LDG Development, University of Louisville, and the James Graham Brown Foundation.

Today on Great Conversations, Todd Purdum, political journalist and author, talks with his former colleague at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd, about celebrity, media, and power.

Her latest book is Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech.

[APPLAUSE] Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the New York Times Opinion pages and a feature writer for the Times█ Style and Arts and Leisure sections.

She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for commentary for her columns about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, and is the author of three bestselling books.

Her latest, Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech, is a collection of her most compelling celebrity profiles in various fields.

We've known each other for a long time, since our days at the New York Times, and one of my first memories of you was when you went out on the Mondale Ferraro campaign in 1984 to cover that race.

But you wrote an amazing page one story about whether this team of Mondale and Ferraro should kiss.

And, arguably, political coverage has never been the same.

[LAUGHTER] So I just wondered, did you set out to revolutionize journalism, or did it just happen along the way?

[LAUGHTER] - I was a metro reporter at the Times, and they offered me the chance to go out on the Ferraro campaign for three weeks and that conventions because it's hard to believe that this game existed not that long ago, but the editors assumed that women would have to cover a woman.

And they also sent black reporters to cover Jesse Jackson.

[LAUGHTER] It never occurred to them that we could kind of mix it up.

[LAUGHTER] But I- at the convention right away, I just wanted to do the crazy body language that the first male and female ticket would have.

And, the weird part about it was, I was a cub reporter, so the Washington bureau chief, I gave him this idea, and he was like, no, no, that's trivial.

You know, we have an important story to go in.

And so the all four days of the convention passed with him not letting me do it, Bill Kovach.

And on the four- And the amazing thing is, no one else did it.

So there's thousands of reporters, but it didn't occur to anyone that for this historic ticket of a man and a woman, things would be different.

And later, Ferraro told me some of the things that when she would go to make a speech, lots of times, and in the South, the host would give her a wrist corsage, [LAUGHTER] you know.

- And ask her- yeah.

- Like she was at a tea party.

- And ask her if she baked blueberry muffins and stuff.

So I knew, of course, it was all going to be different.

And, anyway, on the fourth day Kovach said, well, you want to try that little story that you thought of?

And I did and, yeah, it kind of blew up.

But the moral of the story is, you know, never be afraid that you can█t- if you think of an original idea you can't beat thousands of reporters.

- Well, let me just say that even as a cub reporter, you were a better than average bear.

And [LAUGHTER] you are that real rarity among the Washington press corps in that you're a native Washingtonian and you grew up there, and you saw these people your whole life.

Your father worked as a detective in charge of senate security.

So could you talk a little bit about how growing up in Washington as a civilian influenced your understanding of the way these crazy people who come there to do their jobs work?

- Yeah, I guess it gave us, you know, kind of the worm█s-eye view because, my father, in those days he was- he was a DC police detective in charge of Capitol Hill Police.

But in those days, Capitol Police were law students.

And, you know, they didn't carry guns at the beginning.

And so he was the real policeman in charge of them.

And he would come home and tell my mother about, like, what different politicians were like.

And he judged them by their character, not by their party.

He was a Democrat.

But, you know, he was very critical of Lyndon Johnson, who was the majority leader because he was always firing people.

Like he would fire elevator operators, these young kids, if they- in those days the elevators were those super old fashioned ones where you had to jiggle it to get level, and if he saw them not making it level, he would fire them.

One time, one of these young, you know, Capitol Hill Police people was checking the offices late at night and walked in on Lyndon Johnson and his secretary, so then he was gonna fire that kid.

[LAUGHTER] But it turned out that kid was under the protection of Senator Bible, who had the most seniority.

So he was the only one who could save the kid's job.

But my father, yes, so my father just thought, you know, Lyndon Johnson was not a nice person, but he loved, loved, loved Harry Truman.

- Because he was classy and decent to his staff.

- Yeah.

And he stayed up all night when Harry Truman was elected.

And, then my father saw him after the election and he said, Mr.

President, and Harry Truman said, oh Mike, just call me Harry.

[LAUGHTER] - So you knew from the very early age that these were real people and they were not, you know, some, disembodied- - Well, I never grew up, even though my father was, and my mother at that point, were Democrats.

But then my mother fell in love with Ronald Reagan in a tuxedo and [LAUGHTER] everybody in the family became Republican.

[LAUGHTER] But, yeah, I mean, I just never took it from one side or the other automatically.

And when I got the column at the Times that had never been done to, you know, not take it from either strictly the left or the right.

And I think the first few years, I didn't really feel it was working.

I don't think it was working.

And then Bill Clinton came along and saved me.

[LAUGHTER] And- - I█m sure that's how he thinks of it.

[LAUGHTER] - And one time, Mike McCurry, his press secretary, I was home late at night, and Mike McCurry called me and screamed into the phone, you are draining us of our precious bodily fluids.

[LAUGHTER] And I was like, is that really the metaphor you want to use Mike?

[LAUGHTER] - I mean, it's a line from Dr.

