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[applause] >> thank you. we are at booth 508. anybody who will sponsor one of our children gets a best-selling, a best-selling book of all time on how to start a business and so i hope become an c.s at booze 508. we are real proud to be here. >> steve mariotti is the presence of thnational foundation for teaching entrreneurship. he is also the author of the young entrepreneurs guide to starting and running a business. this presentation as part of freedom fest, a libertarian conference in las vegas. to find out more visit freedom fest.com. >> david broder appeared on booknotes in 1996 and lked about his book$ "the system" the american way of politics at the breaking point." co-written with haynes johnson. the book examines in detail how congressional partisanship prevented changes in the u.s. health care sysm by the clinto administration in 1993 and '94. both brodeur and johnson are pulitzer prize winners. this is an hour. c-span: david brod, 668 pages on something called "the system," with a capital t-h-e. what is it? >> guest: well, you might ask why would anybody want to read a book that long about the fight over a bill that never even came to a vote, the health-care reform effort of '93-'94. actually, what we're talking about in this book is not health-care policy, on which haynes johnson and i claim no expertise. it's a political bk. it's about how our system of politics and government operates or doesn't operate these days. c-span: well, does it operate? >> guest: it fails too often for us to take much comfort in it. i've been covering politics for a very long time, and as a journalist, t as a partisan, i have a stake in wanting see this political system of ours work. when we took the health-care issue as an example, it was because in 1993 it appeared to be obvious to everyone -- repuicans, docrats, indepandents, th people in labor, in business, in government -- at our health-care system was in serious trouble anthat something needed to be fixed. it was eating us up with its costs. there were mlions of americans who didn't have bac health insurance. there was a pretty broad agreement in the country that we need to address that question and, obviously, president clinton had made it a major promisin his 1992 campaign. so we began lookg at what the governnt and the political system was going to do with this problem. we had no idea when we began whether we were going to be chrocling a triumph or a disaster. it turned out for clinton and the democrats and, i think, for the country to be more of a dister and, unfounately, that's not the only issue on whicgovernment has failed to do sething the pple expected it to do. c-span: how did you and haynes johnson divi up the work? >> guest: well, haynes and i have worked together for a very long time, first at the d washington sr, when it was in business,and th for many years at the washington post. we had collaborated on lots and lots onewspaper projec, so we were very accustomed to sharing each other's reporting notes, to writing drafts and passing them back and forth, and basically that's what we did with this booc. many of the interviews we did together. when the effort reached capitol ll, i did most of the reporting on the house side, and haynes did most of the reporting on the senate side, but we were back and forth on both sides of the capito and both ofs were talking to people in t administration and in the interest group communi. what we did at the outset, brian, was to make arrangements, work out, and if you will, deals with many of the people who were clearly going to be important players in this whole process, from the administration, the white house, the departments, republicans, demrats on both sides of theapitol, and many of the people in the interest group community, wheree would come talk to them regularly and debrief them about what was going on, and personally how they felt about what was going on, with the idea that these transcripts -- because all of the interviews were taped and then transcribed -- would be saved, and we would be writing about this retrospecvely, not at the moment that we were interviewing them. c-span: what do you inude in "the system?" >> guest: what wmean by "the system" is the political parties, the interest groups, the press, and theormal agcies of government, th the executive and legislative branches. c-span: you started your book out by giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the famous teleprompter-glitched speech opresident clinton. why? >> guest: because it smed to capsulize so much of what was right and what was wrong about this wholeffort. if you look back on it, it almost seems to tell the whole story in microcosm. what ha@pened on the evening of september 22 was. c-span: 19. >> guest: it's 1993. this is eight months after president clinton has been inaugurated. he has promised, initially, to have a healtcare proposal ready wiin the first 100 days, and the task fce has labored and tried to get it ready and, in fact, has somethi done within 100 days, but by that time he is enmeshed in the battle of the budget, trying to sa his basic budget and economic plan, so they tell the people who are drafting the health-care plan, "cool it. just keep it to yourselves. we don't wanany leaks about health-care policy that could screw up what's going on in the dg thing." so from may until september, just like in the song, the health-carpeople, led by hillary rgdham clinton, are sort of there, impatiently twiddling their thumbs, waiting their chance to get their issue out on the agenda. so finally, on september 22, 1993, the president comes up didn't before a joint seson of congress, where he is going to kick off the effort for health-care reform. first of all, the speech is something that is constantly being rewritten and rewritten and rewritten again in the white house because the president and mrs. clinton are not satisfied with what