Elizabeth Drew covered Watergate. Here's what she thinks of Trump.

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2017

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Elizabeth Drew is the author of Washington Journal, one of my favorite books about Watergate. Drew covered the story as a reporter for the New Yorker, and the book emerges from the real-time, journalistic diary she kept amidst the chaos. As such, it does something no other Watergate book does: tells the story not as a tidy tale with a clear beginning and inevitable end, but as an experience thick with confusion, rumors, alarm, and half-truths.Of late, I've heard a lot of people comparing the early days of Donald Trump's administration — with the strange scandals around Russia, the fast resignation of Trump's national Security Advisor, and the mounting pressure for investigation — with Watergate. And so I asked Drew, who is now a writer at the New York Review of Books, to provide some perspective on whether that comparison makes sense, and how to think about the Trump scandals that are unfolding, slowly and haltingly, right now.Books:-Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America-Andrew Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:27.8	The following podcast contains explicit language.
0:34.8	Hello, welcome to The Asher Klein Show.
0:45.4	This week is a very relevant episode I had on Elizabeth Drew, who is the author of Washington
0:51.8	Journal, which is one of my favorite books about Watergate.
0:54.6	She was at the time the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, so she covered it in
0:58.5	real time today.
0:59.5	Elizabeth writes for The New Yorker View of Books.
1:02.7	Washington Journal is an amazing book because it is a real-time diary.
1:07.7	A real-time journalistic diary reported written beautifully in with great scope, but an
1:12.4	ongoing chronicle of what it felt like to live through Watergate.
1:15.7	What it was like every week as Washington DC and the major players in it tried to absorb
1:21.9	the information they had, tried to puzzle through the information they didn't have.
1:25.6	It really is helpful, I think, for trying to understand what it is like to live through
1:30.4	a period of great confusion and potentially great import.
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