Strangelove - but it█s not- - Yeah, that's right.

But at least then I knew.

I thought, wow, maybe I can do this.

- But one of the other things you began to do very early in your political coverage was to shake politicians off their talking - points, their speeches, - Oh, right.

- which they're much worse about now.

But even 40 years ago, they were pretty bad about just repeating their schtick.

- Yeah.

- So you asked them about things they liked in a culture, what they liked in movies.

- How did that- - Yeah, this sounds very obvious now.

- It wasn't then at all.

- No.

But in the late 80s, I was desperate to kind of think of something that a politician wasn't expecting, so that I could- usually, you know, they would recite speech chunks and, you know, they were sort of practiced in answering whatever you would ask them in politics.

So, and also my motto as a reporter is dare to be trivial because I get more excited, like, learning some small color fact about someone than breaking Watergate, you know.

[LAUGHTER] So I thought, I█ll ask them about culture because nobody did that at that point.

Now it's a standard part of presidential campaign coverage, but then- so I came up with a culture quiz.

And, you know, I just say, do you like opera?

Do you like ballet?

Do you like- what is your favorite play?

Who was your favorite actress growing up?

This kind of thing.

And, and I love, like, George W. Bush, when I asked him what his favorite cultural experience was, he said, baseball.

[LAUGHTER] And then I said, well what's your favorite play?

And he goes, Cats.

And I just love that, you know.

And his father, you know, was Reagan's vice president, so I said, have you ever seen a Ronald Reagan movie?

And he kind of sheepishly confessed that one night in a hotel room, he started watching Santa Fe Trail, but then he fell asleep.

[LAUGHTER] So, I mean, I love this stuff.

Michael Dukakis, and part of it was I'd say, if you had a free Saturday, what would you do with it?

And Michael Dukakis looks at me very earnestly and said, black mulch.

[LAUGHTER] And I said, hm, what do you do with that?

And he said, I put it on my tomato plants.

And at that very moment I knew he would never be president.

[LAUGHTER] - So you really had, you really had the other George Bush's number.

You had an extraordinary understanding of him.

And he used to say when he was trying to popularize himself, that his favorite- that his favorite snack was pork rinds.

But you knew what his real favorite snack was, which was... - Yeah, he liked, you know, he was, Lee Atwater, his political strategist, was trying to overlay his blue blood with some Texas red blood.

So he kind of gave him a few fictional things that his favorite snack was pork rinds.

But, you know, his favorite snack was popcorn with a Walker martini.

[LAUGHTER] Which was, the recipe of that was three parts gin and one part vodka.

[LAUGHTER] - And no vermouth?

- It might be- what is it you always say?

That you walk past the vermouth- - You walk past the bottle of vermouth.

- You walk past the bottle of vermouth.

- So you're talking about your family and- and their partisan evolution of your mom, particularly.

Every year at Thanksgiving time, you turn your column over to your brother Kevin, and you did again this year.

So I guess I should ask you, how was your Thanksgiving?

And how do the Republicans in the Dowd family think that President Trump is doing right now?

- Well, Kevin, okay.

Don't tell Kevin I'm telling you this.

[LAUGHTER] - It█s just between us.

- He█ll never hear about it.

But, you know, Kevin, tells me privately his criticisms of Trump, and then when I got the first draft of the column, you know, nothing was in there.

It was all very triumphalist.

And I said, Kevin, this column can't run in the New York Times because it's not what you say to me, and a column has to has its own integrity.

You can't just use it to impress your friends, or hope you're going to get a Tweet from Trump or something.

You have to really tell the truth.

And so after 3 or 4 more drafts, he turned in one and it was sort of very somber because he did say what, you know, is bothering him about Trump, and- - But, - The attacks on people.

- Yeah.

- The, the cruel kind of attacks and he did not like Trump attacking, calling Marjorie Taylor Greene a traitor.

As Kevin said, no one was more loyal to Trump than Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And I think the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing is very interesting because it's the first time Trump failed.

Usually he's an evil genius at trying to create an alternative reality.

He just says, no, that didn't happen, this happened.

And he's got, you know, he kind of got away with it a lot, with his followers on January 6th.

And he was trying to do that with, with the Epstein files, like, look over there, not here.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene called him on it, and Massie, and he also put out an incredibly nasty post about Massie getting remarried, which kind of had weird, creepy implications in it for no reason except Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene did not do what he wanted.

But I felt like it was the first time he failed to create that alternative reality, because people still want to know what happened with Jeffrey Epstein.

- Washington is not the only zoo you cover.

You go far afield sometimes, and in 2017, for Vanity Fair, you wrote a really pioneering, fascinating story on the tech bros of Silicon Valley.

And there was one in particular whom you described at the time as an anti-Trump tech titan.

Who was that guy?

- Elon Musk.

[LAUGHTER] - What was he thinking then, and how do you process that now?

How he's... - He, well, this was 2017, and I had seen that Elon Musk was making some very, volatile statements about AI and where it might be going.

