track. if they feel like their01(k) is back to a 301 k from the 201-k it w a yr ago, if they're feeling better he'll be okay. i don't know about that. we'll have to see. but there is their prediction. >> any of the three, pawlenty, romney, huntsman, i think if they live up to their

potential will win all the mccain states except maybe arizona and they're probably going to win virginia, north carolina, colorado and indiana. >> charlie: ohio and florida? >> that's it. they just move on. i think it's pretty easy to see. the the economy is bad. if the trend lines as tom referred are are not that good i think any of those guys could win. romney could win michigan, maybe pennsylvania. >> charlie: how much has obama been held by osama bin laden in the sense that he is a commander in chief? >> i don't think it has a lot of legs. it takes away one of the republican arguments. their main argument is the economy, big government. he's done a lousy job. a secondary argument was he's soft on national security and terrorism. when he bagged bin laden, when he did was rumsfeld and george w. bush couldn't do i think that takes away that issue. it's not very credible. but i don't think people will be voting in the fall of 2012.... >> charlie: it's all about the economy. >> mainly and the cultural issues too. >> i think it showed the limits of what he can do to put this away as an incumbent. he went up to 60 in the poll

where he went the highest after getting bin laden. you know, short in stopping a martian invasion i can't imagine a bigger thing he could do to try to unify the country and get that number up to 70, 80. went up to 60 after bin laden. that shows there's a real ceiling on his support. >> even if he could get it up to 80, let's not forget that george h.w.bush was up to 88 at one point and he lost 50 points in 1 months and got 38% on the election day. let's not forget winston churchill got thrown out a few months after winning world war ii because the british people weren't sure that he was the guy for the future. i agree. al i think is exactly right. obama got a decisive bump but not a long-lasting bump from this. >> charlie: all right. so if weñi look ahead to this razor, the question that we haven't talked about either is michael huckabee. huge connections and support within the social

conservatives. could his endorsement be crucial to one of the three? >> it could. one of the dynamics about huckabee not running is he was determined to stop mitt romney from being the nominee. i think part of the reason he was thinking about running was he wanted to get in in there and make sure somebody would stop romney. he didn't like him last time. that was his attitude in 2008. i think he will be as interested in any of the governors and former governor s with an interest in this outcome to say who can stop mitt romney? i think he'll throw his support to that person. >> look, we call this a weak field. it doesn't look like... someone calls the afc west. i mean it doesn't look like a formidable field. these guys have all accomplished sometng. >> charlie: you know what i remember? i remember in 19... was it 1992? they looked around and they said, my god, all the top tier people are not running. mario cuomo is not running. people thought that bill clinton was running really to be vice president and running for '96.

>> but the difference is bill clinton felt like ronald reagan felt when he ran and like george bush felt when he ran and barack obama. this is my moment. this is my destiny. this is what i should do right now because what i offer matches what the country needs. some of these people in the race now i don't think have that attitude. i think that's normally what it takes to win and particularly to beat someone like obama who is despite the ceiling on his support still commands a very strong base of support. >> charlie: tom, one last question for you. you know you really do know and have qofered... covered the bush family and the people that are part of that sort of political dynasty. in your sense of, as you talked about this earlier, they're looking for a candidate and they could go with romney but there's a chance that huntsmanight be appealing to them? and there's chance that. go ahead. >> yes. i wouldn't be shocked if we discovered before too long that george h.w.bush 41 would

like huntsman. they've got the ambassador to china thing. they have that in common. as i said earlier some of the bush family's money guys may go to romney by default. there's not a lot of enthusiasm for that. so i think huntsman is a guy who could end up appealing quite a lot to the bush crowd. >> charlie: thank you, tom and frank. thank you, al hunt. thank you, mark halperin. we'll be right back. stay with us. over the course of 2010 wiki- leaks the anti-secrecy group leaked documents on its website. bradley manning, a former u.s. army intelligence analyst, has been charged with giving the material to the website. much is still unknown about manning's motivations. more important, what was his relationship with julian asaj the founder of wiki-leaks.

