Return to Transcripts main page
Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees
One-On-One With Prince Harry; Buckingham Palace Has Repeatedly Decline To Comment On The Contents Of Prince Harry's Memoir. Aired 8- 9p ET
Aired January 09, 2023 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Or would it use its industrial and economic power to control Taiwan instead of its military and that, Erin, is a critical question.
ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: Oren, thank you very much. Sobering.
And thanks so much for joining us. Don't forget you can watch "Out Front" anytime on CNN Go.
AC 360, meantime starts now.
[20:00:22]
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: Welcome to a Special Edition of 360. The Harry interview, my conversation with Prince Harry that I did it for CBS "60 Minutes."
Tonight, the interview and we'll discuss with our correspondents and guests the potential fallout from it and what Harry reveals in his new book which comes out on Tuesday.
Prince Harry may have stepped back from his Royal duties in 2020, but he and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex certainly haven't stepped away from the spotlight.
Just last month, they appeared in a six-part Netflix documentary about their relationship and their decision to leave their Royal lives behind. But now, the 38-year-old Prince Harry is telling his own story in his new memoir, "Spare," a nod to his backup role in the line of succession.
The book is a stunning break with Royal protocol. It is deeply personal, and it's an account of Prince Harry's decades long struggle with grief after the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and a revealing look at his fractured relationships with his father, King Charles; his stepmother, the Queen Consort, Camila; and his brother, Prince William, the heir to his spare.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: You write about a contentious meeting you had with him in 2021. You said: "I looked at Willy, really looked at him maybe for the first time since we were boys. I took it all in. His familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me, his alarming baldness more advanced than my own, his famous resemblance to mummy, which was fading with time, with age." It's pretty cutting.
PRINCE HARRY, DUKE OF SUSSEX: I don't say it as cutting at all. You know, my brother, and I love each other. I love him deeply. There has been a lot of pain between the two of us, especially the last six years. None of anything that I've written or anything I've included, is ever intended to hurt my family.
But it does give a full picture of the situation as we were growing up and also squashes this idea that somehow my wife was the one that destroyed the relationship between these two brothers.
COOPER: I think so many people around the world watched you and your brother grow up and feel like you two were inseparable. And yet in reading the book, you have lived separate lives from the time your mom died.
Even when you were in the same school in high school --
PRINCE HARRY: Sibling rivalry.
COOPER: Your brother told you, pretend we don't know each other.
PRINCE HARRY: Yes, and at the time, it hurt. I couldn't make sense of it. I said, what are you talking about? We're now at the same school. Like, I haven't seen you for ages. Now, we get to hang out together. He's like, no, no, when we're at school, we don't know each other.
I took that personally. But yes, you're absolutely right. You hit the nail on the head, like, we had a very similar traumatic experience and then we dealt with it in two very different ways.
COOPER: William, it tried to talk to you occasionally about your mom. But as a child, you could not -- you couldn't respond.
PRINCE HARRY: For me. It was never a case of I don't want to talk about it with you. I just don't know how to talk about. I never ever thought that maybe talking about it with my brother or with anybody else at that point would be therapeutic.
COOPER (voice over): In August 1997, Harry and William were vacationing in Scotland with their father. Harry was 12, William 15. They were asleep at Balmoral Castle on August 31st when Harry was awakened by his father, who told him his mother had been in a car crash in Paris.
COOPER: In the book you write? He says, "They tried darling, boy. I'm afraid she didn't make it." These phrases remained in my mind like darts in a board, you say. Did you cry?
PRINCE HARRY: No. I never shed a single tear at that point. I was shocked. You know, I am only 12 years old, sort of seven, seven thirty in the morning, early. Your father comes in, sits on your bed, puts his hand on your knee and tells you there's been an accident. I couldn't believe.
COOPER: And you write in the book that "Pa, didn't hug me. He wasn't great at showing emotions under normal circumstances. But his hand did fall once more on my knee and he said, it's going to be okay." But after that nothing was okay for a long time.
PRINCE HARRY: No, nothing was okay.
COOPER (voice over): Harry says his memories of the next few days are fragmented, but he does remember this: Greeting mourners outside Kensington Palace in London the day before his mother's funeral.
COOPER: When you see those videos now, what do you think?
PRINCE HARRY: I think it's bizarre, because I see William and me smiling. I remember the guilt that I felt --
COOPER: Guilt about?
PRINCE HARRY: The fact that the people that we were meeting were showing more emotion than we were showing, maybe more emotion than we even felt.
COOPER: They were crying, but you weren't.
PRINCE HARRY: There was a lot of tears and I talk about how wet people's hands were, I couldn't understand it at first.
[20:05:12]
COOPER: Their hands were wet.
PRINCE HARRY: Their hands are wet from wiping their own tears away.
I do remember one of the strangest parts to it was taking flowers from people, and then placing those flowers with the rest of them as if I was some sort of middle person for their grief, and that really stood out for me.
COOPER (voice over): The funeral on a cool September morning was watched by as many as two and a half billion people around the world. Perhaps the most indelible image, Prince Harry and his brother walking behind their mother's casket on its way to Westminster Abbey.