And he said- and he, he was talking about his friends out there, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and, you know, the other boys club in Silicon Valley, and he said, we█re summoning the demon.

And I'm Catholic, so naturally I got right on that.

[LAUGHTER] If there was a demon being summoned, I was going to be there.

So, [LAUGHTER] I went out to Silicon Valley and I drove all around and I talked to as many of the tech geniuses as I could find, and told them to explain AI to me.

And mostly the story was about Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who founded a firm called OpenAI.

It was a nonprofit, and the point of it was to be a watchdog on all the other tech giants who were rushing to develop AI without caring if there was a kill switch, or if it was going to get smarter than us and kill us, like, they didn't care.

They thought we were the betamaxes and we were already done.

And, Elon and Sam wanted to, you know, make sure that humanity had a representative.

And that's also why Elon wanted to go to Mars, so in case AI got smarter than us and turned on us, we█d all have somewhere to go.

And Elon- Elon always said, I want to die on Mars, just not on contact.

[LAUGHTER] And, you know, he said about AI, It's fine if the emperor is Marcus Aurelius.

But if the emperor is Caligula we█re in trouble.

So, very prescient, but then he, then he left OpenAI, and Sam Altman realized there were billions and billions of dollars at stake.

So he has made it a for profit company, And now it's just like - all the other companies, - They█re all chasing - everyone is racing.

- the same thing.

- Congress never put any regulations in.

Nobody knows where the kill switch is.

And- oh, also, one of the other tech geniuses explained to Elon that even if he moved to Mars, the AI could follow him [LAUGHTER] because it█s in the air.

So now no one cares about humanity, and our species is going to be wiped out in three years.

Sorry.

[LAUGHTER] - It was fun while it lasted.

- Yeah, it was.

- One of the things I█d like to talk to you a little bit about is sort of tradecraft and your methodology, because Notorious, for those of you haven█t read it, is full of wonderful profiles in which you get enormous and extraordinary access to these people.

Uma Thurman tells you the wrenching story of our relationship with Quentin Tarantino.

You get acting classes from Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes.

And you talk to Robert Redford and Paul Newman and Jane Fonda, people who are iconic, and you get them to really open up quite often in their own homes, or their own lairs.

How do you do that?

Because everyone is so self-protective these days, and the media is omnipresent, and there are all these TMZ and gossip sites that chase them all over, and- And how do you get them to trust you enough to be vulnerable and tell you what they're really thinking and feeling?

- I don't know.

Is it because I█m so charming?

[LAUGHTER] - Yes!

I think partly.

- No, I honestly don't know.

All I know is that I- the older I get, the more careful I am about writing about people, because you've got people's reputations in your hands and, you know, you have to be really careful to make sure you're presenting them, you know, not necessarily in the light they want to be presented in.

But to, you know, give them a fair shot to explain who they are, and, I don't know, I just feel like over the years people realize I'm going to try hard to understand them and convey who they think they are, and then I can also convey who I think they are, and we meet somewhere in the middle.

- Did you ever have an experienc where you got so close to somebody or liked them so much that you felt you couldn't really write about them, or you couldn't write about them anymore?

You'd have to stop writing about them.

- No, because I'm also a columnist, so I'm more- I'm allowed more to bring myself into it a little bit, and my opinion into to it much more than when we started, and when you were a reporter you could never do that.

But I think people have gotten used to my persona enough that I can be, you know, a little part of it, too.

- So that if you like somebody, you could just confess - confess your bonafides that, - Yeah, yeah.

- you know, I like them, and here... - And in this book, I have to say I only chose people I really wanted to delve into because it's a lot of work.

So the people I want to delve into were the people who I admired their leadership style, like Bob Iger, or admired their talent, like Kate Winslet, or I had a crush on them, like Paul Newman, and Robert Reford, and Kevin Costner.

But, then, Kevin Costner turned out to be a big jerk, so, [LAUGHTER] sorry Yellowstone fans.

- And that's clear in the piece, you just let him- You just quote his own words, right?

- Yeah.

- So can you explain- What was it, how was he jerky?

- Well, I, the reason- the reason, I love doing these pieces is I try, and this is true in politics, too, I'm usually getting these people at the very height of their power.

And I want to see how they use that power.

Do they use it for good or evil?

You know, so, I kind of trained for the job of a political reporter on Shakespeare.

So, in Shakespeare, Shakespearean tragedies, the hero sometimes, well in tragedies always becomes his own worst enemy.

And so that, for some crazy reason, that often happens, when someone has first been elected president.

I don't know if it's imposter syndrome, but just at the very moment they should feel a lot of confidence and acclaim, the gremlins start coming out.

You know, I think that happened with W., and Bill Clinton, and, you know, I don't know why that happens, but it does.

But, anyway, also with celebrities.

Like Kevin Costner was- - had just become - The “it” boy of Hollywood.

