Huh, Something Good on the Sunday Shows

Woodward and Bernstein were interviewed about the constellation of scandals that became known as Watergate on Face the Nation:



The high points from the transcript:

WOODWARD: ……… And so what happened here is -- and Carl and I have spent a lot of time looking at tape transcripts, and listening to these tapes and so forth, and you see the real Nixon come out which is kind of the dog that never barks on the tapes. Nixon never says, what's good for the country, what do we need. It was always about Nixon and it was using the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge in a horrendous way.

………

BERNSTEIN: When we were the writing the final days we started to encounter this, and it's in the final days in person after person would tell us about how he railed against Jews and about blacks and finally Arthur Burns, the patrician economic adviser to the president said to me while we were reporting on the final days, Nixon had epithets for whole sections of mankind. There was an anger.

………

WOODWARD: Yes, and then, also, if you look, he was -- he was vice president for Eisenhower for eight years. And there's some marvelous reporting that's been done on this, which shows that Nixon was snubbed by Nix -- by Eisenhower, that Eisenhower never brought him in. And -- and Nixon felt that America was filled with a series of clubs that he could never get into.

And it -- and it just burned him. And, again, it's on the tapes. He'll -- he'll say things like, oh, you know, all those -- he joined -- after he left the vice presidency and lost the governor's race in '62, he went to practice law on Wall Street.

And he says on the tapes with this kind of seething bitterness, you know, any of those lawyers ever ask me to their country clubs and ask me to go out and play golf with them?

Not a one.

………

WOODWARD: Yes.
But, um, what -- it was seven years ago I went over to do what turned out to be the last interview with Bob McNamara, who was secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson, Mr. Vietnam, and who apologized for Vietnam. And it was three hours. And he had an apartment in the Watergate and I kept pressing McNamara, you know, squeeze out what's the final lesson of the mistake of Vietnam?

And he said, there's one lesson, and that is the advisers to the president need to sit around with the president and argue with him and say, wait a minute, let's look at all the options. Uh, you have to create a conflict situation.

And he said what happens in the presidency is no one wants to argue with the president, particularly in front of other advisers. So the president gets isolated and lives in a bubble.

And I think you can argue that happens to every president, including this one.

I think that this last bit might be the most important lesson.

The founder of GM, William Durant, was famous for not allowing a major decision to made if everyone showed up at the meeting in agreement. He thought that it meant the idea had not been properly thought through.^*

I think that he was right.

In addition, I think that any President who goes to a meeting of his staff/cabinet and thinks that he is the smartest guy in the room is likely to be have even more problems with the bubble phenomenon, because they will find it natural for people to agree with him.

^*I cannot find this bit on the Google machine right now. I recall hearing it on the radio at some point in the past century.