Some stories are hard to see, generally because the clues are hidden or disguised. By accident, or on purpose. Other stories hit you in the face. Like Watergate, for instance.
Five guys in business suits, speaking only Spanish, wearing dark glasses and surgical gloves, with crisp new hundred-dollar bills in their pockets, and carrying tear-gas fountain pens, flashlights, cameras, and walkie-talkies, just after midnight in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The best journalists in the world could be forgiven for not realizing that this was the opening act of the scandalous political melodrama—unparalleled in American history—which would end up with the resignation of a disgraced president and the jailing of more than forty people, including the Attorney General of the United States, the White House chief of staff, the White House counsel, and the president’s chief domestic adviser.
But you would have to be Richard Nixon himself to say this was not a story.
The Washington Post got off to a running head start on the story, early on the morning of June 17, 1972, thanks to Joe Califano, once special assistant to President Johnson, then counsel to both the Democratic Party and The Washington Post. Califano was Edward Bennett Williams’s law partner.
Califano called Howard Simons, the Post’s managing editor, that morning to tell him that five guys had broken into the DNC a few hours earlier and were about to be arraigned. I was in West Virginia for the weekend, where the telephone didn’t work, but Simons called Harry Rosenfeld, the Metro editor, and Rosenfeld called Barry Sussman, the city editor. Sussman, still in bed, called two reporters, finally getting to someone who could find out what the hell was going on. (It flows downhill at newspapers, too.) The two reporters, chosen by Rosenfeld and Sussman, were local reporters, for this was a local story, involving the commonest of local crimes—breaking and entering.
They were Al Lewis, the prototypical police reporter, who had loved cops more than civilians for almost fifty years, and Bob Woodward, a former Navy lieutenant and one of the new kids on the staff, who had impressed everyone with his skill at finding stories wherever we sent him.
Lewis arrived at the scene of the break-in in the company of the acting chief of police, sailing past other reporters who had been stopped by the cops. He spent all day behind the police lines, calling in to the city desk regularly with all the vital statistics. Woodward covered the arraignment. He was sitting in the front row (where else?) where he heard James McCord, Jr., whisper, “CIA,” when the arraigning officer asked him what kind of a “retired government worker” he was.
Bingo!
No three letters in the English language, arranged in that particular order, and spoken in similar circumstances, can tighten a good reporter’s sphincter faster than C-I-A.
By day’s end, and on into the night at police headquarters after the final deadline had passed, ten reporters were working on different pieces of the story. On his regular shift at Night Police, after three in the morning, reporter Gene Bachinski was given a look at some of the stuff taken from the pockets of the arrested men. Including address books, and in two of these he found the name of Howard Hunt; along with the notations: “W.H.” and “W. House.”
Bingo!
Just the recollection of that discovery makes my heart beat faster, more than two decades later.
Carl Bernstein, the long-haired, guitar-playing Peck’s Bad Boy of the Metro staff, spent most of Saturday sniffing around the story’s perimeter as all good reporters do, and soon was told to “work the phones.” We needed help in Miami, where all the defendants came from, and it turned out we already had a correspondent there: Kirk. Scharfenberg, another Metro reporter, who had spelled our tireless White House correspondent, Carroll Kilpatrick, on the Nixon watch in Key Biscayne.
The next morning Woodward went looking for the mysterious Howard Hunt, and started by calling the “W. House,” and asking to be connected with him. An extension rang and rang, and rang. No answer. And a wonderful White House telephone operator (all White House telephone operators, by definition, are wonderful) told Woodward to wait, maybe Mr. Hunt was in Mr. Colson’s office.
Bingo!
Another rush of adrenaline, with that word “Colson,” the highprofile hatchetman assistant to Nixon.
Hunt wasn’t there, but Woodward and everyone else wondered why he might have been there, when Charles Colson’s secretary told him to try Hunt at Robert R. Mullen & Co., a PR firm. Hunt was there, and Woodward asked him how come his name was in the address books of two burglars arrested at Democratic headquarters.
There was a long, long pause. And then only, “Good God.”
Bingo!
Kilpatrick spotted McCord’s picture in Sunday’s paper, and immediately recognized him as someone who worked for the president’s reelection committee. CRP, for Committee to Re-elect the President, as the Republicans called it, or CREEP, as it came to be known around town.
Bingo!
In less than forty-eight hours, we had traced what the Republicans were calling a “third-rate burglary” into the White House, and into the very heart of the effort to win Richard Nixon a second term. We didn’t know it yet, but we were out front, never to be headed, in the story of our generation, the story that put us all on the map.
Now, twenty years after the fact, it is far easier to re-create this fabulous story than it was to report this fabulous story . . . thanks to the incredibly detailed record which emerged slowly from the dark:
• Transcripts of tapes of more than 4,000 hours of conversations involving all the key characters . . . Nixon, Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, Colson, et al.
• The voluminous record of hearings held by the spectacular Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, known as the Senate Watergate Committee, or the Ervin Committee, for its chairman, Senator Sam Ervin, the colorful North Carolina Democrat. Eighty-three days of testimony (most of it televised) from thirty-three witnesses.
• The record of the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the impeachment of the president.
• The record of all the trials, which led to more than 40 guilty pleas or convictions.
But for six weeks after the break-in, we were flailing, searching everywhere for any information that might shed any light, unaware that we were up against a massive cover-up being orchestrated by the White House. We were picking at the story, knowing it was there but unable to describe what “it” was, finding what looked like pieces of the puzzle but unable to see where—or even if—these pieces fit. For instance, we soon learned that burglar Frank Sturgis had another name, Frank Fiorini—the same Frank Fiorini I had met some months before, with Tony’s much older half brother, Gifford Pinchot.
Giff was a genuine original, tall, gaunt, and handsome, about sixty years old and a bachelor, living in Miami then, having been kicked out of Castro’s Cuba. In Havana, he had lived with a Cuban woman, known only as La China, taught rhumba dancing, managed a couple of Cuban lightweight boxers, and worked as some kind of an engineer on the side. When I was in New York late one afternoon in 1971, he had asked me to meet him and a friend in an East Side bar for a drink. He thought I’d be interested. Fiorini was tall and well muscled, with oily, wavy black hair, and ham hands. He looked and talked like a hood, as he went about trying to persuade me and “Pinchot, here” to come up with the wherewithal for 1,500 gallons of Diesel fuel, so he could take a boat to Cuba, make trouble for a few days, and get out. I felt sorry for Giff, because his hatred of Castro was clearly going to be money in Fiorini’s pocket.
After we’d identified Fiorini as Sturgis, I tried to see him for weeks after the Watergate break-in—through his lawyer, and through federal marshals—without success.
Bernstein finally broke into the clear with a story on August 1 about the origins of the money found on the Watergate burglars when they were arrested. It was a critically important piece of information. “Cherchez la femme” is good advice for investigative reporters. “Follow the money” is even better advice. Carl understood that instinctively, and persuaded us to send him to Miami to talk to the prosecutor there who had started his own Watergate investigation. He found Martin Dardis, an investigator who had traced the serial numbers on the crisp new hundred-dollar bills to the Republic National Bank of Miami. Did any of the burglars have a bank account there?
Damned if one of them, Bernard Barker, didn’t have two. Dardis had Barker’s telephone records and bank accounts subpoenaed, and found five cashier’s checks, totaling $114,000, which had been deposited in one account in April 1972. Four of those checks, totaling $89,000, had been issued by a Mexican bank to a Mexican lawyer. The fifth check, for $25,000, was even more interesting. Dardis showed Bernstein that it came from a man named Kenneth H. Dahlberg. Woodward, in Washington, found two Kenneth H. Dahlbergs, one in Boca Raton and one in Minneapolis. A little more work and we found they were one and the same man. And a few minutes later Woodward had him on the phone in Minneapolis. He knew nothing about the $25,000 check, he told Woodward, but as a fund-raiser for Nixon he turned over all the funds he raised “to the committee.” And he hung up.
Another Bingo!
A fund-raiser for the President of the United States? What’s he doing putting money in a burglar’s bank account?
A few minutes later, Dahlberg called back, to verify that Woodward was in fact a Post reporter, he said, and was more forthcoming. As a fund-raiser he had accumulated a lot of cash, and in Florida, had converted that cash to a cashier’s check. Dahlberg told Woodward he gave the checks to Maurice Stans, CRP’s finance chairman. And he had no idea how any of the checks ended up in Barker’s bank account. *
Now we had the burglar’s money traced directly to CRP.