a new front line documentary called wiki-secrets attempts to answer those questns. he is a look at the documentary. >> the pern also contacted him via email and they became iends on facebook. it was bradley manning. intelligence anyst in arack. and in his profilehere was the chat name. he read more. >> lking at his facebook page i got the sense that bradley was very depressed. >> reporter: then during one of their chats he started dropping hints about a crazy white-haired aussie. >> he mentioned julian assange in the context julian was the individual who he had initially establish contact with. >> reporter: he also mentioned that he had leaked thousands of classified documents including a huge amount of

diplomatic cable. >> i asked him ifthere's any way to recover the documents. he indicated that they had already been uploaded to wiki- leaks' server. it was fairly unambiguous statement. >> charlie: joining us is the front line correspondent martin smith. i am very pleased to have him back at this table with this story. welcome. >> good to be back, charlie. >> charlie: where does this come from? tell me the beginning. >> well, this story was one that we looked into because being given to julian assange. he was sucking all the oxygen out of the room but here was this soldier who was the whistle-blower. assange has gotten a lot of people calling him the whistle blower. the true whistle blower in this if there is a whistle blower, some people would say he's a villain and wouldn't dare to call him a whistle glo but the fellow here at the center of this story is bradley manning. relatively little was known about him, his past, where he

had come from, what was motivating him. the kind of guy he was. so we set out to take a look, a hard look at bradley manning. of course it's both a duel look. it looks like at julian assange, the relationship with assange, we interviewed assange for the program. but at its heart it's about bradley manning. we wanted to understand him. >> charlie: what did you find out? >> there are a number of bradley mannings. there's not one bradley manning. like a lot of people there's a lot of complex and contradictory strains to the personality but you have an idealistic young guy who joins the military, is struggling with don't ask don't tell because he's gay. he's, therefore, out of place in the military, unhappy. he said to friends that he joined because he wanted the g.i.bill benefits. he's already expressed anti-war sentiments. his facebook page to which we

were granted access three years of his facebook postings which are... will be up on the front line website as of tomorrow night when the program runs. they indicate that he was also struggling with a relationship that was falling apart around the time that he was leaking. he was also getting to know a new group of friends. he grew up in rural oklahoma. he was a smart kid. but while he's at fort drum before he deploys over to iraq, he takes up a relationship with a young man who is going to brandeis. he goes down to boston and hangs out with a new group of people, computer science students and hackers. people to whom julian assange was already something of a legend. all these things came together and created a kind of perfect storm for this all to happen. >> charlie: tell us about jewel and assange, too. >> well, julian.

>> charlie: nothing has been written about him. >> julian has gotten a lot of attention. julian is an interesting character. julian is, of course, a hacker from melbourne australia. he has a kind of purist or at least when he went into this, when he got these large sort of industrial-scale leaks, he had this idea that information wants to be free. let's just put it all out there without regard to what the consequences would be. it was sort of deemed that putting it out this would be a good thing. i think over time julian has changed. he now approaches the handling of this... these various troves of documents differently than he did in the beginning. julian has changed. >> charlie: do you see him as good or bad? >> i think the wiki-leaks has helped us understand a lot about what's going on in the war. it's given us a lot of understanding of the sort of day-to-day routine of war in

both afghanistan and iraq. i think the diplomatic cables, given what was feared would happen as opposed to what actually happened, is not such a, you know, it turned out okay. >> charlie: the defense department and the state department went crazy. >> they went crazy but hillary didn't have the heart attack that was in the, you know, that.... >> charlie: and i think bob gates basically said it didn't do that much damage to us, didn't he? >> well, you have to understand that the defense department was responsible for putting someone in front of all this material. bradley manning. >> charlie: amazing he would have access to that kind of material. that's one of the issues, isn't it? >> that's a big issue. >> charlie: explain. >> that's a big issue. you know, we had the sense after 9/11 that we needed to reform intelligence sharing and we needed to go from a need to know basis to a.... >> charlie: because the c.i.a. was not speak to go the pib. >> nobody was speaking to anybody.

local police, you know, at the state level weren't talk to go the f.b.i., d.o.d.wasn't taking to the the c.i.a. so the idea was to get all this intelligence and push it down and give soldiers, you know and forward-operating bases like where manning was the ability to, as they say, connect the dots and to have a better contextual sense of what was going on in the world. that was a sort of post 9/11 sharing push. at the same time they set up these forward-operating bases, f.o.b.s, very quickly. they didn't install software and technology that existed today. when you go overseas and you present your master card in london, you often have to call home. it gets frozen. you're not able to make a charge until you tell the bank back home that i am in london using my credit card. this kind of unusual use of your card is similar to, you know, had this software been

installed in the forward operating bases, anybody could have seen that soldier was downloading enormous amounts of data that didn't need to be doing it. >> charlie: who is responsible for all this going public and turning him in? >> that's one of the most interesting characters at the center of this is this guy. >> charlie: we just saw him. >> yeah. he's the guy that bradley manning reached out to allegedly reached out but all the evidence is very strong here that this chat took place starting may 21 of last year and goes for four days between this the chat name was his birthday 87. on his facebook page you can see that's his streaming. they start this chat and go on for four days in which bradley manning confesses to adrian lama. he himself is a former hacker.