- Hollywood's hottest hunk, as we called it, and, he had just made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and there was a lot of criticism that his British accent was sometimes you see it, sometimes you don█t, like, yeah, “I'll go into my father's castle,” kind of thing.

[LAUGHTER] And, so, he was on edge, and he didn't like being examined, and he was in a really horrible mood.

He was in New Orleans shooting JFK, and he was in a really horrible mood that day, and we were walking to the hotel where we were going to do the interview.

And these two adorable senior ladies were at the red light with us, and they turned to him and just said, do you mind if we take a quick picture while the light is red?

And he began screaming at them, and it really was like watching someone kick kittens.

[LAUGHTER] And then we did the interview and he was nasty throughout.

And then at the end of it, he put his hand on my neck and squeezed it and said, don't worry, everybody has a bad day.

And I said, you're having the bad day, you know.

- And then, what did he ask you about what you were going to do with the tape - of the interview?

- Yeah.

He said, - are you going to play this tape for your girlfriends?

And I said, I interviewed Paul Newman, and I didn't play that tape for my girlfriends, so I think I can refrain from playing yours.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE] - Well, the other thing about you that's very obvious is your Irishness, but a colleague of ours once said, for example, that when you were covering the the first Bush administration up in Kennebunkport, in the high, uber WASP nature of the Bush and the Walker families, that you could see them with the eyes of, maybe, somebody who whose ancestors could have been the Irish maid in their house.

- Yeah, that was my relationship with Bush Sr., you know, it was like- and I come from a family of, believe it or not, six-foot-tall Irish maids who worked for a lot of the famous families in America, the Mellons and the Gores.

And, and Bush was driven to kindergarten in a chauffeured limo.

So, our relationship was very much a culture clash.

And, you know, I was the working class girl, and he was the WASPy prince.

And he was very disappointed when the Times appointed me to the White House beat.

And so, one night his pollster, Bob Teeter, took me out to dinner.

And after a couple martinis, he said, you know, we don't see you as the New York Times White House reporter.

And I said, what do you mean?

And he goes, we see you more at the New York Daily News or the Chicago Tribune.

So I'm thinking, what?

And I'm going you mean because I█m ethnically different than you guys, and a woman.

And he goes, yes.

And I think Bush had thought at the beginning he would be dealing with someone named Clive Farnsworth - the third.

[LAUGHTER] Yeah.

- A real name of a real... - Clive Farnsworth the third.

And they would drink martinis on Air Force One and talk about the Atlantic Alliance.

And so Brant Scowcroft, his National Security Chief, took me out- I was covering Bush in Houston one New Year█s Eve, and he took me out, and he goes, we have a favor to ask.

And I said, what?

And he goes, can you stop calling the president goofy?

[LAUGHTER] I was like, I can█t, that's my job.

But I would do all these funny features about how he played golf, and I would go on the golf course.

Very quickly, right?

- the golf course.

- Very quickly, right?

- I mean he was... - Oh yeah, he played golf polo.

And if it was raining he would go anyway and play the sand traps as a water hazard.

And it got to the point where the Secret Service would lie to him about weather reports, because he would just go out in any weather, and it was dangerous.

But I would sit and watch him, and then he wrote a note to his press secretary complaining that I was like some Henanistic, which turned out to be a real word, Buddhist-person, sitting cross-legged, staring at him.

Buddhist-person, sitting cross-legged, staring at him.

And he, he- But here is what I have to say about him.

He was such a great guy that he really gave me a chance and kind of got over the fact that I was a woman and ethnic, and was super fair with me.

And- But when you went to see him, - But when you went to see him, sometimes you had to keep it secret from Barbara, right?

- Because she was... - Oh, yeah.

He invited me down to the Bush library and he didn't tell Barbara because she was the injustice collector in the family.

[LAUGHTER] And she was really by that time I was covering W., and I just wrote seven years worth of columns objecting to the Iraq War, so- But he would still write me, and it was really funny.

One time when W. was president, we- there was a funeral and a wedding in Kennebunkport, so W. had to go up there and I was covering him.

So I was there and the phone rang and it was Karl Rove, who was W.

's political guy.

And he said, the old man wants to see you.

And I said, okay.

And he said, he'd like to go out for coffee, but he's trying to figure out how to do it without his son knowing.

So, we're on this tiny promontory in Maine.

There are two presidents, two sets of Secret Service, and somehow a George Bush, Sr.

wants to figure out how to avoid his son's Secrets Service and have coffee with me.

And it was fantastic.

It was like the best French farce, right?

[LAUGHTER] And I thought he might be able to do it because he used to be head of the CIA, and he would sign his letters “head spook.” [LAUGHTER] And he loved, you know, that kind of maneuvering.

But in the end, Karl Rove called back and said he can't figure out how to do it without the president, his son, finding out.

So we didn't get to do it, but I love the fact that he wanted to do it.

And he wrote me great notes for 30 years and, saying, I don't know why, we have this love-hate relationship, but I don't know why I even talked to with the mean coverage of my son, but I think the reason he did was because he agreed with me [LAUGHTER] about the Iraq war.

