The Turnaround Management Association annual convention continued
Wednesday with a keynote address by famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward of The
Washington Post. During the 90-minute session, Woodward spoke mostly
about leadership in a presidential context, from the criminality and
"smallness" of the Nixon White House to the superior communication
skills of President Bill Clinton to the mistakes of the current
Bush administration.
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Woodward cautioned that, as with facts and reporting, TMA members
may have a perception of a company, begin work and find something
completely different. To illustrate his point, he talked about
President Gerald Ford's Sunday morning pardon of Richard Nixon in
September 1974, which Woodward only fully understood decades later
after talking with Ford. The former president said, " 'The country needed
a new presidency ... so I pre-empted the process and gave Nixon a
pardon.' "
Using a more recent example, Woodward compared the Bush
administration to a distressed company, terming it "a great failure ...
it's not a team." If the Iraq War had been a business, he contended, if
would have been bankrupt in 2006, the starting year of Woodward's
newest book, "The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008."
In the question and answer section that followed, Woodward called
the Iraq War "a hinge in history, just like the financial crisis," that
will be debated for decades. - David Elman
David Elman is the editor of The Deal's Bankruptcy Insider newsletter.
