pleasure to welcome you tonight and to provide an overview of this evening's events the format is a bit different from usual our guest speaker acclaimed journalist author and political commentator carl bernstein will be in much should i should know that gary is also a member of the time off alarm advisory board to make these programs happen we're delighted to have both of these gentlemen here this evening to explore the topic can the system work politics government and media for over thirty four years the time of forum has offered its programs as a service to the community all of our events are free and open to the public thank you for joining us tonight and i'm going to turn the program over gary to you gary i can ladies and gentlemen the best and best known journalists of our generation lee best know as the pulitzer prize winning reporter who along with bob woodward broke the watergate story for the washington post their reporting led to the resignation of the president of the united states and set the standard for modern investigative journalism that was back in the early seventy's sense that carl bernstein or serve as a b c s washington bureau chief and senior correspondent he's a contributing editor at vanity fair regular commentator on c and c n n and he's done groundbreaking work for newsweek and rolling stone in the new republic he's the visiting presidential professor at stony brook state university and he's written five bestsellers including all the president's men on the final days about watergate while cheese that's a memoir of his family's experience during the mccarthy red scare era he's written a biography of pope john paul the second and his latest said the other day on c n n that next year's election is going to be unlike any other in our history washoe the sheer spectacle of it because largely of hillary clinton's candidacy hi and actually occurs it time when our political system is broken in a way that perhaps that it's never been and the question of whether or not the candidates will seriously address how the system is broken and whether and how it can be fixed seems to be of power now the importance but let's also take a second look at the phenomenon of hillary clinton which is sui generous forget we were talking about not just hillary clinton but the clintons were talking about what the enemies of hillary and bill clinton call clintonism to which the republican party in the year two thousand when she ran for the senate and often since has been dedicated to wiping out clinton  but more than that the clintons represents something very different in our history which is it spectacle scale but really very serious how did same time hillary clinton more than bill clinton even is judged in soap opera terms yet in terms of this larger huge spectacle all over the world tonight just as we are here people are talking at their dinner tables about hillary clinton and you arguing with each other and yelling at each other and say and she's you know the devil's work or she's the most defender there biography of hillary clinton you have the sense that she has some answers to these problems that you're talking about to the republican candidates have any answers to these for these problems prisoners politics and i think you know we can apportion the blame a little more to one side perhaps or maybe the other one but the effect of this culture well war has depleted us and the unwillingness of the two sides in the cultural warfare to acknowledge the good will ever of the other side and that with jude of the city of the other side ever is somewhere where i think we've never really been and certainly in the last fifty years in this country it it is making our problems almost insoluble in this country we're not dealing with real existing problems because we can't that our founding two sides you know all terribly opposed to the philosophies of each other which managed to produce over the constitution the bill of rights not not bad work for the first coming out from opposite sides but how did that happen because they were able to agree on the terms of debate real existing conditions existentially factual can text cannot have they can textually fact based debate in this country because everything and not just our politicians our media reflects it and our people reflect it including the consumers of news is so often being seen through the lens of ideology and partisanship and there's a place for ideology and a place for partisanship but right now it has blinded us  the point of such detriment and no good will and it is certainly no good will in washington which is good and hard work we've got one of the three branches of government in this country is totally dysfunctional the congress of the united states but also those people didn't get there you know just on their own wings some people sent of their and they were flecked the sentiments to some extent of the people who got them there so i think we needed in also when we talk about journalism in our failures of which there are many in journalism particularly ginning up manufactured controversy to cover one side or both sides of this ideological debate but people are not looking for the best obtainable version of the truth which is really what good journalism good reporting real information is our debate our political debate is not based on the based best obtainable version of the truth in our journalism increasingly is not dedicated to the best obtainable version of the truth i went to work when i was sixteen years old a great newspaper the washington star and the afternoon paper in washington beat the post in those days and you learned then and i think woodward and i am watergate you know what we did was was fairly elemental and simple and it involved that concept of the best obtainable version of the truth which is a simple phrase but it involves some real difficulty in pursuit and commonsense and listening to achieve but it also is required of people seeking information rather than just looking for information to reinforce what they already believe and think they know and i think that's where we are wrong answer sorry so how do you get from here to there carl bernstein i mean barack obama got elected two thousand i claiming he was going to change the culture of washington well he certainly failed at that and he was failed by those who might have joined him and i'm not optimistic for the first time i'm not  optimistic about about what's going on in our culture in this country except for young people you know i think people of my generation generation or two afterwards we took an awful lot from the system and we created amazing things in this country the greatest meritocracy and in the history of the world the civil rights revolution triumph of the public good the common good the national interest it stems from the civil rights revolution gay rights and on the things that have been created gentrification great cities rock n roll a huge don't have to underestimate rock n roll was a political force when you look at for instance at the collapse of the soviet empire and you look at the role of american popular culture and rock and roll we've done all these amazing things i've got students at stony brook university with student debt that is inundated how could this happen in the richest country in the world we who grew up middle class and working class families those are the people who are being choked in this culture today so i believe from what i can see from young people that there really can only generalize so much distasteful of what we've left them they do look at this politics of scorched earth take no prisoners idea of ideological conflict and and they say you pox on both your houses and your practical people i think young people and my hope is that they're going to find some way to say not just a pox on both your houses but to engage in some problem solving mean and i think there's one positive thing that is starting to become a movement that might really change in this country and that is compulsory national service for our young people after high school how many people how many men and women here were in the military i'm not that proud of my military service that i tried to do to get out of vietnam by mistake in the reserves but i went to basic training  formative experience i think for everybody who just raised their hand you throw together with people different than yourself a common purpose some real discipline common objectives helping each other understanding corps do some kind of teaching for those less fortunate work in a hospital work in the woods i see and general mcchrystal former governor pataki of new york many others i think of all kinds of all across the political spectrum are looking at this and i think it's the one practical thing that might make all the difference along with what hillary clinton said yesterday a constitutional amendment to restrict campaign much clinton campaign to expected to spend about two and a half billion billion presumably the republicans will figure out a way to imagine that's five billion dollars twice as much as the last smothering the opportunity to have a fact based debate because they look to have access to our system today you have to contribute you  let's go back to to maybe where this started john corps i own time ago ran for the senate from new jersey spent sixty million dollars of his own money at a time which seemed like a fortune will now cost one hundred fifty million to two hundred million to run for the senate from a big state but what does that mean that means if you spent say one hundred fifty million dollars to run the d n c company senator all so as to spend that kind of money you do the math on a six year term and it means your raise and i don't know you do it in a hundred fifty thousand dollars a day for every day that you're in you're in the senate so what do you think the focus is on it's obsolete it's  constitutional in terms of the intent of what those people in the federalist debate were talking about the idea that we would have to you know i think the big issue is can this campaign domestically use are we going to have government by and for the wealthy and the connected or are we going to have government that is excessive all with participation by everyone and that means that the debate has to be leveled you can't level the debate until we do something about the money because take a look at new york to be a senator from new york whether you're schumer or clinton you have  sensitive to the whims and demands of bankers people who want a certain kind of deregulation for themselves did is probably not follow their own instincts because of the role of money you have said that the media has changed a lot how is it changed since the watergate days could you  almost in every regard but your question is could could we or anyone else break that story today absolutely there's great reporting going on in this country and abroad as well particularly in countries where there is despotism there is great reporting going on but let's talk about this country look at the reporting that the boston globe did on pedophile priest one of the great pieces reporting last fifty years look at the wall street journal the washington post and the new york times every day there is a great reporting that the modern new york times is as great a newspaper as there has ever been the washington post even in its diminished circumstance financially and in the  cutbacks and it's trying to move in a new direction but back to the huge amounts of basic reporting and investigative reporting great reporting in there use notes and probe you look up and look look indeed at things like you would need an editor like ben bradlee and i publisher like kate graham and i'll talk about that a little later and the courage and fearlessness today showed and that could be a problem no i don't think it's a problem and the institutions i've mentioned times the post of wall street journal even under murdoch i think i think the wall street journal that he's left it pretty much alone and it does reflect work but how would that information be received intimate today's environment what happened to the system or prestigious job we did the stories cyrus's the new york times did some great stories time magazine did some great stories c b s did a remarkable coverage of the stories we were writing and then a republican judge judge in his courtroom forced the watergate burglars to acknowledge what we were writing that there was a cover up they were being paid for their silence next step the seventy seven to nothing vote by the senate and united states to conduct an investigation of senate watergate investigation into the campaign activities of the president of the united states seventy seven to nothing you could not get a seventy seven to nothing vote in the senate today to declare groundhog day it would be this ideological warfare and then when nixon refused to give up his tapes the supreme court of the united states was a republican chief justice