So, yeah.

So he wrote these sweet letters, and when my mom died he wrote me this great letter and he said, if you ever need a friend, or a shoulder to cry on, or someone- you're in trouble, please call me.

And he told me about what happened when his mom died.

So, super sweet.

- When you were a reporter, from the very beginning you had an incredibly vivid, perceptive eye and a style of writing.

And you told me, I remember when you became a columnist, that you were worried that that critique of you as a reporter was, that you had too many opinions or too much English on the ball, and that as a columnist, you might not have enough firm opinions.

And as you say, you don█t- your column has never been particularly ideological.

So, how do you, how- what's the difference between being a reporter and being a columnist as you see it?

Because now you're both.

You're a reporter still for the Styles and the Arts and Leisures section, when you write those things, but you have a license of a columnist.

So how do you balance that?

- Yeah, I think I have had a hard time being a polemicist.

You know, Tom Friedman, Anna Quindlen said, when you got a column, you shouldn't quote other people because there wasn't room.

There are only 750 words.

And I really want other voices.

I want to hear what other people have to say, so that has been a hard adjustment.

And- but I do have to say being a columnist is easier with Donald Trump because you can have a lot of firm opinions about his behavior.

- When you started writing about politics for the times in covering the White House, our colleague Russell Baker, who was a beloved columnist and had been a White House correspondent himself, gave you some advice.

What did he tell you about how to think of this?

- Well, what happened was, yeah, I wrote something, and I forget even what it was, and it blew up and everyone was mad at me.

And he took me out to lunch and he said, don't ever forget.

These are the same guys you went to high school with.

Meaning: don't be intimidated, don't be afraid.

And I looked at him and I said, but I went to an all girls high school.

[LAUGHTER] - As you pointed out, when you started asking politicians what culture they liked or, talking about their, you know, their characters and their foibles, hardly anybody was doing that.

Now everybody's doing that.

And there are a lot of people who I think grew up in our business who idolize you and imitate you.

Some of them not very well.

Did you have any feelings about the sort of Dowd-lite strain of journalism?

Are there people that you look at and say, listen, pal, this isn't how you do it?

- No, because when I started, a lot of male journalists, even the bureau chief at one point later, after he left the Times, gave a quote about how I wasn't doing journalism right because it was too emotional and not intellectual enough, which I totally disagreed with.

And a lot of male journalists thought my writing was too trivial because it wasn't about the horse race and, you know, - Missile counts.

- yeah, whatever.

But, honestly, I never had a doubt about that, because when you look back in American history and you look at all the things that have traumatized us, like Vietnam, and Iraq, and Watergate, they came from the foibles of the president, you know.

- The human flaws.

- Yes.

The human flaws.

The gremlins of the president.

- And on the contrast, when things were triumphant they generally came from the enormous personal skills and qualities, like Lincoln or - FDR.

- Yes.

Yeah.

- So everything about politics is personal.

And, you know, I don't care what the big data says.

I think covering politics to me is much more like Shakespeare.

And, I think, a few years ago, the big data guys like Nate Silver, they just thought our kind of journalism was going out the window, but they were obviously totally wrong because their predictions turned out to be wrong and they couldn't predict something like Trump.

They just couldn't, you know, there's no one, kind of more, this isn't what I want to say.

I don█t want to say more human, but he has, like, so many, like, crazy flaws, and he has some political talents.

And it's all human, you know, who knows what he's going to do one day to the next.

And, you know, like, W., when he was campaigning, he said he was going to have humble foreign policy and no new nation building.

And politicians say things when they█re campaigning, but, you know, it it turns out not to be true.

Really, you have to know the human that you're electing, because they're the ones who are going to be in charge of your future and your children's future.

And, anyway, Bob Woodward once, I saw him at the premiere of the movie Nixon, and he said to me, every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves.

And he said he was Nixon's, and he thought I was Clinton█s, and now we have Maggie Haberman for Trump.

- Do you- We█ve both known Trump - But the president can't have a real shrink, so we're actually doing a public service.

[LAUGHTER] Yeah.

It█s the last taboo.

- The- you and I█ve both known Donald Trump for a long time, and we grew up in an environment where he was considered in New York a joke.

Do you have a unified field theory of Trump- of Trump as a president?

Like, how do you- how do you figure him now?

- Well, the weird thing is he's the same.

But, at that point, it just never occurred to us that someone like that could be president.

So I first talked to him in 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to America.

And Gorbachev was in New York.

He came to Washington, but he also went to New York to meet with business leaders.

And I called Donald Trump before the meeting, and I said, Mr.

Trump, what do you think the meeting's going to be like with Gorbachev?

And he was like, oh my God, the Soviet Union.

We can't trust them.

We can never trust them.

They're so untrustworthy.

We've got to be so careful.

And I called him after the meeting and he goes, I love them.

I love them so much.

[LAUGHTER] They want me to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

And it was like he could be had for the price of one compliment.

So he hasn't changed at all in that sense.

And also, you know, I used to go over and do these cultural, I did a cultural quiz with him, actually, but I used to just do cultural lightning rounds and he loves lightning rounds, as you can see from his presidency.

[LAUGHTER] And he would call me and say, come over and let's do a lightning round.

But, basically, he just wanted to talk about- he would say things like, Heidi Klum, sadly, no longer ten, or, Halle Berry, you know, yes, her face is at ten, her midsection is a six, and her legs are an eight, you know.

And so we weren't really thinking of him as presidential timber.

[LAUGHTER] - The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm famously said that all journalists are in some sense seducers.

How do you balance persuading people to talk to you, to give up their secrets, to tell you what they think?

I mean, you took chocolates to Nancy Pelosi.

Do you have any techniques?

Do you do, like, when in Rome do you do as the Romans do?

If you were if somebody Kentucky what you give a bourbon or what?

[LAUGHTER] - Well, as you know Todd, because you're an amazing journalist and writer, it's when you have a limited time to get to know someone it's really hard because you first have to try and win their trust, and then you have to bear down and think of questions where you can try and figure out who they are.

So it's kind of a- it is a dance - of seduction and provocation.

- Betrayal?

- Betrayal?

No, not betrayal.

[LAUGHTER] - Tiny bit of betrayal?

- A little bit of betrayal?

- No!

- I would say seduction and provocation.

You want them to trust you and be honest with you, but then you have to ask all the right questions.

And as I said, I try and ask questions that are a little bit different to try and get to know them in a different way.

Some people might think that█s soft or trivial, but to me, as I was just saying, it's the most important thing because it's the human element that matters when the country is scarred.

It's because of the gremlins of the leaders.

- Did anyone ever land on you li a ton of bricks after a piece?

Did they- did anyone ever really remonstrate?

Really- really hand to your head after you wrote something?

- Well, I remember once - Well John Sununu when he was White House Chief of Staff.

He was pretty tough.

- Yeah, I remember once, during the- Was it during the Anita Hill hearings, I wrote about- I mentioned that Biden's hair plugs look like a field of okra.

[LAUGHTER] And he called me in my office, and I literally, not only did I not take the call, I went and hid under my desk.

[LAUGHTER] But, then later it turned out he just want to laugh about it, and he was super nice and we got to be very, very cordial over the years until a year before he got elected.

I, I wrote a story when Hunter got involved with his sister-in-law, and the Bidens blessed the union and sort- and they kind of cast out Hunter's wife, Kathleen, out of the family.

They ostracized her.

And I wrote a column saying, this was not good and he would have to get it together in his family if he was going to run.

And that was it.

He never talked to me again.

- So you- one of the things you sometimes do in your Arts and Leisure profiles or your Styles profiles, you have this- you ask people to confirm or deny things about themselves.

So I'm going to give a couple to you.

[LAUGHTER] Confirm or deny: you live in a house that was John F. Kennedy█s bachelor pad.

- Yes.

This is a funny story, actually.

So he lived there in 1951 when he was a senator.

And the tour groups come by several times a day, and they all have the same riff, and they say JFK lived here as a bachelor and, until he started dating Jackie.

And then Jackie said, let's get out of this dump.

And then they moved up the street to the famous house they lived in when he was elected, and he would come out and announce that his brother was going to be attorney general.

So sometimes I go out and I say to the tour guide, can you not use the word dump about my house.

[LAUGHTER] - It's not a dump.

It's not a dump.

Confirm or deny: your father was booked on the Titanic, but he decided not to take the boat.

- Yeah.

You know, I just interviewed- I just last week interviewed in Hollywood James Cameron, the director of the movie Titanic, and Avatar, and Aliens, and Terminator.

And I said to him, I was very excited, and I said, you know, my father had a ticket for the Titanic when he was a teenager, one of the stops left from Ireland.

And- but his mother cried so much, he sold it to an 18- year-old woman whose hair turned completely white after, you know, she got picked up by the Carpathia or something.

And he just looked at me very patiently and said, yeah, everybody's father had a ticket for the Titanic.

[LAUGHTER] - Kirk Douglas invited you to see an exhibit of Van Gogh paintings, but you had to say no.

- Ugh.

This is, you know, I was so scared of writing a column the first, how long have I had it?

The first 20 years or something, that I just couldn't do anything else except focus on the column.

And one time, when I was in L.A., Kirk Douglas, who was a friend, called me, and I thought- and he wanted to go to the Van Gogh exhibit, and I thought I could go to Van Gogh with the guy who played Van Gogh in the movie.

And, you know, but I should have gone, but I just, I also missed Rosemary Clooney at the Hollywood Bowl because I would just- if it was the night before a column, I just had to obsess and worry.

Yeah, I missed a lot of things that way.

- Yeah, Esther Williams once asked me if I wanted to go swimming, and I said I didn't have a bathing suit, and maybe that was - very interesting - What?!

