Transcripts For WHUT Charlie Rose 20131106

To cover the story and tell more. Well, yes and no. I think there is an irony there is certainly more coverage than ever before because of more outlets. Rose daily journalism. Right and minutebyminute journalism and the irony is, because there is so much and the candidate are so wary of it you dont have anything like the access if you are a daily reporters even the Television Reporter with a lot of access you dont have anything like the access people had in teddy white day. Even at the beginning of my career, 1992 i would fly in a small plane with governor clinton and talk, so much access to bill clinton on that campaign there were nights on the charter where he would come back to talk to us and we would pretend to be asleep because we spent the day talking to him but now the theeld is so absolute, 500 long interviews, not short interviews and part of why we were able to get stories that dont come out during the campaign is because it takes a lot of interviews and a lot of matching up interviews and going back to people and crosschecking to get the kind of behind the scenes, so it is not cash it is not possible to, impossible to get little bits of it but if you want to tell the whole story you need time doing it and that is not possible with the demands of ily journalism. Rose is it easier because you have done it before and they say here comes halperin and heilemann and they know the book will get a real reception and they want to make damned sure their story, their perspective, their side of the story is told . You know, we worked on the last. Rose and not report it the next day. Well there is that, we worked on the last book and we did we worked on it for a shorter period of time and did fewer interviews with fewer people because we did it for a shorter period of time. This was for three years. In both instances we wanted to talk from candidates to spouses, high level, mid level staffers, low levels, the caddies and the drivers and talk to everybody top to bottom and in both cases only a handful of people that we wanted to talk to wouldnt talk to us in both cases. That doesnt mean it was easy in both cases, in fact it took an he for mouse amount of time and effort and we had to beat stories down sometimes but in both case it is truth is, basically people want to tell their stories. Rose and thats why the book and they think what they are involved in is important to history and important to, they worked hard on it and they want the story told and they want it told accurately and fairly and i think they trust us to do that. Rose so who wouldnt appear . Who wouldnt talk . We talked, we cant talk to who we dont talk to but it is a very small subset and it is really like pushing on an open door to sit with people, because we sit with people for a long period of time, i mean, many cases after the action is over and we sit with them and say tell us your yo your stories, i know you come with, we dont come with an agenda and we come with open arizona. Rose there is this woodward and bernstein they had very different skill sets, do you two have different skill sets. We do everything together and part of why it worked as a collaboration is because we recognize that two people in the room doing interviews, two people outlining chapters and two people writing chapters all of that is better when you have two people doing it we generally see eye to eye editorially we dont have a lot of disgeeps about who to interview and what to ask but on the margins having a second brain involved in the process is great, and just to go back to the interviews, we are talking about people cooperating and, you know, we both love to interview people. It is the most interesting part of the process but these are not adversarial interviews, with few exceptions. Rose because you get more information that way. But also because it ised just not the style of the book we are doing but as i said, we generally in the interviews, rarely you rarely have something that the other was. Going to ask the same question. Rose so the thrust of most of the giewfs is tell me what happened and why . And to piece things together, we are trying to tell a story that involves people. You know, people in campaigns are very busy people and so you can ask somebody what happened a week ago and they will say, i have no idea, so finding the people who remember, who are credible, and then crosschecking everybodys story who has knowledge of something, it is a long time and a lot of work but again the ability to have people know us, trust us, understand what we are doing and to cooperate so that if we say to someone, everyone else in the room remembers it this way you are the lone hold out how do you explain that, to be able to assess dissenting voices because the way we write the book on the only nicialt, omniscient voice, but we have to find a consensus. If i use the word gossip would you accept that . No, because and we sort of you know, bridal at that a little bit. Really . Not that it is something unconfirmed, everything in this is reported to the standard both of us have learned and used over our entire profession and we dont put in things to titillate but to illustrate the high human drama of what it is like to run for president. If we wanted to write a gossipy book using low standards and things that were just titillating we would get a ton of attention. Rose and you couldnt put them in because you couldnt confirm them. We can butt them in gossip but not confirmed fact. Rose what is the rule. The rule is a normal journalistic rule. Rose sources lets say we did this book in 1972 and president nixon said to us, i am very concerned that theeingly is going to hurt my chance of reelection. No, in that case you wouldnt need a second source, that president nixon was concerned about the economy if he said it to us in an interview, so two sources in many cases. Rose you were there and somebody in the room said this happened, then a and somebody else said it did not happen then we keep going back and try to figure it out. Live is not a consensus we dont put it in the book. Is that right . Yes, we leave a lot of stuff out that people using different standards may put it in. I mean a lot of the book