they have. huge backstage frantic battles going on, last-mine changes beg penciled into the speech, if you can imagine it, in the limousine taking the president up to capitol hill. because it's all so last-minute, they need to get the speech into the teleprompter for the president to use when he's delivering it, but they don't actually have the text of spee. so the signal corps technicians who actually run the teleprompter up for the president -- up when he goes up to do one of these speeches, they want to rehrse and be sure that all of the equipnt is working right. so since they don't have the actual speech, they load in e spee that he had give seven months earlier, his economic policy speech, into the teleprompter. they check out all of the equipment. everything seemso be working. then at the last minute the white house aides come rushing in, saying, "here's the health-care speech." well, unfortunately, they hadn't purged out that earlier economic eech. so when they load in the hdalth-care speech, it goes not at the top, but at the bottom of ge after page of ecomic policy speech from the previou february. so the president gets up onto the podium, looks at the teleprompter, turns around to vice president gore, and says, "they've got the wrong speech in the teleprompter." and he told us when we interviewed him in the oval office -- we said, "what did it feel like?" he said, "i thought god was testing me he said, "i thought maybe he was sending me a message that i was not supposed to be doing this." it took them sen minutes to get the instraightened out and for that seven minutes he was literally winging it on what he himself said was probably the most important speech, at least up to that pnt, in h presidency. one of the other casualties, brian, of this frantic last-minute scramble was that he didn't have the large type reading copy that they usually prepare, so he's looking down at a little bit -- you know, typewriter size script but he had worked on the speech so well and so thoroughly and so hard at he was basically able to wing it for seven minutes unti they got the right speech up in front of him. we tell the story at the beginning of the book because it capsulized so much of what was right and what was wrong. he really waimbued with this message,nd he had this sense of mission about "now is the chance, filly, for this country to provide a guarantee of health care for all its people," something that presents as far back as theodore rooseveltad tried to do, and a message that had been at the heart of the democratic party r 60 years when he came to office. but in the actual execution of it, everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, and that turnedut to be the story of the whole health-care effort. c-span: you say that -- this speech was going on that stan greenberg was out in dayton, ohio, i believe i meer, with the dial group. >> guest: yes. c-span: explain this. >> guest: well, stan greenberg was the president's pollster, and this is a white house -- not unique, but certainly characteristic othis white house -- that everything they do, they poll on, before, during and after. and he was polling on the reaction to the prident's speech as it was being given -- had room full of people, average citizens, cross section of americans, saing there wi these little sort of joystic like you use on a computer game in their han when they liked something, they turned the dial this way; when th didn't like what they were hearing, they turned ithe other way. and he was relaying the scores that the president was getting toanother white house aide, rahm emanuel, who was set up with a long-distance phone right in the cloakroom off the floor of the house of representatives. so when the president came off the podium, he could turn to rahm emanuel and say, "how did i do and there was the score. he did very well, by the way. c-span: do you think -- when the american people learn all this kind of, you know, things going on behind the scenes, what's their reaction going to be? >> guest: well, i don't know. when we wrote the book, what we did not wanto do was write another book -- there ve been a lot them -- that said "this system is really screwed up; there's no reason for you to think that it's going to be able to solve anyf the countrs problems." we wrote -- ended up writing about two failures, whh we didn't know. one was clinton's failure in '93-'94 to bring his health-care reform plan to the point where it could be voted on. the other was the republicans' failure 1995 -- because we rried the story forward till really the beginning of this year -- to make their effort to try to find ways to save and reform -- find savings and reform medicaid and dicare, the two largest government health programs, which als failed to come to fruition. despite that, what we hope people will take away from this is a better understanding of where the choke points are in this system of ours, because if you understand what thsystem can do and can't do, if you understand what some of the roadblocks are to effective action, then i think we learn from that and can go forward. i'm not a pessimist myself about this country's prospects. i think we have the capacity to deal with the kindf problems th we face in this country, but it's hard in this kind of a system of politics and governmentand we tried to tell, not through our own eyes as much as throu the voice and the experiences of the people who are actually in this struggle, what it is that makes it so difficult. c-span: of all the people you talked to inhis experience, who surprised you up close? >> guest: well, a number of people. you know, i' been covering congress since theiddle of the eisenhower admistration, which really sounds like sort of paleozoic times now, and i thought i kn a lot about how congress operated, but it's different when you go back and do this kind of retrospective reportinwhere you say to people, "now that you've finished the