- [Announcer] This program was funded by the following: Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and Family, BP America.

And also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(majestic music) - The greatest national security threat we have right now is how poorly we are educating our kids in pre-K through 12.

- We are reinforcing democracy.

We are the ones who get to choose our future.

- Democracy's a fragile thing.

It has to be defended, and it always has to be defended.

(intriguing music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

In this series, we explore America in all its complexity, what our extraordinary but often tempestuous history says about who we are as a people, and the formidable challenges we face today.

50 years ago this year, Richard Nixon tendered his resignation in the face of the misdeeds of the Watergate scandal, marking the only time in American history a president has resigned from office.

The revelations of Watergate were the result of legendary Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, our guests tonight, who reflect on their reporting achievement half a century ago and how the media landscape and our politics have changed in the years since.

Bob, Carl, welcome.

- Good to be with you.

- And we welcome you not to the LBJ Library but to the Harry Ransom Center, which houses your archive, your Watergate archive, which 50 years ago led to the resignation of Richard Nixon.

And I wanna talk about Watergate, but before we jump into that, let me talk about your esteemed careers.

What led you to a career in journalism?

- Being a janitor at my father's law office and going up.

(Carl and Mark laughing) It's true, Carl's heard this story 30 times, I think, and looking at the papers and saying, "Gee, this is interesting stuff."

And up in the attic they had what's called the disposed files.

It was alphabetical, and I could look at the names of people who were my classmates in high school in Wheaton, Illinois, and see that life was not pretty actually when you got to the disposed files.

There were sexual assaults, there were IRS problems.

And this was a community, Wheaton, Illinois, famous for Billy Graham's presence and that sense of, we do things right, and there was a lot wrong in the disposed files.

- Hmm.

- You see that and you realize the surface is not clear.

- Mm, Carl, how about you?

- Well, I was 16 years old, and I had one foot in the classroom and one foot in the pool hall and one foot in the juvenile court.

And my father, sensing that I was going astray, knew that I had a bit of a facility for writing, and he got me an interview at the Washington Star, the capital's afternoon newspaper for a job as a copy boy.

And I got this job as a copy boy, and it changed my life forever.

Got this 16-year-old kid, got the best seat in the country in 1960 while John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were running for the presidency against each other.

And by the time I was 19, they allowed me to be a reporter.

And I grew up in this newsroom of this great newspaper with these amazing mentors who really let me cover pretty much everything.

- Mm!

- I owe a lot.

- And it wasn't the last time you would encounter Richard Nixon.

- No, (chuckles) it was not.

- In 1972, The Washington Post newsroom got the call that there had been a break-in at the Watergate Office Complex in the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

You were both assigned to that story.

Carl, you were 28.

Bob, you were 29.

Why were you assigned to that?

- Well, in a sense, we assigned ourselves.

- That's right.

- The morning of the burglary, I was sent to the courthouse, and I'd been covering night police for about six months.

And in come these burglars in business suits.

Now, I never once had seen a burglar in a business suit.

(Mark laughs) And the judge asked the lead burglar, it was clear he was the leader, older, James McCord, where he worked, and he whispered, "CIA."

And the judge said, "Speak up so we can hear you," finally said, "CIA," and that burglars, business suits, CIA.

I think I muttered an expletive in the courtroom out loud.

(Carl chuckles) - Carl, how did you get assigned?

- At the time, I was the chief Virginia correspondent covering the legislature in Richmond, living in Richmond part of the time, and I was in the office writing a profile of the lieutenant governor of Virginia.

And I suddenly saw all this activity around the city desk, and I went to find out what it was about, and they said there'd been a break-in in Democratic headquarters.

And I said, "Wow, that sounds a lot better story than the one I'm working on, this profile."

I put the profile aside and I told the city editor, "I'm gonna make some checks on the phone," 'cause I was known as somebody who could work the phones pretty well.

And I got on the phones, and from Woodward down at the courthouse, we had the names of those burglars.

And they lived, five of 'em, in Miami.

And I got on the phone and crisscrossed where they lived and got a hold of their wives on the phone that day.

And they too confirmed that their husbands had worked with the CIA.

And so we were sort of off and running.

- Hmm.

- And then the next morning, the two of us came into the office on our own volition.

- Yes, I mean, there were six people on that initial story, a very important sentence in that story, saying it was not known who, if anyone, sponsored these burglars, and it is not known what their purpose might have been.

And if you look at it, the next two years, we're trying to answer that question.

The purpose was to destroy the Democrats, and the sponsor was Richard Nixon.

- And to undermine the very system of democratic free elections in this country, and that's the legacy that stems from that first day that we worked on this story.

- Did you know each other when you were assigned to this story?

Did you?

(Carl chuckles) - We, (chuckles) grazingly, like cattle.

(all laughing) - Yeah, yeah.

- We sort of knew each other and were a little suspicious of each other, I would say.

- I think I would modify that.

(Carl chuckles) Not deeply suspicious, but who was this guy?

We're coming from two different worlds in a way.

- Yeah.

- And then the next day, of the six reporters who worked, we were the only two who came in, and we did our first story together, saying that the lead burglar, James McCord, not only had been head of security at the CIA but was head of security for the Nixon Re-election Committee.

- Mm!

- That in itself was, ah, what's going on here?

- You were young, I mentioned earlier.

You're not even, neither of you were 30 years old.

As you're delving into this stuff, do you think, I'm way out of my depth here?

What are you thinking as you're going through this and finding out more and more that ultimately lead to the president of the United States?

- I think that our thinking was that we knew from those early days that this story was heading in a certain direction, and whatever it was and whoever was responsible, it was an important story.

And our interest was in developing the best obtainable version of the truth, as we came to call it.

And I think we had confidence in ourselves, we had great editors.

We had Ben Bradlee, the great editor of The Washington Post, riding hard over us.

But no, I don't think this was a question of self-doubt, I think it was a question of bringing everything to the reportorial table that we had learned.

In Bob's case, his instinct, going back to when he was poking around in his father's office.

In my case, going back to when I was 16 years old.

By this time, I was 28, I had 12 years experience reportorially.

- Yeah.

- I'm not sure we understood this at the time, we just kind of, this is the way it is and the way it was, that the culture at The Washington Post then was, go get the story.

- Mm.

- Dig.

There's almost a factor of self-assignment.

And Ben Bradlee, the editor, loved good stories, loved the concept of two young people just running with it, working nights, not kind of giving up.

And that really made a big, big difference when you know the ultimate boss and the other editors are open to, you know, there's no off-limit zone.

The zone is find out.

And I was blessed, Carl had this idea, he said, "Look, people are not gonna talk to us in their offices, let's go to their homes at night."

And through, in a sense, luck and your intuition, some of the initial people were the bookkeeper and the treasurer, people who did the money.

- Mm.

- And that obviously was the perfect trail.

- There came a point early on in the story, though, after we had discovered this money trail.

Every day, Bob and I would meet to figure out what we were gonna tell the editors we were doing that day, and we were in a little coffee vending machine room, you know, on a particular day.

And I put a dime in the coffee machine to get a cup, and I felt a chill go down my neck, literally, like I'd never experienced in my life.

And I turned to Woodward, and I said to him, I said, "This president is gonna be impeached."

And Woodward looked at me and said, "Oh my God, you're right."

And we can never use that word impeached in this newsroom lest our editors think we have some kind of agenda beyond reporting the story.

But the stakes became evident.

By then, we had written a story saying that John Mitchell, the former attorney general of the United States and Nixon's campaign manager and former law partner, had controlled those secret funds that paid for the bugging at Watergate and other illegal activities.

And so we had this sense of where we were heading.

- And John Mitchell, I mean, this is so many decades ago, he was Richard Nixon in many ways.

Former law partner- - Attorney general.

- Attorney general.

- Right.

- Ran the Nixon campaign until Watergate.

So this was the Nixon alter ego, if you will.