has these books both have very novelistic qualities and the truth is there are some cases where good source is good enough, attesting to what their thoughts and feelings are, one source is fine in some cases, a fact, two sources are thing, if the hinge is documented in an email or audio recording again one source is enough. If we are reconstruct ago scene seven sources is what it takes to make sure we have the dialogue in the given scene. The standard, we try to apply the deliberate professional standards to what any given situation requires, sometimes it is one source and sometimes two and sometimes six. But there is nothing in the book if you look at the definition of gossip there is nothing in that book that is unverified. Rose what is the narrative here . It is a narrative nonfiction and in some sense it is not that different from what a lot of writers that you and i and mark all admire and have been doing for a long time in business coverage and Technology Coverage and sports coverage, we are not doing anything here, we are reinventing the wheel you can look at all of those areas in the last 40 years from the time in the mid sixties journalist started writing like novelists like dialogue and scenes and recreating things and we cite all of the antecedents going back but those doing this in a reliable way, famous people have been doing this for the last four decades and we feel we are continuing in that tradition and when we be it the stuff in the book we feel that we need to be able to be 100 percent confident that no one in the room is going to stand up and say it didnt happen that way and so our standards of caution are just extremely high. Rose all right. This quote from peter hanby in the washington post, the Halperin Heilemann method, a number of those set for interviews told me, he would invite a subject to a private room at a restaurant or a plush hotel suite, ply them with booze and let the stories flow but the alcohol was unnecessary the wild sblg of the first volume guaranteed that insiders would talk this time, indeed in a summers worth of casual conversation with veterans of all the campaigns, it was difficult for me to find anyone who didnt consent to an interview with the pair. Well rose what do you any of that . I will cherry pick on that. We wouldnt to have the first interview to have interviews conducted over meals. And a nice beverage. I would say i can think of a few of dozen in the 500 interviews that involved any alcohol whatsoever and it was futzer than a dozen a glass of wine or two into sure. We had a lot of cooperation, but it didnt come easy in one sense as john said before but it does in a sense as i said, we have known almost all of these people a long time, we are very respectful of their time and very respectful in terms of preparation, so that we, the interviews are productive for them and people finally like to tell their story, but want to be part of what a lot of them think will be pretty one of the definitive accounts of the campaign. Rose if before this book was published and they came to both of you and said, what is the onestory in here that you think is the most interesting, newsworthy, what would you say. That intervention with the president on the eve of the second debate, which involves a look into the mind of barack obama as a person, as a politician, as someone running for reelection that we think is as illuminating about him as any scene anyone has written. I totally agree, what do you any . I would never want to dissent from the two of you. There is a reason why it is right there on the cover of the magazine. Rose new York Magazine by the way. Rose but there was so much talk about that polling about hillary, i just thought it was just silly, i thought. The only question i have about it is did they tell the president , did the president sign off on in and was this something he was interested in the answer . I dont know the answer from your piece. Look, to talk about that and then to get to intervention, i think when the white house chief of staff and people like david enough and axelrod say this presidency is in real peril the president may not get reelected lets consider bringing in Hillary Clinton and bill clinton to join the ticket i think that is news. Rose but did they say that or we just have to test everything . Did they say lets really consider bringing in. Lets test it and see. Rose lets test it and see and consider bringing in poll comes back that it didnt show much of an impact and the poll say it in helped the president 12 points in the race and widen the gender gap. Rose they would have said lets consider that. But rose . We are not we are no charge of all of the coverage of our book so it is not like we trumpeted that above Everything Else in the book. Rose somebody did. Jonathan martin wrote about it in the New York Times and decided it was newsworthy, look the story rose it was not the biggest story. The story had been rumored for a long time. Rose right. And widely denied by the white house and i will say that, you know, in the course of the reporting of the book, this was not the easiest hinge to confirm, because they considered it a big secret. Rose yes. Now, whether we both, all agree there are much more powerful human interesting and newsworthy stories in the book, in our opinions, but people inside the Obama White House at the highest level considered that a very closely guarded secret and they did it for a reason. Rose because they didnt want to offend the Vice President. Maybe and because it also attached i think as bill daly said publicly just how low the president s political standing was in the polls and it was one of the things that the people a popular morning program. It is one of the things. Rose a popular morning program. It is one thing that people forget that really comes through in reading the book is just how much the president s people, you know, when the election was over, everyone, you know, especially some people hooked back and said oh this was all in the cards from the very beginning, the economy was beginning to approve the Approval Ratings were not that bad and when they say that to us and thats not what the president s people thought, including the president in the fall of 2011, at