he was featured on wire dot-com, an article about... he's something of a legend. he did some time for hacking the "new york times". he's also hacked into some other major systems. he's smart, talented. but there was an article about him, his psychiatric problems. he's got a form of autism. presumably bradley manning saw this and started reaching out to him. in that chat there's a confession. the leaking of the various troves of documents that were leaked snarms what does he do? >> well, he.... >> charlie: that's the story, isn't it? >> well, what would you do. >> charlie: he takes it on the authorities. >> he goes and calls up an old friend that was former army intelligence, a guy name tim webster whom we also talk to in the documentary who says rightly that adrian felt like he was trapped. if he didn't do something, he would be party to a crime. he was already... he already

hadn't paid off his debts to the government for the crimes that he committed in the past. he didn't want to go back in the slammer. so he decides to turn bradley in. he's encouraged to stay on the chat for several days after he makes this decision and try to find out as much as possible. so at that point he's pulling confession out of manning. and this guy is not very well liked now in the hacker community for what he did. >> charlie: what do you want to come out of this piece that you put together some. >> i think that, you know, what wiki-leaks has brought to the table is this ability using the internet to be a conduit for what our industrial-scale leaks that we haven't seen before... leaking has always been with us, but now the sheer quantity of this changes it qualitatively. i don't think this was an act

of espionage. i hope that that can be understood in the cold-war sense espionage was when you took the information from an enemy and gave it to the other. this is not that. this is publication. this i think should be protected by the first amendment. >> charlie: wiki-secrets airs front line tomorrow night may 24 at 9:00 p.m. right here on pbs. the collapse of investment banninging giant baer sterns in 200 set the stage for the most devastating financial crisis in this country since the great depression. as the u.s. kmep went into a free fall a handful of key players worked fiercely behind the scene to save the banking system. and rue sorkin of the "new york times" chronicled these events in his 2009 book too big to fail. now the story has been made

into an hbo film and here is a look at the trailer. >> t one thing we don't have is time. >> we don't do this now, we won't have an economy on monday. >> goldm morgan stanley are going down now. >> it's falling off the cliff. >> people are freaking out. >> it's not just an american problem. >> 35,000 jobs just dippeared. >> you wt uso simply hand over $700 billion. >> it's another bailout with no legislation. >> we don't have options. >> you want too big to fail. here it is. >> charlie: in the interest of full disclosure the company that made this preliminary is one of the supporters of this program, hbo. andrew ross sorkin and two of the film's stores billy crudup and james woods. i am pleased to have them all here at this table. welcome. >> thank you. >> charlie: so you write this book. it's a best seller. hbo comes to you and says we want to make it into a film. >> that is what happened. but when they came to me, i no idea that you'd have actors

like this and curtis hanson at the helm directing this film. to see it in life like this right now is sort of extraordinary. >> charlie: what do you mean by extraordinary. >> as a writer you know we talked about this when you're sitting there toiling in the middle of the night trying to write a book that you're not sure anyone is going to read let alone your mother. the idea that people read the book and are going to see this film which i hope is an important flil because i hope it reminds people about what was an extraordinary moment in our economic history. to see the human drama portrayed on the screen by william hurt, you know, who plays hank paulson, and others. >> charlie: you play ben bernanke. >> extraordinary. >> charlie: the first thing people thought about was wow. how did you get all these people in the hbo film. >> i think they really nailed it. as someone who does care about the nuance i think that for

the most part, you know, you watch these characters and they really captured the essence of what they were doing. >> charlie: tell me what you tried to capture. >> it's funny. when i was approached to play it i got the phone call. i had read the book. i was aware of the complexity of this story. i mean, you know, i went down... i think i can follow these things. you know, i just did not understand how dangerous this situation was. when they came to me and said this is the story. it's going to be told. i thought, it is really like a thriller. only the character was playing. i was i'll do it. we haven't you the script yet. i'll read the script. i'm going to be playing the villain. as i read it and did my research i thought there is a distinction between a person who suffers from hubris and a person who does something criminal. bernie madoff is a criminal.