COOPER: What do you remember about that walk?
PRINCE HARRY: How quiet it was. I remember the occasional wail and screaming of someone. I remember the horse hooves on the road. The bridles of the horses, the gun carriage, the wheels, the occasional gravel stone underneath your shoe, but mainly, the silence.
COOPER (voice over): After the service Princess Diana's body was brought for burial to her family's ancestral estate, Althorp.
PRINCE HARRY: Once my mother's coffin actually went into the ground. That was the first time that I actually cried. Yes, there was never another time.
COOPER: All through your teenage years, you didn't cry about it? PRINCE HARRY: No.
COOPER: You didn't believe she was dead.
PRINCE HARRY: For a long time. I just refused to accept that she was gone. Part of, you know, she would never do this to us, but also part of maybe this is all part of a plan.
COOPER: I mean, you really believe that maybe she had just decided to disappear for a time.
PRINCE HARRY: For a time, and that she would call us and we were going to join her.
COOPER: How long did you believe that?
PRINCE HARRY: Yes. Many, many years. William and I talked about it as well. He had similar thoughts.
COOPER: You write in the book, you say, "I'd often say to myself first thing in the morning, maybe this is the day." Maybe this is the day that she's going to reappear.
PRINCE HARRY: Yes. Hope. I had huge amounts of hope.
COOPER (voice over): He held on to that hope into adulthood. When Harry was 20, he asked to see the police report about the crash that killed his mother, her boyfriend Dodi al Fayed, and their driver Henri Paul, while they were being pursued by paparazzi in a Paris tunnel.
The files contain photographs of the crash scene. Why did you want to see it?
PRINCE HARRY: Mainly proof. Proof that she was in the car, proof that she was injured and proof that the very paparazzi that chased her into the tunnel were the ones that were taking photographs of her lying half dead on the backseat of the car.
COOPER: You write, "I hadn't been aware before this moment," talking about looking at the pictures of the crash scene, "That the last thing mommy saw on this earth was a flashbulb."
PRINCE HARRY: Yes.
COOPER: That's what you saw in the pictures.
PRINCE HARRY: Yes. Well, there were pictures that showed the reflection of a group of photographers taking photographs through the window and the reflection on the window was them.
COOPER (voice over): He only saw some of the crash photos. His private secretary and adviser dissuaded him from looking at the rest.
PRINCE HARRY: All I saw was the back of my mom's head slumped on the backseat. There were other more gruesome photographs, but I will be eternally grateful to him for denying me the ability to inflict pain on myself by seeing that, because that's the kind of stuff that sticks in your mind forever.
COOPER (voice over): Harry says he believed his mother might still be alive until he was 23 and visited Paris for the first time.
You told your driver, "I want to go to the tunnel where my mom died."
PRINCE HARRY: I wanted to see whether it was possible driving at the speed that Henri Paul was driving, that you could lose control of a car and plow into a pillar killing almost everybody in that car. I need to take this journey. I need to ride the same route.
COOPER: The same tunnel, the same speed.
PRINCE HARRY: All of it.
COOPER: Your mother was going.
PRINCE HARRY: Because William and I had already been told the event was like a bicycle chain. If you remove one of those chains, the end result would not have happened and the paparazzi chasing was part of that. But yet, everybody got away with it.
COOPER (voice over): Harry writes he and his brother weren't satisfied with the results of a 2006 investigation by London's Metropolitan Police, concluding Diana's driver, Henri Paul had been drinking and the crash was a "tragic accident."
PRINCE HARRY: William and I considered reopening the inquest, because there was so many gaps and so many holes in it, which just didn't add up and didn't make sense.
COOPER: Would you still like to do that?
PRINCE HARRY: I don't even know if it's an option now, but no, I think -- would I like to do that now? That's a hell of a question, Anderson.
COOPER: Do you feel you have the answers that you need to have about what happened to your mom?
PRINCE HARRY: Truth be known, no. I don't think I do. I don't think my brother does either. I don't think the world does.
[20:10:05]
Do I need any more than I already know? No, I don't think it would change much.
COOPER (voice over): Harry now says it wasn't until he served in combat with the British Army in Afghanistan that he finally found purpose and a sense of normalcy.
PRINCE HARRY: My military career saved me, in many regard.
COOPER: How so?
PRINCE HARRY: It got me out of the spotlight from the UK press. I was able to focus on a purpose larger than myself, to be wearing the same uniform as everybody else, to feel normal for the first time in my life and accomplish some of the biggest challenges that I ever had.
I was training to become an Apache helicopter pilot, you don't get a pass for being a prince.
COOPER: The Apache doesn't give a crap about who you are.
PRINCE HARRY: No. There's no prince autopilot button that you can press and just takes you away.
I was a really good candidate for the military. I was a young man in my 20s, suffering from shock, but I was now in the front seat of an Apache, shooting it, flying it, monitoring four radios simultaneously and being there to save and help anybody that was on the on the ground with a radio screaming, we need your support. We need air support. That was my calling. I felt healing from that, weirdly.
COOPER: And that multitasking, the brain work of that, that felt good to you.
