Susan Page Transcript: April 4, 2025
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:00):
This, we titled this The Art of the Interview because again, like visual storytelling, it’s one of those skills that we just don’t spend enough time on, mostly because there’s no time to kind of step back and think about how you’re going to approach a subject. And I was extremely fortunate at USA today to get a closeup view of how Susan Page prepares for any interview, especially, we worked together on an interview of Jim Comey. I was just a tag along guy, but it was his first print interview timed to the release of his book after he was fired by Trump. And Susan not only snagged the interview because I’m sure FBI directors do not usually sit for interviews, and when they do, they don’t sit very long. But Susan not only snagged it, but also managed to set up a, or is part of the organization of setting up a full production facility inside the guy’s living room.
(01:24):
And I’m not sure how long we got to spend with him, probably days it felt like, but behind the scenes, Susan worked for a couple of days to plot strategy for that interview, and we were joined by various top editors who wanted to get their 2 cents in. But the strategy was not only what questions to ask, but in what order and questions that would break news beyond what was in the book. We had already read the book by this time, at least we had. And so you want obviously to make sure that the interview is meaningful beyond the book. Susan has done this countless times with presidents, how many? 10, 10, 10 presidents would be presidents and many others, and always delivering on this invaluable skill that can boost your work, whether you’re on deadline or on a book leave. And so we’re fortunate to have Susan here to share some of her secrets. And as always, raise your hand when you have a question, but I’ll turn it over to Susan.
Susan Page/USA Today (02:46):
Everything’s blowing up in terms of policy and that President Trump and his a hundred days of shock and awe, but also in the news industry, so many changes that we see. So anyway, I’m glad to see you’re here and doing so well. What would you like me to talk about in terms of interviews? What has either been hard for you or what do you think you’ve been very successful at? Has there been a problem with an interview that you think maybe I should have handled that in a different way? I could just start talking, but sometimes questions are better.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (03:20):
Let me grab a microphone so they can, because on tape and Yeah. Yeah, I guess, I
Hannah Demissie | ABC News (03:33):
Mean, I guess even just before the interview starts, just the process of securing an interview, especially I thank you, especially during campaign season where you have so many people fighting for time with the candidate and it can also apply to the White House, but especially when you’re that only person on the ground. I’m just curious about the process of starting and trying to secure an interview.
Susan Page/USA Today (03:54):
Yeah, I think that’s such a great question to start with because it doesn’t matter if you have a great interview style if you don’t get the interview. And so many people in Washington are hard to get interviews with because everybody wants to interview ’em. So just a couple things. One is just constantly be making the connections that will help you to make an interview, get an interview when there’s an interview around to be gotten. So that is just, it’s part of source development, is to get to know press secretaries and strategists and whoever is around the keep Newsmaker that you might want to talk to so that when you’re making a pitch for an interview, there’s somebody who knows you, who will vouch for you, that is an avenue for you to go to. That’s one thing. The second thing is to try to think about what makes my interview more appealing to the Newsmaker than everybody else’s interview request.
(04:49):
And so for instance, president Biden had done not a single interview with a newspaper during four years of his presidency, which is I think shocking. So when he was after the election, I wanted to put in for an interview with him. I’d interviewed him over the years many times, but I’d obviously never interviewed him while he was in the White House. But I knew him and I knew the people around him and I knew how aggrieved he was about the fact that all the news coverage at the end was focused on his mental acuity and the pardon of his son, right? Because he felt, and the people around him felt that wasn’t a 360 degree picture of his presidency. And so I pitched an interview that I said, I want to do one that’s backward looking, not forward looking. I don’t want to ask him about his future or the Democratic Party’s future or what happens with Kamala Harris.
(05:46):
I want to look back at his four years and I want to look back at all four years. And I said, I want to ask about Hunter Biden, but I also wanted to ask about the things he did in the first two years of his presidency that were pretty significant, really consequential and had been at that point, and even at this point pretty much obscured by his messy finish in office. And so the White House got back to me and we had a conversation about this interview and they clearly found it appealing because I wanted to talk about more than the immediate story. And because I promise not to talk about things ahead, usually an interview that looks ahead is stronger than new. One looks back. But for a president leaving office after four years, having never done a newspaper interview looking back seemed like an appropriate thing to do.
(06:41):
And I didn’t lie to them. I told them I’m going to ask about current controversies, but also about the full scale of his presidency and a look at what this presidency will add up to with the perspective of history. And one of the phrases I used in one of my letters to them was that the news cycle can be harsh history can be kinder. We don’t know what history will judge with President Biden, but it’s worth having that as your perspective because I think that is actually true. And I’ve seen presidents, I’ve covered over the years, assessments of them get better or worse with a passage of a couple years. Clinton looks like a much smaller president now than he did when he left office. And George W. Bush looks like a much worse President, George HW Bush looks like a much better president than he did when he left office.