[LAUGHTER] - Is that a true story?

- It is, it is.

I was profiling Esther Williams, and she said, would you like- - You did not go swimming with -Would you like to- -Esther Williams.

- would you like- - would you like to take a swim?

- Oh, that is so much - worse than what I did.

[LAUGHTER] I know.

You have a master's degree in English from Columbia University, confirm or deny.

- Confirm.

You know, I went to Catholic University and I- all those years I've worked with all these amazing Ivy League people, and I was always kind of curious, is an Ivy League education so much better?

So, during Covid, everyone- there was a story in the Washington Post that a lot of people were exercising a lot and getting a lot hotter looking.

And I was like, well, that's not going to happen.

[LAUGHTER] So what could I do?

And then I thought, well, I could make my brain hotter.

[LAUGHTER] So, yeah, I started the graduate degree.

And it was daunting, I have to say.

But I stuck with it and got my degree a couple of years ago, and, you know, Ivy League kids are just very, very lucky.

I had Colm Tóibín teaching me Ulysses.

I had the foremost of Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro teaching me Shakespeare.

And, you know, it was a sheer pleasure.

Although, I have to say, I wish I had some parents to pay the school loans.

[LAUGHTER] - And you kept working the whole time, you never... - Yeah.

- Do you have a favorite piece that you wrote?

Is there one that if you had to take it with you to desert island and read it over again that you█d take?

- Well, if I had to go to a desert island, I'd take Shakespeare.

And if I was allowed two books, Shakespeare or Dickens.

But, mine- I don't know, in this book, I would say that I'm most proud of the AI piece because I wanted to do it from a layperson's point of view, and to just try and understand what was coming.

And, you know, as someone who didn't understand technology and tell you what was coming.

And I really think that piece accomplishes that.

- What do you make of our current moment?

Do you have any- political predictions are awfully dangerous in these days, but do you have any sense of what's going to happen next year in the midterms or beyond that?

- Yeah, I always say my motto is I don't predict, I report.

I really just like to stay in the moment and report, because I think every time we thought we knew what was going to happen, something else happens.

- You went to see Governor Beshear this afternoon.

Should he be watching out?

Should he look out for something?

[APPLAUSE] - That was really fun.

I had coffee with him for an hour at this really cool coffee place, and it was really interesting to get to know him because, you know, as much as I liked Biden and was hoping he'd run for president early before he cut me off.

[LAUGHTER] I was very, very disappointed that he had this kind of- It isn't like King Lear because he had already given up power, but clinging to power thing.

And it's very sad because he could have, you know, gone down in history as a fine president, and instead he's going to go down as somebody who suffocated all the stars of the party at the very moment they could have risen.

And I think if they had picked the right people, beaten Trump, you know.

He's responsible for that, and his staff and family.

And they still don't even know.

When they're interviewed they're like, well, you know, - We could have won.

- why did he have to get out?

- And it is really awful.

So I never got to see or cover the ones I wanted to cover, which was Gretchen Whitmer, and Josh Shapiro, and Governor Beshear.

And so, you know, it was really cool to talk to him and see what he was like.

- In your profile in the book of Robert Redford, you quote him as quoting T.S.

Eliot saying, “There's only the trying.

The rest is not our business.” That seems like a pretty good way of summing up journalism, too, right?

We're not in the business of outcomes, we█re in the business we█re in the business of... - Yeah.

- asking the questions.

- I mean, I do have to just say, if you read the book, Paul Newman and Robert Redford are so amazing because they not only had a career with all these totemic movies, but they did something incredibly larger, you know, to help people.

Like Robert Redford was an environmentalist and he formed Sundance, which created generations of young, independent filmmakers.

And Paul Newman had The Hole in the Wall Gang, where he helped children with disabilities.

And they managed to be the two biggest movie stars while also helping others.

So I think there were really great models, by the way, that doesn't say anything about journalism, but... - You talked about not being ideological and not having, you know, firmly fixed views about policy questions or whatever, but what makes you mad as a columnist?

What, what makes you- what gets your juices flowing?

Unfairness?

- Yeah, I don't really write from, even though despite what that editor said about me, I don't really write from a place of anger or, you know, I'm not irate.

It's more, I'm much more dispassionate.

I mean, I do write- I don't write from a partisan point of view.

I write more from a moral point of view, like what seems moral or immoral.

- And so, for example, when President Biden didn't want to acknowledge Hunter's child by- out of wedlock, that also you had a column about that.

- Oh, right.

Right.

That didn't help with him talking to me, by the way.

Yeah.

I said that they should acknowledge, that grandchild that he had out of wedlock because that kid's life is going to be destroyed by being ignored by that family.

And he said, after the column, he said he would acknowledge her.

But I don█t really think they have.

And I think Hunter told him that somebody, when they did the paternity test it was a red state, and so somebody might have switched, you know, the results or the sperm or something.