PRINCE HARRY: It felt like I was turning pain into a purpose. I didn't have the awareness at the time that I was living my life in adrenaline. And that was the case from age 12, from the moment that I was told to my mom had died.
COOPER: You say war didn't begin in Afghanistan, it began in August 1997.
PRINCE HARRY: Yes, the war for me unknowingly was when my mum died.
COOPER: Who are you fighting?
PRINCE HARRY: Myself. I had a huge amount of frustration and blame towards the British press for their part in it.
COOPER: Even at 12 -- I mean, at that young, you were feeling that toward the British press.
PRINCE HARRY: Yes, I mean, it was obvious to us as kids, the British press is part in our mother's misery and I had a lot of anger inside of me that luckily, I never expressed toward anybody, but I resorted to drinking heavily, because I wanted to numb the feeling, I wanted to distract myself from whatever I was thinking and I would resort to drugs as well.
COOPER: Harry admits he smoked pot and used cocaine and writes that in his late 20s, he felt hopeless and lost.
PRINCE HARRY: There was this weight on my chest that I felt for so many years, and I was never able to cry. So I was constantly trying to find a way to cry. But even sitting on my sofa, and going over as many memories as I could muster up about my mum and sometimes I watch videos online.
COOPER: Of your mum? PRINCE HARRY: Of my mum.
COOPER: Hoping to cry.
PRINCE HARRY: Yes.
COOPER: And you couldn't.
PRINCE HARRY: I couldn't.
COOPER (voice over): He sought out help from a therapist for the first time seven years ago, and reveals he's also tried more experimental treatments.
You write in the book about psychedelics, Ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms.
PRINCE HARRY: I would never recommend people to do this recreationally, but doing it with the right people if you are suffering from a huge amount of loss, grief or trauma, then these things have a way of working as a medicine.
COOPER: They showed you something. What did they show you?
PRINCE HARRY: For me, they clear the windscreen -- the windshield, the misery of loss. They cleared away this idea that I had in my head that my mother, that I needed to cry to prove to my mother that I missed her, when in fact, all she wanted was for me to be happy.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: We'll continue with part two of my interview shortly. But first joining us right now, CNN Royal correspondent, Max Foster; CNN Royal historian Kate Williams, and Bonnie Greer, noted author and playwright and former Deputy Chair of the British Museum.
Max, let's start with you. You know, this is a two-part interview that we did for "60 Minutes," and one of the reasons that we wanted to start with this -- with a focus on Princess Diana and the experience of her death for Harry is in reading the book and it is 460 pages, I mean, it is, yes, people are going to be paying most attention to all the revelations and you know, the inside information that he's giving out, the break of protocol with Royal family, information he is telling about the Royal family, which we will show shortly.
But for me, I mean, this is such a memoir about loss and about grief and about the devastating impact of childhood trauma, the death of his mom which played out obviously on a global scale and it's extraordinary how the life that he lived is so different than or his perception of himself and his perception of his life is so different than the world's perception of what his life and his inner life must have been like growing up.
I find that sort of dichotomy interesting.
MAX FOSTER, CNN ROYAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and it is where we all connect with Harry, isn't it, that image of him walking behind the coffin and utter sympathy you have for that young boy and how he was so deeply affected.
And as you explored with him, so effectively, this is a really sort of historic part of the interview, because it was a global event defining for the UK in modern history and you see him behind the coffin and you tried to get a sense of what that was like. And you've given that -- you know, you've shown and brought that out. So, it's incredibly powerful.
And these images are seared on the world's consciousness. And then, you know, you explore this part of the -- you know, he didn't -- he wondered if she was still alive and he didn't really believe that she was dead until he saw the photos, and then he sees the paparazzi around the body.
And this is utterly defining, as you explore later on in the interview, how, from that moment onwards, he's at war, really, with a media. And it's not just the photographers. It is the news desks that commission and buy those photographers.
COOPER: Kate, I'm wondering what you thought of this side of Harry, how much was new to you? Does it inform at all the way kind of what is happening now?
KATE WILLIAMS, CNN ROYAL HISTORIAN: Yes, Anderson, it was just heartbreaking to hear him talk about his mother's death. I was so moved, he said he felt guilty, because he couldn't cry.
I remember being out there with the crowds, everyone was weeping. The tears were falling out. You were out there as a reporter. The grief was cataclysmic. And yet Harry, the one with really almost the greatest -- he and William had the greatest right to grieve of all, he just couldn't cry. He felt so guilty.
I was so moved about him talking about his feelings, and how he is speaking out, Harry's book, there really has been three things for me: A portrait of a very dysfunctional family, their relationships with the press in this dysfunctional family. But most of all, a portrait of a young boy losing his mother at this young age, with very little support from within the family and also expected to play this role on the world stage.
And when he said "My war began in 1997," that was, I think, a stunning revelation and really went to the heart of why he is still suffering now, the loss of his mother and how much the press had a role in that.
COOPER: Bonnie, I mean, again, for me, the idea of how little we actually know about the people we think we know in public life, you know, how they see their lives, their inner life is so completely opposite from what people imagined it would be.
BONNIE GREER, FORMER DEPUTY CHAIR, BRITISH MUSEUM: Well, Anderson, this family is a little bit more than, you know, celebrities. I mean, they are constitutional elements of his country. The head of the family is the constitutional head of state, his oldest is also in the Constitution, and the oldest after that are also in the Constitution. So they become much more than a prominent family. They're actually the fabric of the country.
And you know, I can remember I mean, I remember when Charles and Diana brought Harry out of the Lindo Wing at St. Mary's, the day he was born, and watching this jolly little redhead boy who just always had a smile on his face, until that day, when he was made to walk behind that coffin, which was barbaric, but also keeping in the tradition of this family, which is more than a family, they are the state.
So that is the issue I think that the British people are going to have to come to grips with and I think is what Harry in which you show in that really brilliant interview, Harry is challenging this and this is really the conflict and the clash is going to come in the British body politic.
COOPER: It is also interesting, Max, I mean, this whole notion of the heir and the spare, which you know, it's been in tabloids -- tabloid headlines, the fact that it kind of rhymes is obviously a tabloid catnip. Prince Charles and I asked this to Harry, we didn't include it in the interview, but you know, Prince Charles is famously rumored to have said to Diana after Harry's birth, well, you know, I've done my job I've given you an heir and a spare and that my job is done.
I asked him if he thought that was a true story. He said based on the various sources he had talked to or who had told him about it, he thought it probably was true, but also probably meant as a joke.
But that heir and spare dynamic, it pops up throughout the book, and throughout the relationship between Prince William and Prince Harry, we all have this idea that or at least you know, if you see a lot of the coverage in the British tabloids since the whole rift, the argument is that that Meghan was the cause of that, and I don't know what degree that is true, but from what Prince Harry is saying in his book, and he documents this is from the time Diana died, they lived two very separate lives and dealt with that grief in very separate ways. It's like they were on separate paths. And part of that is the heir and spare dynamic.
[20:20:25]
FOSTER: I mean, what Charles said there is the brutal reality though, isn't it? This is a monarchy, it is built on a hierarchy and Harry spoke to you about that. And by any definition, you know, there are more senior people in the hierarchy. If you don't like the hierarchy, you don't like monarchy. And then Harry, of course, says he does believe in monarchy, I think that is the reality.
I mean, I think what William's side would say is that they did everything they could to make Harry not feel like a spare. They elevated him, they had something called the Royal Foundation, where they worked together initially, Harry and William, and that was an umbrella group for all of their charities.
And I think William felt that he was elevating what would be a traditional role for a spare, a spare, would, in the past, just be invisible and brought in if they're needed.
So I think Harry really struggled with that and then it was the treatment, of course, from William that he felt he received as well always being made to feel like a spare. And ultimately, when he found Meghan, and she wasn't happy with the situation, either. They came together and realized they couldn't do this any longer.
COOPER: And Kate, one of the things that Harry talks about is that his being dubbed the spare and his role as the spare, he felt he was more vulnerable to the British press than others in the Royal family. He was essentially expendable, and that particularly comes into play when he is making the argument that other members of the Royal family, as we will see in this next part of the interview, in particular, now, the Queen consort, Camila, he says, was essentially throwing him under the bus.
He was one of the bodies left in the street, as she had a relationship with the British media.
WILLIAMS: Yes, I think that is exactly what Harry is saying. Harry feels he was the scapegoat that many other Royals used him to deflect from their own problems, their own insecurities, and the bad stories about them. And particularly just as you say, he talks about Camila, he said that she was seen as a villain, she needed to rehabilitate her image. And the way she did this particularly was by pushing forward negative stories about Harry.
As the spare, he is expendable, and I thought you brought this out so acutely in the interview, the grief he suffered, that the isolation he suffered, but also as this "Spare," the title of the book, that very structure I think, even though he says he supports the monarchy, he does blame it for so much of what went wrong.
We have a situation in which one child gets everything and all the attention and the next child not only gets nothing, but also is sold out to the press and that is why he was so unhappy and that is why he felt he had to leave and I think it really raises questions about the structure of monarchy, spare and heir, the European Royals don't do it like that. The younger Royals have their jobs, they don't expect to be a backup Royal, maybe that's the way we have to go.
It's not humane in the way that it is at present.
COOPER: We've got to take a short break. We'll have more with Bonnie and Kate and Max. Stay with us.
When we come back, part of my interview you didn't see last night. I asked Harry about why he made no mention of the most headline making comment his wife gave to Oprah Winfrey alleging a Royal family member had expressed concerns about what the skin color their first baby might be.
Also ahead, part two of the "60 Minutes" interview. Harry tells me why he called his stepmother Camila "dangerous."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) COOPER: You wrote, "I even wanted to Camila to be happy, maybe she'd be less dangerous if she was happy." How is she dangerous?
PRINCE HARRY: Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image.
COOPER: That made her dangerous.
PRINCE HARRY: That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:27:32]
COOPER: Welcome back to this Special Edition of 360.
Harry's memoir "Spare" is anything but spare in its unflattering portrayal of the Royal family especially his stepmother, Camila, now the Queen Consort. She married then Prince Charles in 2005, though the two had been romantically involved on and off for decades.