(07:28):
So we should be humble about knowing what history is going to judge a president. And that’s a point I made to them too. I didn’t give them all these examples, but that we shouldn’t presume that whatever we think of a president on the day he leaves office is what we’re always going to think about him. So they bit and they not only agreed to an interview, but they agreed to an interview that lasted an hour. And usually when you interview presidents, they tell you you can have 15 minutes and they give you 20. Right? For a president to give you a half an hour is that is a really substantial White House interview. And we agreed on an hour because we had a lot of ground to cover, and I think they wanted to make sure that the stuff that was a little less sexy the first two years got included.
(08:18):
So that was how I got that interview. One of other thing to keep in mind is you do not get 100% of the interviews that you do not ask for. So I have asked for a bunch of interviews that I thought I would never get last month put in for an interview with the king and queen of England. I know, why would they, right? I mean for a book I’m working on. But anyway, they don’t really do a lot of interviews. And I was apologetic in my letter to the press secretary saying Perhaps this is a naive American request and they haven’t gotten back to me, but you never know. And I’ve gotten any number of interviews that I thought they will never agree to this, but let’s give it a try. So those are some ideas about how to get an interview, which is of course step number one
Kevin Johnson/NPF (09:13):
From, I don’t want to butt in, but from start to finish when you actually had a date in the Biden interview, how long a process was that?
Susan Page/USA Today (09:24):
You mean from my request to the interview
Kevin Johnson/NPF (09:26):
To the date of the interview?
Susan Page/USA Today (09:29):
Well, I put in forward once the kind of shrapnel of the campaign had hit the ground or the election. So I probably put in for it. I don’t actually remember December 1st. And it took place a week before the end of his presidency. And I’ll tell you something about conducting, I said questions, but since I was talking about Biden, should I tell you something about how the interview went?
Kevin Johnson/NPF (09:53):
Sure.
Susan Page/USA Today (09:54):
So good because you’re in charge here.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (09:58):
No, I’m not. You are.
Susan Page/USA Today (10:01):
So then I had to think about how to do this interview. Joe Biden is not a good interviewer interviewee because he talks too much and he gets off on his stories. And that was true. The first time I interviewed him was in 1987. I’ve interviewed this guy a lot. He’s still the same way, only a little slower. And I also knew that the questions I really wanted to get to that would make news were not the questions he wanted to answer, but the deal had been we would look backwards and at the whole scheme of his presidency. So I spent almost the first half of the interview on the positive things. He wanted to talk about the first two years and what he had done and what the repercussions of that would be.
(10:52):
And I let him talk. And one of the bad things that I do that some other people do too is I interrupt too much in an interview I think. And so at the top of each page of interview notes, I put Su, which means shut up, which is a Robert CAO trick. And I also sit, and I know this will look ridiculous, I sit like this after I’ve asked a question to make it harder for me to interrupt the person as he’s answering it. And I definitely use that with the first half of the Biden interview because it was not stuff that was news. It was interesting to see his perspective. And it was good to give me some insights into him, but it wasn’t going to be the news of the interview. But I let that go on for almost a half an hour before we moved on.
(11:42):
So maybe a half an hour, maybe half the interview was warmup. And then half the interview was the stuff that produced the news for the story. And the news for the story was he wished he had stayed in the race, he thought he could have won. I said, could you have served four years? And he said, quote, who the hell knows? And that he wasn’t sure if he could have served four years. So that was astounding. You really shouldn’t run for president if you don’t think you can serve all four years. But he never would’ve said that if I hadn’t let him talk for a half an hour about the things he wanted to talk about. So when you do an interview, you want to think about when you pitch an interview, you want to think, why would this person want to talk to me as opposed to everybody else?
(12:32):
And then you also want to think about how can I get this person to be spontaneous and candid about the things I want him to be spontaneous and candid about, which he will of course be inclined not to be because he’ll want to put his own spin on everything. So my strategy in this case was let him talk for what seemed like an excessively long period of time because that set him up to be candid and spontaneous when it mattered. Once in a while, the reverse strategy is the thing you want to do. If you’ve got 15 minutes with somebody who’s been interviewed a lot, you might want to start with your first question might be, why did you kill her? Because what, you don’t have time to do a real warmup with a short interview and they’ve been interviewed before, so you’re not going to trick them into thinking you’re a friend.
(13:30):
So sometimes the best thing you can do is start with the hardest, most direct possible question. So you have to figure out when you’re thinking about before the interview, what is the strategy that will work in this case because it’s different. And I’ll just say one other thing and then we’ll go back to questions. One thing that Kevin and I did before the interview that we did together was think about what headlines could I get out of this interview? Because I’ll tell you, the very first president I interviewed was Ronald Reagan when he was president. And I was so thrilled to interview a president and so excited to be in the Oval Office that I did the world’s worst interview, and I got nothing he hadn’t already said a hundred times to reporters. And I came out with a notebook of nothing and I had to still write a story for Newsday having landed this interview with the president.