And, I don't know, I think because, I mean, the Biden story is so tragic in so many ways and because his first wife, you know, had died, and his little daughter, and then Beau died of cancer, I just think he was clinging to Hunter.

And so he literally could not see- he could not look at anything that was wrong when Hunter had his drug problems and everything.

And he was so indulgent because it was his last child.

- You talked about loving to interview politicians or profile actors or stars when they were at the peak of their fame or their power, they're getting- they█re influential.

But you also have a marvelous profile in this book of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening when they're falling in love.

And, what's it like to see that kind of chemistry happening with people?

- Yeah, this was really funny.

So, Warren Beatty, if you've seen some of his movies, you know, he has a thing about lighting, so he's always putting himself in shadow.

And, so when I went to interview him, we were first in this office, and I literally couldn't see my notebook to write.

[LAUGHTER] - Because it was so dim?

- Because it was so dim.

And then we went to his house, and that was even darker.

[LAUGHTER] And he wanted to show me something in a book, and he had to get a flashlight.

And- but I didn't put that in because I was thinking, well, I like nice lighting too, so I'm not going to make fun of Warren Beatty for that.

And I was out with our mutual friend Alessandra Stanley, who was a reporter at The Times, and I was telling her about the profile and it was about to run, and I told her about the lighting.

She goes- this was back when we had payphones, she goes, go to the payphone, call the editor, and put that in, because it was kind of a funny detail.

So I did.

- Well, when you were interviewing the great fashion designer Tom Ford on Zoom, he gave you lighting tips for looking good on Zoom.

What did he tell you?

- Yeah, he said- well that was at the beginning of Covid, and none of us knew how to do it.

It was just to put books and then put your computer on top of the books.

So it's not, you█re not looking down.

- There were other things like a white tablecloth.

But Tom, the Tom Ford interview in this book is one of my favorites because he seems like he'd be really intimidating, and actually he's just this nice Texan guy, but he is very- he has such an exquisitely tuned aesthetic sensibility that he is driven, you know, to make everything more beautiful.

And to him, everything can always be more beautiful.

So when I went to this very nice hotel in L.A.

to interview him, he was in the room rearranging [LAUGHTER] the furniture in the room, and getting different flowers, and pulling a plant from one side to the other, [LAUGHTER] because everything can be more beautiful.

And I never know with fashion designers whether you're supposed to wear something of theirs to the interview.

Was that respectful, or is that sucking up?

So I popped for a Tom Ford red chiffon kind of dress, and we did the interview.

And, on the way home, I was on the plane to Washington, and I had the New York Post, and I opened it and I saw the actress Priyanka Chopra in this dress.

And I realized I had had a corset belt on backwards.

[LAUGHTER] So I had the hardwear in front and the laces in back, and I couldn't wait for the plane to land.

I ran home and I called Tom Ford and I said, Mr.

Ford, I just need to ask you, did you notice I had my belt on backwards?

And there's this long pained pause.

[LAUGHTER] And he goes, yes.

[LAUGHTER] And so he spent the whole interview wanting to leap across the table and flip my belt around.

But he's too gentlemanly.

- So I guess I'd like to ask you one last question, just circling back how we began, which is why did you want to become a reporter in the first place?

Or how did you become one?

- Yeah, I, after college, I kind of drifted into a job with the Washington Hilton Swim and Racket Club, where I hired and fired lifeguards and tennis pros.

And even though I thought this was a quite superior job- Even if you had to clean the toilet before the senator█s wife came?

Oh, yeah, I did once in a while have to, yeah, clean the bathroom.

But, my family had an intervention and they're like, you're one of the first ones in our family to go to college, and we don't want you to have a job where you're wearing a tennis dress to work every day.

[LAUGHTER] So my brother set me up with a friend of his who was the sports editor of the Washington Star.

And I went to this bar to meet him.

He asked me how fast I typed, and I said 60 words a minute and he said, okay, you're hired, because it was a typist job.

And then I said, can I start after tennis season?

And he goes, okay, you're fired.

[LAUGHTER] So I ended up working at the tennis club by day, and then at 9 p.m., showing up to be a clerk at the Washington Star.

But I still didn't really think I would be a writer, but it was more a sideways thing.

Like I looked around at other people and I thought, well I can do that.

And I started reporting on the pandas in the Washington Zoo.

And they were having trouble because they had a male panda and a female panda, but they wouldn't mate, - they wanted a baby panda.

- Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing.

- Yeah, exactly.

Todd knows their names.

And so this was a continuing soap opera saga in Washington.

So finally they imported a panda, a male panda from London to mate with the female.

And it turned out he was gay.

[LAUGHTER] So he was trying to mate with the male, so.

[LAUGHTER] Anyway, after that, I clawed my way up.

[LAUGHTER] - Well, a conversation with you is always a way to make me feel better.

So thanks so much for sharing - with us tonight.

- Thank you Todd.

[APPLAUSE] This program was made possible by the Owsley Brown II Family Foundation, LDG Development, University of Louisville, and the James Graham Brown Foundation.