E-mail a friendCarl Bernstein
airdate April 25, 2006
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein helped unearth President Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal. He went on to become ABC News' Washington Bureau chief and senior correspondent and a contributing editor at Time and Vanity Fair magazines. He's also a best-selling author, whose books include Loyalties: A Son's Memoir and, his latest, A Woman in Charge—a controversial look at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Earlier in his career, Bernstein covered police and court beats for The Washington Post.
Carl Bernstein
Tavis: Carl Bernstein is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who, of course, shot to fame during the Watergate era for his work with fellow 'Washington Post' reporter Bob Woodward. His stellar career continues to this day. He's now a contributing editor at 'Vanity Fair.' His latest piece for the magazine actually appears on Vanity Fair.com and is titled 'Senate Hearings For Bush, Now.' Carl Bernstein joins us tonight from New York. Carl Bernstein, nice to have you on, sir.
Carl Bernstein: Good to be here.
Tavis: Let me start with the obvious questions. Why Senate hearings on Bush, and why now?
Bernstein: I believe we need a distinguished panel of a few Senators to try and find out what this President, what this Vice President have done, because we don't really know what the policies of this administration are. What we do know is that we have had the most draconian secrecy of any modern Presidency, as well as information policies more disingenuous even than the Nixon years in terms of the disingenuousness applying across the board to major policies.
Whereas in Watergate, it was about the criminal enterprise of Watergate, and trying to hide other illegal undercover activities, almost everything we know about the Bush Presidency, even about Hurricane Katrina, we know because of former members of the administration who have left, from journalists we know it. But we don't know it from the Bush people, because they don't want us to know.
Tavis: It would seem to me, Carl, that every President engages in secrecy. Every President, every administration, is disingenuous. Every administration tries to hide as much as they can from the media. That notwithstanding, there's gotta be more to it to call for a Senate investigation. And what you guys did at Watergate uncovered a great deal, but there was reason, the break-in, of course, obviously, to engage in a story and an investigation. What's the rationale here for the Bush administration, like them or loathe them, in this case loathe them, being investigated?
Bernstein: As in Watergate, the Watergate break-in was only a minor part of what John Mitchell, the attorney general for Nixon, called the White House horrors undertaken by the President and his men. In this instance, I think that the war, as well as Katrina, what we are learning is that there are horrors underneath.
Whether we're talking about the misuse of intelligence. Whether we're talking about presidentially authorized torture. Whether we're talking about all kinds, the NSA, hidden eavesdropping on Americans. We don't know what's happened, just as we did not know, really, what had happened in Watergate beyond the early disclosures of the press.
And what we had learned in the courtroom. And we're in a similar position now. We really don't know what this President and Vice President and Secretary Of State and Secretary Of Defense have done. And incidentally, I agreed pretty much with what you said about other administrations having secrecy.
But other administrations have not wanted the people and the Congress to really know nothing, or almost nothing about the truth of their policies, and the reality of them. And so far, every indication is that they have wanted us to know nothing, even to the extent of not allowing pictures to be taken of flag-draped coffins coming back to Dover, Delaware, because it might work against their interest.
Tavis: And I agree with everything you've just said, so we have a mutual agreement society here, for the moment, at least. I guess the question, what I'm trying to get to, though, is what a jumping-off point is. You just offered a litany of things that many Americans, of course, have questions and certainly many more have issue with, I would suspect, this White House on or about. But what's the jumping-off point? It can't be just the fact that you believe an administration is operating in secrecy. What's the jumping-off point here?
Bernstein: Look, the idea of Congressional hearings is to find out whether there should be Congressional oversight over the President's policies. In this instance, they don't know the President's policies. They need to find out what they are, and what has been done. We are operating in an information vacuum. We have had misinformation, disinformation, disingenuousness, mendacity, from the top down, thrown at us in a way that, that perhaps even exceeds what we saw in Watergate.
The idea of a Senate investigation, as in Watergate, is to take this out of the culture wars, out of the partisanship, and have a distinguished panel of seven or eight Senators or nine, chosen by the leadership of each party. If it were done now, the Republicans could chair such hearings. I think it would be to their advantage to do it now, rather than after the Democrats might win the Senate or the House.
There's a lot of talk about impeachment, which as we know from the Clinton experience became a horrible, partisan, cultural warfare that we don't need again. What we do need is information. And we need to know the truth. And this administration has not been forthcoming with the truth, even about Hurricane Katrina.
You take the most you would think mundane example. Well, the President has refused to make documents and testimony from White House aides available as to what he and his aides were doing with Katrina before and after the hurricane struck, on grounds of executive privilege. The same grounds Nixon refused to turn over his tapes on.
Now, what in the world can be so secretive about dealing with a hurricane? I think the other point is that all of these questions go to the competence of the President. And we have a situation now where there are grave questions being raised by Republicans and Democrats to each other in the Congress about whether this President is competent.
Tavis: To your point earlier, Carl, about the culture wars, I'm trying to see and trying to figure out how, in fact, Congressional hearings, Senate hearings, in this case, specifically, could get underway in to what this President has been doing, Vice President has been doing, that we are unaware of without it becoming so political that nothing would get accomplished.
You're talking about a bipartisan investigation here. You and I both know that could never happen in this era of culture wars in this red state, blue state. How would that even happen?
Bernstein: I don't believe that. I believe that what we're seeing in the country now is a breakdown of the red state-blue state equation. That many concerned Republicans know that this Presidency is a failure. That we are in a war in the wrong country, which is quite extraordinary. I don't think we've ever gone to war in the wrong country before.
That the real threat was from Iran. That so far, it looks like 9/11 has been used as an excuse for regime change, when in fact the original reasons put forth by the President were not regime change but rather had to do with weapons of mass destruction, which again we know from others, not from this administration, were nonexistent.
So I think that you can get a consensus around the idea that the country, the Congress, and the people need to know what the President did, what the Vice President did, what the Secretary Of Defense did, what the Secretary Of State did. What they knew, and when they knew it. And it's different than Watergate, because it's not about necessarily a criminal enterprise.
And it's a different kind of perhaps unconstitutional, perhaps illegal activities. But the idea here is so that the Congress can finally establish a kind of oversight that this White House has been totally successful in evading.
Tavis: I got 30 seconds here. It is your sense, though, to go back to your earlier point that I thought I heard. It is your sense, though, that what we could find out, were these Senate hearings to ever commence, what we could find out could be worse than Watergate?
Bernstein: I think that you're probably talking apples and oranges. I think aspects of it, obviously, are worse than Watergate. And it, look, in Watergate, the system worked. A criminal President left office. In the case of the Bush Presidency, the system has not worked. We have had secret wars, secret policies, we've had a terrible shock to our system, not just from Al-Qaeda, but from this Presidency.
Tavis: I appreciate you coming on, Carl Bernstein. I'm sorry I'm out of time here. Carl Bernstein's piece can be found at Vanity Fair.com. Contributing editor Carl Bernstein, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Bernstein: Good to be here.
Tavis: Up next on this program, tennis legend Billie Jean King. A new HBO documentary about her set to premiere. We'll talk to Billie Jean King in a moment. Stay with us.
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