Executives, and debate the question of National Security versus freedom of information. This 90 minute event was hosted by the new America Foundation. The Gilder Lehrman institute of American History. And dickinson college. Ok, good morning and welcome to the new America Foundation. We are here for the third and in our panel series of president s at war. This is a series for the understanding lincoln course , brought to you by the Gilder Lehrman institute for American History and dickinson college. So we are engaged in a discussion of Abraham Lincoln and his role in his legacy in American Society but were also thinking about how the issues he confronted as a commander in chief, as a president had he president have evolved in the modern day and where they might be headed in the future. This panel is about the role of the press. This is the wartime press and Civil Liberties during war. It is one of the most controversial aspects of lincolns legacy. It remains one of the most controversial subjects. Subjects in American History. My name is Matthew Pinsker and i am the instructor of the understanding lincoln course. I would like to introduce the panelists and turn it over to our monitor and let him ask a series of questions in an informal discussion about these topics. Our moderator to our far left is a former u. S. Army colonel and served in operation desert storm. He now is at the u. S. Army war college. He got his phd from the fletcher of law Fletcher School of law and diplomacy at tusk university and he previously worked on the National Security council staff. Hes the author of a number of essays and articles and has been a military analyst for cbs news. To his right is one of our panelists. Kimberly is the author of the bestselling memoir breathing the fire, and served as a military Affairs Correspondent for cbs news and the Associated Press and writes for the daily beast. She is the winner of the peabody award and 2 edward armour oh edward r. Murrow award. Im happy to welcome her to dickinson college. She has been named as the chair in the strategic leadership. To her right is tom shanker, the associate editor of the Washington Bureau for the New York Times. A former pentagon correspondent for the times. Hes been covering the pentagon since 2001. And he has formally served as a Foreign Editor and correspondent for the chicago tribune. But i think more important for our discussion tom is the , coauthor of counterstrike, the untold story of our war against al qaeda. An excellent book that i recommend to all of our course participants. To my left is linda mason. She is a former Senior Vice President of cbs news. Linda actually served 47 years with cbs news, ending her career in 2003 as a Senior Vice President for standards and specials. She was a pioneer in the industry, the first female producer on the cbs evening news with Walter Cronkite, and broke ground on a number of fronts as a leader in the News Business and the Company Executive during her career. It is a great panel of journalists. I think we will have a terrific discussion. I just want to remind everyone who is following this that you are welcome live tweet it. At lincoln150. We hope we can open this discussion to a wider collection of classes across the country, at the k12 and the undergraduate level. I want to thank new America Foundation for being our host and hope that everybody who is here will enjoy our discussion. It is really a pleasure for me to moderate this very distinguished panel. Lets begin by taking a question that was previously submitted by one of the participants and that is from chris jax in wichita. Chris said, in lincolns public letters, such as a famous letter he wrote in 1862 to Horace Greeley or in another letter in , 1864 to a journalist, albert hodges, the president used the press to write a level of dutch provide a level of transparency into the policies his presidency was taking. Has the role of the press in the white house changed since the civil war . Let me start with you. Give us the historical backdrop what was the media like during. The civil war . How did lincoln view the media . Did he like reporters . Did he try to influence the way they covered his administration, the conduct of war . The biggest difference is that the media back then was not fair and balanced like it is today. It was partisan. Lincoln had lots of friends in the press because republican newspaper editors and writers, they were partisans for the republican party. As a leader, he used partisan Republican Newspapers like the new york tribune, or unionist newspapers in kentucky to transmit his ideas to the public. He was a pioneer among president s. There were always president s who would use newspapers as official organs. They would designate one paper as a mouthpiece. But lincoln was a pioneer in not designating one mouthpieces by one mouthpiece, but using multiple mouthpieces. In doing that, he created Competition Among friendly journalists. In that sense, manipulated them for a very effective outreach effort. These public letters, Andrew Greeley and the one to hodges in the summer of 1864, those letters were unprecedented attempts by a president to reach the public using media in a way that established lincoln as a great communicator for his age. Linda, lets start with you. Bring us uptodate. Have you seen evidence of modern president s, president bush and president obama, during this period of war, attempting to manipulate the press in trying to get the policies out, particular about the wars in afghanistan and iraq . Then i want to come to tom and kimberly for their reaction to that. Definitely. George bush and obama wanted their story told. The press has a kind of dance we do with the administration. We want to do this, they want us to do that. Most times we are very careful not to buy their line, but to give their line consideration and see if theres truth. Margaret sullivan, the ombudsman for the New York Times, wrote last week about when the iraq war was building, the times was in the forefront of wmd, weapons of mass destruction. One of their star reporters, judith miller, had these great contacts. The great contact was a man named chalibi. He was an insurgent. He was very antisaddam. He wanted to be and may be the next leader of iraq. He planted a couple of generals or people who said they were generals and they gave him gave this false information. He gave the same information to the white house into the and to the pentagon. So when judith checked her sources, which you are supposed to do, they all had the same story. So she thought she had it right. She didnt. There is a lot of criticism now about there werent doubts raised. Even though there were doubts made. Got Knight Ridder got a special commendation for raising these doubts. The problem is, Knight Ridder are not the New York Times and the Washington Post, they did not spread opinion in a big way. So the president was supported and we ended up there. For me, when i saw colin powell talk about those bioweapon trucks. He was so trustworthy. He did not believe it. They were very skillful. Cbs pointed out in 2006 that the information the cia had, which dealt with a tip from the foreign minister of iraq, somebody close to saddam, there were no weapons of mass destruction. And the cia was ignored on that bit of information because it did not fit with the game plan of the Bush Administration. It is hard for the press to dig into that. A way to do it, and margaret is raising the question, is you have to listen to all of the other renditions and let the public know there is a debate going on. How do you see examples in your reporting of the administration trying to manipulate the press . Particularly during recent conflicts. The judy miller situation at the times we investigated ourselves fully and instituted a number of reforms in the way that we report stories. There is another body of work how do you see examples in your reporting of the administration trying to manipulate the press . At the same time that i think helps to balance that out and goes to your point, which is that a year before the invasion of iraq, my colleagues eric schmitt and david sanger began reporting a series of stories getting into the details of the initial war planning for the invasion. Even as president bush were was saying, we are not going to war. Diplomacy is on the table. There is off ramps here and there. The readers of the times were well aware that their president verge, if not already had made, the most grave decision a democracy can make, which is to go to war. The Bush Administration might have been successful in planting some of the wmd stuff, but they were unsuccessful in hiding that fact they decided to go to war. Im proud of the work we did to inform our readers of this. What page did it appear . Page one. The first story invasion was in march. Our for story was in april, saying here are the outlines of the war plan. The troops are in movement. It is already underway. So america, you had better get ready. What is this relationship like . Is it adversarial . We all have a favorite metaphor. My metaphor is that the relationship between the government and the media is like a marriage. Its a dysfunctional marriage to be sure. But we Stay Together for the kids. [laughter] now, what do i mean by that . The government really needs to get its message out to the American People. You can do it from the podium officially but it knows that the best way is by using the American News media to tell its story. We are obligated, kimberly and all of us in the business, to inform the public about the most important and the grimmest decisions the country makes, which are about going to war. We are in the stands, but we are not partisan like we were in lincolns time. We grind the information we get against other surfaces sources to get to the truth. One of the most frustrating things will be when you can get get the response back from the white house on the story. I will have five or six sources highly placed but not in the administration who are explaining to me, here is what is going on, but i need the white houses in put. Input. Increasingly the Obama White House has become so brittle and so controlling of the message that people are afraid to respond to me. Sometimes the most i can get back is a boilerplate one paragraph. That does not tell their side of the story or how they came to decide on this policy. I end up getting frustrated because i realized by their choice, ive only told one side of the story. Now, i just wanted to say when the iraq war started i was a middle east correspondent based in israel. So i did not get to see the runup in washington, d. C. In the decisionmaking process. Runup onseeing the the iraq side. And you could see from the way the inspectors were getting turned away from the sites they were trying to visit, the nuclear inspectors, and the tension in the Iraqi Government, that they were bracing for this confrontation but they were also paralyzed. Because one of the things that did not come up many places was that the Iraqi Government had made a conscious decision to make countries in the area think they had a wmd program. I spoke to Intelligence Officers who raided sites that look from above like a covert nuclear facility. They would lift up what they thought were air vents, and the air vents went to nowhere. It was attempting to look like a nuclear facility, and that said some of the confusion. I found that as the invasion happened in those first few months as we saw iraqi officers getting fired, turned away. They rioted, literally, in the streets. And they told us in interviews , if you do not give us back our jobs, we are going to start an insurgency and fight you and kill your troops. So we saw all this play out and saw u. S. Military commanders this and call it what it was early on, an insurgency. That is where i saw the white house influence. I put, every time we put a u. S. Commander on air saying what he truly felt was going on in front of him, i would get emails later from those commanders or their staff saying, you dont know how much trouble you just got him in with donald rumsfeld, the secretary of defense at the time. That whenever these guys said truly what they thought was happening, they saw an insurgency, that thought, the story the white house wanted out there, which is that the war was won, there was no insurgency. People would stop answering phones after i put the story out like that. That was how i saw the president and those who work for him try to influence my reporting in the field. That may underscore two things that tom and can really fromd kimberly just said , the lincoln perspective. Tom calls the relationship a marriage, a dysfunctional one. This is how it differs the marriage was back then. The chairman of lincolns Reelection Campaign was the editor of the New York Times. There was no distance at all between the paper and the white house. As far as what kimberly was saying about the Chilling Effect of the administration on military commanders in the field, in some ways it was the opposite problem in the civil war. Most commanders in the field of in the field did not want reporters bothering them. Some used them for promotion. For example, William Sherman was notorious for arresting reporters who were following and criticizing him. He was outraged when the Lincoln Administration countermanded his arrests and released the reporters. He cannot believe that the it ministration would want embedded journalists hanging around his headquarters reporting negative information about him. But the Lincoln Administration wanted an open communication with the public in away to some in a way that some of the generals resisted. Into context. At i want to ask tom and kimberly, as i recall back to the point kimberly made about calling it what it is, i leave believe the first time the word insurgency was used was march 2004. A very senior officer. It was 10 months to a year after quite some time before they could use that work. Word. Is that your recollection . I thought it was j. D. Thurman who said earlier than that in a press conference in falluja and got smacked. That sort of broke the ice. He was at the pentagon standing at the podium. The press corps was hammering him. And he was a great intellectual and understands that part of the world. He took a very diplomatic answer. He said, yes, doctrinally speaking i guess what you could say is that we are facing a guerrilla war. Before i proceed to follow up on that, do you think, i straddle this as a military officer and retired as an analysts, it it seemed to me for the current conflict, unlike what matt was describing in the civil war, this put a damper for a time on the standard military action was, to not talk to the press. Nothing ever good can happen talking to the press. At best it will be neutral. Im curious if you think they based on how that all began, this anecdote that kimberly brings up, does that persist in dealing with the media or the military or is that involving to involving, to a certain degree . I watch the evolution on the ground. In 2003 in iraq, the press conferences with a senior military commander who came and briefed every day or every other day, and the large press corps that was there at the time, it was sort of like bulls circling each other. You had a lot of young east coast guys, never been around the military before. In the ranks of the press corps. My dad is a world war ii marine, but i had not been covering the military at the time. I covered the middle east. If you had these generals. There were sparring matches back and forth. Then i watched the evolution as the reporter started doing embeds, getting to know the people, the lingo, the rank, how a humvee door opens. The proper procedures. And they started becoming part of the club. I saw this trend forming on the ground where people would become little rara. Reporters would become case officered. I just came from covering intelligence. One of the things that cia does is they case officer someone. They win someone over to their side. The troops are winning the press over. But also the press was winning the troops over, winning their trust. Because they would say things like you probably remember from the pentagon side of thing, the fight over up armored vehicles. Exactly. The vehicles did not have armor. U. S. Military vehicles did not have armor. And the insurgents were starting to use roadside bombs that were devastating. I was watching troops try to weld on their own armor onto trucks. Between that and other reporters pushing on this issue, they eventually got up armored vehicles. I felt troops were won over by that. And so this warmth built. From my perspective, two things happened. For me, it was choosing not to report a story when i saw a senior officer using racial epithets that i caught on camera against a muslim suspect he had arrested. What i did not understand at the i knew that none of his other guys were using that kind of language, but