Woodward: If I Were Young, I’d Investigate IRS Scandal Like Watergate

KURTZ: “Bob Woodward welcome.”
WOODWARD: “Thank you.”
KURTZ: “When you and Carl Bernstein were deep into Watergate, when the Nixon administration was putting so much pressure on your paper when most of the media were ignoring those stories. What role did Ben Bradlee play?”
WOODWARD: “He was the general. We’ve often said that he in fact had the courage of the whole army, and the idea was, ‘Let’s get to the bottom of this.’ A great believer in the truth, has sense of, you know — he didn’t approach journalism as a way of making moral judgments. It was a way of finding out what happened and then let that unfold.”
KURTZ: “Given the enormous stakes and you two were couple of young pups — we can now say it as this advanced age — did you worry about keeping his confidence or what was he like to deal with personally when you were deciding on difficult stories?”
WOODWARD: “He never suggested he was going to take us off the story. And he said subsequently that we were getting new information and he knew this was coming from the Nixon campaign treasurer, or the bookkeeper, or people who witnessed the massive house cleaning and destruction of documents after the Watergate burglars were arrested, that we had somebody in the Justice Department — as we now know Mark Felt, the number two in the FBI giving this guidance and assistance about what directions to look in and what the consequences might be. So, at the same time, as Ben said, you’re publishing these stories, you’re not naming the sources. You believe you got good sources, but we don’t have documents, we don’t have tapes, we don’t have videos. You go home with the lump in your stomach and it’s a kind of — it’s not doubt, it’s — as Katherine Graham said, ‘Well, when is the whole story going to come out?’ And we kind of thought, ‘maybe never.’”
KURTZ: “Right. It’s easy to look back and say, you know, Nixon’s resignation was inevitable. At the time, you were doing it piece by piece, knocking on people’s doors. But how did Ben Bradlee react when you made one significant error in your Watergate reporting, saying that a witness had name, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, to the grand jury? That must have been a tough moment.”
WOODWARD: “Yeah, that was a very tough moment and he said, ‘Why? How did it happen?’ What’s really important about that moment — I mean, here we lead story in the Post, accusing the president’s top aide of been involved in all of this and controlling this secret Watergate fund, which turned out to be true, but we said there have been grand jury testimony to that effect — there had not, because no one dares to witness about Haldeman. The  witness would have said, ‘Oh yeah Haldeman controlled that fund.’ There was no anger, there was no rancor on the part of Ben. It was, ‘Let’s get this straightened out. Let’s untangle it. Let’s be calm.’ He was always kind of, you know, there was never a thrown book or a fist on the table. It was, ‘OK. More reporting.’ More reporting is always the solution. I think that there’s a great lesson in all of this for older reporters like you and myself and for 
younger reporters: the facts. You know, who are witnesses, how do they know this? Do they have an ax to grind? It is a reality in my view that in the Obama administration there’s lots of answered questions about the IRS particularly. If I were young, I would take Carl Bernstein  and move to Cincinnati where that IRS office is and set up headquarters and go talk to everyone. Now, there there’s been political spin put on it by lots of people, including Fox News, including the White House. Question is: what are the facts?What really happened? And that was the  Bradley method. Get the facts, listen to everyone, see what the official version is, but always doubt and be skeptical about that official version.”
KURTZ: “Are you suggesting that Fox News is not trying to get the facts or just that just that the ‘opinion’ people on both sides you could say are turning some of these issues —“ [crosstalk] 
WOODWARD: “Yeah. I think there have been — there has been a lot of fact based reporting and there’s been a lot a political spin on all sides on this. And Bradley, were he the editor or if he were Roger Ailes at Fox News, would be saying, ‘What 
exactly did you ask these people? What did they say what evidence is there? Who else can we talk to? How do we verify this? He had a whole litany of questions and that’s how you do good journalism.”