appointed by richard nixon the president expecting that that chief justice would bring this home for nixon and that he would not be forced to give up his tapes what happened to chief justice and his other justices convened and they insisted there be a unanimous decision holding that no one in this country is above the law and clued in the president of the united states and the articles of impeachment voted by the house judiciary committee were the key votes i spent the last three days in illinois it was really moving because it's one hundred fiftieth anniversary of lincoln's death and to be in illinois and to be in springfield at that time is is really just a remarkable thing and you think of president marches down to the white house with other republican leaders when nixon who thinks he can beat in the senate in a trial that he'll be able to get a third of the votes in the senate trial necessary to be acquitted goldwater marches down there leads a delegation sits across from the president united states who has a very how many votes do i have in a sense you don't want to look sentences you certainly don't have mine mr president nor do you have many republican votes not enough to survive from two days later nixon resigned one getting two year industry around about i keep coming back to the same point that if we're going to have a functioning system have got to find a way that there is some kind of consensus about the common good and about the national interest and it's impossible in today's political atmosphere so that somehow some president may be able to do what obama said he could do has been prevented from doing certainly by the opposition party but also he has you know used to present the united states and could he have gone perhaps farther in trying to engage the opposition i think perhaps i think of one thing that there a while ago we finally met with white house you go in there you got pictures of jefferson lincoln washington and you know i've been there i don't know how many times since i'm sixteen years old went to work in this business you know one can your tummy every time you walk in the white house and in the power of the presidency and persuasion is inherent in that house and to not use it for that purpose so that such i keep coming back to this that this is the great question  fix our system do we have leaders in both parties and what's interesting about about the democrats it seems to me is that people like president clinton like hillary clinton like bill clinton have such a great understanding of our problems and solutions but are they willing to say and take positions that might be a little antithetical to conventional progressive even wisdom that that maybe there's some things that we've taken for granted so long perhaps about some quote in title myths maybe we do have to look at the cost of medicare i mean we do have to refashion medicare but you and and then of course you have the other party of such incredible obstructionism unlike anything i've seen in the in the fifty five years since i went to work when i was sixteen years old at the start so that's where we are you're listening to the westminster town hall forum coming to you from westminster presbyterian church on the neck with mall in downtown minneapolis i'm gary i can our guest is pulitzer prize winning journalist author and commentator carl bernstein reminder to join us here at westminster next month on thursday may fourteenth at noon senior pastor tim hart anderson will be back to moderate a forum featuring political analyst david brooks should be a dandy program going to find out more about the forum at westminster forum dot org and a reminder of course that all of our forums are free and open to the public now time for some audience questions so if you would please if you've got a question just got to jot down offers we'll pick them up and we'll get to as many as we can while waiting for audience questions karl what is a  that is directly a result of digitalisation of the web the old the quote traditional media is in retreat of the newspaper model economic model has failed hence the decline of newspapers but also even before the  web as happened here when mcclatchy came in or again that went into town after town and stripper do you know what that was when they came into those towns newspaper business in the late ninety's was still making one thousand percent a year and you know huge profit and what do they do most of them certainly can that came in took a two newspaper town close one down strip the local papers so there was barely any reporting left real reporting so this of things were happening before the web came along and and made things even even more difficult but the web is a great vehicle for delivering reporting i mean look read the new york times online and see what you can do online and you can't do in the paper infinite length for side bars for stories for video for documents and and also there is a diversity now of reportorial as well as opinionated journalism  did not exist in the seventy's and eighty's and even here in the ninety's but the noice of the internet of the environment of twenty four seven use definite and smothering but it also is serving customers who want to and not just young customers so i come back to this look we've always had yellow journalism i wrote a piece in one thousand nine hundred three a cover story for the new republic magazine called the triumphant idiot culture you can read it on my website well it was about it was about to find something else to read if i don't think i have it here i did it was about the increasing dominance in the press of gossip sensationalism and manufactured scream at each other and raise holy hell and you run out of the room rather than trying to dig deep about who they are about what the issues are about how they relate to their district all manner of things it's not real reporting but we've always had yellow press we've always had sensationalism but now as i wrote in that piece in ninety three and the situation is far worse since it is in the culture  configuration but it's not just journalism you can't separate reporting in journalism from the rest of the larger culture same with our politics all of this is connected in so much of the focus it seems to me when i read about it whether i read in vanity fair or whether i'm reading even in the new york post often or about these phenomena of where is the press where is our politics i don't see enough of a connection between the people of the country and the