we, billy and i, billy gives a great performance, geithner very complex nuanced performance as did everybody actually but billy-i will tell you in our business we have the same level of hubris that you might find in the head of the imf, for example. or the people on wall street. whatever. i mean there are people who are... you also have the same precipitous environment which is you're as good as your last movie, as good as your last share price or whatever and so on. as i looked, i said this guy wasn't a bad guy. he always talkd about protecting his employees, protecting his colleagues, protecting his shareholders. when i talked to people off the record who knew him they said he had his head in the sand. somebody brought him the bad news a few weeks earlier and so he was fired. don't bring dick any bad news. people said that in war and leaders have unfortunately watched their countries go up in flames. there are people who said that he really didn't get it until virtually the weekend before

his the stock crash. >> charlie: and what the stakes were. >> you have to remember, he turned down warn buffet who was willing to buy eeb the toxic assets, the real estate securities that were such a disaster. bufert >> this is a guy who had a billion dollars of stock in his company. i mean he had all the skin in the game you'd ever want. he was only to supposed to make the right decisions. he ends up with $56,000 because he believed to the bitter end-- and i what i love about his performance is he captures both the mistakes of this man but also sort of the human element of it. >> right. if you fail and you know if you're losing a billion dollars all the people you're responsible for, all the people in your organization, you'd have to be a savage not to say this is a terrible calamity. how did it happen to me? he was a guy who thought he could fix anything.

lets put up the sandbags and the river is rising and the levees are breaking but we can do something. this can't happen to us. if you look at any great tragedies in history guys jumps out of buildings in 1929 because they thought this is impossible. now when you think about it, just because you can't play at the country club anymore and drive a rolls royce, why would you throw yourself out of the building? people saw the world changing in ways they thought was imaginable. they actually took their own lives. the irony is the depression didn't start until '31 or '32. the reason was for the same reasons they have now. people put their money under the mattress. they didn't want to invest it. we finally bailed out all the banks made them bigger and more powerful. president obama and the congress gave them money. they're holding on to it and you can't get a mortgage to save your life. are we in the first act or the third act or still in the second act. >> charlie: here is a clip from the hbo film "too big to fail" starring james wood in this case and talking about

warren buffet. >> we're at 6 right now. we haven't been anywhere near 66 in months. markets like buffet. his name ll push the price up overnight. >> i don't care who he is. i am not spending $360 million a year r the pleasure of doin business with hi real estate will come back. >> korns have been sniffing around. >>here you go. i've seen this before. ceos pan ig and they sell out cheap. right now the street is running around with its hair on fire but the storm always passes. we stand strong. on the other side we'll eat goldman's lunch. >> charlie: not so. geithner. tell me how you saw him because he's.... >> yeah. >> charlie:... still a part of our lives. >> absolutely. the script did, you know, he serves a purpose in this script. it's not really a character study of geithner and his journey through it. i feel like the script really focuses on paulson as your center piece.

geithner was a sort of fascinating figure to me because when i first started to do a little bit of research on him, the easiest access i had to take on him was the contentious hearings he would have at congress. it was an interesting introduction to somebody you're going to try to warm to in some way. first, i had a long way to go. i did not go to m.i.t., so i had a longer way to go to understand much of the language. so i focused mainly on the hair. i figured if i got my hair right, that would be just about as much as i needed to do. there were aspects of geithner's personality that i thought were interesting. you know, behave yoor. that's one of the things that you often latch on to as an actor if you have the opportunity to portray a real person is you want to feel their behavior. you want to be like them because the people who are

watching probably have access to him as well. but in terms of his mind, the people that i spoke to seem to indicate i can recall one particular phrase a woman said we used to say that he can see around corners. so there was a guy who... which is, you know, of course as an actor you always want to play that guy speaking of hubris. you always think of yourself as, i want to play the smart guy there. geithner actually is sort of product gal talent. from point of view of some of the people i spoke to who worked for him. >> charlie: what kind of role did you play in the making of the film. >> i started as a consultant. this is hanson and gould's film. >> charlie: screen writer. >> they were the remarkably inclusive. to tell you i was surprised but also thrilled that they involved me snarms what would they say when you would say, well, this character was more like this than this? >> look, when peter was

writing the script we would talk on sunday for hours and go over it. i would say, you know, i'm not sure that this is going to come off right. you know, if you're going to do this, you probably need to do this. if you're going to make this point you probably have to go here. i wouldn't say they agreed with everything i said but they definitely took it under consideration and then curtis was very kind. i met all these guys early on in the process and spent a little bit of time on the set and later when curtis was out in l.a., you know, for a little bit of that as well. for me, a remarkably... (all talking at the same time) >> an unbelievable lesson as someone not in the film business just in terms of how it all gets done and how the sausage.... >> charlie: what's the hardest part of translating something like this? a book that was 600 pages to a gts. >> you're going to disappoint nearly everybody involved. >> like a divorce. nobody is happy. >> it took me a little while for this.

i know longer watched the film as the person who is involved in the book. i now watch the film for the film. i watch for the performances and i try to watch the movie as a movie. i think actually a great challenge, if you have read the book or you are involved in the financial markets, you will sit there and think of this and this and and this. i think if you can let yourself go for a minute, it's just... for me. >> exactly. you'll never hear an actor say that he's happy to have a scene cut. there was a beautiful scene we shot all day downtown near wall street of joe greg rewho was essentially thrown to the wolves. he's got to go or else, you know, the company is going to go under. so i say good-bye to him as he gets into his jet helicopter and leaves. only billionaires can cry over the fact that the poor guy is out of a job and now he has to go back to his $20 million mansion in his jet helicopter.

as he leaves i'm left on the pier as this embattled leader who now everybody is going and it's this little figure as we pull away and so on. it was a very poignant moment finally. it wasn't in the movie. i thought, wow, i mean it's fine. i have a wonderful part but i would think that that would be in the movie because it was such a human moment and a very complex story. >> charlie: do you call up the direct sfr. >> quite the opposite. as i watched the movie at the premiere the other night i thought, wow, he kept my character up in that tower, in that office. that's the only place we see him visually. i realized he's, you know, the prince in the tower about to have his head chopped off on the blocks. he's literally in the tower of london. that's where he is. if you take him outside it takes the pressure off. visually curtis hanson, you know, i mean the movie doesn't stop getting made until the day before it's released. you edit here and change a little music there. an event happens. >> charlie: what was it that was the hardest for you to leave out?

>> that's good. a good question. >> that's a great question. i think that the hardest part about compressing the story is that it is a human dram in the book of so many different characters with so much build-up and history about each character. so that by the time you actually get to the action, you know so much about them in advance that it explains a lot of the things that they do later. because we had to compress not only time but character, it really was left to the actors to develop that character and to it quickly in the short amount of time that they had on screen. i think that was actually the great challenge but i think they really did pull it off. >> when you have to put a monster story like this together you lose the little touches. i remember just referenced a true story but i did a movie once where i played the murder of medgar evers when he went to trial the recoil from the rifle left a circle around his

eye. i said we have to have that on there. he said, jimmy, it's so ununbelievable that even though it happened in a movie it would get a laugh. i mean it's true. there are things that happen that are so bizarre in these stories that you're really afraid you're going to get a laugh. >> charlie: where are we today? >> that's the interesting part. at the end of the film you feel like you have been saved but i think there's the larger question about whether the can has just been kickd down the road. >> i feel when you hear the tick, tick, tick, the entire movie and then they're at the wires and fiddling with the wires. the red one, the green one. the ticking stops and over the credits you hear tick, tick,. >> it hasn't been decided. this is also a human problem not just an economic problem. >> charlie: this is about saving the financial system and banks on wall street are doing phenomenally well. >> there's a good assessment. i mean because a lot of times

you say wall street is doing great but this is finally-- and i love that little bit in the trailer-- you know really finally i think there's a greater disconnect between wall street and main street. what's good for general motors is gohr america? try to sell that now. it's just not true. >> charlie: let me stay with this idea. did what we see in your film produced by hank paulson, tim geithner, ben bernanke and some people in the business, did it work in the end? did they make the right choices in the end? >> i think that they made the right choices for the moment. i think the larger question and what i hope that the film raises is whether we've made the right choices long term, whether our banks are in a better position than they were before and whether this idea of too big to fail is still with us. i think the answer sadly is clearly yes. >> charlie: not only that but the interesting thing about this is the fact that they're bigger.

the bank of america owns merrill lynch. >> one of the lines that goes after the credits is the top ten banks now control 77% of all the bank assets. >> in emergency room jargon, the most important understanding of your responsibility is treat the worst first. this would be like saving al capone's life. you think well we treated the worst first. the guy was bleeding to death but we just saved al capone. we may have saved a financial system that is first of all broken. >> charlie: what about all the financial reform we have seen enacted? >> you and i talked about this before. my view justify as somebody studying it is that unfortunately it does a lot of good things but only around the edges. >> charlie: not too big to fail. >> we don't get at the core problem of too big to fail. that's what i think this movie really gets at. >> charlie: too big to fail means? >> the idea that one

institution is so big and so inter-connected that ultimately it can take down the entire system. >> charlie: if it fails. >> it can become the leading domino. >> charlie: thank you.