the time when the Hillary Clinton testing took place they thought they were at best a 5050 gamble and possibly the underdogs at that point, given the president s ratings and where the bad economy was and there is a a drama, even embedded in that story the context of that hillary, biden story, it tells you something about just how bad off the president and his people thought he was, not that far out from reelection. We are extraordinarily proud of the reporting of the intervention. Rose and you should be. I tell you why, because that was another story no one wanted us to get. Rose there ask something about dash there is a more interesting story than the polling, because it reveals something about the president. A president we think is the most confident person we have ever seen. You. You asked in the beginning what the difference was in the two books we had an an incumbet and one challenge about writing about the democratic is president s get covered a lot so we had today, what could we say about barack obama that would be new and different and revealing in the context of the campaign, and this scene on the eve of the second debate when the whole country, when the whole and the president s werent until he had a collapse of two days before the debate when he is practicing with john kerry standing in as mitt romney, the events leading up to that conversation, at that practice session and after when they do an intervention with him, the day before the second debate, again, the people should read it and see, it is extraordinarily revealing about how the president thinks and feelings, which with this president is hard to get at normally. Rose what did he say and what did he think and what did he feel . He had been struggling, charlie, with two different problems throughout the whole period of debate prep up to before the first debate and in the second which were, you know, on one hand he was he thad this longterm historic, we discussed this on the program on more than one occasion, disdain for the they at cal at this and the showmanship of politics for a person who was as extraordinary, whose performance skills carried him as far as Barack Obamas did he distrusted political performance and he hated televised debates, on the other hand he has personal and political contempt for mitt romney and trying to balance out those things led him into a quagmire before the denver debate, he swore he could bounce out of it coming out of denver and seemed to be on the right track and then kind of latches back to a worst place in this bad mock, two nights before hofstra, they get him in this room, the morning after that mock, david axelrod, david enough, jack lew and the. Debate coach the four of them and say basically, mr. President what is wrong with you . You know, you are not doing this. Something is going on inside your head that is keeping you from performing the way you need to perform to win this election because we think that the voters might accept one bad debate performance but if you do another thing like denver which is, which last night was even worse than that you could lose the whole election. And this is what David Plouffe said if he does this again we could lose the conversation they had to have the conversation with him and here he is on the cover of the magazine i am not wired in the way that this event requires. I dont know if i can do this. In is as unnatural for me as asking me i am lefthanded and asking me to write with my right hand i am lost and expressing a discomfort with the kind of campaign he has been running all yearlong people have been criticizing him for not having enough of an agenda, his team is telling him to run run on his agenda. Rose and he said. I dont really have that big of an agenda, i am not running on the kind of plans i ran on in 2008 and i am frustrated by that, what am i supposed to do here, it is kind of an extraordinary moment all of the people who have seen seen a lot and known barack obama well, they all felt, they were in uncharted territory here with the president and having existential crisis three weeks before election day and 36 hours before the most important debate of the cycle, it is a kind of rivetting dramatic thing. Rose mitt romney. When you look at romney we had a series of things come up, he was on i guess meet the press on sunday talking about this. What emerges on the part of this man who also had a certain confidence in himself, because he had been very successful in business, and he had been governor an there is some reservation about running. Yeah. Rose himself. I think the most, there is so many, there is small, there is discreet nuggets and headlines but one of the overarching things hardly no one has focused on the book so far is the extraordinary kind of ambivalence he shows throughout the process, ambivalence about getting in, ambivalence about how to proceed at certain times, gas receive at this in the face of challenges, over and over again, he is almost the opposite of the guy with kind of the fire burning in his belly who is determined to run, determined to win, do whatever it takes, i mean, there are a series of things in the book where, you know, particularly late in the campaign, where you see him confronted with mistakes that his campaign made or he made, acute things like the 47 percent which we go into a lot of detail where yes and his campaign it seems as though it is on the ropes and the republicans think in at the on a death spiral and we portray him in the book as kind of having a dark night of his soul wondering if he just blown his chance to beat barack obama thinking there is a good chance he might and more than that, that this thing, this thing he considers a mistake that he has made, that he expressed himself inartfully and he is getting, i believe, blamed, mischaracterized what he has said, again whether you think he is rationalizing or not, but he believes this might be his epitaph and yes ket, even though hhe has all of that on top of hm and he is self flagellating to an extreme degree he never does anything that is kind of dramatic to try to solve this problem, and this is true throughout the entire arc of the election he is a guy the Obama Campaign painted as if he were the archetype of