- Mm.

- And the idea that he controlled this money and that the money, when it finally came out, was hundreds of thousands of dollars of available cash for a series of, some people called them, dirty tricks, Carl rightly called, so no, this is a campaign of sabotage and espionage.

And this was not just a dirty trick, this was organized, this was designed to destroy the democratic candidate.

- So this was much bigger than a failed burglary of Democratic National headquarters, right?

- Absolutely, the White House was fairly brilliantly insistent in calling it a third-rate burglary, and most people regarded it that way, including most of our colleagues in the Washington press corps when we were doing the early stories.

But in fact, it was a systematic attempt to have the Nixon White House determine through political espionage and sabotage who the Democrats would make their nominee, and they succeeded.

Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine was probably the most prominent and the most formidable candidate the Democrats had, and he was the object of this campaign of dirty tricks and political sabotage more than any of his other- - And it really worked.

- It worked.

- Yeah.

- And George McGovern became the nominee largely through the undermining of the other campaigns by the Nixon people.

- But these stories largely were not believed in Washington.

I think there was a sense that, oh, Nixon's too smart to be involved in this.

And other than Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, who was the publisher of the Post, our savior on this was Senator Sam Ervin.

- Mm.

- Called us up and said he's gonna investigate Watergate with the Senate Watergate Committee.

And he had low expectations, and he wanted our sources, and we said we just can't give sources.

And vividly remember that sense he had of, well, we're gonna do it, and we've got the power of the Senate, the power of subpoena.

And if you go back and look at those hearings, they were the gold standard.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And they followed and called the people that we had named in our reporting.

In the end, they discovered the secret taping system, which is what really brought Nixon down.

- Bears mentioning, Carl, you mentioned that Muskie was the likely candidate, the presumptive candidate for the Democratic Party, you mentioned that George McGovern became the candidate, and it resulted in the greatest landslide in history.

Nixon got 64% of the popular vote, rode into a second term with great glory, and then two years later, resigned the office.

Where were you when you learned that Nixon would resign?

- We were in the office.

We were working the story, trying to find out what was going on in the White House at that moment.

I think we had both, on that day, been in touch with people in the White House who described to us that he was undergoing a kind of agonizing decision-making.

- What were you feeling in that moment?

- My feeling was one of awe for the country, the role of the newspaper, our role, obviously, but I was awed by what had happened and the fact that yes, we had this role in it, but awed by the fact that the system had worked.

There was really an incredible relief because we understood the criminality of the president of the United States, that we had uncovered an awful lot about this man's criminality, unprecedented in the White House.

- And there's so much on the tape.

- Yeah.

- And we knew there was much more than had been revealed.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, and there's a tape that we often talk about.

December '72, this is the high point of the Nixon presidency, he'd won those 49 states.

And of course he never thought this would come out, but what he says on the tape is, "We are gonna survive our enemies."

- Mm-hmm.

- He's talking to Henry Kissinger.

And he said, "The press is the enemy, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy, the establishment is the enemy," and then instructs, in a strange way, "Kissinger, write that on a blackboard a hundred times.

Never forget it, we're gonna outlast the enemies."

As he saw it, he'd won 49 states, had no idea that there would be an investigation.

I think they felt, and we see from the memoirs, they'd disposed of our reporting by just ignoring it.

- This was behind them.

There was great confidence in that.

Nixon, in fact, gave to the principals who worked at the White House right after that election a calendar, a leather-bound calendar, saying, this is, we now, in essence, have a clear sailing for this ship.

- This is the second term.

- Right.

- Each day of four years, and that didn't happen.

- A month after the resignation of Richard Nixon, President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a free and absolute pardon for all the misdeeds of Watergate.

At the time, two thirds of Americans disagreed with the pardon.

When Ford died 30 years later, two thirds of Americans agreed with the pardon to heal the nation in the wake of Watergate and in order to move on to more pressing issues, stagflation and the lingering war in Vietnam among them.