(14:29):
And I decided then that I would not do that again, that I wouldn’t interview anybody and come out with nothing with a big Newsmaker. So in any interview, I try to think about what is the best headline I could get out of this interview? And I try to have a couple of ’em, and some of them won’t turn out to be true. I mean person won’t say that or won’t even think it, but I think you need to have an idea of what your goal is because your goal is to get something that is either no one has had before. Who the hell knows if I could serve four more years or some insight into someone that no one has shown a illumination of a big newsmaker that no one’s had before because you had the chance to talk to them. Yeah,
Kevin Johnson/NPF (15:19):
Let me get off the mic. Okay,
Cybele Mayes-Osterman | USA Today (15:24):
Thank you. So how do you handle when you know that you have to ask someone a difficult question that they’re not going to want to answer or they’ve been asked about it before? How do you find the right way to word something to get a fresh or original angle into what’s going on?
Susan Page/USA Today (15:49):
So it depends a little on what it is. So I got an email, email from someone this week who said that my very first job was at Newsday working in the Ron Con Bureau, which no longer exists. And I worked on Sundays, the Sunday morning shift where part of my job was to go get pictures and talk to the survivors of teenagers who had been killed in car crashes on Long Island on Saturday night, of which like 20 weeks a year, there was somebody I had to go right? It’s like the worst thing in the world to do. And I remember this, and this was the mother of someone I had gone to her house on Sunday morning when her son had died. Teenage son had died the night before in a car crash.
(16:46):
And I always worried that on the worst day in these people’s lives, I was making things worse. And her note, which was very kind, was that I had made things better. And that’s sometimes even a very tough question can do that. So I think the question I used to use on those terrible Sunday mornings was tell me about your son. And this was often very emotional and often you learn something interesting and also you didn’t feel like you were torturing somebody who didn’t deserve to be tortured. So sometimes you would do something like that, you would do a kind question. And sometimes if it’s something that I did this biography of Barbara Walters that came out last year and her interview of Monica Lewinsky is really a masterclass in doing an interview. And her key question was, what were you thinking? And it’s like you don’t have to go through every, I have to say you had an affair with a president, you were a White House intern.
(17:58):
You didn’t need to have a big buildup. And by having it be kind of conversational and almost funny, it got a laugh and an answer. But sometimes you’ve just got to be very tough and direct. And the one thing I will say, I think the better questions are the shorter questions. And one of the things I try to do not always successfully is to stop talking. So ask the shorter and more direct a question is the harder it is to dodge. And one of the things that drives me crazy about many people, many of my colleagues in the White House press core is they’ll ask a three part question. I’m sorry, ridiculous. You’re giving the other person the chance to choose which part of the question he or she wants to answer. Whereas if you ask a question that has five or six words in it, it is really hard to dodge when you’re one last thing when you’re trying to ask a question that is painful.
(19:10):
I just wouldn’t bundle it up in a bunch of gauze. I would make it short and simple and you can decide if it needs to be kind of kind or tough depending on what it is. One thing I find very useful is to write things down before. So I’ll spend a lot of time thinking, and as Kevin said, we did thinking about what’s the question that makes it harder to dodge and more likely to get a real answer and write down that question and then don’t focus. Remember that you’ve written down a version that you think will work and it won’t always work, but at least you’re not there kind of talking about irrelevant things. And then kind of looping back to the question, which is not, I think an effective way to ask anybody a question,
Sophie Hills | The Christian Science Monitor (20:04):
Right? Sophie Hills Christian Science monitor, and I have a multi-part question and a long note short, I’ll choose the one I want to answer. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, and with the caveat that I don’t have much experience to build off of, I have the last several years, but I feel like there are, I just honestly see a lot of public officials or people not Vox Pop, not people who don’t typically talk to the press, but professional people just really lying and there’s no shame. It doesn’t seem to be a real worry about their reputation in the way that I’ve heard there was in the past maybe. And so I’m wondering one, if you do feel like that is more of a challenge now and two, when someone is lying and they are, or you think they are, but they’re so blatant with it, what do you do? Because when someone basically says, yep, yeah, it’s almost like what do you do? They’ve now put you kind of with your back against a wall.
Susan Page/USA Today (21:09):
Yeah, that’s really a great question because it’s one of the things that’s changed here. I mean in Washington, maybe the country, but in Washington, because there was a time when if you did a fact check on somebody and they had said something that was wrong, they would stop saying it. And those days are just gone. It makes interviews so much less effective. I mean, number one, because lying to you, but also because it increases the obligation that you have to fact check. And if you’re interviewing, so I’ve interviewed Trump three times once during his first, let’s see, once during his first term when running the first time and once when he was running the second time, the third time when he was running the third time. And it’s like you’ve got to figure out to what degree do you want to do fact checking because it interrupts everything else.
(22:06):
And it’s much harder, I think for people on TV because with print, he or anyone else can say something that isn’t true but is not relevant to what you’re going to write about and you can let it go because you’re not going to deal with it. So why get tangled up in weeds? But if it’s something you’re going to write about, you got to correct the person and give them a chance to respond because in the story you are going to say, so-and-so said this, but that is incorrect. And when challenge said this, right, it ladders a whole complicated layer. So as with everything else, you want to think about it beforehand and think about what your goal is and the degree to which fact checking is necessary and the degree to which it’s a distraction because sometimes it’s one and sometimes it’s the other.