phenomenon it always seems to me is focused on the reporters it's focused on the press is focused on the politicians somebody out there must be watching this crap  and people make a lot of money off of it and also i think we've got to talk about one other thing here and that is fox  the fox news is probably the most potent political force that we've had in this country in the last thirty years it is jan you can't make a metric for this you can't prove it but i certainly believe it has changed our politics it has amplified views that nothing wrong with the philosophy perhaps or having a philosophical debate but so much of themselves really they're not really reporting organizations any anymore and so on all this stuff is connected that's the that's what i really believe in yes indeed desire to not have people know what was discussed in your work in that sense yes but i think it's very important to remember what watergate was about and i come back to her clinton in a minute and who richard nixon was he was a criminal president of the united states who presided over a criminal presidency but listen to this tape from june seventeenth one thousand nine hundred seventy one exactly one year before the watergate break and really there were five wars as bob and i have written in the campaign trying to engineer which really was what what happened in the watergate break in and related activities designed to try and make george mcgovern the one nine hundred seventy two nominee of the democratic ervin the chairman of the watergate committee said this was about undermining our very system of free elections in this country through political espionage and sabotage and his words going back to to read  what really happened but let's listen to this tape one year before the break in nixon is in the oval office with his chief of staff bob haldeman henry kissinger his national secure the advisor and they're discussing a file that they believe is in a safe in a think tank in washington called the brookings institution and this file from lyndon johnson's presidency which showed that his handling of the one nine hundred sixty eight bombing home was even more egre nixon's handling of the war and thus would make nixon look better and tend to undermine the antiwar movement which was making life so difficult for nixon so then you hear nixon's chief of staff say to the president  injure you can blackmail johnson on this stuff and it might be worth doing any smear and then just never says yeah but bob and i have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years they wanted to complete story that was in that file in the safe home and says houston swears to god there's a file on it at brookings houston here's an aide to nixon john trolls used in who in the first months of the nixon presidency was charged by the president to come goddammit get in and get those files blow the safe and get the president of the united states he wouldn't let the matter drop the president thirteen days later according to another tape discussion with all the many kissinger the president says break in and take it out you understand and the next morning nixon says bob get on the brookings thing right away i've got to get that safe cracked over there the president of the united states a criminal president of the united states right to get was not about a third rate burglary as the white house call the nixon continues to call it and later he said that morning who's going to break into the brookings institution so that's what we're talking about here and hillary clinton is e mails are not a bout a criminal secretary of state that sa there have attended the clintons and particularly hillary clinton i call it did to end of the of a woman in charge and it's in the context you have to read the book and i hope you will what i write has a quote difficult relationship with the tr always aspired to be better than conventional conventional but in her artfully crafted public utterances in written sentences there is almost always been an effort at baseline truthfulness yet almost always something holds her back from telling the whole story as if she doesn't trust the reader listener friend interviewer constituent or perhaps yourself to understand the true significance of events again back to the idea of the clintons and hillary clinton being somewhat sui generous halls enemies i'm like anything that we have seen in our politics until pr politically hopeless sidle intent of their political enemies and so all of this figures in it so i think we need to look at the context i think if you read this whole biography you understand this remarkable life the killer clinton has had since her childhood growing up in a family her father who had dot com again contrary to what she writes in living history about her memoir about this almost idyllic suburban childhood of hers in suburban illinois i won't you know i interviewed the people who knew her best including extended members of her family  hand everything about hillary clinton is more complicated than we've been led to believe but some of which to her detriment she has failed to convey what are the three biggest things that really in  her life that are consistent religion is the basis for some watching what she does she grew up in a methodist household came under the influence of a methodist wesley and teacher whose idea of christianity and the gospels we were in where the teachings of christ and his message about what must be done for your fellow man and that remains a big part you know when she went to the senate with no fanfare nothing on her sleeve she joined one of those christian prayer groups with all the right wing senators didn't make a big fuss about it she did it because that's a part of her religion family and then you begin to understand some of the dynamics because this is a real love affair between bill clinton and hillary clinton whatever you want i might think it looks like her has look like each is the brightest star in the other's universe it was a co presidency and if there is to be another clinton presidency it certainly will have large elements of a co presidency and bill clinton is certainly very brilliant knowledgeable about a lot of things so they're dimension then we need to look at what the record is of that and how she goes about it where what is humor citizen turn to get truthful news if you claim it's our responsibility to  you know it started brooke the journalism department downright teach different courses over a two year cycle journalism american