 Greetings. It's a pleasure to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward back to the University of Texas, at least virtually. And I want to extend a word of welcome to all who are joining us online. My name is Stephen S. and I'm director of the Harry Ransom Center, which holds, among its collections, Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's Watergate Papers. Since the arrival of these papers in the opening of that archive in 2005, numerous students and researchers have benefited from access to this collection of Watergate documents. And over the intervening years, Bob has become a good friend to the University of Texas. He and his Washington Post colleague, Carl Bernstein, created the Woodward and Bernstein Endowment to support the further study and understanding of that national crisis in American political life. For nearly five decades, Bob Woodward has been one of our closest observers of the American presidency. He is the author of 20 books beginning with All the Presidents Men and the Final Days, both co-authored with Carl Bernstein, and subsequent books extending over the next eight presidencies, including The Agenda Inside the Clinton White House, Bush at War, and Obama's Wars. Woodward and Bernstein returned to campus with Robert Redford for the 35th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. And Bob was last with us for a discussion of his 2015 book, The Last of the Presidents Men at the LPGA Presidential Library. It is a pleasure to have him with us again, even remotely, for a conversation about his latest book, Rage. Seldom has a book been as urgent as this one. With each passing year, it becomes clearer that Watergate was not a distant historical event, but one that raised still relevant questions about the extent of presidential power and the resiliency of our constitutional framework. As this history reminds us, our founding constitution doesn't work on its own, but instead requires our constant care and attention. It requires, of course, an informed citizenry, full participation in our political process, and a system of representative government that is accountable to the people. Few have been as attentive to the role of the press in upholding these obligations as Bob Woodward. Rage is a deeply researched book that draws upon 17 interviews with President Trump and hundreds of hours of anonymous interviews with others conducted under deep background. In the course of writing this book, Bob Woodward obtained copies of the letters exchanged between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, and drew upon diaries, emails, meeting notes, and other primary source records. The resulting account takes us inside the Trump White House during one of the most tumultuous periods in recent American presidential history. Engaging Bob Woodward in conversation is my friend and colleague Mark up to Grove, President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. Mark is himself an accomplished journalist and historian and author most recently of The Last Republicans inside the extraordinary relationship between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, published in 2017. This online conversation is co-sponsored by the Harry Ransom Center, the LBJ Presidential Library, and UT School of Journalism and Media. It's my pleasure to welcome you to an evening with Bob Woodward. So Bob Woodward, welcome and congratulations on the smash success of Rage. Thank you. Well, Bob, you came to national prominence by taking down a president with the journalism that you did with your partner, Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post in the early 1970s. And since then, you've scrutinized eight presidents, including Aaron Cumber, Donald Trump, with your book, Fear, which did not exactly paint a flattering picture of Donald Trump. So why would Trump agree to 18 exclusive interviews for your current book? Well, it started out in the book 2018 book, Fear, he didn't like and he denounced and I understand some people close to him said, well, it's all true. And so he had regretted not talking to me for fear. And so this time he agreed to do it. And it started December 5. Last year, I went into the Oval Office, plunked down my Olympus tape recorder and said, this is all on the record will be recorded for the book that will come out before the election. I did not expect to have the opportunity as he provided to interview him 18 or 19 times in the matter in what 10 months, nine months, and to spend nine hours and 41 minutes talking to him. But Bob, why would he do it? Why would he talk to you, of all people, you again, who have scrutinized so many and you've made it very clear what you think of Trump and his administration. And yet, did he think he could beguile you, he could sway you and bring you over to his side? What was behind that decision? Well, I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't know why he agreed to do it. I promised that he would have his say. And even last week, though he had said earlier some bad things about rage, he said some great things in the book. And when asked by a Fox News anchor, is the book accurate? Trump said, it's okay, it's fine. I read your other books, Bob. And it seems to me you've never spoken as frankly to a president as you did to Donald Trump. Was that your feeling as well? Well, because it was in the middle of events. And I did maybe 10 to 12 hours of interviews with George W. Bush about the wars and so forth. But it wasn't. The interviews with Bush were at the White House and the Oval Office or in his private study in the residence. And maybe there were half a dozen of them. And in this case, there were many