(23:02):
And people doing live interview on tv, they do not have this option of thinking about it, right? Much harder. I admire them a lot for handling it. But you’ve got to think about what is your obligation is not to correct every single thing somebody says, it’s to do an interview that is kind of grounded in reality and that on the things you’re going to call for them for not telling the truth, that you give them a chance to back down or to correct themselves or forever or whatever. This came up when, so it was the moderator on the vice presidential debate in 2020, the one between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris and the Fly.
(23:45):
I had to think a lot about fact checking before that debate because to what degree was I going to interject myself into an answer to do fact checking? And both candidates needed some fact checking Pence more than Harris, but both of them said things that deserved to be challenged. But I decided that was, in this particular case, not my role, that the role of the debate was not the role of an interview. The role of the debate was for millions of Americans who didn’t pay much attention to politics, to take a look at these two candidates and decide which one they wanted to support and to talk about not the issues
that I thought were most interesting and I thought was most newsworthy, but the issues that mattered to voters who were then trying to make up their minds. And I decided that with only one or two exceptions, I would not do fact checking and the other candidate could do fact checking and the coverage could do fact checking. But that in this 90 minute debate, that was not the role I set for myself. And I got some criticism for that, which is maybe the critics are right, maybe I should have decided to do something else. But it was the result of trying to think it through beforehand that I did that. I did what I did
Corina Cappabianca | Spectrum News (25:26):
Hi, Corina Cappabianca with Spectrum News. What’s your strategy for dealing with an interviewee dodging a question and how do you know when to keep pressing or move on to the next subject, especially when it’s maybe time sensitive
Susan Page/USA Today (25:43):
And it’s always time sensitive. So I think it’s good to repeat a question twice. Maybe it’s easier if you’ve started out with an easy question, how old are you? And they lie and you say or they don’t answer, and you say, no, I’m sorry, I don’t think you answered my question. Maybe you didn’t understand my question. How old are you? And some diversionary answer, and maybe ask it one more time just to make the point you realize that they haven’t told you how old they are and then move on because they’re not going to tell you. And that’s especially important I think when they’ve wrapped up their answer in so much wrapping paper that hoping you have forgotten whatever the question was that you ask. So I think it’s important to ask it and then ask it again and eventually let it go because you’re not prosecuting them, right? You’re trying to do an interview in which you get some news. And of course if they won’t tell you how old they are, maybe that’s some news. I mean, sometimes just the fact that I ask four times how old you are and you won’t tell me is your lead right?
(26:54):
But it is a zero sum game every time you ask the same question over again. It makes the point, but it takes up the time you could have used for some other question too. Fact checking is like that too. You don’t have unlimited time and you don’t have unlimited patience. And so that’s why I really try to think beforehand, what is my goal in this interview? What is it that I want to get and how can I go about getting it?
Skylar Woodhouse | Bloomberg News (27:25):
Hi, thanks so much for being here. Skyler Woodhouse with Bloomberg News. So I’m on the White House team, and to your point, what you’re talking about in terms of repeating a question, and I’m thinking back to Sunday, we were flying back on a F1 from Palm Beach, and that was the day where Trump had his interview with Kristen Walker and kept calling her. And I’m like, the whole press pool is here, sir, come talk to us. But he comes back on the plane and the question everyone wants to know is about the third term comment. So we’re all hitting it just different ways. And of course he’s like, oh, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it. And so I dunno, just from where you sit, how much is it worth? And obviously it’s a judgment call, but how much is it worth asking the question when we just go down the row A, B, C was there, not Hannah, but we just go down the row asking the same question in a different way. Is that a waste of time or is it worth, I guess harping on?
Susan Page/USA Today (28:27):
Yeah. So what would be in that situation? You don’t get many chances to ask a president a question. What would you, what would be the best thing that could happen from that exchange for you?
Skylar Woodhouse | Bloomberg News (28:41):
I mean, I do work for Bloomberg. So I traditionally skew obviously towards the tariff news right now. And anything sort of more market’s focus is my lane. But I felt like I asked him about it as well. I wasn’t the first person who brought it up, but I did try and follow up with it. I mean, I thought it was interesting, obviously very timely given everything that’s going on right now. But for me, I would say the goal is that when we land, I can pop out or my editors can pop out headlines that
Susan Page/USA Today (29:16):
They get some news.
Skylar Woodhouse | Bloomberg News (29:17):
And it might not be the newsiest thing, but it is news. And usually Trump will give you something because Trump, and it’s breaking news. So yeah,
Susan Page/USA Today (29:26):
Trump has said what he said about a third term, and that’s interesting and possibly important if he does run for a third term. But he at that point had kind of given the answer he was going to give, and so I would’ve asked about something else. And sometimes for some news organizations, it’s important for them to say, he told our name of our reporter this so that you see that sometimes in the White House briefing where one asks a question, gets an answer, person who asks the same question gets an answer, and then they can both use it as their question. And to me, that is such total bullshit. I mean, who can ask about something else or a follow up for God’s sakes or something. So I guess I would be a fan of moving on to something else. And Trump is super willing to engage.
