Bob Woodward – Missouri Boys State – June 18, 2013 – Q and A, parts 1, 2 & 3

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Bob Woodward, missouri, Missouri Boys State

On Tuesday evening Bob Woodward, author and associate editor of the Washington Post, was the keynote speaker at Missouri Boys State in Hendricks Hall on the campus of the University of Central Missouri. He spoke for approximately twenty minutes, then took questions from the audience for close to an hour.

Bob Woodward, associate editor of the Washington Post, taking questions from the audience

in Warrensburg at Missouri Boys State on the campus of the University of Central Missouri on Tuesday evening.

The question and answer portion, part 1 – on journalism, partisanship and balance, the lack of resources for oversight, true believers, and reporting on Watergate:

Part 2 – on national security versus the story, mistrust of government, Watergate and Nixon:

Bob Woodward;…it is astonishing to hear the rage and anger and, uh, it, the job of the president is to serve the country and the dog that doesn’t bark on thousands of hours of Nixon tapes, to my knowledge no one ever says, what does the country need, what would be right? The question always was, uh, what’s, how can Nixon use his power to use, uh, the power of the presidency to, uh, you, kind of come up with vengeful acts, get the CIA, the IRS, get the, uh, FBI on people who are political opponents. Well, the presidency is not something to be converted to an instrument of personal revenge. It’s about what the country needs. And that doesn’t come up in the Nixon tapes. That’s the horrify, it’s not crimes, abuses, in the end the sadness of Nixon is the smallness that was always of him…

Part 3 – on the Watergate burglary story, All The President’s Men and Deep Throat, print and online media, the practice of journalism and pursuing interviews: