Ramos believes we should be asking for much more accountability. We should demand it at every level of our lives. “We all have the right—the responsibility—to challenge and question powerful people.”
An Audience Helps
You don’t need a television show to be effective when asking for accountability. If you have the basics—solid information, a clear objective to your questioning, and enough spine and moral indignation to stand up to authority—you can have impact, especially if you understand your platform and know your audience. Invoking community is one of the surest ways to give more heft to your case and more edge to your questions.
Thomas Wilson’s questions were powerful. But it was the audience around him that made his appeal impossible to ignore. Wilson was a specialist with the Tennessee National Guard. He was serving in Iraq at a time when large numbers of U.S. service members were dying as a result of improvised explosive devices—IEDs—that regularly ripped through poorly protected Humvees and other vehicles. At a gathering that was supposed to be a pep rally—the New York Times described it as a “morale-lifting town hall discussion with Iraq-bound troops”—Wilson raised his hand and asked the visiting secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, a pair of right-between-the-eyes questions.
Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?
Why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?
The place burst into applause. Wilson was asking what everyone in the room was thinking. Rumsfeld was caught off guard and, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words.
“Now, settle down, settle down,” he told the crowd. “Hell, I’m an old man, it’s early in the morning, and I’m gathering my thoughts here.”
“It was highly unusual for soldiers to dare to confront Mr. Rumsfeld directly,” the Times pointed out. But Wilson’s questions were poignant and accurate and brilliantly framed. They drew attention to the problem of under-armored vehicles and increased the pressure to fix the problem. Wilson’s platform—a troop town hall in Kuwait—was compelling. His community was reinforcing. He invoked the crowd and painted a vivid word picture of the problem. He gave it a moral undertone and framed it as a shameful betrayal of those who were doing the fighting and dying. And it wasn’t a speech; it was a question.
The Pentagon felt the heat and amped up efforts to provide the armor the vehicles needed.
Whether at a town hall or a staff meeting, confronting a powerful person is not easy. But having a community on your side creates an alliance. Your questions become the group’s questions, harder to dismiss as the ranting of a malcontent and easier to amplify because of the implied voices ready to join you. If you’ve done your homework, are prepared to stand up to the pressure of the encounter, and have crafted your questions so that you succinctly express the problem and the challenge, you can take the high ground and demand answers.
No Way Out
The situations, personalities, and dynamics of this line of inquiry vary widely. But whether you are confronting a politician who has broken a promise or a salesman who has ripped you off, a student who has cheated on an exam or an employee who has padded an expense report, you should prepare for an evasive or confrontational response.
Effective confrontational questioners have to be fast and uncompromising listeners. It’s what good lawyers do in a courtroom and what good interviewers do in front of a camera. They pick up on voice tone and swoop in on hesitation. They shut down attempts to filibuster or self-aggrandize. They keep the laser aimed at the core issue they’re after.
I’ve talked a lot about open-ended questions, those broad, nonthreatening inquiries that invite people to answer as they wish and go where they want. Accountability questioning is different. You want precision. You want to pin someone down. You don’t want to ask a question that lets someone off the hook or invites a speech she can use to obscure the argument or change the subject. Often, questions that elicit one-word answers can be the most effective crowbars to the truth. Yes-no questions.
You were late yesterday. Is that correct?
Did you call when you knew you were going to be late?
Did you think about the consequences of being late?
I wanted to explore how lawyers apply this yes-no strategy, so I called on Ted Olson, the great conservative attorney and former solicitor general of the United States. Olson had argued more than sixty cases before the Supreme Court—including the famous Bush v. Gore case that decided the presidency in 2000, which is where I first got to know him. In 2009, Olson surprised many conservatives and liberals alike when he took on California’s Proposition 8, which rolled back same-sex marriage in the state before the U.S. Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land.
Olson explained that lawyers like yes-no questions because they establish the record and draw precise boundaries. They put on the record a definitive response to a specific action or moment and give the questioner almost complete control over the witness and the testimony.
“You basically want to channel the witness into one of these box canyons you used to see in western movies,” Olson told me over lunch in downtown D.C. The advantage lawyers have going to trial is that they have studied the evidence and pored over the facts of the case. They have deposed the witnesses and can anticipate what those witnesses will say.
“It is good to ask the questions you already know the answer to—it’s very important to do that,” Olson says, “and to put [people] in a frame in which you’re having a dialogue, getting people somewhat comfortable with the rhythm. And then go someplace that maybe they haven’t anticipated.”
In the article you published on August 13, did you write these words…?
Did you believe those words when you wrote them?
Do you still believe those words?
“And the nice thing about yes-no is that the witness puts himself or herself on the record, and they’re on record categorically. What you don’t want in trial,” Olson advises, “is a lot of open-ended questions, because then the witness has no boundaries and may say something that you don’t anticipate and is damaging to your case. You don’t want to give the witness an opportunity for an exposition.”
Olson observes that a judge may still give the witness an opportunity to explain because “most things in life are not yes or no.” But asking yes-no questions conveys a purpose and a strategy.
Yes or no can paint a vivid picture. Oprah Winfrey did not make her name by grilling people. Confrontation and accountability are not her trademarks. But when she sat down with disgraced cycling champion Lance Armstrong for his first interview since he admitted to doping, she launched a series of surgical strike, yes-no questions that categorically established the facts.
OPRAH: Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
OPRAH: Was one of those banned substances EPO, which stimulates red blood cell production?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
OPRAH: Did you ever blood dope or use blood transfusions to enhance your cycling performance?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
OPRAH: Did you ever use any other banned substances such as testosterone, cortisone, or human growth hormone?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
OPRAH: In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope?