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Renowned journalist Bob Woodward has released a new audiobook, “The Trump Tapes,” and he’ll be at the Pantages Theater in Tacoma on Sunday, November 13 to talk about it. It will be an audience participation experience that Woodward said he is very much looking forward to.
The Tacoma Weekly spoke with Woodward about what he plans to discuss when he takes the stage to introduce “Bob Woodward: 50th Watergate anniversary. He has a lot of material to sort through, given that he has decades of stories to tell and observations about his career as an award-winning reporter, best-selling author and co-author of books on American and world affairs, and renowned interviewer of our nation’s presidents.
“I’m looking forward to getting out there,” he said of coming to Tacoma. “I released these new Trump tapes and I’m going to talk about that and why I did it, but I’m also going to talk about the 10 presidents that I’ve covered, some of the lessons and what’s going on in politics. I’m much more interested in trying to answer the questions people might have.
Woodward said he released an audiobook rather than a written book because of the impact of hearing Trump in his own words, a style of journalism Woodward had not ventured into before.
“This is an experiment. I haven’t done it before, but eEarlier this year I went back and listened to the interviews and felt very strongly that when you hear it, it’s different than just reading it on the page.”
Woodward’s writing career was based on words on paper, which earned him much acclaim, almost every major American journalism award, and two Pulitzer Prizes won by The Washington Post. For him to add audiotaped interviews to his repertoire is remarkable and a clear sign of the seriousness of what Trump has told him over the course of 20 interviews with the former president.
“One of my conclusions in this audiobook and the tapes is that he doesn’t understand the presidency — his responsibilities to the people. He’s very self-absorbed, which we knew.”
Woodward said he asked Trump at one point if he had received any help for Trump’s June 2020 law and order speech.
As Woodward recounts, “He said, ‘Yes, but the ideas are all mine.'” Then, in that confidential whisper, he said, ‘It’s all mine.’ Well, it isn’t. The presidency is not his. This is a self-centeredness that I have not heard of in other presidents. A lot of them have big egos, and I guess you need that to go through what it takes to get the presidency, but I think Trump is a danger not only because of his attitude toward democracy, but also because of his attitude toward the presidency. This is as important, and perhaps more important, than his attitude to democracy.
Trump’s attacks on the media also don’t sit well with Woodward, especially Trump’s tendency to label any criticism of him as “fake news.”
“We have had some discussions about this. I backed off pretty hard,” Woodward said. “Sometimes we get things wrong, but generally the media’s efforts are well-intentioned. Maybe there are some exceptions with the ideological media on the left and the right.”
Woodward expects his appearance in Tacoma right after the midterm elections could generate plenty of talking points. He said he is currently reading author Ted Widmer’s “Lincoln on the Brink: Thirteen Days to Washington,” which chronicles President Abraham Lincoln’s 13-day journey to his inauguration amid the deepest crisis in American history — and the new a presidency southerners vowed to preserve Considering the tumultuous transition of power after our country’s 2020 presidential election and the events of this January 6, Woodward sees similarities between the crisis then and the crisis now.
“We don’t just have elections; we have crises and there’s nothing smooth about the electoral process,” he said, often compounded by the Internet and social media, which Woodward said have “generated a lot of impatience and speed.” People want simplification, and I’d rather do long-form journalism or books, so I’m not crazy about simplifying and compressing information. I’ve always been against that.”
In the large landscape of media in all its varied forms in this 21St century, Woodward still upholds the importance of local media and independent weekly community newspapers.
“They couldn’t be more important. I’m a big fan and I hear about the struggles and the closing of newspapers and the downsizing. I think it’s a tragedy.”
It was a weekly newspaper where Woodward started in 1970. After being discharged as a lieutenant in the US Navy, he applied for a job as a reporter at The Washington Post, but was turned down for lack of experience. The nearby Montgomery Sentinel outside of Washington wanted him, however, and for the next year he kept Montgomery County readers informed through investigative stories and assignments from his editor, Roger Farquhar, whom Woodward describes as “one of the great editors, always probing and thinking.’
The experience he gained at the Montgomery Sentinel was his bridge to finally being hired by The Washington Post in 1971. The work he and his reporting partner Carl Bernstein did drew more readers to the Post and soon the entire country when the two fearless men broke up what became known as the “Watergate Scandal”.
On the strength of the Woodward and Bernstein reports, President Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace andmore than 40 people went to prison over the Watergate investigations, including Nixon’s top White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s top lawyers, former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, White House Counsel John W. .Dean and Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer.
Woodward and Bernstein’s book All the President’s Men was a #1 national bestseller, and the classic film that followed is as relevant today as it was when it was released in 1976.
“Journalism is the greatest job anyone can have,” Woodward told the Tacoma Weekly as he pondered a question about the state of journalism and its future in the hands of today’s young reporters. “If you’re a doctor, you have patients who are boring. If you’re a lawyer, you have even more clients who are boring. But someone calls you and says, “I have a routine story for you,” and you say, “How about something that’s not routine?”
This is the Bob Woodward that people know and respect, always digging deeper to discover what others may overlook or fail to consider. He is one of the greats, standing side by side with Carl Bernstein, Walter Cronkite, Bob Sheaffer, Edward R. Murrow and a host of veteran reporters, Hall of Famers who set the bar that today’s journalists strive to reach.
For tickets to see Woodward live and in person and maybe have a chance to ask him a question or two, visit tacomaartslive.org.
Narrated by Matt Nagle: [email protected]
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