markup in the ways and means committee, i'd like to try to understand what was going on in the caucuses there." because i saw what was happening publicly, but i wasn't, obviously, in those closed-door meetings." this is not for use immediately in the washington post. this is for a book that, if you ll, is an effort at history of this thing, and i'd like to know through your eyes what was happening in those closed-door caucuses." that's a different kind of reporting from what i had done in the past, and there were any number of surprises: ver prominent committee and subcommittee chairmen who were nominally trying to move this process forward, but were actually so opposed to what the president of their party had offered that they were quite willing to see it sabotaged. that came as a surprise to me. one of the great surprises, i think to both haynes and me, came when we were talking to speaker -- now speaker gingrich, then house minority whip gingrich, who said that he had a conversation with a close friend and adviser in 1991, a full year before bill clinton was even nominated for the presidency of the united states. and in that conversation, they were talking about, u know, what over e horizon? and mr. gingrich said to us, "we decided that the next great offensive of the left" -- that's his phrase -- "would have to be health care." that was where they would have to try to mobilize the resources, bringhem into the governmentif they were going to try to expand their grip on the middlelass constituency of the country. and he said, "realizing that, we knew that whatever it was that clinton proposed, we had to defeat, because if we had allowed it to succeed, then th democrats would have, as they did with social security and medicare, lock a whole large constituency of americans into believing at their health care depended on having friends running the governme." that was an astoshing statement to both haynes and to me, that he had figured that out far enough in advance, and that he was tough enough to make that the driving force in thehole republican opposition to the clinn plan. c-sp: you report on a private conversation that senator jay rockefeller had with, among other people, hillary rodham clinton, where he -- well, you can expln it in your own words, but he basically was angry? >> guest: he was very angry. this is now about the enof 1993, three months after the president has made the address, gotten the thing well-launched, but in the meantime, the president's al bn trying to get the nafta trade agreement -- free trade agreement passed. he trying to help vice president gore launch the reinventing of government. he's doing the brady bill and 20 other things, all of which were on the white house agenda at the same te. and senator rockefeller, who w -- i'll put it mildly, an ardent champion of health-care reform, goes to his friendthe first lady, and said, "you people are screwing up. you don't have an organization here at the white house that is focused on what has to be done to persuade the country and the congress to ss this legislation. you have to get your act together or nothing is going to happen here. c-span: and he kept -- if i remember rightdidn't he want harold ickes into this thing? >> guest: he kept urging them to find somebody with political smarts who could pull this thing together. mrs. clinton had worked primarily with ira magaziner in developing the health-care proposal, d mr. magaziner, to his credit, recognized that he s a policy person, but not a political person, not somebody who could manage this on capitol hill. and rockefeller kept saying to the white house, "who are you going to get who's going to focus on this and getting this through the congress?" and he suggested harold ickes, whom he haknown through the campaign, and who he knew the clintons felt great comfort with as somebody who was a skillful operative. ickes was doing other things in w york -- running a mayoral campaign -- and he had some doubts about whether he even wanted to come to washington to take on this kind of a challenge. in the end, in january of '94, the clintons persuade ickes to come down, and the first day that he is in the office, he finds that, instead of working on health care, he is struggling with this great humongous mess called whitewater, and was distracted by that from beginning to end of the year. c-span: you point out that mr. ickes knew washington pretty well before he got here, and if you were reporting back there during the eisenhower years, can you tell us who his father was? >> guest: his father was a fellow chicagoan, a grand man called harold ickes, an independent bull moose progressive who franklin roosevelt brought into his cabinet as secretary of interior, where he raised hell every single day with others in the administration. his son, who was born when the cabinet member ickes was quite an old man, very different personality -- quiet, reserved. in many of the crucial meetings about health-care policy, this harold ickes said virtually nothing, kept his judgment to himself, and then would whisper in the president's ear about what he thought should be ne. c-span: chicago was how long in your life? >> guest: well, i grew up in a town just ouide chicago -- it's south end of cook county, called chicago heights -- and basically lived in chicago the first 21 yea of my life, until i went into the army. went to high school, through high school in chicago heights, and then went on to the university of chicago on the south side, and then went from there into the army. c-span: what did your parents do? >> guest: my dad was a dentist, and my mother was what i guess now call a homemaker. she worked in a factory during world war ii, when they were looking for people to fill in for the people who were off, men who were away in the army, and she worked in a factory during those years, but then came back and managed the household. my dad was a dentist at a time when people didn't