It was three months after the “third-rate burglary” (and less than six weeks before the election). The Republican denials and counterattacks were getting louder every day, and we knew they were lying. Nothing kept us more committed to this story than our knowledge—not suspicion, not wonder, but knowledge—that they were lying.
Woodward and Bernstein got hold of a copy of the CRP telephone directory and address book, and started calling CRP employees one by one—always after work, and often five or six times.
Soon they learned that at least some of the people who worked for CRP were scared. Some were asking to be interviewed by the FBI, without a CRP lawyer taking notes. One of the CRP employees they talked to was Hugh Sloan, the committee’s treasurer, and suddenly in September, as city editor Barry Sussman remembers, Sloan “became helpful.” By now we were beginning to obsess on the Watergate story. Other newspapers were breaking new ground occasionally, notably the Los Angeles Times. But the Post had the story by the throat, and the story had the town by the throat. Katharine Graham was in and out of the city room two or three times a day, looking for a “fix” on each day’s story. Most nights many of us would get telephone calls from friends in and out of government, unable to wait for the first edition to discover the latest development.
One morning after a particularly good story, attorney and dean of Washington insiders Clark Clifford, then at the height of his power and influence, called me, and in that dramatic, triplebreasted basso profundo of his spoke for much of Washington: “Mr. Bradlee, I would like to tell you something. I woke up this morning, put on my bathrobe and my slippers, went downstairs slowly, opened the front door carefully, and there it was. The sun was already shining. It was going to be a beautiful day. And I looked up to the heavens, and said, ‘Thank God for The Washington Post.’”
At first the White House counterattacks had tried to laugh off the Watergate break-in as a third-rate burglary, and dismissed newspaper interest as “just politics.” Kansas Senator Bob Dole, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, played the role of lead pit bull, accusing the Post of being Democratic candidate George McGovern’s surrogate in his challenge of President Nixon. Ron Ziegler, the White House press secretary, was making the evening news regularly to deny everything, expressing his “horror” at the “shoddy journalism” being practiced by the Post. (Clark MacGregor, the former Minnesota congressman, soon to succeed Mitchell as chairman of CRP, grew more and more critical, even one night when his daughter Laurie was spending the night at our house, as a friend of one of my stepchildren.)
John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager at CRP, had weighed in with his criticism early in a uniquely vulgar and sexist way. On September 29—at 11:30 P.M.—Bernstein telephoned him for comment on a story that he had controlled a “secret fund” when he was Attorney General. Bernstein started reading out the story, when Mitchell exploded:
“All that crap you’re putting in the paper. It’s all been denied. Katie Graham’s going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ! That’s the most sickening thing I’ve ever heard. . . . You fellows got a great ball game. As soon as you’re through paying Ed Williams and the rest of those fellows, we’re going to do a little story on all of you.”*
Secretary of Commerce Pete Peterson, one of the few Nixon cabinet members who stayed friends with any of us, kept telling us that we were underestimating how much “they” hated us, were determined to do us in. We had no idea what they felt was their range of options. TV licenses? IRS audits? Wiretapping?
As the former Attorney General’s “tit in the wringer” quote resounded through the halls of Washington, we were already working on a story about Donald Segretti, a young California lawyer, first discovered by the FBI as agents went through Howard Hunt’s subpoenaed telephone records. A week after the Watergate breakin, the Feds realized that Hunt and Segretti were in some kind of business together, but they had put Segretti on a back burner when they couldn’t tie him to the Watergate break-in itself. Not Woodward and Bernstein. They didn’t have a back burner.
Woodward learned more about Donald Segretti from his “friend” who was known in the city room to have quite extraordinary sources. This friend was the soon-to-be legendary “Deep Throat.” Managing editor Howard Simons christened Woodward’s source “Deep Throat.” “Deep” surely from “deep background,” the terms on which he gave Woodward all information, and “Deep Throat” probably because that was the title of the year’s most successful pornographic movie, starring the awesome sodomist Linda Lovelace.
In the middle of September, Woodward read Deep Throat the draft of a story saying that federal investigators “had received information from Nixon campaign workers that high officials of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP) had been involved in the funding of the Watergate operation.” Deep Throat told Woodward the story was “too soft,” adding, “you can go much stronger.”
The next day Deep Throat offered up Jeb Stuart Magruder, deputy campaign director of CRP, and Bart Porter (Herbert L.), scheduling director of CRP, “both deeply involved in Watergate,” he said, and confirmed that they had received at least $50,000 in dirty trick money from the safe of former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, now the finance chairman of the president’s reelection campaign. Woodward was told he could be damn sure the money had not been used for legitimate purposes. That was fact, not allegation, Deep Throat said.
In late September, Bernstein took a call from an anonymous male, who described himself only as a government lawyer. He told Bernstein about an organized campaign of political sabotage and spying against the Democrats, and suggested he call Alex Shipley, then an assistant attorney general of Tennessee, for the details. Shipley told Bernstein that he had been in the Army with Segretti, and when he got out, Segretti tried to recruit him to join the sabotage effort. Woodward and Bernstein managed to get copies of Segretti’s credit card records, and they confirmed that Segretti had been traveling the nation, spending a day or two in cities where the Democratic primaries would be held.
At the end of September, Clark MacGregor, campaign director at CRP, squeezed the pressure bar a bit by “demanding” an appointment with Katharine and me. With exaggerated emphasis, he would say only that the subject was “extremely important,” and we set it up for the morning of the 29th. By accident I had bumped into him the afternoon before, and he had started whining to me about Woodward and Bernstein “harassing” secretaries.
An hour before our appointment, MacGregor’s secretary called to say that he would be unable to keep it. She told me MacGregor felt he “had substantially accomplished his mission” during our conversation, according to a memorandum of conversation I dictated.
I asked her to tell him it had not accomplished anything, and she put him on. I asked him which secretaries were claiming what had been done to them by whom. (It would turn out that only Bernstein was being accused of harassment above and beyond the call of duty.) According to MacGregor, Sally Harmony, a secretary at CRP, had gone home sick one afternoon, and Bernstein learned about it, and went to her apartment, “and repeatedly tried to get in.” Another secretary had consistently found Bernstein waiting for her at her apartment door. Still another had been telephoned so often by Bernstein that she had been forced to move out and go live with her parents.
Bernstein had “repeatedly suggested lunch, cocktails, and so forth” to a secretary to Justice Rehnquist, again according to MacGregor.
I told him, “That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard about either one of them in years,” then murmured something about a raise for the boys, and hung up.
On October 9, Woodward and Deep Throat had their longest meeting ever, and one of their most productive.
“There is a way to untie the Watergate knot,” Deep Throat started out. “. . . everything points in the direction of what was called ‘Offensive Security. . . .’ Remember, you don’t do 1,500 interviews [with the FBI] and not have something on your hands other than a single break-in.”
“Who was involved?” Woodward asked.
“Only the President and Mitchell know,” came the ominous answer, without elaboration.
“That guy [Attorney General Mitchell] definitely learned some things in those ten days after Watergate. He was just sick, and everyone was saying that he was ruined because of what his people did, especially Mardian [political coordinator at CRP] and LaRue [Deputy Director, CRP], and what happened at the White House.
“And Mitchell said, ‘If this all comes out, it could ruin the administration. I mean, ruin it.’
“They were playing games, all over the map . . . in Illinois, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, California, Texas, Florida, and the District of Columbia,” Deep Throat continued.
“What about Howard Hunt and leak-plugging?” Woodward asked.
“That operation was not only to check leaks to the papers but often to manufacture items for the press. It was a Colson-Hunt operation. Recipients include all of you guys—Jack Anderson, Evans and Novak, the Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune. The business of Eagleton’s drunk-driving record or his health records, I understand, involves the White House and Hunt somehow.” (McGovern had dumped his vice-presidential candidate, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, after reports surfaced in the press that Eagleton had been treated for clinical depression.)
A Letter to the Editor, which had appeared in William Loeb’s right-wing Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader, charged presidential candidate Ed Muskie with condoning an ethnic slur against people of French Canadian descent by using the word “Canuck.” It became known as the Canuck letter, and according to Deep Throat, “It was a White House Operation—done inside the gates surrounding the White House and the Executive Office Building. Is that enough?”
No. Woodward pressed for more.
“Okay, this is very serious. You can safely say that 50 people—more than 50—worked for the White House and CRP to play games and spy and sabotage.”
Woodward left the meeting with a list that included “bugging, following people, false press leaks, fake letters, canceling campaign rallies, investigating campaign workers’ private lives, planting spies, stealing documents, planting provocateurs.”
