When Fintan O’Toole – no mean scribe himself, of course – welcomed legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to the stage of Dublin’s Olympia Theater this past week, he said: “If you’re a journalist, you hope that you might sometimes accurately report on history. Very, very few journalists actually get to make history.”

It felt, O’Toole said, rather like a musician preparing to interview Beethoven.

Thus began an evening of entertaining anecdotes, observations and lessons spanning the past almost half-century in journalism and politics, with connections, parallels – even warnings – in a direct line to the present day.

Woodward has written 19 books, his most recent being Fear: Trump in the White House, which looks at the current incumbent’s transition from reality TV star to candidate to president and his chaotic approach to “governing”. But Woodward will always inevitably be linked in the public mind to his very first book, All The President’s Men, written with his reporting partner Carl Bernstein in 1974, based on their Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Watergate crisis and the downfall of Richard Nixon.

Woodward’s great skill in producing such reporting, which he spoke about at length, was his fundamental ability to get people to talk to him. But he said it required a proactive approach to newsgathering; going to see people at their homes, not just relying on a telephone or online sources.  “We’ve got to retool our reporting procedures,” he said.

(Yet, by way of indicating how different methods inevitably work for different ages, witness how a more recent Post Pulitzer winner David Fahrenthold used groundbreaking crowdsourcing techniques to track and document funding around Trump’s charitable activities.)

Regardless of the story, though, Woodward said, “The most potent words in journalism remain ‘I need your help’”.

“Carl always used to say ‘you can’t call people up and say ‘I  know you stole the money.’ But you have to let people know that you take them as seriously as they take themselves.”

There was a perfect moment about half an hour into the evening when O’Toole announced a special guest was in the theatre, before bringing out Bernstein to audible gasps and applause from the audience.

Bernstein himself has been covering Trump recently for CNN and said that just as important as what’s next for the American political process is what’s next for the press, and – in yet another echo of Watergate – how does the press cover a Republican party reluctant to turn on its figurehead?

Then and now

The timing of the Dublin event was appropriate, given that the break-in at the Democratic National Committee that set those historic events in motion took place on June 17, 1972. But also because Trump’s declaration for president was on June 16 just four short years ago. The debate around the nature of political reporting in the age of Trump has rarely been sedate or restrained, and it flared up again the day before the event with a “then and now” article in Woodward’s Washington Post by media writer Margaret Sullivan, arguing that “Journalists can’t repeat their Watergate-hero act. The reasons should make us grieve.”

In it, she argues: “Back then, what was said on the three networks — often fed by revelations from [Woodward and Bernstein]— was largely believed. Much more than now, there was a shared set of facts. That doesn’t mean there was agreement about what to do about those facts, or that there wasn’t plenty of political spin and denial. (“I am not a crook,” Nixon famously said, though he was.)

“But in general,” Sullivan continues, “straight news was not relentlessly countered by bad-faith propaganda in the style of Fox News’s Sean Hannity. (Recall that Fox News, with all of its intended-from-the-start evils, was founded in 1996.) News came to citizens from sources they trusted — including their local newspapers. While many editorial pages supported Nixon almost to the end, front pages all around the country were telling people what was happening, blow by blow. Those papers are no longer a major news source in many places. Facebook, though, is.”

The contrast between then and now, both in reporting and political behavior, was a theme Woodward touched on recently at a Q&A following a screening of the “All The President’s Men” movie at the American Film Institute, the same day as special counsel Robert Mueller’s press conference about his report into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

And Woodward and Bernstein were asked about those contrasts in a question from the Dublin audience.

“We need to look at today’s situation in real time,” said Bernstein. “Both the media and political cultures are very different today than they were 50 years ago. A big difference is the amplification of information that isn’t curated.  The curatorial function, exercised by newspapers and television, used to provide the best obtainable version of the truth. Today’s counter movement often has no curatorial responsibility whatsoever, and many people are just not interested in the truth.”

“So we have a totally different atmosphere, and Trump and his people are very effective at understanding the social media dynamic.”

As if to prove the point, even in the past few days, Trump’s onslaught on the press has intensified, from attacking Watergate figure John Dean to “hitting back” against the “corrupt media”.

And this very weekend, the president used Twitter to accuse the New York Times of a “virtual act of treason” over a story concerning cyber measures the US was taking against Russia. The Times article on Saturday said that there was a “broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction – and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials.”

On Sunday, the president tweeted:

‘Chaos is habit’

In the run-up to the Dublin event, Hugh Linehan interviewed Woodward for the ‘Inside Politics’ podcast at the Irish Times and wrote about their conversation in an article famously titled “In fairness to Trump, he hasn’t started a war.”

Linehan writes: “One really important point to understand about the American presidency is that the concentration of power is almost unimaginable,” [Woodward] says. “Presidents can start wars on their own. The president has vast influence on the economy. And Trump, because he exploits the communication channels so aggressively with the tweets and the daily statements, he has enhanced his power, quite possibly more than any president, at least of the nine I’ve written about.”

And in a theme Woodward returned to on stage: “We have, let’s face it, a governing crisis in this country. He [Trump] is not focused on governing. He does not have a process or a strategy except let’s make America great. And he will decide on the spur of the moment what to do. ”

Onstage, Woodward emphasized the point, saying “For Trump, chaos is habit.”

I guess we’ll just have to see how long Linehan’s headline holds true.

Woodward said he was currently working on a second book about the Trump administration. During questions, my colleague Matthew O’Neill asked whether he’d return to Dublin to talk about it when it was complete.

“We may have to move here. Is there asylum? ” Woodward responded.

Matthew O’Neill adds:

Woodward and Bernstein’s recollections offered the audience a masterclass in investigative journalism as well as an analysis of the current state of the practice and institutions of their craft.

But what dominated as a recurring theme of the evening, in comparing Nixon’s presidency with that of Trump, was the evolving conceptualization of power: how a presidency has the power to inspire but also, in its newest form, instill fear.

Woodward’s insight was clear and direct as to how this presidency is going and what the current incumbent’s legacy will be. For anyone who has been keeping up with contemporary politics, it’s no surprise that he thinks it’s not going particularly well.

Woodward’s nineteen books – studies of power and its effect on the individual – offer readers a interesting comparative analysis which often gets lost in the world of Trump. In taking the time to assess recent presidents, it is clear how a level of still-unknown political precedent has emerged during his time in office.

So the question I went to bed pondering was how do we look beyond Trump and the election of 2020? And how do we make the changes necessary to develop the mechanisms and robust structures we need to hold power accountable?

What’s most apparent is that this isn’t solely an American question but a global one. The evening’s message was clear: within the different institutional structures we need to start doing our homework to develop a holistic approach, not only to understand where America is going, but the direction democracy as a whole might be taking.

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward with Northern Slant’s Steve McGookin, Julia Flanagan and Matthew O’Neill in Dublin