Jim Lehrer

by From Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates

  The first subject on my list was “strong central government.” Did the founders have such a concept in mind?

  Wood, Rawlings, and Ellis gave brilliant answers.

  “Independent judiciary” was next. What was their thinking about that?

  Thereafter I moved the three great men of history on through “role of the presidency,” “type of economic system,” “taxes,” “standing army and navy,” “individual rights,” “slavery,” “God,” “free press,” “health care,” “education,” and “foreign policy.”

  To my own pleasure and amazement, the give-and-take among my three panelists—geniuses, I now think of them forever—was extraordinary. Not knowing what each was going to say, I was as freshly informed as the audience as I listened to each piece of information and insight about the founders’ intent.

  The bottom line for me was that I had escaped embarrassment, despite having violated a critical rule of moderating: Do your homework.

  I have not always been so fortunate.

  ON APRIL 16, 2002, with the tragedies of 9/11 still fresh, there was a panel discussion in the Spring Luncheon series at the New York Public Library. A full house of some four hundred or so library supporters was present for the event sponsored by the library’s active volunteers program.

  The subject was “America: What’s Next?” The participants were Washington Post foreign affairs columnist Jim Hoagland, presidential historian Michael Beschloss, New Yorker staff writer and author Nicholas Lemann, and novelist-poet Jamaica Kincaid.

  I was the moderator.

  I had done very little preparation, because I had spent hours covering stories and running discussions on The NewsHour about the various impacts 9/11 was having and would continue to have on all levels of American society. I assumed the library discussion would be mostly reactive and, in many ways, an expansion of the layers of shared sadness, grief, and fear we all had as Americans.

  I did go over the biographies of the panelists—I was already familiar with Beschloss and Hoagland—but did no further research on specifically what any of the four was likely to say.

  That was my first mistake.

  My second was to make a decision for strictly politically correct reasons. Here we had—counting me—four white males and one black female. So on that basis alone I began the questioning with Jamaica Kincaid.

  I have been unable to locate a transcript or recording of the discussion, but my memory and those of others has me asking a simplistic general question about the meaning of 9/11.

  Jamaica Kincaid’s immediate answer went right to what she had come to say: The people of New York City, if not all of America, must realize they deserve some of the blame for the attacks. Our militaristic, discriminatory, bullying attitudes and holier-than-thou righteousness, among other things, had essentially brought it all on ourselves.

  I could hear and feel a whoosh of collective gasps from the audience. Several people stood up and walked out.

  Beschloss, sitting on my left, whispered to me that it didn’t matter what any of us say for the rest of this panel “because the audience will remember this one thing from the event.”

  He was absolutely right.

  And the whole thing was my fault. First, I should have done my homework enough to know what Kincaid had on her mind to say. Then, PC or not, I should have gotten the discussion started on a more general track before opening the bomb bay for Kincaid. Her point would have still been heard loudly and clearly but within a context.

  Since I was not prepared for her strong statement, I sputtered and stammered to get other answers in response. Hoagland quickly disputed Kincaid’s premise. Beschloss took a similar position. And Lemann, on his way to becoming the dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, made a strong personal statement about the emotional impact the 9/11 attacks had had on the people of New York. The audience applauded.

  The event struggled on for sixty minutes or more, making it one of the longest hours ever for me as a moderator, with my face remaining the warmest it has ever been during such an event.

  In the end, there was no serious exchange of ideas. Kincaid’s opening blast had devastated the audience and set the tone for the discussion that followed. And I was unable, through questions or other means, to get beyond it.

  The point of the story is simply that I failed as a moderator, primarily because I did not go into it prepared.

  It definitely was not Jamaica Kincaid’s fault. She had a perfect right to say anything she wished. The responsibility was mine to make it work.

  My face reddens with the retelling even now.

  BUT I RETAIN a different kind of glow from the October 9, 1995, discussion among François Mitterrand, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Brian Mulroney, and George H. W. Bush at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

  The occasion was a private summit called “A World Transformed: Our Reflections on Ending the Cold War.” Former president George H. W. Bush was the host; the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and the Forum for International Policy were the sponsors. The invited audience of more than one hundred was made up of Bush friends, former officials of his administration, and supporters of his library, which was then under construction at Texas A&M University in College Station.

  For several hours, divided among sessions over two days, the former prime ministers of Great Britain and Canada and the former presidents of France, the Soviet Union, and the United States talked in detail about their involvement in events and decisions that began with perestroika and went through the various revolutions in Eastern Europe, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  To say that I “moderated” their discussion is not a precisely accurate description. Most of my questions were along the lines of “Is that how you saw it?” and followed longish statements, particularly by Gorbachev and Thatcher.

  But that was way, way beside the point.

  The pleasure for Kate and me and for all others present was to hear such things as Gorbachev recalling the first perestroika talks between American and Soviet officials.