Was Ford right to pardon Richard Nixon, or did it set a precedent that we have to live by today at a time when Donald Trump is facing 88 felony counts?

- After Nixon resigned and Ford became president, 25 years later, I spent a lot of time, seven trips out to Rancho Mirage to interview Ford.

And he really convinced me and his lawyers and his aides that his goal was to move beyond Watergate and Nixon, and the way to do that is the pardon.

It was quite, in a man who is not known for his eloquence, quite eloquent, where he said, "Look, I had to look at what's the national interest," and the national interest was to move on and not get caught in replaying everything about Nixon.

And in the 30 days, the first 30 days Ford was president, all the stories in the newspaper, including ones we wrote, were about Nixon.

- Mm-hmm.

- The tapes, what's gonna happen, is he gonna go to jail, is Kissinger gonna stay, and so forth.

And Ford wanted to kind of pop that.

And, I don't know, it always made sense to me once you listened to him.

- Well, actually we kinda followed those two thirds, the way you've described them.

On the day that the pardon was announced, I called Woodward, (chuckles) and he picked up, I said, "You hear the news?"

And he said, "No, what's going on?"

I said, "Well, the son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch."

(Mark laughs) And Woodward actually figured that out very quickly without any translator in the middle, (Mark laughs) and that was our view at the time.

- That it was just, oh, this is a deal.

This, you know, it's too cute.

Ford gets the presidency and Nixon gets pardoned.

- But I think we need to talk about it in terms of one of the most courageous acts by a president of the United States in our history, I think, because Ford knew, and we both came to believe, that it was necessary for Ford to have his own presidency.

It was necessary for the country to move on.

More than that, Ford knew that he could lose the presidency in running for re-election because of the two thirds', as you put it, perception that this was part of a deal and that indeed people held this view of it, and he was willing to do this knowing that he was likely or very likely to lose the election because of this.

- Yes.

- Imagine a president of the United States looking into the national interest and doing the one thing that could make him a one-term president.

- And that's precisely what happened, he lost to Jimmy Carter.

- That's right.

- 47% of the popular vote.

- Yeah, but there was a practical component to this, as there always is.

- Yeah.

- To a political decision.

The arrangement was the Government would get Nixon's tapes back, 'cause Nixon had taken them to California with himself, and in that deal, the tapes returned to the Government.

And of course, as Carl always said, the system worked magnificently, all the elements.

Senate, House, Supreme Court.

- Political courage notwithstanding, and I got to know President Ford and at occasion talked to him as well, and he always insisted, "I thought I was doing right, it was the right thing to do," and there's no question that in his heart it was and he believed he was acting in the best, to your point, Carl, in the best interest of the nation.

But looking at the precedent that it set, do you believe that it was the right thing to do for history?

- I don't think that you do things for history, I think that you do things, if you have real principles, you do things as you see them at the moment and what will this do for the better interests of the people of this country.

And that's what Ford did, and I think as we look at two criminal presidencies, Nixon's criminal presidency, Trump's criminal presidency, we see examples of two presidents who had a different notion of the national interest.

I think you can see on the tapes, there are times where Nixon indeed thinks about the national interest.

That's not to say that he was not a criminal president, and there are evidences on the tapes throughout of other criminal activities.

Nixon ordering his aide to firebomb, one year to the day before the Watergate break-in, Nixon ordering his aides to firebomb a think tank in Washington to get some documents out of a safe that would make Nixon look good and LBJ look bad.

But I think this question of people doing things because they're right.

And then we have these two criminal presidents, and yet in Trump's case, we have a president of the United States who everything is about Trump, no national interest comes into play.

And God knows Bob has written about this more than any reporter through his books, through his reporting, but we have seen no evidence of a concern by a president of the United States for the national interest, only for Trump's own interest.

- This is part one of our interview with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and I urge our audience to come back for part two.

Bob, Carl, thanks so much.

- Thank you.

(majestic music) (majestic music continues) - [Announcer] This program was funded by the following: Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and family, BP America.

And also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(lighthearted music) (bright music)