(30:18):
And the thing about Trump, if you can think of a provocative question to ask him, especially one that he hasn’t answered 16 times, he might well answer it. So I think it is always worth trying to think of something that would, his interest, actually, that’s true of a lot of people. You ask ’em the question that they have a pat answer for, they’ll probably give you the pat answer if you ask them a question, no one’s asked them before or in a way that they haven’t been asked before, you might get an answer. And Sam Donaldson, who is like a million years old, but he was the master of a question short enough to be shouted, that would entice a president to answer, especially Reagan, but others as well, because it was just provocative in some Sam Donaldson way. And that was a real skill. I mean, he got some news that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise by doing that.
Skylar Woodhouse | Bloomberg News (31:15):
It was lucky that night we had him long enough to where I feel like we could actually harp on a lot of things. I had originally asked him about TikTok,
Susan Page/USA Today (31:25):
He
Skylar Woodhouse | Bloomberg News (31:25):
Said, we’d have a deal, then there’s no deal.
Susan Page/USA Today (31:28):
Also, the war in Ukraine is going to end and the Middle East very peaceful. So Trump is fun. I mean Trump is alarming to cover in some ways, but he’s really fun to cover. I think there are several of, you’re covering the White House, the people covering the White House, who has been able to ask Trump an actual question yourself. So one, two, okay, not that many, but that’s a real privilege. And most presidents, like you covered Biden, you could have been the senior New York Times White House correspondent, and you might never have asked Biden a question, but Trump is very transparent. He, as you know, answers questions most days in one form or another. He loves the late afternoon executive order signing combination with news conference. And that is, I find appealing as in a public official.
Mia McCarthy | Politico (32:25):
Hi, Mia McCarthy with Politico. I wanted to ask your strategy on follow-up questions and when you decide whether to go forward with follow-ups or try to move on to the questions you already had planned.
Susan Page/USA Today (32:37):
So I think it’s so important to do follow up questions. And even though I go into an interview, not a news conference, but in a sit down interview, I go in with a plan. But what’s important is to listen to the answer and to respond to the answer you got. And times when I’ve, I can’t bear to listen to interviews I’ve done because it’s like, why did I do that? Oh, stop that. Can’t you stop talking? That’s often what I think.
Mia McCarthy | Politico (33:04):
This is why I’m asking you that. I do the same thing.
Susan Page/USA Today (33:06):
Yeah, God. But when I read transcripts of say, automated transcripts of long interviews I’ve done, I’m often appalled by how I failed to listen carefully enough and that there was a nugget of something that would’ve made a really great follow up if I hadn’t been so stupid. So I think follow ups definitely crucial. It enables you to explore something you hadn’t even thought about, which might make it really newsworthy. And you really have to, even if you come in with a plan and here are my three headlines, can I get one of those? Maybe your Newsmaker will give you some other headline that’s even better, or that’s different or that’s so surprising that it didn’t occur to you, but you have to listen really hard to hear that and follow up on it. So follow ups, absolutely. It’s a bad, if there’s an interview where I’ve gotten 12 questions in a row that I think might work, and we go down those 12 questions, that is a terrible interview because really they didn’t say anything that was intriguing or that you wanted to unwind or a good interview.
(34:15):
You have a start and you have a plan, but then the interview takes over and an interview, it’s like a performance in a way. It took me a long time to learn this as part of engaging with the person you’re talking to, asking clear, short, hard to dodge questions, listening really hard to the answers with the Biden interview, so long runway, long slow, slow runway, and finally a lift off. And then that was kind of the trajectory of that interview. But with every interview you’re thinking about how does it start? How can it build, and what do I want to do at the end? Because one thing that I always try to prepare is a walking away question and a walking away question. We did one with, yeah, I don’t remember what it was.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (35:15):
I don’t either, but I remember actually you using those words.
Susan Page/USA Today (35:19):
Yeah. So I always have a walking away question, which is a question that can be asked really quickly as you’re walking away that is kind of different, not just a continuation of the interview. And that could get an answer that is really great. So my husband also a journalist had an interview with George HW Bush, and he worked for a Texas paper, so he knew Bush well. And so his walking away question was, Hey, you’re going to keep, who’s his vice president? Quail, Hey, you’re going to keep quail on the ticket. And Bush said, absolutely, of course I am. And that was like he’d never said that before. So that was the lead at his story was his walking away question. So I would always have something in my pocket as a walking away question for any interview. And sometimes you can’t pop it because of this, you’re being hustled out of the room or whatever. But the walking away question can often be the best question of the whole thing.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (36:25):
That’s absolutely right. It’s a great tip. There was a moment I got into interview Rod Rosenstein who was overseeing Mahler’s investigation and nobody had interviewed him because he didn’t want to be interviewed. And the whole idea of the interview was, what else are you spending your time on? And he wanted to engage on that. And so I kind of used that as my pitch. I mean, everybody thinks you’re spending all of your time overseeing Mueller. So he went in the interview and it wasn’t a trick or anything like that. He knew I was going to ask him about Mueller. So we got to the end of it, and he was actually providing some interesting news out of it. He spent very little time overseeing Mueller, and we were getting to the end, and he actually stood up and I said, why do you think that Justice Department is consumed by this? And he said, Bob Mueller is not an unguided missile. And I said, thank you, and walked out. Exactly. And that’s sort of like, and again, a great tip to think about when you’re doing,
Susan Page/USA Today (37:38):
And of course one reason it works so well is that people at that point think, I’ve survived this interview.
