Fred Barnes on Reporting on Politics

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2015

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Executive Editor of The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes is one of America’s most respected political commentators. In this conversation, Barnes reflects on key figures and events from his forty years of covering Washington, including Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Jack Kemp, and George W. Bush. Kristol and Barnes also discuss the rise of cable political commentary and Barnes' contribution to it from The McLaughlin Group to The Beltway Boys and Special Report.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Conversations. I'm Bill Crystal and I'm very pleased to be
0:17.2	joined today by my friend and colleague Fred Barnes. Fred thanks for taking the
0:21.2	time to do this. Well, glad to be here.
0:23.0	So I came to Washington in 1985,
0:25.0	but I had already read you for a decade before then, covering the White House.
0:28.0	How did that happen?
0:30.0	Well, I was covering the White House for the New Republic magazine, which everyone knows now.
0:33.7	It was a very, very liberal magazine.
0:35.6	Wasn't that liberal then?
0:37.0	The owner was Marty Perrots, who was sort of, he'd come sort of halfway down the
0:41.6	Neo-conservative trail, and Charles Krauthammer of course was their big
0:45.7	foreign policy writer there and so it was a very congenial. The new Republican had
0:50.6	a column for a long time called White House Watch and it was very good
0:54.8	it was written for years by a man named John Osborne then he was replaced by
0:58.4	a Mort Kondraki my friend and of you know, who was in 1985 was hired to be the Bureau
1:06.0	Chief for Newsweek.
1:07.5	So he left and I'd gotten to know a little bit Mike Kinsley, who was then the editor of the new Republican and they
1:14.5	hired me to come in and really white I write this White House watch column which I
1:19.3	did almost every week. You've been covering the White House already, obviously that's why you
1:23.3	hired. Since when? When did you show up at the White House? I showed up at the White House in
1:27.9	August 9th, 1974. You'll remember that as a crucial date because that's when Richard Nixon flew off on a
1:35.4	helicopter out of the White House and Gerald Ford became president.
	...

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