history political science and memoir writing but the journalism department there had developed a course called news literacy is now exported to dozens and dozens of universities about how to sort through news if you really contributed or through media and if you're really interested in how to do it and it's a great thing and the more of it to do gets out there the better i first you know read the new york times every day and it's pretty good beginning for the washington post or the wall street journal but we also got to look at the fact that young people by a margin are not interested in reading the new york times or the wall street journal or or the washington post  but they carry on traditional news values of the best obtainable version of the truth but the web has such possibilities list look at what just happened with netanyahu in washington and  have this ability to pull out anything that we want but it's a question of discriminating and i think that's so hard for people particularly because so many people are looking for this newspaper people who have not said that they deserve to be attacked but have suggested that the media should take a look at itself and not deliberately insult inflame people what do you think about that think you've got to go back to jonathan swift i think you have to look at i did this notion that look there is there ought to be some kinds of self censorship for all kinds of reasons in various situations including certain national security secrets all kinds of things common sense but the idea that satire is somehow off limits is repulsive and also there's a real question here about the nature and the basic documents and the basic teachings of one of those one of the three great face they were they were a threat to the nation you're a threat to my well being i thought they were part of a very courageous group of people in washington d c who integrated the capital of the united states mostly left wing people working with you with white left wing people working with with black people you know it's i was thinking about it when i was in illinois yesterday and i went to lincoln's to me actually yesterday and my five years at the washington star bracket the civil war by exactly a century and that the civil war then still cast its shadow over the nation even more and in today much more than today particularly in washington how many people here i want to separate legally segregated public schools in the capital of the united states still brown how many people here know that this public schools in the district of columbia the capital of the united states were segregated till nine hundred fifty four one two three four and we're minnesota and this is an audience of people many of whom are in their fifty's sixty's and said so think about this the companion case to brown is bowling versus shark which is the d c school system  mother native of washington went to post segregated public schools that is as did j edgar hoover went to the same school she did and so the surveillance there was huge surveillance of left wing people in the nineteen fifties during the so called which chance mccarthy period a lot of the so called mccarthy i stuff begins earlier and and then harry truman's loyalty order which set up a system of loyalty oaths and government departments has a lot to do with what happened which is what my memoir about my family was partly about so i assumed at the time the surveillance was going on my parents assumed it was and there came a time at the star when i during the cuban missile crisis and in did my family got a that had provided for camps actually to be used to have wished in a national emergency that security risks would be taken to later we've seen the documentation of how hoover tried to set that in motion at the time and what those calls were i'm going to presuppose your question and say we're heading to snowden got about a traitor here well patriot something else not a hero not a traitor something else certainly in the tradition of whistleblowers which are like daniel ellsberg in the pentagon papers that he won't violate the secrecy agreement that he has signed that he has been trusted with secrets and now he's disclosing them and disclosing to me legally and yet he believes that the larger public good  makes this justifiable to me the amazing thing about snowden disclosures is that dave took so many people by surprise including in the press there was a book published in late eighty's early ninety's called the puzzle palace about the national security agency and what it what it does and this was still it even in the animal or here in europe i think it's a giant vacuum cleaner it sucks up all the electronic information in the world that it can possibly get into it's hopeless and then it puts it in a bag and it doesn't put the bag in the trash and it goes back through the bag and sift through the information when he needs given the charge of that agency and given terrorism and given the national defense in yemen that they're going to get every damn piece of information that they can and terrorism is real and it's a real threat not just to e but the threat is real and much more real than conventional warfare between nation states nation states saw this surprise at what the from this vacuum cleaner if you could have imagined what a couple of those committee chairman in congress might do if they could get their hands on some of this information surreptitiously i won't mention any names so the potential for abuse is so awful and there have been abuses there's no question so the great contribution seems to be of snowden is by real wakening in awakening people in this country and around the world to the scale of what's happened has revealed the total lack of oversight by the congress by the special courts that are supposed to be overseeing and regulating what the n s a does and obviously there needs to be some curtailment of some of of its mission  be mine where i would go with that program seen by question before we wrap up all the president's men you are portrayed in the movie by dustin hoffman a great actor woodw a really inspired choice and the great thing about the movie of all the president's men getting back to where we started it's about reporting it's not about our personal lives it's not about our characters it's about two guys aged twenty eight twenty nine years old who go out to do a story and it shows you how reporting what the best obtainable version of the truth is and how you might go about doing it that's it