In an exclusive interview, legendary journalist Bob Woodward speaks on his career, President Trump, and the current state of American media and the role of the press in a functioning democracy. The following transcript was edited for clarity. 

“I’d like to talk about journalism. There are certain basics. I’m interested in gathering facts, getting first hand witnesses, getting documents, getting notes, so we are able to say with authority what happened. I think that should be the goal of journalism.

[The role of a journalist] is to gather facts. Sometimes you can draw conclusions from facts that are obvious without injecting opinions, and sometimes an opinion is clear from the facts. Fact-based journalism is the best kind of journalism. Let people reach their own conclusions, or if the journalist reaches a clear conclusion, do it. 

I remember filming ‘The Agenda’ with 60 Minutes, and Mike Wallace did an interview with me. I remember it started out asking ‘what was the Clinton White House like’ and I think I said ‘chaos.’ If you look it up, Hillary Clinton said that book caused them all kinds of trouble.

Anyway, I go back to the first book I did with Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men, and of course, that is the process of reporting. How we came to write that book that way, I will tell you because I think it illustrates a number of points. It was Carl’s idea, he decided we should do a book about the White House, but so much was breaking daily, we said ‘my god, how are we going to write a book about this’ and we said, ‘well, one of the good rules in journalism is write about what you know.’ And what we knew was what we did. Carl’s initial thought was ‘that’s not going to work,’ and our editor, Alice Mayhew, who was editor on many, many of my books was reluctant but when we looked at it we realized that it worked because we held nothing back. 

We made mistakes, as we did absolutely real-time reports of what we did, in that case it was our reporting on Nixon and Nixon’s White House. Of course, when we first reported it in the Post, a lot of people didn’t believe it, and when eventually everything came out, the universal realization was true, but we had a somewhat understated version of that truth. When it happens, you face it and you try to avoid mistakes by being very careful. Firsthand witnesses, documents, that’s the basic principle.

You do the interviews, get the documents, get the notes. One of the things from Nixon and the earlier presidents, was that I didn’t actually interview them. Nixon was never interviewed by Carl and myself, so we had to base it on what others said. It was discovered that he had a secret taping system, and once that came out, the Supreme Court ordered him to turn in his tapes. Then, it all came tumbling out that what we wrote was not only true, but that he had not just acknowledged Watergate but that he orchestrated it and ran a criminal, illegal coverup of what they had done.

You never can remove yourself emotionally fully, I mean you can’t do that, but you try to get your emotions out of the process as much as possible and stick to the facts. 

I’m most familiar with The Trump Tapes, the book that has the verbatim interviews I did with Trump. With Trump the first book I did was called Fear because of an interview I did with him when he was a candidate. We were talking to him about power and he said, ‘real power, and I hate to use the word, but real power is fear.’ And of course, the first book was called Fear because it was right out of his own mouth, and he’s saying, which I think is reflective of the way Trump looks at the world, that you scare people, you use fear as an instrument. We now see him assume the presidency again, and he must have scared lots of people. 

The first book on Trump called Fear, he denounced and said it was made up. And then lots of people who worked for him and people who were in Congress that knew him said ‘it’s all true’ and then Trump agreed to be interviewed for the second book I did [on Trump] called Rage. I went to see him in the Oval Office and for the first interview, and he said ‘It was a mistake I didn’t talk to you for Fear. I know you asked, word didn’t get to me.’ And he literally sat there behind his desk and he said ‘I’ll make sure you get everything you need for the second book’ and so I did the second book, Rage, which was the last year of his presidency, 2020. I think I did nine hours of interviews. 

This was the year of COVID, and it took me months to find out that he had been warned that it was coming, COVID, and that it was going to kill 650,000 people. He didn’t warn the public, and kept denying it saying ‘it’s going to go away, it’s going to go away.’ I remember vividly the last interview I did with him, July 20th, 2020. He’s running again, he’s president, and it’s in the book, I asked him ‘what’s your plan?’ and I kept pressing him ‘what are you going to do about COVID?’ and he said on July 20th, ‘don’t worry I’ll have a plan in 105 or 106 days.’ 

I was shocked because I realized 105 or 106 days from that interview on July 20th was election day. He was worried about the election. Not solving the problem. His advisors told him he lost the election because of those interviews in which he told me ‘oh it’s going to go away’ and ‘don’t worry about it’, and never had a plan for tackling the biggest health crisis the United States has ever had in modern times. He was the president and he kept denying it and saying ‘it’s going to go away, it’s going to go away.’ 

And in the reporting I found that, if I remember the date correctly, January 28th, 2020, his national security advisor, Robert O’Brien said ‘this virus is coming, it’s going to be the biggest national security threat you will face in your presidency.’ That’s January 28th, there was one case of COVID in the country at the time. The deputy national security advisor spent years in China as a Wall Street Journal reporter, and had contacts, political and health contacts in China, and told President Trump it’s going to be like the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 that killed 650,000 people. So Trump was warned. And people forget that. The tapes are released. People can hear in his own words what he said. What I found out and what he did in 2020 is, and I have said this publicly, a moral felony, because he failed to warn the public of what he knew and that is one of the jobs of the president. 

It’s like if somebody went to Franklin Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor, with an expert or his national security advisor, and said the Japanese are going to bomb Pearl Harbor on December 7th and he just kissed it off and not told the public. Well we know he didn’t get that warning, it was a surprise attack. Trump treated COVID like it was a surprise health crisis, but it wasn’t. He was warned, he was told. 

This is the best job in the world. If someone came from Mars and spent a year in the United States and went back to Mars and said, ‘who has the best job in America,’ it’s a journalist. Why? Because journalists get to focus on what’s relevant, what’s going on, what hopefully has meaning. And so as a journalist, you hopefully get to focus on things that are important in people’s lives, and then you get out when it ceases to be news. That’s a great luxury. 

What is pressing and what has consequences in people’s lives, that’s the task.”

“You never can remove yourself emotionally fully, I mean you can’t do that, but you try to get your emotions out of the process as much as possible and stick to the facts,” said Bob Woodward.