When Princess Diana famously referred to Camila as the third person in her marriage, the British tabloids ran with it and Prince Harry has never forgotten.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PRINCE HARRY: She was the villain. She was the third person in the marriage, she needed to rehabilitate her image.
COOPER: You and your brother both directly asked your dad not to marry Camila.
PRINCE HARRY: Yes.
COOPER: Why?
PRINCE HARRY: We didn't think it was necessary. We thought that it was going to cause more harm than good. And that if he was now with his person, that surely that's enough. Why go that far when you don't necessarily need to.
We wanted him to be happy and we saw how happy he was with her. So at the time it was okay.
COOPER: You wrote that she started a campaign in the British press to pave the way for a marriage and you wrote, "I even wanted Camila to be happy, maybe she'd be less dangerous if she was happy." How was she dangerous?
PRINCE HARRY: Because of the need for her to rehabilitate her image.
COOPER: That made her dangerous. PRINCE HARRY: That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press, and there was open willingness on both sides to trade information and with a family built on hierarchy and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that.
COOPER (voice over): Harry says over the years, he was one of those bodies. He accuses Camila and even his father at times of using him or William to get better tabloid coverage for themselves.
Prince Harry writes Camila, "... sacrificed me on her personal PR altar."
PRINCE HARRY: If you are led to believe as a member of the family that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that's what you're going to do.
COOPER (voice over): In his book, Harry writes that when he introduced Meghan Markle to his family in 2016, his father initially took a liking to her. But William was skeptical, disdainfully referring to Meghan as an American actress, though Harry doesn't specify who, he says other members of the Royal family were uneasy as well.
PRINCE HARRY: Right from the beginning before he even got a chance to get to know, and the UK press jumped on that and here we are.
[20:30:10]
COOPER (on-camera): And what was that based on, that mistrust?
PRINCE HARRY: The fact that she was American, an actress, divorced, black, biracial for the black mother. Those were just four of the typical stereotypes that is becomes a feeding frenzy for the British press.
COOPER (on-camera): But all those things within the family also were sources of mistrust.
PRINCE HARRY: Yes, you know, my family read the tabloids. You know, it's laid out at breakfast when everyone comes together. So, whether you walk around saying you believe it or not, it's still leaving an imprint in your mind. So, if you have that judgment based on a stereotype right at the beginning, it's very, very hard to get over that. And a large part of it for the family, but also the British press and numerous other people, was like, he's changed. She must be a witch. He's changed. As opposed to, yes, I did change and I'm really glad I changed, because rather than getting drunk, falling out of clubs, taking drugs, I had now found the love of my life and I now have the opportunity to start a family with her.
COOPER (voice-over): Soon after their relationship became public, harry insisted on putting out a statement condemning some of the tabloid coverage of Meghan and what he called, quote, the racial undertones of comment pieces. (on-camera): You write that your dad and your brother William were
furious with you for doing that. Why?
PRINCE HARRY: They felt as though it made them look bad. They felt as though they didn't have a chance or weren't able to do that for their partners. What Meghan had to go through was similar in some part to what Kate and what Camilla went through. Very different circumstances. But then you add in the race element, which was what the British press jumped on straight away. I went into this incredibly naive I had no idea the British press was so bigoted. Hell, I was probably bigoted before the relationship with Meghan.
COOPER (on-camera): You think you were bigoted before the relationship with Meghan?
PRINCE HARRY: I don't know. Put it this way, I didn't see what I now see.
COOPER (voice-over): They were married in May 2018 in a ceremony that seemed to promise a more modern and inclusive royal family and given the titles Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Behind the scenes, according to Harry, William's mistrust of Meghan only worsened.
(on-camera): Did you ever try to meet with William and Kate to defuse the tension?
PRINCE HARRY: Yes.
COOPER (on-camera): How did that meeting go?
PRINCE HARRY: Not particularly well.
COOPER (voice-over): In early 2019, Harry writes, the rancor between William and him exploded at Harry's cottage on the grounds of Kensington Palace.
(on-camera): Your arguments with your brother became physical.
PRINCE HARRY: It was a buildup of frustration, I think, on his part. It was at a time where he was being told certain things by people within his office. And at the same time, he was consuming a lot of the tabloid press, a lot of the stories, and he had a few issues which were based not on reality. And I was defending my wife, and he was coming for my wife. She wasn't there at the time, but through the things that he was saying, I was defending myself and we moved from one room into the kitchen and his frustrations were growing and growing, and growing. He was shouting at me. I was shouting back at him. It wasn't nice. It wasn't pleasant at all. And he snapped and he pushed me to the floor.
COOPER (on-camera): He knocked you over?
PRINCE HARRY: He knocked me over. I landed on the dog bowl.
COOPER (on-camera): You cut your back? PRINCE HARRY: Yes, I cut my back. I didn't know about it at the time.
But yes, he apologized afterwards. It was a pretty nasty experience, but --
COOPER (on-camera): He asked you not to tell anybody? Not to tell Meghan?
PRINCE HARRY: Yes. And I wouldn't have done. I didn't until she saw on my back, she goes, what's that? I was like, what? Actually, didn't know what she was talking about. I looked in the mirror, I was like, because I hadn't seen it.
