-Congratulations on your book
being the "New York Times" best-seller.
So, you wrote about 1950s Washington, D.C.
This is a thriller. This is about politicians.
This is about the swamp and corruption.
I would have thought that if you wrote a book,
you would maybe try to escape from what you talk about every day.
But it seemed like you took a -- you escaped via a cul-de-sac.
-I went right back into the swamp.
Yeah, no, it was exciting,
and I could write about Washington today,
in a way, by looking at it in 1954.
And the basic premise is a young congressman and his wife
go down to Washington, try to do good,
and they get swept away in this conspiracy.
But what was fun was writing about actual figures --
John F. Kennedy as a senator and Joe McCarthy --
and putting them in the book, having them be characters.
-And have you gotten good feedback from people
who, obviously, still live in that world today?
-There's one Republican congressional aide
who reached out to me and said that it seemed like
I was trying to get some things off my chest,
which I thought was funny because --
There is a lot of -- You know, they say
history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
And when you read about Joe McCarthy
and you study about Joe McCarthy,
there's a lot of rhyming.
-Yes. -You hear a lot of rhyming.
This guy who was larger than life
and very popular with the base of his party
and smeared a lot of people and lied all the time,
and Washington just didn't know what to do,
and reporters and members of the Senate didn't know what to do.
-And we also look back -- I think there's a tendency
to look back on the '50s as, like,
this really "apple pie" era of America.
But there was -- It was -- Not maybe as much,
but it was rife with corruption then, as well.
-Yeah. It was -- It was hard. I mean, first of all,
if you're a white man, it was probably pretty good.
But for everybody who wasn't a white man, it was awful.
But then, even beyond that,
the '50s, yeah, in pop culture, it's idyllic.
It's serene. It's benign.
But, like, in truth, there was the Red Scare.
There was McCarthyism.
There were actual Communists infiltrating government.
There was the atomic race. It was horrible.
So, that's -- I thought it would be fun to write.
Because on the surface, you know,
it's all Sinatra and Jack Kennedy,
but, really, underneath it all,
it's McCarthyism and real mass.
-I want to ask you about this.
Because, obviously, you write a book.
You go out, you do press about your book.
But because of everything else you do,
you know I'm going to ask you other questions.
I'm going to ask you about your show on Sunday.
I'm gonna ask you about other people you've interviewed.
Have you been surprised? 'Cause someone else who's doing
press right now is President Bill Clinton.
And he seems very caught off guard when he is also asked
about specifically the MeToo movement.
Have you been surprised... -Stunned.
-...at his failure
to predict that those questions were coming?
-First of all, I know some of the people on that team.
And I'm sure that they tried to prepare him,
but I've been amazed at how poorly
he's handled these questions.
I mean, a lot of them, you could have anticipated.
The world has changed in just the last year.
It was, I mean, I think -- Who was the Emmy --
Who was the Tonys host a year ago?
-Kevin Spacey. -Kevin Spacey.
-Yeah. -I mean, that was a year ago.
-And I thought he should have done it again.
[ Laughter ]
I thought he was great.
-So, I mean, it's just --
The world has changed, so you have to adapt.
And I would think he would have had automatic answers for,
"Do you owe Monica Lewinsky an apology?"
"What do you make of the MeToo movement?"
"What do you make of this individual case, Harvey Weinstein, whoever?"
And, boy, some of the answers have been just --
You couldn't -- If you wanted to write
the worst answer he could give, it as almost as if --
That one he did today
about whether or not you can grope people.
-Yeah. It's a -- -People have different rules
today about where you're allowed to touch them
on their bodies involuntarily.
-It was -- Yeah. It was not well thought-out.
-And then he said -- And then he ended it with,
"But, you know, maybe I'm old-fashioned."
-Not a good way to frame it, yeah.
I do want to ask about someone else who had a real moment
in the MeToo movement
and was so tragic to lose, was Anthony Bourdain.
-Yeah. -Who was your colleague at CNN.
-Yeah. -I found it heartbreaking.
Did you know him well? -I knew him. I knew him okay.
I wasn't one of his closest friends, but I knew him okay.
And, in fact, it was through the MeToo movement
that he and I started talking a lot because he was so outraged.
And we had done a lot of coverage about Harvey Weinstein
last year, and he would reach out, and we would talk a lot.
And that's one of the things -- It's such a loss
for people who were inspired by him for any number of ways.
His show was about the humanity of us all.
-It really was, yeah. -But he really had --
The side that I saw of him that I loved was his passion,
his righteous indignation against injustice
and against all the people
who let Harvey Weinstein get away with it for so long.
And it's not like there are a ton of people
who have that righteous indignation,
so the world is much poorer for his having left.
-Yeah. He will really be missed.
Thank you so much for sharing that and being here.
It's always such a pleasure. Congrats on the book.