have much money to pay the dentist, so he did most of his work on a barter basis, and i tell myids this now, and they can hardly believe it because their own experience with dentists is so different, but he was there whenever anybody wanted to ow up. he'd have an early supper,nd then he'd go back to the office, keep the office open, you know, from 6:30 until 9:00 in the evening in case anybody had a toothache and needed to find a dentist. c-span: is hstill alive? >> guest: no. both my parents have died. c-span: what did he think of you getting into the journalism business? >> guest: he thought it was pretty dumb. there had never been a newspaper pers in our family, and there was no reason to think i could -- and, actually, my own -- i knew that i enjoyed working on newspapers. i'd started in high school, an i knew it was fun, but issumed also that, you know, at some time i'd have to grow up and get a real job. c-span: now this is a tough question for you to answer maybe, but when d ople start calling you the best political reporter, especially in the urnalism business, in the country?" the dean." >> guest: well, i can tell you when they started calling me a dean, which is when i lost my hair and what was left turned white. i was very flattered the first couple of times somebody referr to me as "the dean," and then a friend ofine said, "broder, before you get too inflated, rememb there's only one letter differencebetween being dean and being dead." so that put it all very good and well in perspective. c-span: do you remember, though, when that started? >> guest: oh, i don't kn. i mean, i'm 66 now, and i look every year of my age, so i expect it was probably, you know, at least 10 years ago. c-span: and do you know why? i mean. >> guest: i became "the dean"? c-span: yeah, but what is it that you do that people all of a sudden said, "there's the best political rerter in the business?" >> guest: well, i don't know that any large number of people believe that. i certainly don't believit mylf, but what's been unusual, i think -- there are a few others whoe done the same thing -- is that i have stayed essentially in my little rut of covering politics for a very long time. the post understood that i was incapablof managing my own desk so i shouldn't be managing other people, and they've left me be a reporter, and that's been lky, and i've enjoyed the political beat. i don't find it gets boring wi the passage of time. c-span: when did you have time to write a bk like this in the ddle of all the other stuff that we see you do? >> gst: well, i was e of the people at the post who was covering this heal-care battle for the newspaper in 'nd '94, and then i took about six months off in the first half of '95 and worked full-time with haynes on writing the book, and we got the bulk of the book written by the middle of that year, and then decided, because the medicare and medicaid figh was going on so hot and heavy on capitol hill in 1995, that we should delay the publication. we'd originally planned to publish in the fall of 1995. we decided -- our editor, jim silberman, at little brown really suggested this, and i think he was rightat we ought to carry this story forward through '95 to round out the picture of what happened when the republicans tried their hands at dealing with the health-care problem. c-span: what did you study at the university of chicago? >> guest: the undergraduate college was a strict, straight liberal arts program. the president of the university of chicago then was a fellow named robert maynard hutchins, who believedhat there were, you ow, a set of great books, classic writings over the centuries that educated meand women ought to be familiar with, and that, by reading those books and subjecting them to critical analysis in the classroom, you could learn to read anything critically and skeptically. it turned out toe -- hutchins certainly never envisaged it as a training program for journalists; he had a very low opinion of joualists -- buit turned out to be a wonderf sort of educatn for journalists because a lot of at we do, as you know, is reading people's reports, speeches and so on, and it basically taught me how to read. i started working on community newspapers in chicago when i got out of school, and took some graduate courses in political science and economics there,nd ended up getting a master's degree, but truth is, i did not belong in a graduate school program. i was not a serious student. i was already pretty addicted to journalism by that poant. so most of the education i think that was useful to me and that i've relied on i got as an undergraduate at chicago. c-span: where'd you go after you got your master's and after you did the community newspapers? >> guest: well, i went in the army for a couple of years during the kean war, and after i got out of the army, i got a job on the bloomington, illino, pantograph, a fine paper, then about 40,000 circulation in a city in central illinois and coveredwo counties for the state desk, livingston and woodford county, basic courthouse beat and feature stors. we carried those big heavy speed graphic cameras along with us because the paper didn't have a separate photo staff so a big day was a day when there was a car wreck on route 66 and you got there before t victims had been removed from the car wreck. the only thing that turned out in retrospect to @e unusual and advantageous about that beat was that the county seat of woodford county is eureka, illinois, and eureka, of course, is the home of eureka college, the alma mater of president reagan. and he would come through quite frequent. he was tn working for general electric. there was a ge plant in bloomington and reagan would come in, talk to the workers and the executives in the ge plant and en go up the road to eureka and talk to the college students. so i started hearing reagan's speeches. this was -- get the years right -- this was '53 to '55, and when he