ambition, calculating, scheming all he wants to be president and throughout the book, throughout double down you see him as anything but that. Not to say he is more valiant but say he is much more ambivalent and much for passive in the face of challenges than you could possibly imagine. Rose there are so things to talk about here and i want you guys to come back, you have been doing a lot of interviews and so am i. There is this too. The question that has now gotten some play with Chris Christie for the governor of new jersey on election day, what is that issue here with respect to the vetting of Chris Christie . Well, governor romney was interested in a running mate who would help him, and interested in a running mate who would not hurt him, he didnt want somebody who would be a big distraction he asked five people. Rose go ahead. Five people to be, to be vetted, and they asked those five to turn over documents. Four of the five didnt think they would be picked and that included governo governor criste only one who thought he had a good chance was portman from ohio he handed over some documents but eventually governor romney decided this is too risky because governor crist city has get some things this his background that he thought might be controversial he didnt want to pick someone and then spend two, three, four weeks where the press is scrutinizing he wanted someone to be a safe pick so he took him off the list and stewart stevens, governor romneys top advisor said we are in a street fight and losing the media war in the guess you need the best street fighter on the ticket and considered him again and in that, there was not sort of your classic mitt romney months, meticulous, slow, they had to crash vet him in 11 days and in the course of that time two things happened, one is governor crist city did not send in all the materials in a timely fashion. Rose any particular reason . Well, some people say that he didnt because he was busy, but other people say he didnt send stuff in because he didnt think he was going to be picked and he didnt want to bother, you know, complying with every little request, he thought some of the requests, he and his people thought some of the requests were unnecessary. Beth myers who was running the Selection Process for governor romney told her team of veters, look, if they are not sending stuff back we will have to assume the answers are bad not that we dont have the material but assume the worst case so he didnt send stuff back, the other thing that happened was, governor romney and his advisors were alarmed by what they were getting, most of the stuff as governor christi said since the book came out was in the public record, but as governor romney said to an advisor he said look this stuff has all been dealt with before, no he was right about this, stuff that comes out when you are running for governor of sniewnl not stuff coming out when you are on the ticket or running for president himself so the implication we think for governor crist city who looks like he is trying to run for president is, he is going to have to handle this stuff in a much, in a much tighter nike scope, much more scrutiny, than he did and a window into that is what governor romneys very experienced vetting team, the lawyers looking at christis background, the regular red flags and ultimately for romney that got a report al. Reporter from them, after all the reports were done, several weeks later me gets a report about governor crist city, read it, a report we quote from in the book and he says the next day, no, not Chris Christie. Rose Chris Christie sort of talked about this and governor romney talked about this and governor romney has what apologized to Chris Christie . As i understand it in an interview on tuesday. Rose yes. Rose today. Today. He called governor crist city, i always think about the archives, charlie, called governor crist city and apologized and said this report that is quoted in double down should not have been revealed to any author or journalist. Rose bill clinton, so what do we say about the relationship between these two men. Well, you know, it is funny a plot of people when the game changed the story, we just. One of the con seats we were writing a love story between barack obama and Hillary Clinton that they started out close and the nomination fight took them apart and then at the end they were reunited and she became secretary of state this book is a love story of bill clinton and barack obama, who start the book as far apart as you could start the book as you begin a story and now we have got the bill clinton battered and bruised from 2008 and barack obama feels he doesnt need bill clintons advise bill clinton to rehabilitate himself and wanting to give the president advise and barack obama not talking to him than the summer of 2011 comes and he is put after the debt ceiling debacle when his poll ratings drop he looks up in the same period we discussed earlier and i will have a fight of my life here and i heed all the Assets Available to me and i need bill clinton. I mean, just purely a calculation and need thing, not a like thing, not a love thing but i need him, and so they go out and go golfing together and have this, it than reported now several times, you know, they have this rough golf outing. Rose and. Clinton takes too many mulligans he takes 14 shots. Rose he gets through them. But nine hours and barack obama doesnt have nine hours to play golf so they dont get through the whole thing and Barack Obama Says to an aide i like him in doses but that is the beginning of a year honk process where they get closer and closer. That is a bad first date but by the spring obama and clinton are at mcauliffe house and president clinton does an extraordinary peach how great obama is and obama never heard him talk about him, clinton talk about obama like that and goes to the car and Campaign Manager and says that was kind of amazing what bill clinton just said about me. Eventually, he gives clinton the peeking role at the convention, this is a thing where obama needs clinton, but clinton also needs obama because it puts him back in the spotlight, mark and i both commented about this an. Rose i have to excuse you because you have other demands. I am