  “I would not want to paint a perfect picture. We sometimes had quite heated arguments, and I was sometimes struck by the fact that our ideas were not properly appreciated among those in the United States, including among people close to the president,” Gorbachev said, referring to then president Ronald Reagan. “Some of them were saying that it was another Communist trick.”

  Mitterrand said, “What brought everything down was East Germany. They could not control the fantastic migration outflow from East Germany into Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and West Germany.”

  The former French president had already been diagnosed with the cancer that would cause his death three months later. His skin was gray and his body was frail, but his mind was as sharp as ever.

  Thatcher was her usual Thatcher.

  “You could not say it [the end of the Cold War] was inevitable,” she said, among other things, disagreeing with Mitterrand. “It wasn’t. It was facilitated.”

  She expressed a particularly dim view of Germans and reunification:

  “I, to this day, cannot understand why so many Germans, who are so highly intellectual, let Hitler do the things he did.…

  “There is something in the character of the German people which led to things that should never have happened. Some people say, ‘You have got to anchor Germany into Europe to stop this feature from ever coming out again.’ You have anchored Europe to a new dominant large Germany.…

  “In the end, my friends, it will not work.”

  Thatcher drew a sharp response from Gorbachev with her claim that the missile defense proposal by Reagan—the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, as it was called—helped bring an end to the Cold War.

  “We could find a response to SDI, as well,” Gorbachev said. “So SDI was not decisive in our movement toward a new relationship.”

  One of the most memorable Thatcher moments for me came at a small cocktail
party for the major players before a larger prelude dinner.

  President Bush took me over to one side within minutes after it began. “Guess what,” he said with a friendly laugh. “My friend Maggie’s got some strong ideas about how this thing is supposed to go in the morning. I told her it was your show and she should talk to you about it. Good luck, Jim.” And he slapped me on the back and walked away.

  Before I could take a breath or a first sip of wine, there was the former prime minister of Britain right by me.

  “Now, here’s what we must do,” she said, with no real preamble. I did not write down her instructions and I do not remember them precisely, but it was mostly a list of what she thought were the real causes of the end of the Cold War that must be discussed.

  I mumbled some kind of response and she went away.

  Afterward, President Bush, who only three years before had lost his 1992 reelection run to Bill Clinton, brought the summit to an emotional close. Tears filled his eyes as he thanked his four fellow conferees:

  “I loved our discussion. I so much miss this kind of Thing.…”

  He could not finish the sentence.

  CHAPTER 9

  Good Nights

  “Thank you and good night.”

  Those words, addressed to a TV camera or to a room full of people, are an “off” switch for me. Done! The knife-blade trip is over. Now I can breathe normally again.

  And begin to cherish the good but—mostly—to lament the bad.

  Much unhappiness came after the New York Public Library discussion. I had done a lousy job and I knew it. I also felt down after the three Bush-Gore debates in 2000 because of the overall mix of things—and having been whacked in The New York Times.

  But so it always goes.

  Some moderating mishaps are truly unavoidable—and unchargeable, so to speak, to the moderator: an audio line goes dead, a TelePrompTer stays dark, a Secret Service agent blocks the path to the debate stage.

  The ones that hurt are those where bad judgment and/or poor preparation caused the calamity. Both played a part, for example, in the library fiasco. I look upon the good end result of the discussion with the Colonial Williamsburg historians as an undeserved miraculous escape.

  Preparation normally works on several levels for a moderator. Hard editorial research—homework—is critical for forming questions, but there is more to it than that. Homework is also the route to confidence: to know that whatever happens, mechanically or intellectually, I can deal with this, whether a candidate violates the rules, a question bombs, or a sentence comes out incomprehensibly.

  I have in my ancient journalist mind what I call “the click.” It began for me nearly fifty years ago as a newspaper reporter in Texas, and I have carried it with me as the guiding force in my work in journalism ever since.

  The click comes when I know I am ready. Sometimes it happens almost immediately after I conduct one or two interviews or gather a few pieces of information; sometimes it comes later. And sometimes the click never comes. The story is not ready and may never be.

  Today, the click mostly signifies that I am in my zone ready to sit across from somebody or a group of somebodies and conduct a fair and fruitful exchange.

  For a presidential or vice presidential debate, the search for the click is long and hard. It is the grail behind every moment I spend preparing for a debate. Until that click comes, I am not fit to live with and not easy on my colleagues, family—or myself.

  A most critical aspect of the click has to do with listening to the answers. If my preparation is limited to only writing questions, there will be no click—no real one. Most anyone, even ten people off the street, as they say, can think up some form of question.

  Not everyone can be relaxed or comfortable enough to seriously listen to the answers.

  As I see it, the airwaves of America are chock-full of television and radio people who ask memorized precisely worded questions and then seemingly ignore the answers and move on to another prepared question.

  From the click comes an attitude for listening that is not only sensitive to follow-up possibilities but also to engagement, which I believe is essential for any real public exchange to work.