COOPER (voice-over): Meghan has said constant criticism and pressure led her in the winter of 2019 to contemplate suicide.
PRINCE HARRY: The thing that's terrified me the most is history repeating itself.
COOPER (on-camera): You really feared that your wife Meghan?
PRINCE HARRY: Yes, I feared. I feared a lot that the end result, the fact that I lost my mum when I was twelve years old could easily happen against my wife.
COOPER (voice-over): In January 2020, Prince Harry and Meghan announced they intended to, in their words, step back as senior members of the royal family. They moved to California three months later. Then there was the headline grabbing interview with Oprah Winfrey and a deal with Netflix worth a reported hundred million dollars. Critics say the Duke and Duchess are cashing in on their royal titles while they still can.
[20:35:01]
(on-camera): Why not renounce your titles as Duke and Duchess?
PRINCE HARRY: And what difference would that make?
COOPER (on-camera): One of the criticisms that you've received, is that, OK, fine, you want to move to California, you want to step back from the institutional role. Why be so public? Why reveal conversations you've had with your father or with your brother? You say you try to do this privately.
PRINCE HARRY: And every single time I've tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife. You know, the family motto is, never complained, never explain. But it's just a motto, and it doesn't really hold.
COOPER (on-camera): There's a lot of complaining and a lot of explaining?
PRINCE HARRY: Yes.
COOPER (on-camera): And private being done in through leaks.
PRINCE HARRY: Through leaks.
COOPER (voice-over): Prince Harry continues to claim he would never leak against his family.
PRINCE HARRY: So now trying to speak a language that perhaps they understand, I will sit here and speak truth to you with the words that come out of my mouth, rather than using someone else, an unnamed source, to feed in lies or a narrative to a tabloid media that literally radicalizes its readers to then potentially cause harm to my family, my wife, my kids.
COOPER (voice-over): Last month, the British tabloid The Sun published a vicious column about Meghan written by a TV host.
(on-camera): He said, I hate her at night. I'm unable to sleep as I lie there grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day where she is made to walk naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant shame and throw lumps of excrement at her. Did that surprise you?
PRINCE HARRY: Did it surprise me? No. Is it shocking? Yes. I mean, thank you for proving our point.
COOPER (on-camera): Has there been any response from the palace?
PRINCE HARRY: No. That comes a point when silence is betrayal.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: A lot to talk about. I'm joined now by Max Foster, Kate Williams, Bonnie Greer. There's a lot of issues there to talk about the issue of Camilla, which is probably one of the big allegations made in this book.
But Bonnie, I also want to bring up something that wasn't in the included in the 60 Minutes interview, though. Though it took part in the interview. It was played on CBS Mornings this morning. I asked Harry about a comment that Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, had made to Oprah Winfrey in that headline making interview when they first came to the United States before the Netflix show. And she had said that a member of the family, of Harry's family had expressed concerns. There have been conversations about the potential skin color of their first child. I want to play they didn't go any further in that interview, Oprah oppressed them, they didn't go any further. It became a huge story. I want to play -- I asked Harry about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER (on-camera): In your interview with Oprah, probably one of the most explosive claims came from Meghan, which was that a member of the Royal family wondered how dark your child skin would be. That wasn't brought up in Netflix or in the book. Why?
PRINCE HARRY: The way the British press reacted to that was fairly typical. There was like a hunt for the raw racist. Neither of us believe that comment or that experience or that opinion was based in racism, unconscious bias, yes. But I think that you speak to the majority, maybe not all, but the majority of mixed-race couples around the world that the white side of the family would wonder whether talking openly about it or amongst themselves, what the kids are going to look like. The key word here was concern as opposed to curiosity. But the way that the British press, what they turned it into was not what it was.
COOPER (on-camera): But you stand by that happened, but you just didn't feel the need to.
PRINCE HARRY: Yes, but what else did I say at the end of within that Oprah interview?
COOPER (on-camera): That you would not discuss it further.
PRINCE HARRY: OK.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Bonnie, I wonder you made of how he framed that? Because obviously it was got a huge publicity at the time and there was no mention of it in ethics, no mention of it in his book.
BONNIE GREER, FMR DEPUTY CHAIR, BRITISH MUSUEM: Well, you know, I saw it. You remember Oprah's reaction was something like what? And the whole world stopped, then Meghan looked as she was about to cry. So, you know, we have to take that as very serious and maybe even deliberate. And then Harry kind of implies that maybe it wasn't. So, you know, how do you take this?
The other thing I want to say that I didn't get a chance to say about spare. Anderson, there's no way that a person who is royal one side and high nobility on the other would be surprised about being called a spare. The second son is a norm in aristocratic of royal circles. Henry the 8th was a second son. His great grandfather was a second son. They were spares. So, Harry would have known about the spares. He would have gone to school with a bunch of spares.