more. And there was a I have to say it. And you see it in the book. Trump is very appealing. He wants to push his point of view. He would say, oh, I write, let me quote him. He said, you write shit about me. And he expected a lousy book, but he kept going on and answering questions. So it provides a truly unique history, I believe, a window into his mind and into his presidency. What was the greatest revelation for you, Bob? I mean, you knew this president pretty well, having completed fear and conducted many interviews, albeit not with Trump around that book. But what was the greatest revelation that came from this book? Well, first of all, it took me three months to get to this, that on January 28 of last year, when his national security advisor, Robert O'Brien, said the virus is coming to the United States. It will be not maybe, but will be the biggest national security threat to your presidency. The deputy, Matt Pottinger, who had been in China in the 2003 SARS epidemic, and knew how the Chinese government lied and responded. But Pottinger had kind of, I mean, you know how important it is to have a source inside or multiple sources who will say this is reality? Pottinger had those sources, told the president on January 28. Mr. President, my sources tell me this is going to be like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed, I mean, think of this, 50 million people then killed 675,000 people in the United States. Trump absorbed all of this in the reasoning and the failure to really lead and protect the country. I once asked Trump, what's the job of the president? And he said it's to protect the people. He failed to do that. The January 28 of last year should have been a day that the Trump presidency changed when he had an opportunity to lead in a coming crisis. He had the evidence. He unfortunately, as I quote Dr. Fauci in the book saying that Trump is obsessed with reelection, I think the focus is on reelection. I think it's tragic for Trump. I'm really, quite frankly, embarrassed for him that he could not step up to that moment and tell the country the truth in some form. I mean, just, I mean, you know all about the presidency and how it works. You are one of the country's experts on our presidents. And a few days after this meeting in the Oval Office, top secret told to the president, the president asked questions, absorbed it. A few days later was the State of the Union address. As you know, the State of the Union address, it's in the Constitution actually requires the president to report what's going on, what's important, where are we heading. He gave his State of the Union address February 4th, so this is a week afterwards. 40 million, this is before the Congress, 40 million people are watching on television. He devoted 15 seconds to the virus and said, we're doing everything we can, which of course was not true. And then he devoted two minutes and 45 seconds to Rush Limbaugh. At this moment, the president could have said, my national security team has come to me with convincing evidence, we have a public health crisis coming. We're going to do everything we can. And he could have in the simplest way said there is remedial action that people immediately can take. Wash your hands, keep six feet away from people, wear a mask, don't get in a closed room with other people for an extended period of time. Experts and people who model all of this said if Trump had done some of that or all of it, we would have had maybe even one person says it would have saved 150,000 lives, 160,000 lives. I don't know. I don't know the medicine. I don't understand it well enough, but what I do understand is the presidency. You know this or it's a sacred trust you have in the presidency that a president has and lots of presidents have said when you're in that office, you have a almost mystical communication with every citizen. You know you have to protect them. You have to keep them informed. You have to tell them the truth. As president, as a human being, you have a moral responsibility, I believe, to share information with other citizens. And he failed and it was not until May I learned about this key meeting. The book starts with that meeting because that's the fulcrum around which everything turns. I'm embarrassed for him. I'm embarrassed for the Republican party. I'm embarrassed that he did not find a way to step up to the task because the task is actually quite simple. And when I asked him later in March, I said, why didn't you, why did you respond this way? He said, well, I wanted to play it down. I always wanted to play it down. I did not want to create a panic. You know from all your work on presidents, presidents, if they tell the truth to the country, George W. Bush after 9-11 rallied the country, rallied the Congress, rallied the intelligence agencies, rallied the military. And Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, go listen to some of those fireside chats in which two days after Pearl Harbor, he actually stepped up. Can I read something? Because I wanted to be comprehensive. So this is two days after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. And in a fireside chat, Roosevelt says, it's all bad news. We have been hit, quote, the most serious undertaking in American history is before us. It's going to be grueling work, day, night, every hour, every minute. And he said, government has confidence in you, the citizens of this country, your ability to hear the worst without losing heart. That's what the country did, rallied around and won World War II under his leadership. And to not understand the obligation as a president, as a human being, as somebody who had moral responsibility and sees