Sophie Hills | The Christian Science Monitor (37:44):
And
Susan Page/USA Today (37:45):
It’s like for them, the interview is over only for you. The interview is not over. Another tip is to start your tape recorder before you get near and to run your tape recorder until you are out of the room, because sometimes the first thing somebody says to you is going to be really worthwhile. And sometimes the last thing they say to, you’ll be really worthwhile. So don’t screw around with turning your tape recorder on and off. Have it on before you’re even near the place and leave it on until you’re too far away to be heard.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (38:18):
Exactly right, right next door. And now hold down.
Audrey Decker | Defense One (38:23):
Hi, Audrey with Defense one. This kind connects to what you were talking about before, but I’m just curious if you have any tips for when you’re interviewing someone who just doesn’t want to talk? I mean, I cover the military, so I interview generals who are just not very loquacious and just kind of will respond with very terse answers, no matter how I try and warm them up, I guess. And so if you’re in that situation, what do you do?
Susan Page/USA Today (38:49):
So what do you do?
Audrey Decker | Defense One (38:52):
I cover?
Susan Page/USA Today (38:53):
No, no, when they’re in that situation.
Audrey Decker | Defense One (38:55):
Oh, when I’m in that situation, I usually just try and either attack, make the question more broad, usually just to kind of try and get them talking. And then if that doesn’t work, I’ll just go to my next question and see if something else sticks. But sometimes they maybe haven’t done an interview before, and so they’re scared. And especially just right now with everything going on, all these generals are scared of being fired, and so they’re kind of scared.
Susan Page/USA Today (39:33):
So I would say if they’re just not accustomed to being interviewed, maybe it’s a technique, they don’t want to answer your question, but let’s say it’s because they’re generals and they find reporters terrify in interviews, but nothing like being in combat, which would be easy. So one thing I would do in a situation with an interview like that is I would ask the question and then you would say, no, ma’am. Right? And I would not speak, and I would just sit and listen as I’m listening and nodding as though,
(40:16):
And you’ll eventually feel compelled to start talking to fill the silence between us, because that’s what human beings do. So as though I’m saying how interesting your Noman was, now of course you’re going to tell me more. And it takes some discipline not to start talking, but I’m telling you, it is like the best way in the world to make someone talk. And if they never speak again, at which point I might say, tell me more. And not to say, you idiot, tell me more, but just like that. No ma’am, really intriguing. Tell me more and then don’t talk and see what happens with them.
Michael Williams | CNN (41:12):
Hey there. My name is Michael. I work with CNN, former Dallas Morning News.
Susan Page/USA Today (41:16):
My husband. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know Carl?
Michael Williams | CNN (41:18):
No, he was before my time a
Susan Page/USA Today (41:19):
Little bit. He’s really old.
Michael Williams | CNN (41:21):
He’s a legend. So I heard a lot about him. You talking about Robert Caro, speaking of Texas, sort of reminded me of the story that he always tells about when he was working on his LBJ biographies and he was interviewing Lady Bird Johnson, and they probably spoke for about three days. He asked her every single question, but the one question that he couldn’t bring himself to ask was whether she knew that LBJ was having affairs with all his different secretaries. So I’m curious if you’ve ever found yourself in that situation where there’s one question that you’re always kind of dancing around, but there’s just something that’s kind of keeping you from asking that. And if so, how do you sort get over that and what’s your sort of thought process when something like that comes up?
Susan Page/USA Today (42:04):
So somebody did ask her that, I don’t remember who it was, and she gave a wonderful answer, which was along the lines of, I had a wonderful marriage, and he was a wonderful man, and that’s what I, her answer basically acknowledged the affairs and said she had come to terms with it. So that’s a lesson in just asking the question because maybe you’ll get an answer that is really meaningful. And if you’ve thought before, so it is an irrelevant unkind question, I wouldn’t ask it, but that’s a relevant question. If you’re doing 600, 8, 6, I don’t even know how many books he has on his LBJ series, but if you’re going to do that kind of book, this is a relevant question to ask. So I hope I would have figured out how to phrase the question for starters and then suck it up and ask it.
(43:04):
That’s why you’re there. You’re not there to be friendly. You’re not there to be nice. You’re there because there’s information you want. There’s a story you want to tell. And it’s not like this has never occurred to her as something somebody would want to talk about. And in fact, her answer was quite brilliant. So Carol, you’d think he knew everything about LBJ because he spent a lifetime doing this biographical series now trying to finish the last part before he dies. And yet, last year this wonderful book came out about Lady Bird called In Plain Sight. Do you know about this book? And it’s a wonderful book, and it’s about Lady Bird’s role as a political advisor to LBJ, including crucially on his decision not to run for reelection. And this is something that’s not in any of the Carroll books. And the author did this wonderful in plain side thing, said she thought he just never thought Ladybird was important enough to worry about. And so that was a lesson in, it’s a lesson in not being myopic. It’s also a lesson in how there’s always aspects to the story that haven’t been explored before. Even somebody like LBJ who has had so many great biographies written about him, including by Robert Caro, that there was still this important piece that no one had ever seen before.