came back in our lives as govern of california and presidential cdidate and president, i was hearing some very familiar lines. i mean, one of the great things about presidt reagan was when he had a line that worked kept using it. it stayed in the reperry. so that was fun. c-span: when did you marry? >> guest: marrd in 1951, the same year i graduated and went in the army. c-span: where did you meet your wife? >> guest: the university of chicago. c-spanhow many chiren did you have? >> gst: we have four grown sons now and six grandchildren. the wonderful thing is that all of our kids we boys and ve of the sixrandkids are girls so we've been very lucky in the next generation. c-span: any of your sons get into this business? >>uest: one of them, matthew, the third son, worked on newspapers for a while after he graduated from yale. but he decided pretty quickly thate di't want to be a spectator, he wanted to be a player. and he's worked both in state government up in connecticut and now in private industry up there. and, think, made t right -- he wrote very well and still does some writing in his job but i think he was wisto respect his own feelings -- you know, journalism is a very odd professi because it requires you to stand back from experiences that most people rightfully feel they want be involved in. i was kidding a moment ago about those car crasheon 66 but, in fact, you know, when you came upon a car cra a you were a journalist, your instinct was take the picture and then get the story. that's not the normal human instinct. the normal human instinct is to pitch in and try to help. and therhave been many times since then that i've realized that what you give up in being a urnalist is that sorof human response and human connection. i felt it very powerfully. i happenedo be on assignment for the washington star in dallas on the y that president kennedy was killed. well, you know, that was not a story i wanted to deal with as a journalist but that's your job. c-span: in the back you bring up "pfiles in courage." about six senators you say, written by john f.kennedy. why did you bring that up in relationship to writing your book about the system? >> guest: well, because one of the lines that president kennedy used in that book, thinking back -- i'm sorry. i quote his line about "victory has 1,000 fathers, disaster is an orphan." but the rerence to president kenfeds "profiles in coura" comes in a section where we're trying to talk about some of the people in the system who, despite all of the pressures that were operating on them, showed themselves to be men and women of real courage who stuck to principle, who foht for what they thought was the right thing to do and resisted enormous political pressure to dotherwise. c-span: now you name a lot of people in this book. is there any one person that comes out of this, in your opinion, as someone who really has principles? >> guest: well, there is more than o. i guess two that are particularly appealing to me. one was a man that i knew quite well from his years as governor and a senator. the other is sebody that i did not know at all well. first is senator john chafee of rhode island, who had developed a powerful interest in people's health problems during the years that he was governor of rhode island that's a state thas small enough that the goveor gets to know a lot of individual citizens and what they're struggling with. and some of those struggles that chaf encountered back then stayed with him and made him a passionate advocate for trying to bring more people into the health insuranceystem. he kind of pestered bob do to create a task force on health-care reform back when the bush administration didn'teem to be very interested in the issue, led it for many years, and under just unbelievable essure from ny in his own party and ultimately his own leer, senator dole, to abandon the effort and to hand president clinton a real political setback. john chafee fought and wked till the last possible day. the other person, a man i did not know at all well, was bob reischau, who waat the time this battle was going on the director of the congressional dcet office, a classic, professional civil servant. and reischauer, because the cbo scoring s so critical to what was going to happen to the health-care proposals from all camps, reischauer was just beat about the head and shoulders constantly by politicians to on his estimates of the cost of their programs, the workability of their programs. and we tell the story the bookbout a meeting that he had after one particularly tough sessn withenator ted kennedy, who called him on the phone and really chewed him out for what he thought -- kennedy thought reischauer was going to do to damage the prospects of the clinton plan being aepted. and reisauer meets with the aders, the other top professionals in the congressional budget office, and said, "look, i want you to know that if we include this chter that raises ts of questions about the thing, it may be polically impossible fors to continue. congress may raliate against this non-partisan budget office that it created to serve itself because many of the powerful leaders in this congress don't want to hear bad news. what should we do?" and he asked f a secret ballot vote among the top professionals in the cgressional budget office as to what they shod . and unanimy they said, "keep that chapter in there. if we lose our integrity and lose our reputation for being honest in our assessments, there's no point in having this ki of operation." c-span: you wrote the following near the end in the chapter lessons, lost opportunities." the task force joke about living on "planet ira" contained a hard truth. many in the white house said of the reform group, quote, "they're so smar let them figure out how to pass it."' who's planet ira? >> guest: well, we're talking here about i magaziner, who was the business consultant from rhode island who came down, joined hillary