GEMSTONE
This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.
—White House counsel John Dean, August 16, 1971
From the time G. Gordon Liddy was appointed CRP [Committee for the Re-election of the President] General Counsel in December 1971, his principal efforts were devoted to developing, advocating, and implementing a comprehensive political intelligence-gathering program for CRP under the code name “Gemstone.”
—Senate Watergate Report, 1974
If you are expecting me to tell you about the elections, only 27 days away, I am going to disappoint you.
I tried that 20 years ago, when I was covering my first national campaign while working for Newsweek magazine.
For some reason that I have conveniently forgotten, I was talking to a group of hotshot businessmen in Detroit at the Economic Club.
After I had talked for a few minutes, there were questions from the audience. They wanted to know who I thought was going to win.
I demurred. Reporters shouldn’t predict. I was too green. The election was too close. And on top of all that, I didn’t know.
But they insisted. And, finally cornered, I allowed as how, if I had a gun at my head, I thought, maybe, Jack Kennedy would just squeak in.
Afterwards, a stubby little guy—turns out he was a General Motors vice president with a salary of $250,000 a year (and I was making nineteen five)—came up to me and poked a stubby finger hard into my chest, and said:
“Listen, sonny boy, if you want to amount to anything in your business, you just stick close to Dick Nixon.”
Which, of course, I did.
—BCB prepared speech text, Wittenberg University,
Springfield, Ohio, October 7, 1980
We drive along Route 114 from East Hampton to Sag Harbor in two separate cars. When we arrive at the restaurant, we’re led to a tight but beautifully set table near the front windows, overlooking Sag Harbor’s main drag. My wife shoots me an eyebrow as she takes her seat for the evening, between Bob and Carl.
It’s Ben’s eighty-ninth birthday, Thursday, August 26, 2010. The big party at Grey Gardens isn’t until the weekend, but today is Ben’s actual birthday, and Bob has made the announcement that he wants to take the entire house out to celebrate. Given how nice the restaurant is, and how many of us there are—twelve in all—this is not a low-value proposition.
The first bit of wine sets in, and the talk turns to Watergate. Elsa, Bob’s wife, leads the discussion, asking people questions and saying she wants to focus on “old times,” but the truth is that Bob and Carl and Ben don’t seem to need much prodding. Bob and Carl play off each other in their well-worn way, clearly enjoying the opportunity to tell stories about Ben with Ben himself sitting there. Everybody at the table is well aware of my role, and so the stories take on a kind of grandstanding quality, with style points at a premium.
I haven’t brought my notebook. I’m there to have fun, not to take notes or make people self-conscious. But as the wine flows and the stories start to spill out I begin to rue my decision. Nobody is saying much that’s historically new; it’s more about how they’re saying it than anything else. Sally mentions offhand that I really should have brought my tape recorder, and after a couple of people around the table reiterate that idea I contemplate the possibility of putting the phone in my pocket to inconspicuous use. A night like this won’t happen again, at least not for me.
As the phone’s recorder cuts in, the conversation has just turned to Martha Mitchell, the wife of John Mitchell, the former attorney general and campaign manager for Nixon who eventually went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. Martha was famously gabby and difficult to control, and in the first days after the break-in at the Watergate she enjoyed calling reporters (notably Helen Thomas) to deliver her opinions on developing events. As the story goes, during one of these calls on June 22—five days after the break-in—one or some of the security men around Martha ripped the phone out of the wall while she was still talking. Later, she alleged that she had been “forcibly sedated” when those around her feared she would reveal too much. She was a strange bird, a kind of canary in the coal mine of Watergate, and after her husband left her she took the odd step of inviting Woodward and Bernstein up to her apartment in New York:
BW: She said, “Are you and Mr.…”—she always said Mr. Bern-STINE—“busy?” And I said, “Well, what’s going on?” And she said, “The son of a bitch finally left me.”
CB: Remember, we didn’t know what had really happened …
BW: And so she said, “He’s moved out, and you and Mr. BernSTINE come up here, and you can go into his office. He left all these papers …”
CB: She was a well-known drunk by this time.… She intimated that there was more to the Watergate story than anybody knew.…
B: Did he have a girlfriend? I bet he did.
CB: Well, later—Martha must’ve been about sixty.
BW: So we call Bradlee, we always observe the chain of command.
CB: Oh yeah.
BW: This is one of the great lessons of this. We call the city editor, we had eight levels of editors between us and Bradlee. So we just said, there’s not time. And Martha …
CB: This is part of the good cop/bad cop between us.
CB: It was always Sunday.
BW: So we call Bradlee, and we say we have this offer to come up and go through his papers. And so Bradlee says, “We better get the lawyers.”
CB: Legal reasons.
[The editors, reporters, and lawyers agree on a theory of “constructive abandonment” that allows them all to feel that what they’re doing is okay.]
BW: And she greets us at the door, I remember it, and she had a martini in one hand and the Chinese menu in the other, and she said, “Let’s order.”
B: This is Martha?
BW: “I hope you nail the son of a bitch.”
CB: [The apartment] had a lot of cabinets. There was this linen closet that was painted all powder blue. And she said, “I think that he keeps stuff up in there.” So I took my shoes off and went crawling around in this closet, throwing down [papers].
BW: There were letters in there, one from Elmer Bobst who ran a big drug company, saying, Dear John, if we give a hundred thousand dollars in the ’72 fray, campaign, will you help us with our problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission? I mean, no one ever writes letters like that anymore. But they did.
Everybody at the table has heard most of these stories before, but it’s fun to hear Carl and Bob egging each other on, with Ben cracking wise whenever he sees an opening. Conversation turns to Robert Redford, and to how boring All the President’s Men seems to their kids. Bob retells the story about Pakula and Robards having to find fifteen different ways to say “Where’s the fucking story?” Carl tells an abbreviated and often interrupted version of the moment in September of 1972 when he and Bob realized that Nixon might well be impeached.
“That was a word I never used,” Ben says, as serious as he’s been the whole night, “and a word that I told you never to use.”
As we are having dessert, Bob gives his own toast, in earnest:
BW: One of the fires in my life is Elsa, who—and she lights many fires. And one of the things she’s said over recent years is, “Take Ben to lunch. See Ben. Go do this, go do that, with Ben.” And we have the saying, in our family, because in our place in Maryland we have sculls and we go out and row, and the saying is, “Any day you row is a good day.” And I have, in the last good number of years, realized that any day you get to spend some time with Ben Bradlee is a good day. So thank you.
Quinn [Ben’s son]: He also put you on the map, too.
[laughter]
Sally: Or maybe the other way around, they put him on the map.
B: We shared that.
BW: No, no. [To Quinn] Your father had the answer to this. Nixon put us on the map.
CB: He’s right.