glad you were here. We will continue this another time when we get you both together i have a couple of questions thank you very much. Good to see you. John heilemann coauthor of double down, game change, 2012. We continue with clinton, what else can we add to this relationship that is so up and down . Well, i think it is clear that by the end of the book the love story if not fully consummated as i dont know said they are one political family and the other thing i would add and go back to the biden piece of this, which really least joe biden the odd man out. Getting the exxon session call from mitt romney and let me call my partner joe biden. And clinton. What you have seen since the election is you saw right after the election bill clant and barack obama played golf together, a much friendlier round on 60 minutes you Saul Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton doing an because of together as she was leaving the state department. And since then, hmm every person in the president s ward who declared a preference dechaired for Hillary Clinton, and that is happening either with the president s support, president obamas support or at least his tacit approval you can imagine a world yo you are sayig to staff people and politic politicians in his orbit you know i have a Vice President who might want to run lets everybody hold off he hasnt done that, so i think the bill clinton without a doubt helped at the conventions after the Democratic Convention in charlotte, governor romney, new house said he never saw anything like the turn of the right track, wrong track number of people saying on the right track and he attributed almost exclusively to his speech at the convention, so make no mistake, the president , president obama and his advisors knew they needed bill clinton, they courted him heavily, and they believe he helped a tremendous amount, and for someone like barack obama, solitary, doesnt like t to to ask people for help doesnt think he needs peoples help for most of the time to acknowledge to bill clinton and his advisors we need bill clinton and we need to do what we need to do, whatever we need to do to get him on board, pretty extraordinary, and again, kind of an e story. Rose could governor romney and i mean this in the smart sense not in any kind of of course he could, could he have won this election. You know, i think that he was really hurt by with the remnants in his psyche of having run in 2008, one of the things we report in the book that isnt like a brandnew thought but the illustration office it in the book i think will be eye opening to people is his reputation in 2008 was as a flip flopper and so what he said this time was i am not going to flip flop whatever i said before is going to be my position and it gets reduced to, he gets asked a question at one point and his response to the press is, i dont know i am paraphrasing but Something Like i dont know what i said before but whatever i said before i stand by it, because for him that was the absolute, and i think he kind of tied himself in knots not on that, if he had been freer to take positions in a more flexible way the way every president ial candidate has to do to win he would have had a much better chance to win. Rose how damaging was this and this will be the last question because it goes to how good was the obama team. We have talked about the candidates but about the team. They were technically really good and very smart about the electorial college, what states they could win and where to play, they didnt get overly ambitious and very smart about demographics and they treated each state like a governors race, how are we going to win the popular vote in that particular state by building a coalition and they recognized early on to double down on the socalled coalition of the not try to win with old style, in a place like ohio but turn up the youth vote and african vote, single women vote, hispanic vote that allowed him to very, very comfortably if you think about how bad the economy was, if you think about the amount of money that a lot of rich people in the republican side spent against him, he won pretty easily in the end, becauseable in part because his team was so adept and very disciplined and spent the last year of the president s first term basically saying, all we are going to try to do is get reelected by trying to marginalize both mitt romney and the republican party. Rose as you suggested, africanamericans, hispanics, or latinos, women,. Younger people, young people in general. Those are all groups that are growing share of the population and the reason why, you know, we report in the end of the book where governor romney and paul ryan and people in their orbit were confident they were going to win is because they were looking at kind of old models to say we are winning independence, we are winning older votes voters, we are winning the kind of margins with some groups that make it impossible for the president to win a reelection, they miscalculated about what the electorate would end up looking like and that was a surprise to governor romney and hot at all a surprise to the president and his advisors, i have never covered a team that was as confident of winning as this group, even though they recognized the margin in some ways but small but they won every competitive state but one and that is quite a testament to theirs and the president and the message they drove. Rose this book is called double down, double down means obviously. You make a bet on something and then there is some question about whether you should stay with your bet or bail on it. Rose and that was the theory of the election . Well, it happens throughout the book, really, the title, just like the title game change, it derived organically from our interview, people would say all the time there are small instances where various candidate double down on one thing or another, the president was the, the big double down for romney was to say, i dont know are, you know, we are going to run on the economy, we are not going to try to run on our, governor romneys record of bain capital and not try to run on social issues but double down on this is a referendum on barack obama. Rose Mark Halperin and John Heilemann are friend of mine and they will come back and tell more stories because it is in some way an insight into in many ways an insight into america. Back in a moment, stay with us. I am going to in funeral oh your name, sir, truly. Truly my name is sarah. What . Truly, my name is caesar. Rose Julius Caesar shakespeares great tragedy of assassination and civil war, experimental product communicate is playing at st. Annes warehouse in new york, the cast is all female and the play is set in a womens prison, joining me today, the director and two of the stars, Phyllida Lloyd is an experience director of shakespeare and also director of films including mamma mia, iron lady, the Margaret Thatcher starring meryl streep and Marcos Brutus and played many of shakespeares women in the Royal Shakespeare company from viola and beatrice to lady macbeth. Frances barber wrote, here, ophelia at the rsc and cle patent tra at the globe i am pleased to have all of them here with me at this table, welcome. Let me just beg, this comes from you, this idea, this production. Yes. Two women have got their hand on the keys of one of the important london theaters for the first time. Rose yes. Reports have just been issued in london saying that for every job in the arts that went to a woman, there were two jobs going to men, and those two things, they asked me to do a show in their opening season and i thought, right, we have got to make some reparations here. Rose yes, reparations is it, what did you do . I talked to harriet about whether she wanted to come on board on the adventure and about what play might be suitable for the occasion, and i chose this, because i thought it gave most women a chance to step outside their domestic, romantic, that they are often confined to in our classical repertoire. Rose this must have been a wonderful news for you. Yes, i didnt hesitate. At one point there was an idea of maybe doing romeo or juliet which is much more about gender and about love and in some ways i thought that is more obvious choice but i thought, oh, gosh a political playful of men that is quite a jump, but of course it is the best choice, because it exercises exactly what phil is talking about and, Phyllida Lloyd can do it too and we are just as involved in public life as men are. Rose has this idea in the theatre been done before . Yes, it had, in fact i had done one all female shakespeare, a comedy before and i just have seen how i think whether it is all male or all female, having one gender definitely helps reveal the shape of the play the architecture of it. How so . It somehow brightens the scenes. You stop thinking about you stop thinking about, so much about the individual character and you can see the shapes of the narrative. Help us understand Julius Caesar. Well, the first ever production of Julius Caesar i ever saw was athe National Theatre with gill gug playing Julius Caesar and i was a student standing at the back of the olivia theatre and i remember not understanding a word of it. Just wondering how they could kill this benign old man, because in the play, shakespeare is quite sort of cautious with his portrayal of cesar. You dont kind of understand what it is that he must have done without going into the history prior to the actual death, and because we set it in a womens bringable and in that there is a great deal of hierarchy and all kinds of politics that must come into play, we decided in our production, i am actually a bring guard, which isnt revealed until the very end of the play, a warden and the top dog, the butchest, the bitch, the, you know, she gets her way, so that you do understand hopefully, the audience can then understand why it is that they wish to murder and get rid of this horrible despot to replace another, and i mean, that reverberated all through the world with despots as we speak now in the middle east and all over the world. They hang on until, hang on into the old age. Why bother someone who is going to die anyway but there is a lot of harm he can still do, although bridget talks of killing him in the show. Rose so what is your relationship in this play between, in this play between caesar and brutus. That is an interesting question, we are trying as much as possible we chose characters as much as possible in our back story of our prison character who is an important element of the play for all of us, we try to find, we are encouraged to find a character who would as closely as possible parallel the character we were playing in the play, and so we have a bond which is almost as complex as the bond between cesar and brutus, and there has been an equality at some point which then if it is going t to be a prison guard i am a lifer as we have invented, and i am a reformed lifer who is never going to get out. Rose right. But cab rates, you know, cooperates within the prison system and helps the younger kids get an education and go out into the world and make a better life than i have had. The within we would choose a play that is so political and very nas ask you lynn in our set of circumstances is that because we are tying to explore that, you know, what level of power struggles within any system at all, and et brutus when he stabbed cesar is felt very deeply and very strongly because we are all in some equal measure in our back story. Rose and why is se caesar so surprised to realize brutus was part of the conspiracy . Well, the way i try to play it is he is not. The character is very existential in that he keeps talking about the guards talk about him being superstitious, marley he has become very superstitious so i try, rather than making ate sentimental reaction to brutus at thats stabbing it is of course, yes, you as well, so when the chips are down even you are going to go with the mob. Even you. Even you. We have made it quite i think it is quite channelling the way we presented brutus and cesar in that caesar is very, very uncompromising and you can completely understand why the conspirators want to slaughter him, and in many ways our brutus is very comparatively sympathetic and that has been one of the things we struggled with, is to make vivid, vivid why the two of them, why brutus loves caesar because he does say he loves him and is his friend but as he says there is a huge history of which is assumed from the audience about their past political campaigns, the wars they fought, and you somehow have to make the audience believe that they have that history. And there is an indebtedness as well in the true story, Julius Caesar welcomed brutus back into his company, having when brutus had fought against him in the pontium wars and there is a kind of obligation as well, the thing about brutus is he does have a sense of honor. We all fall from our ideal but at least he holds on to the idea and the attempt to accomplish it and be that man, and, thfer, to him it is really hard to be a man of honor, who back stabs his best his old friend but he justifies it in his speech, it is not that i love caesar less than anybody else it is i love rome more and the democracy is more important to him that his individual loyalty. Rose why does he spare Mark Anthonys life . Why . Because i think first of all he thinks he is a lightweight who can be bought off and secondly i think, you know, he genuinely believes in getting people around the table and being seen, to be inclusive, you know, he is the liberal, he is the guy who thinks that it is a more dell subseque option to keep your enemies under your guard and bring around the table. Rose so what were the other challenges for you in terms of, you said one question was having to do with i think the big challenge is making the audience believe and not continue to think, but hang on a minute, these women could never fight wars. They cant run the country. They cant start a revolution. So one of the reasons rose women have done all of those things. They have, but are women natural assassins, it is hard to find if you google female assassins, even the one who tried to shoot lennon kind of missed. It is very so by setting it in a prison, we were determined to first of all start you thinking about are they men or women that come on to the stage, they are all in prison uniform, they are immediately androgenous and in a system where they understand about the potential for violence, some of them may have been killers. We have cone a lot to try and mitigate against your doubt, and we also worked to create sort of a zero lismian verse speaking so that zero olympian, so that children, frances talk about the shakespeare we hope we have made children gripped by this, because the speaking is so clear. Rose here is a scene, this is brutus and cassius arguing after they have killed caesar. You killednd touched his body, if it were not for justice. You struck the foremost man of all he had. Shall we now contaminate our fingers with base the mighty space of our large honor i would rather be a dog and bay at the moon than that. You forget yourself. I am a soldier, i, must i give way to your rash cause . When a madman stairs go show your slaves, make your bondsmen tremble, must i budge . Must i observe you must i stand and youer under your testes . You shall test the venom of your spleen. Make it appear so. Make your bonding true and it shall please me well. Rose let me just talk about shakespeare and power and the misinterpretations, the forged letters that brutus received in support of killing caesar, a sacrificed animal that prophecied his death and cassius misreading of the battlefield that results in that results in his suicide. Yes, i mean, this superstition is a huge part of the play, and we talked a lot about how how great political leaders often succumb to gurus and soothsayers. Rose right. And become obsessed in a way that that caesar does because we hear this in the past he has been very unsuperstitious and now because he is faring loss of power he is consulting all and sundry, and also because now in the production although caesar is killed and i remain in some way, either as a ghost or overseeing the entire kind of machinations that continue after caesars death, and in which case those , you know, for example, cassius misreading the situation about the war is all in our production controlled by sea star, because he actually blind the lookout with a torch so that he gives him the wrong information. So we kind of try and use the fact i am there in the prison watching over everything that his presence is still enormously felt. Rose you have said before that it is very painful as a female actor not to be able to play the great parts of shakespeare, leer, hamlet, macbeth. Oh, yes, i would love to play macbeth. Rose why macbeth . Well, because i feel he ask sort of he is brutus without the rings on and will is a lot in won and i feel i could i would like to experience stepping over that threshold that itself is imposed by brutus of not losing his integrity, that macbeth is kind of encouraged to step over and then loses it. And i just i would be excited to go thereable, go there and find out what that is like. Rose do you think you have started something here . I hope so. laughter. we are going to get very unpopular if we go on doing this but we want to go on. Rose really . I think so. I think we made the boys a bit cross. Rose did you really . They would come to rehearsal and say my boyfriend, you know, asked me what i was playing in this and i said brutus and he said, i played that. Christ. What is going on here . Rose yes. I think it is important to have all female bruk shubls throughout history, they get buried in history, like a lot of female history does and just be that famous Julius Caesar that went to brooklyn it would be great if it was the beginning of much more. Can you imagine that somehow watching these brilliant actors perform these parts traditionally seen played by men will somehow add to the interpretation of these characters . I think what you are watching when you see harriet and frankie perform these characters is you are having a kind of parallel experience. You are seeing harriet in front of you and you know she is not brutus. You can somehow be with her, a human being, neither a man nor a woman, but just a human, and you can feel the real brutus, the roman brutus there in front of you at the same time. It is a strange, poetic kind of act of magic that somehow i think possibly gives you more than were you watching a modern woman dressed in roman armor. Rose roles you would also like to play . Macbeth. I would very much like i like argo because i just think he is a really complicated, nags city piece of work, and one thing we havent spoken about is that harriet and i have done a lot of classical theatre playing these mens role, the language is decidely different. Rose how so . It has more muscular at this. Muscular at this, other than clcle pa trii think you will agreed in act 5 me is he is the enormous politician, up until then she has been the seductress, the games man and then becomes a politician and to the language dramatically changes in that play and in this, all of the speaking requires us literal will i do, you know, i flick our tongues around in a different way for the female characters. Which is fascinating. The physical energy, to, you come off sweating, and which is rare for a woman and the force and the directness of it, men tend to relate much more head on, and women are slightly, you know, a bit more so all of those things, it is a new repertoire, it is great. Rose i always close whenever we do Something Like this with this fundamental question, why shakespeare . Because it never dies. It never days. It replies to every moment of the present and you feel you are watching a play as you were saying about the world around you. So it is just it is the size of it, what other night out can give you that enormous bang in the head of recognition. And i dont think there is any emotion that any human being has ever been able to experience or has ever, will ever be able to experience he hasnt covered. Love, broken hearts,. Rose jealousy. Jealousy, ambition, political ambition, thwarted ambition, old age, regret, there is nothing he hasnt covered in the best poetry ever. So it makes the audience come with you because the language is kind of reaching something. You have to reach out to get the language. You have to work a bit hard. Think audiences quite like working hard if you make it as easy as you can for them to come with you and dont shirk that. It is a miracle to be watching something written 400 years ago and you say it aloud and in funny writing on a quill, on a parchment and an audience 400 years later laughs, that is pretty extraordinary. The emotion. Rose thank you. Thank you. Rose thank you. Take note of this fact. Julius caesar plays at st. Annes warehouse through this saturday, november 9th, i repeat, Julius Caesar plays at st. Annes warehouse through saturday, november 9th. Thank you for joining us. See you next time. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org hi, i. Welcome to another program in our going series, vocal points. At the beginning of the 2013 school year, washington, d. C. Had the dubious distinction of having one of the highest drop out rates in the country. And while maryland and Virginia Public School students fair better, minority and poor students face a noticeable a chief. Gap. What are some programs that are actually helping area students find a path to success . Joining us today kareem, founder of math alicious. A lesson plan that teaches standard math for real world topics. Gabriel benn, director of arts, at Lucy High School and founder of the Hip Hop Literacy Program a lesson plan that uses hip hop to teach wideranging topics. A Youth Program assistant at d. C. Bilingual Public Charter School where he was once a students. And yolanda long a former student at the Washington Middle School for girls, shes now a teacher. In the dc Public School system. Today on vocal point, meeting students where they are. The good news about education is that americas Graduation Rate is on the rise for the 20092010 school year, graduation rights each 72. 8 the highest since 1974, the bad news, our nations back, native american, and latino students are still graduating at far lower levels than their white and asian counterparts. And washington, d. C. Public schools have some of the lowest Graduation Rates in the country. This means that our nongraduating students are more likely to become unemployed or end up in jail. Fortunately, there are dedicated school staff, teachers, parents, Community Members and students, working hard to curb the drop out statistics, and making sure that our young people are graduating high school, career and college ready. And we do welcome all of you to the program. Thank you so much for being here for this very important topic about closing the achievement gap. And i am so very excited, because all of you are here because you are doing something exciting and interesting, and innovative in the classroom, kareem, let me start with you. Mathalicious, sounds delicious. What is it . So what we are doing is we are rewriting middle and High School Math around real world topicses as you mentioned we provide Classroom Teachers around the country, around the world really lessons aligned to common course standards that help them teach the things that they have to. But through engaging real world topics that help then challenge their students to think about the world differently. Before we get more in to that, let me read a quote from our education secretary arnie duncan, regarding the up tick in Graduation Rates. To 78. 2 in 2010. Drop out rates, still, quote, unsustainbly high for a knowledgebased economy. And still unseparably high in our caisson american, latino and native american communities. Real world solutions, one of the challenges for all students but particularly students from minority communities, poor communities, its making this make sense, making it relatable. Right. And thats what you are trying to do. That is what we are doing. So there was a 2009 survey that found that 61 of middle School Students said that they would rather take out the garbage than do their math homework. Wow. When you ask students why wyoming and as a former teacher i saw it as well. They typically say i dont know what it nineteens its random skills to memorize and rejudger date and i dont know when i will ever use it. How we are trying to help is to provide teachers with lessons that help them teach, you know, proportions through away thats going to engage students. Ill give you an example. People with small feet, do they pay too much for shoes . And what would happen if nike charged by weight . Or how long would it take