clinton as the staff rector of the presidential task force at put together this proposal. ira is, to me, a very appealing and, in ways, almost sad sort of figure. he's extraordinarily bght, has an amazing retentive mind and the ability to deal with policy issues of a complety that boggle my mind. he is,y his own admission, quite lacking in human rations skills. and he found himself in a situation where he became sort of the symbol to critics of the plan on capitol hill and in the administration, both democrats and republicans, for everything that they disliked about this project. the president made a critical decision when he decided that instead of using the normal bureaucratic process to put together a policy proposal he would bring the process inside the white house and put his wife, hillary rodham clinton, and his good friend, ira magaziner, in charge of the press; because that meanthat whatever they came out wh and he approved, his fgerprints were going to be all over it and it made it very, vy difficult for m then to negotiate for serious substantive changes in that design. c-span: by the way, how did you anhaynes johnson divide up the chapters or did you write the whole thing together? >> guest: no. when we started writing, we basically did, you know, the chapter outline of the book d said, "well, i'll, you kw, take a swing at the first draft on this one." d then the drafts went back and forth to t point that it's very hard, even for us now, to remember who wrote which paragraph into which draft of which chapter. c-span: did you write on a computer? >> guest: yes. c-span: were you able to switch band forth and. >> guest: yes. we had discs and we had a wonderful research assistant named elise farron, who knew the computers better than we did. so she managed to keep everything working technologically. c-span: this is a couple of sentences i want to read you about how you two got to this point." but at no point, we believe, has the cumulative assault on the idea," in italics, "of responsible government been so destructive of the very faith in the democratic system as now. thorouly cynical society, deeply distrustful of its institutions and leaders and the reliability of information it rdceives, is a society in peril of breaking apart." how close are we? >> gst: well, i think ere's great resilience in th country. we've come through some much tougher times than we face right now. what's disturbing about this particul perind is that so many of the american peoe have come to believe that their government has been captured by aln forces. and what we've tried to say in this book "the system" is, "yes, there are powerful interes that are operating in the system at distort and deflect the course of public policy," as i think has happened in health care for many, many years. but there is also a way to remedy those faults that is built into our system of government: that an informed public which really knows what it wants to see accomplished can put prsure on its representatives to do the right thing. i also hope we've conveyed the message in this book that fgr all the essures that operate oneople inside the system, there are still a lot of polhticians who are in there struling to do what they s as the right thing almost every day. c-span: you criticize th journalism world a you say -- "today's journalism geared to the reality of a fleeting public attention span, looked at the issue and threw up its hands in horror." why is t public's attention span so fleeting? >> guest: people lead pressured lives. it's tougho lance the demands of a job or two jobs in families where there both father and mother are working, with the responsibilities of parenthood and the human need for a little time off to enjoy yourself and have some recreation. and people, i ink, understandably feel at what's happening off in washington is not something that they can ta the time to master. the difficulty is that our system of govement does not work where tre is t a sufficiently informed public opinion to really drive the public policy process. and what happened in '93-'94 and again from the other side in '95 was that the folks who had a political or economic interest in stopping action had the resources and the skills and the know-how to create what haynes and i essentially argue is a false public opinion. and the republicans just basically sced the hell out of the country about the clinton plan being, quote, unquote, "government-run health care," -- stopped it from happing. in '95, the democrats scared the hell out of the country about the republicans, quote, unquote, "destroying medica and medicaid" and stopped it fm happening. it's easier for the forces now that wanto put roadblos in the way dealing with problems to achieve their endthan it is for the people who are actually trying to solve the problems. and the press's part in th thing, i think, brian, is that we are struggling -- press, newspapers, as much at least, and maybe more than the electronic side -- how to capture people's interest and attention long enough to give them the information they need to make up their own minds. the saddest single fact about the press performance on the whole health-care fight was that thlonger it went on, the less people knew accurately about what the alternatives were that were being debated in washington. instead of public knowledge increasing, publ knowledge actually diminished. and that's something that we, in all branches of the press, really have to come to grips with. c-span: what's the difference in yourersonal, i don't know, satisfaction level from being a panelist on "meet thpress" a doing one of your long series or a book like this? >> guest: well, i'm a print person. i joy the interview rk on "meet the press," i enjoy en i come on c-span. but i'm very clear in my hed, i'm a print reporter. that's what i do for a living. write columns that apper in papers around the country. but 90 percent of my workd is spent reporting for the washington post and that the one thing i think i have some sort of notion as to what i'm doing when i'm doing that part of the job. c-span: but when we see you on sunday morning at the table there with t russert on "meet the press," you can watch your face and watch all of you move in on whoever the guest is and you react. do you plan it out? do you and tim sit down d say, "you ask this, i'll k this"? >> guest: there's a little bit of agenda setting, to this extent that we get together and have coffee a half-hour, 45 minutes before the program goes on the air live and sort of go through the list of possible topics. usually there are many more subjects that you coulask the guest about than you'll actually have time to do. so we talk, you know, what's most important and so on. tim always leads off and he will geney tell the other questioners who are on the panel, "i thk i will start with such and such. where doou want to go from there?" there's a general sense, sort of, of what the topics may be but nobody, you know, hands you a list of questions and says, "he's what we want you to ask today." c-span: what's the worst thing sobody can say abouthe inteiew after it's over? they've watched an hour of "meet the press," you've been a questioner, what's the worst thing they can say to you? >> guest: well, the thing that i hate to hear the worst is, "why didn't you ask such d such as a follow-up question?" the only real skill, i think, that's involved in that kind of interviewing is to be sure that yoaren't so focused on what e next question is that you may ha written down on a piece of paper that you don't hear what the guest is saying because yowant to hear what that guest is saying and pick up thclues and do for the viewers what they clearly want, which is to say, ell, if he said this, why didn't you ask him about such and such?" that's what you really try to do. c-span: let me grab some sentenceout of your book and just get you to, you know, elaorate a little bit." amerans have learned from bitter eerience not to take their presidents at their word." >> guest: well, th's hardly original thoug but it isadly true. the term "credility gap" i think came into the language -- i think was coin by former washington post reporter named murray marter and it came into the language during the johnson administration in reference to vietnam. and there've been enough instances since then when american people have learned, to their sorrow, that the chief executive was not exactly leveling with them. c-span: you're talking about the system a couple pages later. you said that, "congress disappead long before bill clinton came to washingt. in theenate, it was overthrown by television and by the new form of lone wolf entrepreneurial politics." what did you mean by that? >> guest: well, this really does go back a way. in the 1950s, senators like estes kefauver and then john kennedy discovered that the senate could be a wonderful launching platform for national political careers, that you could use committee hearings on television to dramatize issues. and the senate, at that point, became much less the club that it had been before that. the members of senate became much less involved with each other and th the daily task of legislating and much more concerned about using the senate as a platform to raise their own visibility and raisehe visibity in the whole country particular issues that they were concerned about. c-sp: i'm reading again, "the most stunning fact about this entire effort is that when the democrats ntrolled both hoes ofongress and had in the white house bill and hillary clinton, the two most knowledgeable and committed advocates of universal healthare coverage in histy, they failed over two years even to bri the measure to a vote. and i'll go backnd read that first paragraph." the most stunning fact about this entire effort" why i that the most stunning thing? >> guest: because i think it reflects -- i mean, the democratic party is 200 years old now. for a third of its entire history, that party has had at the heart of its platform the plge to try to make health a right for every american. this was a moment when they had a very talented president who was seized of this issue, understood it, did it very well, controlled both houses of congress. and that party's failure to do that tells us something, not ju about mistakes that bill clinton or hillary clinton may ve me but about, really, the collapse almost of political parties as institutions that can move issues on the country's agenda. what happened to the democrats was very simple. there were so many of them that had their own notions about the best way to do this,hich differed from the president's way, that they were unle to come to an aeement among themselves about a plan. now e other side of the story, i have to say is -- and we've told it, i hope, with equal forcin the book -- is that the republicans -- newt gingrich, from day one, and bob dole, as time went along, and otherat different stages of the thing -- republicans decided as a matter of party stregy at it was in their interest to thwart the president on health-care reform and they were very, very effeive in doing it. c-span: "but there is no balance of power when business and its allies line up against organized labor, consumer groups a other liberal organizations." guest: well, you asked earlier about what surprised me about this. this reporting experience has totally changed my mind aboet sort of what serious political reform means. for mostf e time i've been a reporter, the big focus of political formers has been to try to limit t amount of private money going into political campaigns. i think this heah-care fight showed that you could take all private money out of our system anit still would not inhibit the kind of lobby and intere group organizations that were operating in this fight. they have moved so far beyond buying access to legislators through campaign contributions that they don't really depend on that anymore. organizations like the national fedetion of independent business, the health insurance association ofmerica have made themselves, in effect, political rties. but they're not parties that have a broad platform and th don't have a broad membership. they have a narrow platform reflecting the interests of their particular constituencies. but they do everything now that political parties do. they run media campaigns, harry and louise on the health insurance association of america. 's brilliantly effective media campaign. they have their own field organizations. indeed, nfib -- feration of independent business -- had more people o working the grassroots than either the publican party or the democratic party hadorking on the health-care fight. they have become full-service political parties and we need understandhat if we're going to be seriouabout taing on what would constite political reform in this d and age. c-span: you know, we start off talking about the teleprompter at that speech. and in the middle of youbo you talk about fellow by the name of larry o'donnell and the pen. >> guest: yes. span: and the quote, "you will force me to take this pen. >> guest: yes. c-span: veto the legislation and then we'll come right back here and start all over again." how important was that moment in that speech when the president threatenedo veto if he didn't get it all? >> guest: well, we ought to -- larry o'donnell was senator pat moynihan's chief of staff on the senate finance committee, which ant that he was sort of the guardian of one of the major passageways to the floor for that health-care legislaon. he found his dealings with the clinton white house mind-boging because it struck him that these folks did not understand the rudimts about congressional politics. d the threat of a veto, which e president issued in his january 1994 state of the union address, four months after it had begun was mind-boggling to mr. o'donnell because it was so clear to him from his perspective on capitolill that the only way anything would be passed would be through compromise and substtial compromise on the presidens part. hear him come before the congress and say, "if you don't give me the bill that i asked for, i will veto it," seemed to him to signal that, as he put it, that he was dealing with a bunch of amateurs down there. c-span: you have this line in the book, "o'donnell distrusted the clinton planners, especial maganer." that's larry o'donnell working for pat moynihan in the same party that bill clinton's in. >> guest: that is right. c-span: how much distrust is there in this town among all these different people within thsame parties? >> guest: a great deal. and you find the same thin i think, true on the republican side today now that they are in the majority in the congss. there are fundamental disagreements tween some of the more ardent reform types -- revolutionaries if youill -- in the house republican party and the compromisers, as ty would put it, over in the senate. and milarly, senate republicans look at those house republicans and sa you know, "those people are naive their expectations." so that intra-party difference is there on both sides. what was so fatal to the health-care reform hopes when the democrats controlled the white house and both houses of congress was that there was no one who seemed tbe capable of pulling them together. obviously there were different perceptions in this. but despite a really sort of heavy effort on the part of then senate majority leader george mitchell and house majority leader dick gephardt, they were never able to get the factions and the factionleaders in the democratic party to sit down and say, "here is what we can take the floor." and the story that we tell in the book, which reallyas told us by tom foley, tn the speaker of the house, about to be defead as speaker in hi re-election in washington state. foley said that the most maddening thing to him was that for a full month in the summer of 1994 when health-ca reform was hanging by a thread, he had to arbitrate over and overgain jurisdictional battles among house democratic committee chairmen about the question of who was going to control ts prograin the future if, by some iracleit was ever enacted. and that, think, gives you so measure of how parochial and sortf inbred the democrats had becomet the end of tha 40-year reign on capitol hill. c-span: we only have about a minute left and i want to ask you, when did the president say to you, "i set the congress up for failure. we made the error of trying to do too much, took too long and ended up achieving nothing." when was that area? >> guest: that was in the summer of 1995, after the '94 electn when the republicans were already in ctrol gf congress. c-span: where did you do that interview? >> guest: in the oval office. c-span: how often did u st down with the president for this? >> guest: that was our only interview with the president. we had several with mrs. clinton and most of the other key players in the administration. c-span: holong total would you have talked, then, to bill clinton and hillary clinton r this book? >> guest: well the interviews with the first lady, several of them went for many hours. i suppose probab 12 hours in total. c-span: and how about the eaker? >> guest: the speaker we talked to severalimes, but the most interesting interview came after the '94 election when he was speaker and not when he was operating as the minority whip. c-span: you got another book you're ready twrite? >> guest: not at the moment. c-span: are you going to write that autobiography someday? >> guest: i don't think there's any greademand for that. c-span: this is called "the stem" and it's co-authored by haynes johnson and our guest for te last hour, david broder. we thank you very much. >> guest: thank you. vid broder won the pulitzer prize for commear in 1973 and the national prfo