Woodward Woos Teatro

Another heady season at the salon is over. Last week brought a final gathering of Calgary’s cultural elite and intelligentsia to Teatro Restaurant for the last in speaker series on “The Race to the White House and Beyond.” Infamous investigative journalist Bob Woodward was the guest of honour.

Well known for uncovering the Watergate scandal, and introduced by Rudyard Griffiths as a “chronicler of our time”, Woodward focused his remarks on the role of journalism in a democracy, and his personal recollections of the Bush administration. But he began with a different race to the Oval Office, way back when Al Gore was a contender.

“Having dinner with Al Gore is unpleasant,” Woodward said dryly. There was laughter and the clink of glasses as the audience took another swig of Tegrino Vin Santo. “There is not one pleasant thing about it,” he confirmed, “It is taxing. He is absolutely sure he knows everything about every subject.”

Yet there was some wisdom Woodward did accept at face value: Gore told him that only one percent of what goes on in the White House is public knowledge. Years later, it was clear that little more than that was even executive knowledge, when George W. Bush told him he did not attend many of the early meetings on the Iraq war.

“We’ve seen a staggering increase in the level of violence in Iraq - almost incomprehensible - and George Bush was out there asking if we were winning, not for months but for years!” Woodward charged, “The idea that the commander-in-chief would absent himself from those meetings … I felt sick. Sick for my country. The president had lost control. He didn’t know what was real; he didn’t have a grasp on it.”

And thus began his treatise on the role of the press in a liberal democracy, complete with mea culpa on the coverage of the Iraq war. “Media drives them toward accountability,” he said.

The questions ranged from ironic - Tom Flanagan asking about barriers to accessing Canadian politicians - to the cheeky - Carlo Bellusci asked, “Isn’t it true that if governments weren’t so secretive, you’d be out of a job? And don’t people want to just kind of tune all this out and go to the cottage?”

Woodward took it all in stride, concluding on a truly diplomatic note: “Obama thinks he’s restored moral authority to the White House, just as Bush though he’d restored dignity. I say, we’ll see. You can be so sure of something, then time passes, you do your homework, and things look very different.”

The Salon Speaker Series at Teatro will resume in Autumn 2009.

Guests dined on a mouthwatering preserved lemon risotto, the classic Alberta beef tenderloin, and a dainty selection of mignardises. Among those in attendance were: the camera-shy Murray Edwards, University of Calgary’s Barry Cooper, Greg Forrest, John Cordeau of Bennett Jones, Randy Pettipas of Global Public Affairs, Dina and George Honke, energy analyst Wilf Gobert, and Timothy Hamilton, managing partner of Hamilton Hall Soles/ Ray & Berndtson Inc.

Published in National Post, May 9 2009