[20:40:15]
The issue is, I think, that there was no space for this man to be who he is in this particular family. I mean and that's the crisis. And we can see that when he's walking behind his mother's coffin on that day. That is a crisis. And it's a crisis not just for Harry. It's a crisis for the British people. They have to make some decisions about this family, because I've frankly, I've lived here a long time, half my life, and every decade, there's something about the royal family that's going on every decade. And I think the British people are going to have to make a decision about this, because the head of the family is the constitutional head of state. His eldest is the constitutional, and his eldest is constitutional. Everybody else is despair.
COOPER: Yes.
GREER: So, you know, we need to actually this has to be in the hands of the British people to actually understand what's going on here and deal with it, because this can't keep going on.
COOPER: Max, you know, you hear Prince Harry talking about his relationship with the Queen Consort, Camilla. I mean that's really some of in the book, some of his toughest perspective is about her.
MAX FOSTER, CNN ROYAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And for me, that was seismic. You know, actually, it's interesting through that story and, you know, part of the interview, how he lets off Charles quite lightly there, and he has done, actually, throughout the whole of this book. The reality is, over the last 20 years or so, Charles has driven this effort to rehabilitate Camilla's image. And Harry, in that interview in the book, is literally blowtorching that saying that she's dangerous and she was leaking stories, and that was undermining other members of the royal family. But Charles was part of that as well, has been part of that. There's no way she could have gone through that process of working with the media, which (INAUDIBLE) --
COOPER: And I should point out, Harry does hinted that -- does talk about that, his perspective on it in the book. There's more detail of it in the book. He talks about one particular incident when Harry was actually in high school and there were all these stories about alleged drug use. Harry was, I believe, smoking pot, he says, but many of the details were, he says, were not true that were being reported. And he believes a decision was made by the spin doctors that were employed by his father and by Camilla, essentially, to, if not greenlight those stories, not try to squash them or count or in some way try to minimize them because they were convinced or told by their spin doctor that those stories would make Prince Charles look better. He would suddenly go from being the villain in the story who had been terrible to his former wife, to being the beleaguered dad with a drug adult son.
FOSTER: Yes. I mean, reality is they do protect the more senior members of the family. Not necessarily a campaign against the junior members of the family, but I mean the crying incident. You know, this has gone into folklore, you know, who made who cry? Meghan or Kate over the bridesmaid dress just before the wedding. I mean it's quite defining. I mean, none of us know who made who cry. The story got in the papers was that Meghan made Kate cry and Meghan and Harry are really precious about this, saying it wasn't that way around, it was the other way around. But the palace wouldn't address that because it would be a more negative story for Kate to make Meghan cry. And that's the sort of thing that really frustrates Harry and Meghan.
But, you know, my experience was that whenever I worked with William's side of the palace, they would often, you know, and hey were working with the Sussexes as well. They were constantly talking about, you know, the racism and the sexism in the British tabloid media, and they were trying to stick up for them. But, you know, I didn't, I was a party to the conversations between behind palace walls, and clearly Harry had the inside track, and he felt that it was always working against him and Meghan.
COOPER: Yes. Everyone stick around. More of my interview with Prince Harry when we come back, including what happened when he learned his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, was near death. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRINCE HARRY: I asked my brother, I said, what are your plans? How are you and Kate getting up there? And then a couple of hours later, you know, all of the family members that live within the Windsor and Ascot area were jumping on a plane together. A plane with 12, 14, maybe 16 seats.
COOPER (on-camera): You were not invited on that plane?
PRINCE HARRY: I was not invited.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:48:45]
COOPER: More now of my interview with Prince Harry that first aired last night on CBS's 60 Minutes. We pick up the conversation with the death of the Queen. And once again, Harry finds himself with his brother, this time behind his grandmother's casket.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER (voice-over): Harry has been back in the United Kingdom. He was in London last September for a charity event when the palace announced his grandmother, the Queen, was under medical supervision at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.
PRINCE HARRY: I asked my brother, I said, what are your plans? How are you and Kate getting up there? And then a couple of hours later, you know, all of the family members that live within the Windsor and Ascot area were jumping on a plane together. A plane with 12, 14, maybe 16 seats.
COOPER (on-camera): You were not invited on that plane?
PRINCE HARRY: I was not invited.
COOPER (voice-over): By the time Harry got to Balmoral on his own, the Queen was dead.
PRINCE HARRY: I walked into the hall and my aunt was there to greet me. And she asked me if I wanted to see her. I thought about it for about 5 seconds, thinking, is this a good idea? And I was like, you know what, you can do this. You need to say goodbye. So, I went upstairs, took my jacket off and walked in and just spent some time with her alone.
COOPER (on-camera): Where was she?
PRINCE HARRY: She was in her bedroom. I was really happy for her because she'd finished life, she'd completed life, and her husband was waiting for her. And the two of them were buried together.
[20:50:09]
COOPER (on-camera): As they had 25 years earlier, Harry and William found themselves walking together, but apart this time behind their grandmother's casket.
(on-camera): Do you speak to William now? Do you text?
PRINCE HARRY: Currently, no. But I look forward to us being able to find peace.
COOPER (on-camera): How long has it been since you spoke?
PRINCE HARRY: A while.
COOPER (on-camera): Do you speak to your dad?
PRINCE HARRY: We haven't spoken for quite a while. No, not recently.
COOPER (on-camera): Can you see a day when you would return as a full- time member of the royal family?