that moment is, I think people in your business writing the history 10 years, 20 years from now are going to describe that as one of the most horrific moments in American history and a failure by a sitting president to understand his broad responsibility. It's breathtaking, Bob, but you look at Richard Dixon who also misled and lied to the American people and he leaves office with an approval rating of 26%. This president has clearly lied and misled folks and he doesn't deny it. It's incontrovertible. You have recorded these conversations with Donald Trump and yet he still has an approval rating of 40 some percent. How do you explain that? Well, look at, I talked to Trump about this. Trump came in 2016 and he seized history's clock. As Barbara Tuckman in her great book, The Guns of August talks about what happened in World War before World War I and that the old order went out in a dying blaze. I believe in 2016 the old order, Republicans, Democrats, independents, people in the media, and I include myself high on that list or the top of the list, did not understand what was happening in the country that you had building, feeling that people who were workers, people who were businessmen and that they'd been cheated by the elite and been cheated by both parties and Trump came in and I asked him, I said, you know, you seized history's clock and he said, yes, I did. And he said, I'm going to do it again in the coming election. So we're going to see, I think the coming election, frankly, is a toss-up. Trump told me, pounded this into me, said, I have lots of secret support, lots of secret support. There is evidence of that, how much there is. We don't know, but we look at November 3rd. What is it? Six weeks away, six weeks away. He has said, we don't know how we're going to count the votes, don't count these mail-in ballots, millions of ballots. He has forecast, the president of the United States has forecast a quadruple train wreck in our election that's coming up. How are we going to know? What is the response going to be? I asked him, the people are saying that you are not going to leave office. And he said, I don't want to comment on that. It's one of the few things he would not comment on. But how do you sort this out? A president, I think it's the obligation of the president to think more about the country than himself. A president who thought about the country and had some sense of how important the electoral process is for our democracy would work out some way with the Democrats and say, you know, we have to make sure it's the fairest election, the most open one, that we can count the ballots in a reasonable time. But Trump, it's all about him. It's all about being re-elected. And not only, I mean, for the virus, he has smashed the country. I guess he's going to smash the country again with this election. I tremble for what might happen. I want to come back to the election, Bob. But we've talked about history several times. You yourself are an historic figure. You will go down in history. You came to prominence as a journalist, but your books have made you an historian. When you have a revelation like you got from Trump earlier this year around COVID-19 and him deliberately misleading the people, how do you balance your responsibilities between being a journalist and being an historian? It's an absolutely fair question. And when he told me that in February 7th, I can get out of giant stack of articles from the Washington Post in the New York Times. At that time in January and February, all the discussion was about China. The viruses was in China. They closed down 768 million people in China, twice the population of the United States. And when they closed people down in China, they locked you in your apartment. And it was extraordinary. That was covered, I thought, on February 7th when he told me this. He was talking about China. All the evidence was about China. You know as a historian, you live your life in chronological order. You don't report or gather evidence in chronological order. It was in May that I discovered about the January 28th meeting and asked him about it. And he confirmed, yes, he didn't remember it, but he knows it was said that he got the warning that I described. So in May, even in March, the virus, everyone knows it's airborne. Everyone knows it's deadly. What am I going to tell them? So I focused on finishing the book, trying to put a package of information about him in his White House and his administration. The demarcation line for me was the election. Can I get it out two months or so before the election so people can have this window into a kind of truth, particularly with all the recorded conversations, what he did, what he said, what he cared about? And you know that as a historian. Have you ever worked on something for months and then you discover something that now I understand what happened in January? I want to go back to the election, Bob. And you mentioned earlier, it seems that Trump's main intent is to get reelected. That's very clear in the book. He wants to get reelected. That's his principal agenda as president right now. What's not clear is what he wants to do with a second term. There's no defining agenda. What does Donald Trump want to do with the president if he is elected to a second term? It's a great question. And I don't know because see, that's not the way Trump thinks. You're talking about planning. I'm sorry to go back to January 28th, but it's a key moment in American history. And in, you know, you or your successors as historians are going to be writing about that and putting the pieces together. So that's key. But as the book shows, Trump doesn't plan. He doesn't organize. He sends out messages and decisions by impulse, by tweet. I chart in massive detail the experiences of James Mattis, the secretary of defense. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, damn coats the number one intelligence officer in the country dealing with Trump and dealing with these decisions by tweet. Mattis is so worried rightly about a possible nuclear war with North Korea. He goes to the National Cathedral here in Washington. Have you ever been to the National Cathedral, not for a big service, but just to go in? I mean, it smacks you in the face. This is a place to think about moral responsibility. This is the moment to reflect on your life, how you are doing. And he went in there to pray and reflect and realized, I mean, I quote him saying, my God, what's going to happen if I have to incinerate millions of people in order to protect the United States? This was the moment. And Trump talked to me in length about this. He said, we almost had a war. I quote secretary of state Pompeo saying, yes, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, told him Pompeo, yes, we were ready to go. Pompeo is quoted saying, I don't know if it was true. It might have been a bluff, but we had to prepare for it. So the secretary of defense who has that responsibility has to prepare for it. It's one of the most chilling chapters in the book about somebody who has that responsibility, who knows Trump isn't into the details. Trump has delegated the authority to Mattis to shoot down North Korean missile that might come to the United States. And Mattis realizes if he does that, Kim Jong-un could launch dozens of nuclear weapons in South Korea, our allies, Japan, or the United States. And so he might have to recommend to the president, because his own Mattis cannot use nuclear weapons, have to be the person recommending to President Trump, we are going to have to use nuclear weapons to make sure our country is kept safe, which is his number one duty as secretary of defense. So we dig into these things and the life these people led working for Trump. So many members of our audience have asked the same question, and particularly in light of what Trump has said recently, but in your view, Bob, if Trump does not get reelected, will there be a peaceful transfer of power that is the hallmark of American democracy? I don't know. And the fact that I can't answer that is because Trump has made it very clear publicly that he's not going to step aside if there's some questions about it. He has promised, I mean, think of this, president of the United States promising chaos about the November 3rd election. It is unfathomable, and it is further indication that he is abdicated, his responsibility to care for the country, to care for the electoral traditions for the promise that your vote is going to be counted, that it's going to matter, that we're going to have a level playing field. I shudder. I absolutely shudder when I think about the next six or seven weeks before the election. What's going to happen? What's going to happen on election day? What's going to happen days after when some states have laws that say, well, you can have up to 30 days after the election to count the ballots? And he has, Trump has the responsibility to take care that our system works. And instead of taking care, he has promised a, as I say, quadruple frame rate. Imagine that. How can somebody do that? Where are the Republican senators who know? I happen to know some of them. They know, as I said at the end of my book, that Trump is the wrong man for the job. They know this. They won't step up publicly and say this. They won't go to him and say, you can't behave this way. What you are doing, it's not only to yourself. It is to the Republican party. It is to the country. And because of our place in the world, I mean, look at what is Europe going to think? What is Putin going to think even if he's directly operating to help Trump? There's evidence of that. This is a, your next book is going to be, the title is just going to be 2020, Trump in Chaos, Trump maker of chaos. Trump, the president who abdicated his constitutional and moral responsibility. I'm sorry. That's the conclusion from the, you read the book. Do you agree or not? Well, no, it's very disturbing. I do agree. And there are so many revelations in this that are breathtaking. One of them is his pension for authoritarians. And you quote Trump as saying, it's funny about the relationships I have. The tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them, you know? Explain that to me today, someday. Okay? The easy ones are the ones I maybe don't like as much or don't get along with as much. So, so Bob, explain that to us. Trump is often at odds with our allies, but he seems genuinely close to despots like Erdogan and Kim Jong-un who you mentioned earlier and Vladimir Putin. Why? It's not that he seems, he is. As you know, it's in the constitution. The president controls foreign affairs. He and the secretary of state decide what our relations are going to be with countries. And Trump has picked Putin. He's Kim Jong-un, as you say, the leader, the despotic leader of North Korea. He has picked the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, MBS, who according to the CIA ordered the execution of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who was doing work for my newspaper, The Washington Post. And this is who Trump is working with. And he won't work with somebody very well like Engel Merkel in Germany. And these are the old relationships we have. I mean, this is, this is a part of this that is part of the catastrophe. Secretary of Defense Mattis is quoted saying, because Trump is always criticizing allies. Why do we help South Korea? Why do we pay for all of their, these 32,000 people that we have, I'm sorry, 32,000 U.S. troops in South Korea? And he said, we are suckers. We are fools to do this. The same with the force in Afghanistan in Iraq. He always wants to reduce it. The general say, look, it's not that we want to have a war. It's that these are insurance policies that guarantee or help prevent additional terrorist attacks or instability, particularly in the middle, the Middle East, he will, he will not, that doesn't matter to him. Think of this moment now, we are in what the end of September, right? Very short time to the election, Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee. He probably cannot go abroad as the Democratic nominee. Sometimes the nominees of the other party have gone abroad and they get in trouble because the president will say, no, wait a minute, I'm in charge of foreign affairs. You can't even go, have conversations with world leaders. And so Trump totally controls this. He decides it is his authority under the Constitution. And what have we got? The face of the United States is sketched out and set in concrete by Donald Trump. Go to Germany, go to Spain, go anywhere and say, what do you think about Donald Trump? And they also tremble and worry, what's going on? Our alliances like NATO, which has been the pillar of stability in the world after World War II. And Trump just scorns it and says, we've got to get more money from people. Sometimes I think he views his job not as being president and leader, but as chief financial officer. And he wants to go around with the tin cup and get money from our allies, getting them to spend more for defense. And I think that's reasonable. But in the process, you do not want to alienate them in the US. What do you think is at the root of his exceptionally close relationship with Vladimir Putin? It's strange. And I quote Dan Coates, the head intelligence person, somebody who'd been a Republican senator from Indiana, close ally with Vice President Pence, I quote Dan Coates saying they went through all the intelligence, they went through the deep cover sources that intercepts because they thought something's going on. There's some unfavorable, maybe even illegal relationship that Trump has with Putin. They found no hard evidence of that. But Coates still tells other people, he said, but even though there's no proof, I cannot shake the idea that Putin has something on Donald Trump. Which is again another exceptional revelation here. You alluded earlier, Bob, to the conclusion you make in the book, your last words of the book, which are Trump is not the right man for the job. You've covered nine presidents. We mentioned, I mentioned earlier. Is there anyone else aside from perhaps Richard Nixon, to whom you would apply those words? Wouldn't come close, Mark. And that is a conclusion reached on overwhelming evidence out of Trump's own mouth, out of documents and diaries. And we are in a position, as somebody said to me, said, you know, you say he's the wrong man for the job that kind of understates it. And perhaps that's the case. But that's my conclusion. And I typed it as I was doing the epilogue, as you know, you're writing books and you have evidence documents, you've got thoughts and out in totality. Trump is the wrong man for the job. I was kind of surprised at myself. I checked with my wife, Elsa Walsh, publisher, John Karp, it's Simon and Schuster, my two trusted and hardworking assistants, Evelyn Duffy and Steve Riley. And I said, what do you think? And they knew all the information, all the interviews, not just with Trump, but with key people in the administration and an authoritative report of what went on. And they said, it was fascinating for me, they spoke with one voice and said, this is a book about truth. How do you not write the truth? As you see it, you can't, you have an obligation at this point. And after the book came out, lots of people, lots of friends have said to me, said, of course you had to write that. If you had not said, you would join the chorus of Republican senators who know that he's the wrong man for the job, but won't say publicly, you can't hide as a author or as a journalist, you can't hide in silence when you're trying to write about truth. Now people may disagree with me, people, that's fine. That's my conclusion. And I'm just not, I can't hide in silence. I think that I'm 77 years old and there would be no justification to my wife and my assistants and my publisher and quite frankly people who read the book, they're gonna say, well, how does this end? What does he really think? And so that's the choice I made. I also understand that people may disagree with that and think that is the wrong course to take, but that's the one I chose. Well, we end on a very sober note, but it's a very sobering time. Bob Woodward, thank you very much for being here and congratulations on Rage and thank you for the great work you do. Thank you, Murrow. On behalf of the LBJ Library and our co-hosts, the Harry Ransom Center and the UT School of Journalism and Media, thanks to our guest Bob Woodward. Signed copies of Bob Woodward's book, Rage, While They Last, are now available at lbjstore.com. If you liked what you saw tonight, please join the Friends of the LBJ Library to be invited to all of our programs. Upcoming speakers include former Secretary of State James Baker, along with New York Times, Chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, and the New Yorkers, Susan Glasser, and the co-host of ABC's The View, Sonny Hostin, and much, much more. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.