Grant Schwab | The Detroit News (44:35):
Hey, grant Schwab with the Detroit News, this is sort of the flip to Audrey’s question. When you have a subject who is too loquacious, who is either filibustering on purpose or maybe they’re just not used to being interviewed or they have a certain characteristic about them where they just go on and on and on, what are your approaches to that? Do you try to prep them beforehand so they know that they might be interrupted? Or are there things you do on the fly to make it work? You
Susan Page/USA Today (45:05):
Mean like President Biden? I know you’re really loquacious. Please excuse me if I feel me. I wouldn’t do that. Probably if somebody is just outrageous, like Schumer is a terrible interview because he talks and talks and talks. And with Schumer, I would say you’d wait until he’s taken a breath and say, interesting. Instead, I want to talk to you about this. I find interesting is a good interjection, and then ask some other question. And usually I would say usually people who talk like that are accustomed to being interrupted, so it’s okay. Interesting. Don’t tell me more. It’d be the reverse of the general. Right.
Mia McCarthy | Politico (45:54):
I have a follow up. You mentioned a lot of different tips of things that you’ve done to try to get a headline out of your story or since from Reagan up until now, right? Or out of your interview, what tips haven’t you said yet? I guess in our last few minutes, what are we missing? Which ones have we not asked about? I don’t know. Are there any things that you do every single time you go into an interview besides just the basics, prepping your questions, writing su at the top of your paper? Anything else?
Susan Page/USA Today (46:24):
I just think that you need to think about it. We all do a lot of interviews that are on the fly, and then you do the best you can, but the more thinking you do, it seems to me the better the interview will be and the willingness to throw away the interview you plan to do. That can be important too, because some of the interviews I’ve done that I’m proudest of are ones that it took some entirely different direction. One thing you need, one thing that’s important also in Washington is to know what the person has said before. Because the worst feeling in the world is you come out of an interview, you think you’ve gotten some news and you Google it, and they said it last week, right? So the idea of preparation, I think, is to prepare and then be prepared to throw it away. That would be the two things that seem contradictory but aren’t. Because if you over prepare what’s going to be important or consequential, and if you listen really hard and are willing to throw away whatever your preconceptions were, those are two things that enable you to get interviews that are meaningful and consequential as opposed to interviews that the guy said at a news conference three days earlier.
Mia McCarthy | Politico (47:52):
Do you have any suggestions for really quick interviews when you don’t have time to prepare?
Susan Page/USA Today (47:58):
It’s like a muscle so that the more interviews you do, the better you’ll do them. And some of the folks on the Hill who do these interviews of members of Congress as they’re running into the elevator are really fantastic. Man. Raju is fantastic at asking exactly the right question that they can answer quickly that gets him the information he wants to have. So that might be somebody you think something else to watch, people who you think do a good job interviewing and why does it work for them.
Cady Stanton | Tax Notes (48:36):
Thank you, Katie. Hi, Cady Stanton with Tax Notes. Have you ever had an interview that really just went off the rails, not just in the sense of someone talking too much or too little, but you’ve upset the person you’re talking to or maybe touched a nerve. And in any of those scenarios, were you able to get it back on track? And if so, how did you keep either rebuild that trust quickly or kind of change the tension in the room to get it back to a good place?
Susan Page/USA Today (49:07):
Of course, that kind of interview can be a really good interview, right? Because not really trying to go to Thanksgiving dinner with these people. You’re trying to find out something that they know or find out something about them. So when somebody gets really pissed off an interview, that can be the best kind of interview. But sometimes people need, you got to, so I interviewed Henry Kissinger a couple of times, but when he was a gazillion years old, and the first time I had an interview with him, I went up to New York to interview him in his office, and he came in and he looked terrible, but he always looked kind of terrible, but he looked terrible. And this was an interview, this was when I was doing a thing for USA today called Capital Download. So it was interviews that were on video, so we did stories, but video was part of this concept that we did for a couple of years.
(50:10):
And so I had this, a videographer with me, and we had said, and he didn’t want to do the interview, and even though he had committed, and I’d come from DC to do the stupid interview, and here we were in his office, and I finally realized he didn’t want to do the interview because, oh, did he have a patch or a scar or a bruise? He had something had gone wrong with his face and it became clear that he didn’t want to do the interview because he was embarrassed about how he looked. And so I started to, and I’m embarrassed to tell you this, flirt with him because I really didn’t want to go back to Washington without an interview with Kissinger who was probably going to die the next day. If I didn’t get an degree, I couldn’t come back. He was so old. And so I started to say, ah, I just can’t tell you Dr. Kissinger, what a thrill it is for me to be here next to you. And I may have even touched him on the shoulder or on his arm like Dr. Kissinger, really? You can imagine can What a thrill this is. I’m going to have to call my mom tonight and tell her about it. And you know what? He did the interview. I feel less good about myself, but he did the interview.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (51:36):
Anybody else?