PRINCE HARRY: No. I can't see that happening.
COOPER (on-camera): In the book, you call this a full-scale rupture. Can it be healed?
PRINCE HARRY: Yes. The board is very much in their call. But, you know, Meghan and I have continued to say that we will openly apologize for anything that we did wrong. But every time we ask that question, no one's telling us the specifics or anything. There needs to be a constructive conversation, one that can happen in private, that doesn't get late.
COOPER (on-camera): I assume they would say, well, how can we trust you? How do we know that you're not going to reveal whatever conversations we have in an interview somewhere?
PRINCE HARRY: This all started with them briefing daily against my wife, with lies to the point of where my wife and I had to run away from my country.
COOPER (on-camera): It's hard, I think, for anybody to imagine a family dynamic that is so Game of Thrones without dragons.
PRINCE HARRY: I don't watch Game of Thrones, but there's definitely dragons. And that's, again, the third party, which is the British press. So ultimately, without the British press as part of this, we would probably still be a fairly dysfunctional family, like a lot all. But at the heart of it, there is a family, without question. And I really look forward to having that family element back. I look forward to having a relationship with my brother. I look forward to having a relationship with my father and other members of my family.
COOPER (on-camera): You want that?
PRINCE HARRY: That's all I've ever asked for. (END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: The 60 Minutes reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment about this interview. Its representatives demanded that before even considering responding, 60 Minutes provide them with a report prior to airing it last night, which is something the broadcast never does.
Back now with Max, Kate and Bonnie. So, Kate, I mean obviously the royal family would like to avoid a public tit for tat with Prince Harry. They have not responded, I assume they probably won't, given that this is probably the worst in terms of the attention, the amount of coverage and revelations to come. What happens now?
KATE WILLIAMS, CNN ROYAL HISTORIAN: Anderson, they've said they're not going to respond. They're going to stay (INAUDIBLE). And it's interesting, isn't it, because Harry was saying that never explain, never complain was just tomato. As you were saying, there's an awful lot of complaining and explaining behind the scenes. So, they aren't going to say anything officially, but we've already had sources briefing the newspaper that they're devastated, that William is angry that there won't be a role for Harry in the coronation.
So, there are sources who Harry, of course, would say comes from Buckingham Palace itself. These sources are anonymous sources are briefing. At the moment, it looks very much as if there can't be a reconciliation. There is a big distance between them. Harry said we haven't spoken for a while. He said there are dragons in the family. The press he said that actually also that the press wanted them to stay apart. They'd be terrified by a peace between them. So there seems to be this huge investment in keeping them apart and Harry sees that, you know, about to continue.
So, I don't see a happy family reconciliation anytime soon, but I certainly think that Harry feels that he's been damaged so much already, that this is not burning bridges, it's honesty, and he's telling his truth.
COOPER: Bonnie, what do you think happens now?
GREER: Well, this is the story of a human being caught in a machine. The royal family, as Kate and Max have implied and said, is a machine and it's grinding along and Harry has said, halt. So, it's halted, but it's going to still try to struggle. If there's a coronation in May, that's going to be fascinating. But Harry is telling a story that has to be told. His mother started it, he's going to finish it. So, in that sense, spare at your interview with him is very, very important because we're getting a look at the vicious, nasty tabloids which Americans we don't have an equivalent of that anywhere in the United States. There is no equivalent. So, he's right about how Meghan was labeled, which was appalling.
So, this guy is stopping the machine. I hope he does. I hope the British people in this great country also began to look at this machine, because it's not doing, I don't think it's doing the country any good, even though my taxi driver said he wanted the royal family to stay because of continuity. [20:55:14]
COOPER: Max, I mean, it's interesting, you know, the palace is not responding publicly, and yet they are briefing, as Kate said, I assume privately, and offering up people who will say things that they want to be said.
FOSTER: I haven't had that. There's been a bit of it in the papers. I'm not sure where it's coming from. I think a very clear decision not to say anything here, (INAUDIBLE) get it all out, or perhaps to rise above it. I don't really know. I'm a bit more hopeful than the other two, only because things are so bad, they can't get any worse. I mean, he's broken the cardinal rule wash, you know, he's -- the really private moments he's exposed, you know, at moments at Philip's funeral, at the Queen's funeral. You would not talk about this as part of the family. He feels he has to do that. It's so bad. I think he only get better.
So, in future they might look at this and say, well, let, you know, it's all out there now. We might as well try to fix things. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, but I'm quite hopeful, you know, it can only get better, frankly.
COOPER: Yes. And he has said that the ball is in their court. There need to be conversations, but that from his concern. He says that the original offer is still on the table of a partial role for him. He doesn't see a full-time role, but he would like to see a partial role. Obviously that there needs to be a lot of conversations before that.
GREER: Charles needs to be the king and actually take his fund offer up. If he wants to change his institution, that's what he needs to do.
COOPER: Bonnie Greer, Max Foster, Kate Williams, I appreciate all you being with us. Thank you so much.
We turn back to U.S. politics and our breaking news tonight. President Biden now with his own classified documents controversy and the Justice Department investigating. Details next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