  The language between and among the parties should be that of the body as well as the mouth. Nods of agreement, head shakes of disagreement, frowns, and smiles are all part of such an effective exercise. There is nothing more disconcerting to a participant, for instance, than to answer a question while the interviewer is looking away or down at a paper for the next question.

  That is one of the reasons that I always—always—do my best to keep my eyes—and mind—on the one talking. Yes, it did lead me to miss the Big Sigh news of the first Gore-Bush debate in Boston, but the trade-off was worth it.

  There’s a made-up example I often use in speeches to explain the hazards of not paying attention to what is being said:

  Q: Senator, do you believe the U.S. should sell more grain to Cuba?

  A: Yes, Jim, I do. But first we should bomb Havana.

  Q: What kind of grain, Senator?

  There was a very public real-world reminder of the listen/follow-up challenge in January 2010. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was talking on ABC’s Good Morning America about the 2009 Christmas Day bombing attempt on an airliner bound for Detroit.

  “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” said Giuliani, referring to former president George W. Bush. “We’ve had one under Obama.”

  The interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, moved on to another subject without first noting—for Giuliani and the audience—that Bush was president when the September 11, 2001, attacks occurred. There were other Bush-era terror incidents as well, including the shoe-bombing attempt on an airliner flying to the United States from London.

  The New York Times, following the lead of several bloggers, jumped on the Stephanopoulos story. He answered on his own blog:

  “All of you who have pointed out that I should have pressed him on that misstatement in the moment are right. My mistake, my responsibility.”

  MY MISTAKE, MY responsibility.

  Honest, professional words that must be at the ready for all of us who interview and moderate.

  I have a personal example that is much worse than George’s.

  It happened during my interview with then president Bill Clinton on January 21, 1998, that day in infamy when the Monica Lewinsky story broke.

  I had a long-scheduled conversation with Clinton to preview his coming State of the Union address. The White House had agreed to at least thirty minutes, to be taped at 1 p.m. in the Roosevelt Room next to the Oval Office for broadcast that evening. It was a significant coup for me and The NewsHour.

  With the help of NewsHour editorial and research staff, I had spent hours studying the ramifications of the pope’s visit to Cuba, which had just begun, as well as cramming about Bosnia, the Middle East, the Asian financial crisis, racial tensions, and affirmative action. I went to bed that night feeling prepared. I had done my homework.

  The click had come.

  At dawn’s early light, I went out to get the morning newspapers from our front steps.

  Across the top of The Washington Post was the headline: CLINTON ACCUSED OF URGING AIDE TO LIE.

  I reacted with a two-word shout, the first word being “holy.”

  I quickly read the lead paragraph:

  “Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr has expanded his investigation of President Clinton to examine whether Clinton and his close friend Vernon Jordan encouraged a 24-year-old former White House intern to lie to lawyers for Paula Jones about whether the intern had an affair with the president, sources close to the investigation said yesterday.”

  Paula Jones was a former Arkansas state employee who had sued Clinton in civil court for allegedly sexually harassing her when he was governor.

  Now I uttered another two or three words, none of which is repeatable, in the early morning quiet.

  And I knew I was abo
ut to have one of the most important interviews of my small career or, more likely, no interview at all.

  There was, in fact, considerable uncertainty between the NewsHour and White House staffs for the next few hours before we were given a final go.

  At the request of ABC News and then of the other networks, we even agreed to allow everyone in the broadcast world to take the interview live. Our commercial colleagues were amazed that we had not held on to it as an “exclusive,” only to be aired by us at a time of our choosing. NewsHour executive producer Les Crystal and I made the decision on the grounds that we of public broadcasting had a special obligation to share. I remain most pleased—and, yes, even proud—of what we did.

  At 3:20 p.m. the first major post-Lewinsky-news interview with President Clinton was under way. We of The NewsHour saw it as a kind of coup of coups.

  LEHRER: Mr. President, welcome.

  CLINTON: Thank you, Jim.

  LEHRER: The news of this day is that Kenneth Starr, independent counsel, is investigating allegations that you suborned perjury by encouraging a twenty-four-year-old woman, a former White House intern, to lie under oath in a civil deposition about her having had an affair with you. Mr. President, is that true?

  CLINTON: That is not true. That is not true. I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth. There is no improper relationship and I intend to cooperate with this inquiry, but that is not true.

  So far, so good. Or so I thought at that most hairy, scary moment.

  LEHRER: No improper relationship, define what you mean by that.

  CLINTON: Well, I think you know what it means. It means that there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship.

  LEHRER: You had no sexual relationship with this young woman?

  CLINTON: There is not a sexual relationship. That is accurate. We are doing our best to cooperate here, but we don’t know much yet, and that’s all I can say now. What I’m trying to do is to contain my natural impulses and get back to work. It’s important that we cooperate. I will cooperate, but I want to focus on the work at hand.