Nicholas Anastácio | National Journal (51:39):
Right
Kevin Johnson/NPF (51:39):
Over here
Nicholas Anastácio | National Journal (51:40):
In the back. Hi, Nicholas Anastasia, national Journal and Hotline. Apart from just the questions and listening to the person talk, are there any sort of tips and tricks of assessing body language and keeping your own body language in mind so that in some ways you can assert yourself in the interview and have them sort of take you a little bit more seriously with your questioning?
Susan Page/USA Today (52:09):
So I think body language is really important, and there are some interviews where I’m trying to sit absolutely still as I can, so I’m providing no distraction. But with a lot of interviews, I would say more typically you want to engage the person. You want them to tell you stuff. And so whether that’s leaning forward or gesturing or seeming, really making it clear how close attention you’re paying to them, I think those are good ways just to make it a kind of human connection with them. I think watching their body language is smart too, because many times when you’re doing a big interview, it’s for a piece in which you’re going to try to paint a portrait of them. It’s not just an inverted pyramid of quotes. You’re trying to give your readers, our viewers, a sense of who this person is and why they matter and why they did this newsmaking thing that they’ve done.
(53:07):
And so the body language can be an important part of that and watching everything about the interview. So for instance, for the Biden interview, they had prepared note cards for him that were on his desk. Now he use them only at the very end, but that showed how nervous they were about his ability to handle an hour long interview. He used it at the end to make sure he’d made the points he really wanted to make. So that was a good thing to notice and to mention in the story because it tells you something about him. And there in most interviews, there are a couple things that happen where the person seems, or with the Biden interview, the question for which he was most animated was when I asked about the pardon of Hunter, and he said, basically, I don’t care about the politics. And then he started to talk about Hunter and how much he loved him and how brave he had been and how he’d fought addiction. And this was completely sincere. This was not a prepared thing they had done. This was a father talking about his son who had been in such peril. And so that was an important thing to note as well. So you want to notice everything that’s going on with the interview, not just what the person’s saying, but how they’re saying it and whether they look defensive and anything else you can notice in the room.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (54:33):
Thank you. I think we have time for one more right here.
Susan Page/USA Today (54:35):
This guy race is handed the very beginning.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (54:39):
My question was on.
Susan Page/USA Today (54:40):
Oh, okay. Right. And then I called on you and then they gave the mic to somebody else. It’s so unfair. Okay.
Linley Sanders | The Associated Press (54:50):
Linley Sanders, I’m with the ap. I’m glad you brought back up the Biden interview because I am kind of dying to know if who the hell knows was one of the headlines you walked in with, and if you had kind of a strategy in place for AP had said, yes, of course I’m fit as a fiddle.
Susan Page/USA Today (55:07):
Yeah, it was one of the headlines I thought, although I never thought I’d say, who the hell knows, just which was really something I think if he had said yes, of course I could have. I didn’t have a plan after that because that would’ve indicated he wasn’t going to really engage. What would’ve been a follow-up to Yes, of course I could have. Could it have been like you can hardly walk across a stage. Now
Linley Sanders | The Associated Press (55:37):
What I was wondering in that situation, do you sit there and go,
Susan Page/USA Today (55:42):
Are you sure? You might say, but we see what a struggle you have even these days, Mr. President. So maybe that would’ve been the right, I’m not sure I would’ve come up with the right follow-up, but maybe the right follow-up would’ve been, but Mr. President, we see how you’ve aged in office. It’s such a tough job. You have trouble even these days. But something like that.
Skylar Woodhouse | Bloomberg News (56:07):
Can I, would it have been worth asking, because you’re going to be with, you said, you said the interview was end of, sorry, I’m blanking. In January. In January, okay. Yes. So I mean, he had done his trip to Africa early December, and I was there, and I remember he was falling asleep at the round table with the other African leaders. I mean, would it have been valid to say, oh, well, when you did your trip in Africa, you were caught dozing off, falling asleep, sort of swaying staff coming over to check on you. We all thought something was wrong.
Susan Page/USA Today (56:47):
So if I was in that situation, I probably wouldn’t have done that as a follow-up because it’s a specific thing that you can say, I had jet lag or I was coming down with a cold. But it’s a really, what you want to get at is a more general question as, which is we can already see you’re not fit for office physically. Right. So I think in this particular case, saying isn’t the, I’m sorry, lemme turn this off. I think a more general question that seems really sympathetic might’ve been the way to go. Like, this is such a tough job, aren’t you already struggling? Something like that. We see how physically you’re struggling, you might’ve made it a physical thing too. He had just done an hour long interview in which he made only one error. He completed something at the end, but mentally he had shown that he was up to doing an interview for an hour, but physically, obviously he was struggling. So maybe that would’ve been the way to get him to acknowledge. Maybe he would’ve said then, yes, it has been really hard. It is a tough job. And then maybe you get a more candid answer after that.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (58:01):
Well, I’m going to have to close it there. I told you we’d save the best for last, and I thank Susan for sharing these secrets and these nuggets of wisdom. I think they’re all immediately usable, and I would take her up on it.
Susan Page/USA Today (58:19):
Hey, well, good luck to all of you and congratulations on being in this program. Thank you.
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