Many people wondered then—and even now, so many years later—how the Post dared ride over the constant denials of the President of the United States, and the Attorney General of the United States, and the top presidential aides like H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Colson, and stand by the guns of Woodward, Bernstein, and Deep Throat. The answer isn’t that complicated. Little by little, week by week, we knew our information was right when we heard it, right when we checked it once and right when we checked it again. Little by little we came to realize that the White House information was wrong as soon as we checked it. That all these statesmen were lying.
Woodward was in the office a few hours later writing up his notes. We had roughed out a plan for three stories:
• A Woodstein special on the espionage and sabotage campaign of fifty agents from the White House and CRP. Surely the lead of the next day’s paper.
• A Bernstein sidebar on Donald Segretti, a California lawyer recruited to play dirty tricks on selected “enemies.”
• A Woodward sidebar.
Not just another day at the office, and it wasn’t 10:00 A.M. yet, but all this was about to change.
Marilyn Berger covered foreign affairs thoroughly and skillfully for the Post, an attractive single woman, who loved being involved with the day’s big story, whatever it was, like all good journalists. Bernstein was at the water cooler getting set to write the Canuck letter story—he had already sharpened every pencil at his desk and been to the bathroom three times. Berger came up to him and asked casually if “they” knew about the Canuck letter. This was an interesting question, since Woodward had only known about the Canuck letter since six o’clock that morning, and he hadn’t told Bernstein until 9:00 A.M.
“What do you mean?” Bernstein asked with poorly disguised nonchalance.
“Ken Clawson wrote the Canuck letter,” Berger announced, out of the blue. And it turned out Clawson had told her about it over a drink at her apartment one night a couple of weeks earlier. This was major news. First, because it confirmed part of Deep Throat’s hoursold bombshell. Second, because Clawson had worked for The Washington Post, covering Attorney General Mitchell and the Justice Department, before joining Nixon’s staff only a short time earlier. During the next eight hours, he found himself deeper and deeper in the soup, as he realized that the Post was about to say that he had told a Post reporter that he had written a fraudulent letter to the New Hampshire paper, the Manchester Union-Leader, and helped force Democratic presidential candidate Ed Muskie out of the race.
Clawson knew we would print his denial, but he seemed more worried that we would say where he had admitted authorship of the fraudulent letter. He was on the telephone most of the afternoon—to Berger, to Woodward and Bernstein, and to me. Clawson asked me specifically not to say he had been in Berger’s apartment. The venue was of no importance to the story, but I wasn’t about to let Clawson off the hook until we had everything out of him that we were going to get.
Late that afternoon (after 6:00 P.M.) we decided to combine all three stories into one big ball-breaker. It often seemed that every big Watergate story came together only late in the afternoon. Howard Simons and I would bet each other that as we left for home around eight o’clock, either Woodward or Bernstein would come sidling up to us and say something like, “We think we may have a pretty good story here.”
One of the best “pretty good” stories they came up with in October was the first outline of the true scope of the Watergate conspiracy, showing a broad pattern of illicit behavior. It appeared in the Post on October 10, 1972.
FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.
The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files, were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential candidates and—since 1971—represented a basic strategy of the re-election effort.
During the Watergate investigation federal agents established that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nixon campaign contributions had been set aside to pay for an extensive undercover campaign aimed at discrediting individual Democratic presidential candidates and disrupting their campaigns.
“Intelligence work” is normal during a campaign and is said to be carried out by both political parties. But federal investigators said what they uncovered being done by the Nixon forces is unprecedented in scope and intensity.
The next two paragraphs described the dirty tricks:
Following members of Democratic candidates’ families; assembling dossiers of their personal lives; forging letters and distributing them under the candidates’ letterheads; leaking false and manufactured items to the press; throwing campaign schedules into disarray; seizing confidential campaign files and investigating the lives of dozens of campaign workers.
In addition, investigators said the activities included planting provocateurs in the ranks of organizations expected to demonstrate at the Republican and Democratic conventions; and investigating potential donors to the Nixon campaign before their contributions were solicited.
The story then told about the Canuck letter for ten paragraphs: how White House staffer Ken Clawson had told Marilyn Berger he had written the Canuck letter that mortally wounded Ed Muskie’s presidential candidacy, but now denied it. We didn’t get to Donald Segretti and his dirty tricks, and the involvement of at least fifty undercover Nixon operatives who traveled throughout the country trying to disrupt and spy on Democratic campaigns, until the story jumped to an inside page at paragraph 19 (of a 65-paragraph story).
The White House called the story a “collection of absurdities,” but the New York Times had its own story on the front page, largely quoting the Post. There are many, many rewards in the newspaper business, but one of the finest comes with reading the competition quoting your paper on its front page.
On October 15, Bernstein and Woodward (we alternated the order of their names in bylines) revealed that Nixon’s appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, and an ex-White House aide named Donald H. Segretti were integral parts of a White House spying and sabotage operation.
On October 24, our Watergate machine blew a fuse. We had been pursuing the money, tracing it deeper and deeper into the White House and higher and higher up the White House ladder. We had followed it to the presidential appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, but we had never been able to trace any money to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, or the president himself. Hugh Sloan, committee treasurer of the CRP, had confirmed to Woodward and Bernstein that five men controlled the White House secret fund, used to finance all political sabotage and payoffs. Woodward and Bernstein knew who four of them were when they met with Sloan on October 23: Jeb Magruder, Maurice Stans, John Mitchell, and Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney. They suspected Bob Haldeman was the fifth, but had been unable to confirm. Sloan was less than forthcoming. Was it Ehrlichman? No. Was it Colson? No. Was it the president himself? No. Then it had to be Haldeman. It was a question, not a statement.
As Woodward and Bernstein later recalled this back and forth in their book All the President’s Men, Sloan said, “Let me put it this way. I have no problems if you write a story like that.” Then it’s correct? Woodward asked. And Sloan finally said yes.
Woodward felt Sloan’s “yes” specifically included the fact that he had named Haldeman as one of the five men who controlled the secret fund to FBI investigators and in his grand jury testimony.
One source, solid, now. Deep Throat was two, but we could never quote him, and so we needed at least one more on a story this important. And this is where we got in trouble. With Woodward listening on an extension, Bernstein got an FBI agent to confirm that the bureau “got Haldeman’s name in connection with his control over the secret fund,” and that “it also came out in the grand jury.” When Bernstein asked him if he was sure Haldeman was the fifth man in control of the secret fund, the agent replied, “Yeah, Haldeman. John Haldeman.”
That was a “tilt,” of course. Haldeman was Bob. And John could be Ehrlichman, though that had been denied. Carl called the agent back, and he said he never could remember names. It was Bob Haldeman. And the boys were ready to write.
As we got closer and closer to Nixon, I was becoming more and more cautious. This time, with Simons, Sussman, and Rosenfeld, we went after Woodward and Bernstein like prosecutors, demanding to know word for bloody word what each source had said in reply to what questions, not the general meaning but the exact words. Then I finally said, “Go.” It was October 24, for the issue of October 25, 1972.
Meanwhile, Bernstein had gone after a fourth source, even as the story was being set in the composing room, and hit upon a gimmick that plowed new—and unholy—ground in the annals of journalism, and also could have gotten us in major trouble at just the wrong time. He tried one more source, a Justice Department lawyer, who told him he would like to help, but could not. Bernstein read the lawyer the story, and then suggested he was going to count to ten. If the lawyer found nothing wrong with our story, he would still be on the telephone when Bernstein reached ten. If something was wrong with the story, the lawyer would hang up before Bernstein reached ten. Or something.
Bernstein reached ten and the lawyer was still at the other end of the line.
All I could think of was the Sherlock Holmes tale about the dog that didn’t bark. The lawyer who didn’t hang up.
I watched the shit hit the fan early next day on the CBS Morning News. To my eternal horror, there was correspondent Dan Schorr with a microphone jammed in the face of Hugh Sloan and his lawyer. And the lawyer was categorical in his denial: Sloan had not testified to the grand jury that Haldeman controlled the secret fund.
No one can imagine how I felt. We had written more than fifty Watergate stories, in the teeth of one of history’s great political cover-ups, and we hadn’t made a material mistake. Not one. We had been supported by the publisher every step of the way, and she had withstood enormous pressures to stand by our side. Pressures from her friends as well as her enemies. And now this.
The denials exploded all around us all day like incoming artillery shells. After Sloan came Ron Ziegler, Clark MacGregor, and good old Bob Dole, always ready to pile on. Some of the denials sounded technical, almost hair-splitting to us. But if it looked like a denial, smelled like a denial, and read like a denial, it was a denial, as far as the readers were concerned. Newspapers which hadn’t bothered to run the story about Haldeman’s control of the secret fund headlined the various White House denials; major newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Denver Post, the Minneapolis Tribune.
Bernstein and Woodward, tails between their legs and my unhappiness ringing in their ears, started out on the long road of finding out what had gone wrong. I was sore . . . at them and at myself. It was a jackass scheme, and I should have caught it. All along, we had wanted to “win” without knowing what winning might turn out to be. But all along, we knew we could not afford any mistakes. And now we had made one. The next step was to find out where we had gone wrong, and how to get back in our stride.
Election Day was less than a month off, and the Nixon White House had settled on its ultimate defense. The night before our “mistake” ran on page one, Bob Dole, the GOP chairman, had given a speech in Baltimore with an astounding fifty-seven critical references to the Post:
The greatest political scandal of this campaign is the brazen manner in which, without benefit of clergy, The Washington Post has set up housekeeping with the McGovern campaign. With his campaign collapsing around his ears, Mr. McGovern some weeks back became the beneficiary of the most extensive journalistic rescue-and-salvage operation in American politics.
The Post’s reputation for objectivity and credibility have sunk so low they have almost disappeared from the Big Board altogether.
There is a cultural and social affinity between the McGovernites and the Post executives and editors. They belong to the same elite; they can be found living cheek by jowl in the same exclusive neighborhood, and hob-nobbing at the same Georgetown parties. . . .
It is only The Washington Post which deliberately mixes together illegal and unethical episodes, like the Watergate caper, with shenanigans which have been the stock in trade of political pranksters from the day I came into politics.
Now, Mr. Bradlee, an old Kennedy coat-holder, is entitled to his views. But when he allows his paper to be used as a political instrument of the McGovernite campaign; when he himself travels the country as a small-bore McGovern surrogate, then he and his publication should expect appropriate treatment, which they will with regularity receive.
The Republican Party has been the victim of a barrage of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations by George McGovern and his partner in mud-slinging, The Washington Post.
Ziegler said the Post’s stories “are based on hearsay, innuendo, guilt by association. . . . Since the Watergate case broke, people have been trying to link the case with the White House . . . and no link has been established . . . because no link exists.” And Clark MacGregor, who had succeeded Mitchell as director of Nixon’s campaign, weighed in with a no-questions-allowed press conference, where he allowed as how “The Washington Post’s credibility has today sunk lower than that of George McGovern. Using innuendo, third person hearsay, unsubstantiated charges, anonymous sources and huge scare headlines, the Post has maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate—a charge the Post knows and half a dozen investigations have found to be false. The hallmark of the Post’s campaign is hypocrisy.”
Mercifully for us, on the afternoon of October 26, Henry Kissinger gave a press conference at the White House to announce that “peace was at hand in Vietnam,” and that gave us a little breathing room, since it occupied both the press and the Nixon administration. And after a long conversation with Sloan’s lawyer, James Stoner, and a few more days of digging, the truth emerged (as Walter Lippmann so long ago promised it would): Haldeman did have control of the secret fund, despite all the technical denials, but Sloan had not testified to that effect in front of the grand jury. He hadn’t told the grand jury about Haldeman’s control, because the jury hadn’t asked him about Haldeman’s involvement.
Sloan finally told us, “Our denial was strictly limited.” And so be it; they caused us anguish we had never felt before.
We had already tied Segretti to Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, and to Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s lawyer, so we were keeping the pressure on. But it was lonely out there, targeted as we were more and more by Messrs. Dole, MacGregor, Ziegler and company. With only a few exceptions (Time magazine, the L.A. Times, the New York Times, and each of them only rarely during this period), the press was concentrating on the political race between Nixon and McGovern, seemingly content to leave us alone and “see what you guys can come up with,” as one editor told me. It was discouraging as hell.
In the middle of October, my old Newsweek buddy Gordon Manning, vice president and director at CBS, had called with good news.
“You’ve never been able to do anything without me, Bradlee,” he started, “and now I’m going to save your ass in this Watergate thing. Cronkite and I have gotten CBS to agree to do two back-to-back long pieces on the ‘Evening News’ about Watergate. We’re going to make you famous.”
That was good news, because television had been generally unable to cope with Watergate, and national acceptance of the story had lagged accordingly. Probably because it would never be a visual story until the Senate hearings five long months later, except for a few shots of Dan Rather and Nixon shouting at each other in press conferences.
“There’s only one thing,” Manning went on. “You’ve got to let us have the documents. We don’t have any.”
“Gordon, there aren’t any documents,” I told him. “Believe it or not. Of course, we’ll help you, but we have information. We don’t have photocopies, Xeroxes, nothing.”
“Come on, Benny,” he insisted. “We’ll make you famous, and you guys need us. You’re all alone out there.”
True enough, as I saw it, but he wouldn’t believe me. Instead, he sent down some hot-shot producer, and we told him what we knew and a good part of what we suspected. But he finally became convinced that Walter was not going to get nonexistent documents.
When the pieces finally ran (fourteen minutes on October 27, and eight minutes the next night), they had a powerful impact everywhere—on the Post, on the politicians (if not the voters), and on newsrooms outside Washington. Somehow the Great White Father, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, had blessed the story by spending so much time on it. The lack of documents had forced Gordon “Think Visual” Manning and company to use giant blow-ups of Washington Post logos, and front-page stories. We were thrilled. No new ground was broken, but the broadcasts validated the Post’s stories in the public’s mind and gave us all an immense morale boost.
On November 7, 1972, the voters reelected Richard Nixon by one of the greatest margins in American history. He won more than 60 percent of the vote, and every state in the union except Massachusetts, an historic sweep. And one of the first orders of business in the second term was retaliation against the Post . . . most of it petty, but all of it vaguely threatening.
After the election, Chuck Colson—spang in the middle of all the obstruction of justice that eventually landed him in jail—gave a speech to the New England newspaper editors that stands by itself as a monument to lying and general dishonesty:
Ben Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of what Boston’s Teddy White once described as “that tiny little fringe of arrogant elitists who infect the healthy mainstream of American journalism with their own peculiar view of the world.”
I think if Bradlee ever left the Georgetown cocktail circuit, where he and his pals dine on third-hand information and gossip and rumor, he might discover out here the real America, and he might learn that all truth and all knowledge and all superior wisdom doesn’t emanate exclusively from that small little clique in Georgetown, and that the rest of the country isn’t just sitting out here waiting to be told what they’re supposed to think. . . .
An independent investigation was conducted in the White House which corroborated the findings of the FBI that no one in the White House was in any way involved in the Watergate affair.
A reporter for the Washington Star-News was promised by Chuck Colson that the administration would bury the Post. “Come in with your breadbasket, and we’ll fill it,” Colson is quoted as telling other reporters by city editor Barry Sussman, by then in charge of our day-to-day Watergate reporting. And sure enough, Nixon’s first exclusive interview in his second term went to Garnett Horner, of the Star-News. He didn’t say a damn thing in the interview, but we could identify a shot across our bow when we saw one. Some government officials stopped notifying Post reporters of bread-and-butter developments on their beats. One of the most distinguished—and unanimously loved—reporters on The Washington Post was Dorothy McCardle, age sixty-eight, a white-haired grandmother who had covered the Lindbergh kidnapping for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She covered the East Wing of the White House, the source of all information about White House social gatherings of all kinds, and she was systematically excluded from all pools, where she would have a chance to report directly, rather than accept force-fed handouts. Her exclusion actually boomeranged against the White House, after the Star-News wrote an editorial saying they would boycott social events rather than be used as an instrument of revenge against McCardle.
Behind the scenes, and unknown to Post officials until months later, Nixon himself, plus Haldeman and others, were plotting hardball revenge against the paper. The Post was going to have “damnable, damnable problems,” according to the transcripts of the president’s post-election conversations with his inner circle, when it came time for its television station licenses to be renewed.
And sure enough, we did. In those days the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required TV license renewals every three years. By January 1973, only four challenges had been filed against all the TV stations in the United States. Three of the challenges were against Post-owned WJXT in Jacksonville, Florida, and the other was against Post-owned WPLG (for Philip L. Graham) in Miami. At least two of the challenges involved people active in Nixon’s reelection effort. And the general counsel of the Committee to Re-elect the President, J. Glenn Sedam, actually traveled to Jacksonville to talk to business leaders there about how to file challenges. *
Right after our “mistake” on October 25, Woodward, Bernstein, and the rest of us had disappeared into a black hole, where we couldn’t get anyone to talk, we couldn’t get a smell of a story. I suggested to Rosenfeld and Sussman that they keep Woodward’s and Bernstein’s heads under water until they came up with something. But without success. At the same time, the Republicans—and some of our journalist colleagues—were telling everyone: “See? As soon as the election is over, the Post can’t find anything to write about. We told you it was all politics.”
Much has been made of an incident at the end of November 1972 when Woodward and Bernstein, with my knowledge and support, tried to contact grand jurors convened to investigate Watergate. I am sure we all were influenced by Nixon’s overwhelming reelection win, on top of our own inability to break new ground in the Watergate story.
We had been told by our lawyers that talking to grand jurors was not illegal “per se,” whatever that meant in this context, although it was possibly illegal for grand jurors to talk to reporters. And we had confirmed evidence that the Nixon administration Justice Department was not presenting certain evidence to the grand jury. We felt the playing field wasn’t even to start with, given the scope of the Nixon cover-up, and the tools any administration has to cover up the truth. If key evidence was being withheld from the grand jury, we felt we had no chance to get to the truth we knew was there.
Our grand jury episode began when Post news editor Ben Cason was emptying the trash at his house in northern Virginia at the same time his neighbor was emptying his trash. The neighbor told Cason his aunt was on a grand jury, which he thought was the Watergate grand jury. His aunt was a Republican who disliked Richard Nixon—just to put a little frosting on the cake.
We went into conferences with our lawyers and ourselves. Ed Williams agreed—reluctantly—that Woodward and Bernstein could talk to the lady juror, but urged extreme caution, suggesting they merely ask the lady if she wanted to talk. I insisted that the reporters identify themselves as Washington Post reporters, and urged Bernstein to try to be subtle. After they left to call on the woman, we all stayed glued to the phone . . . but she wasn’t home. Next morning, they rang her doorbell, identified themselves, and were invited in. They didn’t mention the grand jury. They just asked her casually some questions about Watergate. Woodward quotes the lady as answering: “It’s a mess, but how would I know anything about it except what I read in the papers.”
She was a grand juror, all right, but on a different grand jury, not the Watergate grand jury.
Next morning, Woodward persuaded a clerk in the U.S. District Court to let him see the master list of trial jurors and grand jurors, after promising he wouldn’t copy anything. He plowed through the file drawers, found the list of jurors on two grand juries sworn in earlier that summer, and picked the right grand jury by remembering that the foreman had an Eastern European name. In front of him lay twenty-three small orange cards, each listing the name, age, occupation, address, and telephone number of a Watergate grand juror. Fifteen feet away from him sat the clerk, suspicious eyes fixed on him.
Bob Woodward simply memorized the whole list. The first four names in about ten minutes, followed by a short visit to the men’s room, where he copied the names down in his notebook. On his next try, he memorized five cards, and asked the clerk for directions to the chief judge’s chambers. In a different men’s room, he wrote down five names, addresses, ages, and phone numbers. Back for a third try—with fourteen names to go, and the clerk becoming unmanageably suspicious—Woodward memorized the contents of six cards, wrote them down during a phony lunch break, and returned to get the last eight . . . in just forty-five minutes.
The fruits of those considerable labors were nonexistent. After trying to guess which of the twenty-three might talk, Woodward and Bernstein reached “about half a dozen,” they reported. One told them he had taken two oaths of secrecy in his life, one for the Elks and one for the grand jury, and wasn’t about to violate either one. But several grand jurors told Judge John J. Sirica early Monday morning that they had been contacted by the Post, and the shit hit the fan. “Maximum John” Sirica, so called for his tough sentences, was “some kind of pissed at you fellas,” Ed Williams told us after the judge had contacted him. But Sirica settled for a stern lecture from the bench, after the prosecutors recommended taking no action since no information had been given the reporters by the grand jurors. Sirica didn’t even identify Woodward and Bernstein in his lecture from the bench, although he had insisted that they be brought to court and seated in the front row.
In All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein recall this episode in all our lives as “a seedy venture” and “a clumsy charade.” Woodward described himself as wondering “whether there was ever justification for a reporter to entice someone across the line of legality while standing safely on the right side himself.” Bernstein was described as a man “who vaguely approved of selective civil disobedience,” not “concerned about breaking the law in the abstract.” With him, the co-authors said, “it was a question of which law, and he believed that grand-jury proceedings should be inviolate.”
I don’t look at it that way. I remember figuring, after being told that it was not illegal and after insisting that we tell no lies and identify ourselves, that it was worth a shot. In the same circumstances, I’d do it again. The stakes were too high.
But the new year brought us the trial of the five Watergate burglars, plus Hunt, and the oddball zealot, Gordon Liddy: Liddy, an ex-FBI agent who had worked on the staff of John Ehrlichman, and was the administration’s unofficial expert on dirty tricks. Hunt and the four Miami burglars pleaded guilty before the trial, and the jury found Liddy and McCord guilty. We were back in business, and because the trial was a national story, the Post was not alone. In fact, before the trial ended, Sy Hersh, who had broken the story of the My Lai massacre * and was now working for the New York Times, dropped a beauty on us and the world with a detailed account of how the defendants had been paid hush money with funds ostensibly raised to reelect President Nixon. I hate to get beaten on any story, but I loved that one by my pal Hersh, because it meant the Post was no longer alone in alleging obstruction of justice by the administration—as long as we didn’t get beaten again.
Sentencing was set for late March, and when the day finally came, two men made sure that Watergate would never die, and that Richard Nixon himself was going to pay a fearful price for his role in it. The first was Judge John Sirica, and the second was James W. McCord, Jr. The date was Friday, March 23, 1973. The courtroom was crowded, and Sirica had whispered to a reporter that he would have a surprise for everyone. Sirica was always described as a former boxer. He was sixty-nine years old, small, scrappy, with a face you know but find hard to remember how. As chief judge of the U.S. District Court, he had assigned himself the Watergate burglary because he liked the limelight as much as the next judge, maybe a little more. He ran that trial with an iron hand, but he was frustrated by all the guilty pleas, and as sentencing approached he knew that he had been unable to get to the truth.
But now he suddenly had his chance. His “surprise” turned out to be a confidential letter received three days earlier from McCord in jail. Worried about being second-guessed, Sirica made his bombshell public as soon as the crowded court room came to order.
“Certain questions have been posed to me from your honor through the probation officer,” McCord’s letter began,
dealing with details of the case, motivations, intent and mitigating circumstances. In endeavoring to respond to these questions, I am whipsawed in a variety of legalities. . . .
There are further considerations which are not to be taken lightly. Several members of my family have expressed fear for my life if I disclose knowledge of the facts in this matter, either publicly or to any government representative. . . . Whereas I do not share their concerns to the same degree, nevertheless, I do believe that retaliatory measures will be taken against me, my family and my friends should I disclose such facts. Such retaliation could destroy careers, income and reputations of persons who are innocent of any guilt whatever.
But if he failed to answer Judge Sirica’s questions, McCord’s letter continued, he could
expect a much more severe sentence. . . . In the interests of justice and in the interests of restoring faith in the criminal justice system, which faith has been severely damaged in this case, I will state the following to you at this time which I hope may be of help to you in meting out justice in this case.
1. There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.
2. Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to the very structure, orientation and impact of the government’s case, and to the motivation and intent of the defendants.
3. Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, when they could have been by those testifying. . . .
Following sentencing, I would appreciate the opportunity to talk with you privately in chambers. Since I cannot feel confident in talking with an FBI agent, in testifying before a grand jury whose U.S. attorneys work for the Department of Justice, or in talking with other government representatives, such a discussion would be of assistance to me.
The Watergate dam was about to burst. These were devastating charges, by the one person involved in the break-in with some stature in his community. He was a career CIA technician, not a spy with extensive dirty trick experience like Hunt, not a kook like Liddy, not a political fanatic like the men from Miami. And here he was under oath in front of a federal judge, talking about perjury, about hush money, about cover-ups by people involved intimately with the president’s closest advisers. This wasn’t some press figment of the imagination, quoting anonymous sources, whose motives could be attacked. This was an insider talking, and everyone knew it.
Sirica had to recess his court for a minute because he had a serious bellyache, but when he started to feel better, he got on with the business of sentencing the defendants for what he called “sordid, despicable and thoroughly reprehensible” crimes.
First, G. Gordon Liddy, who said nothing—cool, grinning, unafraid, respected by the criminals he had met in jail, cordially disliked by the prosecutor. On six counts of burglary and wiretapping, Liddy was sentenced to a minimum of six years and eight months and a maximum of twenty years in prison, plus a fine of $40,000. He would serve fifty-two months of actual time.
Then Howard Hunt, who pleaded emotionally for mercy: “I have lost virtually everything I cherished in life—my wife [who had died with a bag of cash in a plane crash on December 8, 1972], my job, my reputation . . . except my [four] children, who are all that remain of a once happy family. . . . I have suffered agonies I never believed a man could endure and still survive. My fate . . . is in your hands.” Judge Sirica was unmoved. He sentenced Hunt to thirty-five years in jail, and fined him $40,000. Unknown to anyone publicly, Hunt had just been paid off by the White House to remain silent. Hunt ultimately served thirty-one and a half months in jail.
The Miami men, also silent, got forty years and $50,000 fines. The sentences for Hunt and the burglars were especially heavy, but they were also provisional. Sirica told them he would rethink their sentences if they decided to spill the beans and tell what they knew. “I hold out no promises or hopes of any kind to you in this matter,” he told them, “but I do say that should you decide to speak freely, I would have to weigh that factor in appraising what sentence will finally be imposed in each case.” None of the Miami men served more than fourteen months.
For the first time, really, I felt in my guts that we were going to win. And winning would mean all the truth. Every bit. I had no idea still how it would all come out, but I no longer believed Watergate would end in a tie. My great fear had always been that it would just peter out, with The Washington Post and the rest of the good guys saying it was an awful conspiracy, and the White House saying it was just the press and politics. Now, I knew there was going to be a winner. And I knew it was not going to be the president or the White House gang.
For the record, I told Woodward and Bernstein to go find out who were the people McCord said had perjured themselves, and who had put what pressure on whom. Privately, I was so damned excited I couldn’t sit down. I called Kay Graham in Singapore with the news, and I had lunch with Buchwald and Williams.
That always made me feel good.
Williams and Buchwald and I had been eating lunch together so long and so often that before we knew it we had our own de facto club. First at the Sans Souci restaurant, where Buchwald had conned the owner into putting his name on a plaque over his favorite banquette seat, later at the Maison Blanche, and sometimes at Duke Zeibert’s. This was an extremely exclusive and sexist club. Its only by-law (unwritten) was that no one else could join. In fact, its only purpose was to keep good friends out—Jack Valenti, George Stevens, Phil Geyelin, Joe Califano and company. Aspirants could buy us lunch and they could eat with us, but they wouldn’t make it past the membership committee.
In all the years of its existence, the only exception was Katharine Graham. Once Buchwald sent her the following memo after inviting her to lunch:
This is a list of the guests at the luncheon tomorrow which will help you know who they are and what to talk about.
1. Benjamin Bradlee is the managing editor of The Washington Post, which is a very influential newspaper in the Nation’s Capital. Bradlee’s interests are football and girls—not necessarily in that order—but if you wish, you can talk to him about the newspaper business.
2. Edward Bennett Williams is a leading criminal lawyer in Washington who has defended such diversified clients as Milwaukee Phil, Arizona Pete, and Three-Finger George. He is a very strong Catholic, so I suggest you discuss religion with him—particularly birth control and if priests should get married.
3. Art Buchwald is the columnist for The Washington Posty. He is terribly charming and can talk on any subject. I think that of the three, you will find him the most interesting.
I doubt if there will be any toast, except to the President of the United States.
Kay would eat with us from time to time, and Williams and Buchwald would always tell her that they had proposed her for membership but I had blackballed her. Finally, on her sixty-fifth birthday, we took her to lunch and told her she had been elected, and we toasted her induction with champagne. But at the end of the meal, Williams broke the news to our new member—his prestigious client and my boss: Unfortunately, the club had an age limit, and all members had to resign when they reached sixty-five.
More normally, the three of us would eat together, and two of us would pair off on the third guy. Buchwald and I would dump on some of Ed’s more unsavory clients, especially Victor Posner, the shady Miami businessman with a well-known taste for teenage girls. Ed and I would go after Art’s pronouncements about what was really going on in Washington. And the two of them would gang up on me, generally complaining that anything they told me ended up somewhere in the paper. This was true, especially from Williams, but I figured he knew how I made my living, and never told me anything he didn’t want me to know. He never once told me about his lawsuits, and he had the most interesting clients in town. From time to time during our meals—liberated as we all were—we would play quick games of “Wouldya” as persons of the female persuasion crossed our fields of vision.
Male friends are important to me, and the ones that I love are vitally important. These two guys, I loved. Differently. Friendship with Buchwald requires constant attention. If I didn’t call Art on the phone pretty regularly, I would start hearing from mutual friends like Harry Dalinsky, who ran all our lives from behind the counter at the Georgetown Pharmacy, that Art’s feelings were hurt. Art shared with me his complicated courtship with the wonderful Ann McGarry. There was some mixture of sensibility and vulnerability plus the twinkle and the humor that made Art unique. And irresistible. Then, and now.
With Williams, our friendship could survive weeks of negligence, and flourish minutes after renewed contact. From the day of our first lunch at some greasy spoon luncheonette near the courthouse, two things were quickly obvious to me about Williams: wherever Ed was, there was a good story, and whatever he did, he had a good time and it showed. He was smart, tough, funny, and soft-hearted, and he didn’t take himself too seriously, while taking his jobs extremely seriously. I knew right away I wanted him by my side if I ever got in trouble. I missed him the moment he died almost forty years later, and I have missed him and his warmth and humor and common sense every day since.
After Judge Sirica’s sentencing of the Watergate burglars, the Washington press corps began full-time pursuit of the story, falling all over each other like a pack of beagles, in Stewart Alsop’s apt phrase, noisily barking, sometimes at the fresh scent of a new lead, but often at the scent and sight of each other.
The air was thick with lies, and the president was the lead liar. In April 1973, Nixon said he “began intensive new inquiries.” That was a lie. In the same statement, he said he condemned “any attempts to cover up in this case, no matter who is involved.” That was another lie. He, himself, was leading the cover-up of Watergate. Ziegler was lying so often, he had to coin the expression “inoperative statements” when he needed to find the euphemistic way to admit that he had lied. Today’s statement was called the “operative statement,” while earlier statements were dismissed as “inoperative.” Not even George Orwell would have dared to try that in 1984. * Kleindienst even had to lie to get confirmed, when he told the Senate that President Nixon had not interfered in a 1972 Justice Department investigation of International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). *
Henry Kissinger contributed uniquely to efforts to play down Watergate by saying that the nation had to decide whether it could stand “an orgy of recrimination,” suggesting the nation might be better off by forgetting Watergate. Spiro Agnew, a man who had accepted payoffs in the Executive Office Building as a sitting vice president, found the gall somewhere to tell a bunch of students he would resign if Watergate made him unable to continue in “good conscience.” The acting director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray, destroyed two folders of Watergate evidence, given him by Ehrlichman and Dean, on July 3, 1972, and was asked to withdraw his nomination nine months later. Re orters who wrote stories Kissinger didn’t want disclosed got their phones tapped. It was revealed that Liddy and Hunt had burglarized the files of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in 1971, looking for information to smear Ellsberg and get even with him for making the Pentagon Papers available. And finally Kleindienst resigned, replaced by Elliot Richardson, the incorruptible Brahmin from Boston.
The focus of the Watergate affair had shifted from Sirica’s courtroom and the Post’s Woodward and Bernstein pieces to Senator Ervin’s committee, and the investigations being conducted by the committee staff, under committee counsel Sam Dash. Reporters were having a field day, simply because of the sudden multiplication of news sources. As the principals were first interviewed by committee investigators, then behind closed doors before members of the committee, the opportunities presented to each senator and each investigator for some serious leaking were proving irresistible.
Senators, on and off the Ervin Committee, were looking for high ground. Spiro Agnew announced that he was “appalled” by Watergate. Richard Kleindienst, the new Attorney General, about to be forced to resign himself, was the first to mention publicly the dreaded “I” word (Impeachment).
Nixon explained himself so many times, it was hard not to be confused. My own favorite rationale came on April 30 when the president tried one more time to con the American people in a latter-day Checkers speech: “The easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I had delegated the responsibility to run the campaign, but that would be the cowardly thing to do.” This from the man who ten days earlier, it turns out, had told his assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division to “stay out of” the break-in to Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office because “that is a national security matter.” An awesome lie.
It seemed as if reporters were just bringing their buckets to work, sure that they would be filled with the latest sleazy revelations without any great work on their part. No reporter had ever seen anything like this before.
And most remarkable of all, no one yet knew the complete story. The existence of the White House tapes, with their vivid and detailed self-incrimination, was still unknown to us—or to any investigator. At the Post, where reporters and editors knew more than almost anyone else, we were still trying to fit each new piece of information into the puzzle. We grew increasingly confident that this was the greatest political scandal of our time, and we still didn’t know the half of it.
In the middle of all this, I got a call from my old friend Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the founding editor of the French weekly, L’Express, with a startling invitation. He wanted to put me on the cover of L’Express’s twentieth anniversary issue, to symbolize the importance to society of a free and independent press. They were in something of a hurry. (I wondered—only briefly—whether the regularly scheduled cover had just fallen through and they were in a real jam.) A photographer was on his way to take the cover photo, because JJ-SS was sure I would agree. They would fly Tony and me to Paris twenty-four hours later for the magazine’s big birthday party, where “le tout Paris” would be gathered. I would have to give only a five-minute speech in French, but then we would be free to enjoy an April-in-Paris weekend by ourselves.
Meg Greenfield—her warmth and humor sometimes overpowered the brainy, intellectual image reflected in her Newsweek column picture.
Howard Simons—the great eclectic mind of the newsroom. He invented SMERSH (Science, Medicine, Education, Religion, and all that SHit).
The pressmen’s strike for five months in 1974 and 1975 killed the union and gave the Post vitally needed control of its production. That’s the union president, Charlie Davis, carrying the particularly tasteless sign. He moved on to bartending.
The third generation takes over in 1979 when Don Graham becomes publisher. Katharine had succeeded her husband in August 1963 and created the modem Washington Post.
In the 1980s I started moving away from my image as a bookie or a jewel thief, and started being pensive when photographed.
This is a meeting of our club, just after turning down Katharine Graham for membership. Edward Bennett Williams with his arms around Art Buchwald and me.
Artie and I at one of the political conventions, teasing our photographer friend Diana Walker.
Sally Quinn clowning, early in her life as a Style reporter, still an impossible dream in my eyes.
I asked artist Steve Mendelson to draw this—to give to reporters clinically unable to admit they sometimes missed a story, even part of a story.
Ward Just typified the new breed of smart, hungry reporters who could write like angels. We stripped his story about the patrol where he got his ass full of shrapnel over the masthead with the headline “Ain’t Nobody Here but Charlie Cong.”
The new pope was a Pole, and four days later, October 20, 1978, Sally and I were married.
Sister Connie and brother Freddy in Leesburg, Virginia, for Marina’s wedding, October 27, 1984.
There’s no word for former stepchildren, but here they are at Marina’s wedding, sandwiched between Dino and Ben, Jr.: Rosamond Casey and Andy, Tammy, and Nancy Pittman.
Quinn and his dad. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Ben, Jr., Dino, and Quinn hamming it up at Ben’s wedding in Cambridge, November 17, 1990.
Harry “Doc” Dalinsky outside his Georgetown drugstore, where he dispensed wisdom, love, and bagels to his friends for almost forty years.
Flirting in Central Park in 1975.
Parenting in Georgetown, 1995. Quinn Bradlee, newly a teenager.
This is Porto Bello as we found it in 1990, on the St. Mary’s River in southern Maryland.
This is Porto Bello in the June 1995 issue of Architectural Digest, a glorious expression of Sally Quinn’s taste and Washington Post stock.
Moving out, moving on . . . with a hug from Len Downie, the new executive editor, and a fantastic send-off from the troops.
The Graham publishers and one of their chief beneficiaries.
Without pause, I said I would do it, with great delight. And I called Tony to tell her to start packing for a roller-coaster ride, only to be told that she did not want to go. I was stunned to realize that the prospect of a unique adventure together was no longer attractive.
But I went anyway, somewhere between glad, mad, and sad.
Servan-Schreiber was an interesting man in the early seventies, not yet overwhelmed by his ego. He and his longtime friend and colleague, the spectacular Françoise Giroud, disciples of Pierre Mendès-France, had started L’Express in 1953, and they quickly made it the exciting weekly journal of intelligence and relevance.
Two hours after I landed in Paris, I walked into a mirrored ballroom in a downtown hotel where at least fifty four- by six-feet posters of me on the cover of L’Express stared out at the glitzy crowd. I was scared to death—by the pictures of me, and by the prospect of making a speech in French. I thought I had arranged for Nicole Salinger, the wife of Pierre, to help me translate my thoughts into decent French, but she missed connections and I had to write it myself.
The rest of the night dissolved into a fog of flattery. At the end of it, I found myself with an attractive escort. I didn’t want to sleep alone on this night of “triumph,” and wondered if she would be interested in sleeping with me. She would, she said, and she did. And the next day, I flew back to Washington, feeling not quite as guilty as I had expected.
Life on the ladder of fame was something that all of us were still struggling with, and did not yet understand. I knew I was on it, but I didn’t know how many rungs I was going to get to climb. It is one thing to have a page-one byline, but that notoriety is pretty much confined to your mother and a few friends. It is another thing to be the subject of a page-one story, as I had been when the French expelled me for contacting the Algerian rebels. But that was a three-day flash in the pan, preoccupying to me, but of limited interest to the rest of the world. Now I had been on the cover of a news magazine. Profiles were showing up in more or less serious parts of the press. Reporters were calling me for quotes. I remembered once more Russ Wiggins’s importunities that journalists be longed in the audience, not on the stage, but I was plainly not following them. In fact, I felt rattled by them. All of us seek evidence of our effectiveness, and when that evidence turns public, it is hard to pretend that it doesn’t feel good.
I came back from Paris to Washington to a cascade of page-one stories that would have been unbelievable only a few weeks before.
April 1973 was probably the worst month ever for the Nixon White House. The Ervin Committee, which had been created in February to investigate the Watergate break-in and related allegations, was up and running. Its members were leaking to the press like sieves as they jockeyed for headlines, even though televised hearings were still a month off. Liddy was held in contempt of court for refusing to testify to the grand jury. A Wall Street Journal poll showed that a majority of Americans now believed that the president knew about the cover-up. On April 12, the Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate reporting. Newspaper reports that month by the Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times showed:
• A Mitchell aide (Frederick C. LaRue) had received $70,000, to pay hush money for Watergate conspirators.
• Mitchell had been shown logs of the Watergate wiretaps.
• Magruder told the grand jury that Dean and Mitchell had approved the Watergate bugging.
• Acting FBI director Patrick Gray was revealed to have destroyed two folders taken from Howard Hunt’s safe in the White House, immediately after the Watergate break-in, and was forced to resign in humiliation.
• The Ellsberg trial ended in a mistrial, after the judge reported prosecutors had withheld evidence.
• The Ellsberg judge revealed that Liddy and Hunt had burglarized Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, while they were working out of the White House.
• And on the last day of the month, Big Casino: Ehrlichman and Haldeman were tossed over the side, and still the ship sank on, as the new Attorney General, Kleindienst, “resigned,” John Dean was fired, Len Garment was named White House counsel, and Elliot Richardson became Attorney General. The press could barely keep up with the news, and the Ervin Committee hearings hadn’t even started.
In the summer 1973 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, James McCartney, a national correspondent for Knight Newspapers, described that last day in April thusly:
It was 11:55 a.m., on April 30, and Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, 51, executive editor of The Washington Post, chatted with a visitor, feet on the desk, idly attempting to toss a plastic toy basketball through a hoop mounted on an office window 12’ away. The inevitable subject of conversation: Watergate. Howard Simons, the Post’s managing editor, slipped into the room to interrupt: “Nixon has accepted the resignations of Ehrlichman and Haldeman and Dean. Kleindienst is out and Richardson is the new AG.”
For a split second, Ben Bradlee’s mouth dropped open with an expression of sheer delight. Then he put one cheek on the desk, eyes closed, and banged the desk repeatedly with his fist. In a moment, he recovered. “How do you like them apples?” he said to the grinning Simons. “Not a bad start.”
Bradlee couldn’t restrain himself . . . and shouted across two rows of desks to . . . Woodward . . . “Not bad, Bob. Not half bad!”
The day after the resignations, one of the least expected wire service stories in my lifetime was dropped on my desk by a copy boy . . . from United Press International:
White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler publicly apologized today to the Washington Post and two of its reporters for his earlier criticism of their investigating reporting of the Watergate conspiracy.
At the White House briefing, a reporter asked Ziegler if the White House didn’t owe the Post an apology.
“In thinking of it all at this point in time, yes,” Ziegler said, “I would apologize to the Post, and I would apologize to Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein. . . . We would all have to say that mistakes were made in terms of comments. I was over-enthusiastic in my comments about the Post, particularly if you look at them in the context of developments that have taken place. . . . When we are wrong, we are wrong, as we were in that case.”
As Ziegler finished he started to say “But. . . .” He was cut off by a reporter who said: “Now, don’t take it back, Ron.”
Ron Ziegler was a small-bore man, over his head, and riding a bad horse. I feel sorrier for him today than I did then, and I’ll never forget his apology, but a man can fairly be judged by the quality of his heroes, by the quality of the leaders he chooses to follow.
Just after two in the morning on May 16, 1973, I got a call from Bernstein. He was calling from a public telephone nearby, to say that he and Woodward had to see me right away. In a scene right out of a le Carré spy novel, they sat down silently in my living room and handed me a memo, written by Woodward a few hours earlier after a dramatic encounter with Deep Throat. Specifically, Deep Throat had said, “Everyone’s life is in danger.”
That concentrated my mind for real, and I started reading the memo:
Dean talked with Senator [Howard] Baker after Watergate Committee formed and Baker is in the bag completely, reporting back directly to White House. . . .
President threatened Dean personally and said if he ever revealed the national security activities that president would insure he went to jail.
Mitchell started doing covert national and international things early, and then involved everyone else. The list is longer than anyone could imagine.
Caulfield [one time NYC cop John J. Caulfield, who had done under-cover and investigative work for the White House. met McCord and said that the president knows that we are meeting and he offers you executive clemency and you’ll only have to spend about 11 months in jail.
Caulfield threatened McCord and said, “Your life is no good in this country if you don’t cooperate.”
The covert activities involve the whole U.S. intelligence community and are incredible. Deep Throat refused to give specifics because it is against the law.
The cover-up had little to do with Watergate, but was mainly to protect the covert operations.
The president himself has been blackmailed. When Hunt became involved, he decided that the conspirators should get some money for this. Hunt started an “extortion” racket of the rankest kind.
Cover-up cost to be about $1 million. Everyone is involved—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, the president, Dean, Mardian, Caulfield and Mitchell. They all had a problem getting the money and couldn’t trust anyone, so they started raising money on the outside and chipping in their own personal funds. Mitchell couldn’t meet his quota and . . . they cut Mitchell loose.
C.I.A. people can testify that Haldeman and Ehrlichman said that the president orders you to carry this out, meaning the Watergate cover-up . . . Walters and Helms and maybe others.
Apparently, though this is not clear, these guys in the White House were out to make money and a few of them went wild trying.
Dean acted as a go-between between Haldeman-Ehrlichman and Mitchell-LaRue.
The documents that Dean has are much more than anyone has imagined and they are quite detailed.
Liddy told Dean that they could shoot him and/or that he would shoot himself, but that he would never talk and always be a good soldier.
Hunt was key to much of the crazy stuff and he used the Watergate arrests to get money . . . first $100,000 and then kept going back for more. . . .
Unreal atmosphere around the White House—realizing it is curtains on one hand and on the other trying to laugh it off and go on with business. President has had fits of “dangerous” depression.
When I asked for details about Deep Throat’s feeling that our lives were in danger, Woodward and Bernstein insisted that we move outdoors. Fear began to seep in as we talked more on my lawn. I thought I knew all about hardball, but I had never yet felt that we were dealing with hitmen. I suspected our telephones were probably being tapped, that our taxes were surely getting a worldclass audit, but I had never felt physically threatened. Now they were saying that our lives were in fact in danger.
I had trouble believing it then (and now). I had no idea what to do next, except—as usual—talk with Ed Williams, and with Post colleagues. I met with the colleagues a few hours later—in the garden court on the eighth floor of the Post outside Kay Graham’s office to avoid any bugs. Dick Harwood, the national editor and the man I have always wanted in my foxhole, thought we were fantasizing. Howard Simons worried that we might be being set up. Ed Williams invoked the name of the deity a couple of times, but didn’t have much concrete advice. “Watch your ass, Benjy”—as if I wasn’t already looking in that direction.
Woodward and Bernstein were told to do some more reporting, to see what might emerge from Woodward’s memo as “storiable”—something we could put in the paper. Slowly, information from those blessed anonymous sources began to suggest that the prosecutors and the Ervin Committee were close to concluding that Nixon himself was in on the whole affair from the beginning. It is hard to describe how much energy is involved in asking hundreds of people thousands of questions—over and over again—in search of a single unknown piece of information that might shed light on other bits of information which we felt fit into the puzzle, but didn’t know where.
From the day McCord told Judge Sirica that he wanted to talk on March 23, 1973, until the president’s “definitive” statement of his ignorance in the Watergate “incident” on May 22, less than two months had passed, but the Watergate story had finally exploded beyond the reach of those who would deny it, cover it up, or explain it away.
There was no bottom to the Watergate scandal. In Washington, when trouble strikes, veterans know that recovery is not possible until the worst is known, until the bottom is struck, the point after which there is no worse news coming. But there was no bottom to the Watergate scandal, and the Nixon White House was working overtime to see that none of us would ever find one.
In fact, of course, the bottom was still a long way off, as the next month proved. General Al Haig was appointed interim chief of staff, the same day John Dean revealed that he had removed certain incriminating documents from the White House when he was fired. He had put them in a safe-deposit box and turned over the key to Judge Sirica. The Ervin Committee opened its hearings on May 17. Archibald Cox was named special prosecutor the next day, and on May 22, the president gave yet another official version of his involvement, a 4,000-word statement containing more lies than information.
By now we were all exhausted. We had no other life beside Watergate. Specifically, no family life. We felt as if we were in a constant, high-stakes pitched battle. If we lost, a great newspaper’s reputation would suffer mortal injuries . . . and all of us would be looking for work. The first signs of paranoia were emerging. We decided that it would be prudent if we checked for taps on our office and personal telephones. A little more than $5,000 later, we were told only that while the specialists swept our telephone wires, there were no signs that our phones were tapped. But as I left my house in Wesley Heights the next morning, there was some guy on the top of the telephone pole on the sidewalk.
“What are you up to?”
“Just checking the line.”
And who’s paranoid?
At the end of June, John Dean testified for four days before the Ervin Committee: he accused the Nixon White House of wiretapping, burglary, manipulating secret funds, laundering money, using enemies’ lists, dirty tricks, and the so-called plumbers. His testimony was dramatic, but it was based solely on his own recollection of events. He had no documentation.
In the unfolding of the Watergate drama, none was more devastating to President Nixon than the testimony on July 13, 1973, by Alexander P. Butterfield.
Reporters are always making lists of unexplored leads, or of unquestioned actors in whatever drama is being investigated. Woodward and Bernstein were no exception. In May, they realized that Butterfield, a career Air Force officer and Nixon aide who was described by White House insiders as “in charge of internal security,” was on both of their lists. Woodward had stopped by his house one night in January, but no one answered the doorbell. In May, he had asked an investigator on the Ervin Committee whether Butterfield had been questioned, and was told, “We’re too busy.” A couple of weeks later, Woodward bugged the committee staffer once more, pointing out that Butterfield was listed as having been in charge of “internal security” at the White House. The staffer suggested a Butterfield interview to Ervin Committee counsel Sam Dash, which was to be held on Friday, July 13.
Late on the night of Dash’s interview, Woodward remembers getting a telephone call from a committee investigator, offering his congratulations—off the record. “We interviewed Butterfield,” the staffer said. “He told the whole story. Nixon bugged himself.”
The death knell of Richard Nixon was tolling. Only the president, Haldeman, Butterfield, Lawrence Higby (Haldeman’s assistant/office manager), General Haig, and the few Secret Service agents who maintained it knew of the existence of the elaborate, voice-activated taping system, which had recorded everything the president had said, and everything anyone had said to the president. It had been installed in the spring of 1971, and was still in operation, Butterfield told the committee in executive session.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the answers to all the unanswered questions about Watergate were hidden on those tapes . . . including the vital question: what did Nixon know and when did he know it?
If it was true.
I, for one, could not believe it when Bob Woodward called with the news late that night. How could Nixon have done it in the first place? How come he hadn’t destroyed them, once he saw how much trouble he was in? How could we—The Washington Post, and America—be so lucky?
“How would you rate the story?” Woodward asked on the phone, a question which twenty years later still seems to have been asked for the future book or the future movie. In any case I gave it a B-plus, as Woodward is fond of reminding me, one of the cloudier calls of my career.
Two days later, it seemed like the whole country was watching television when Butterfield told the Ervin Committee everything about the taping systems “in all of the president’s offices.”
Next time I saw Woodward, I told him, “Okay, you bastard, it’s better than a B-plus.” And indeed it was.
It was the beginning of the end. It was always Richard Nixon who got Nixon, not the press, but from that moment on, the courts and the Congress had the president in their sights, and he couldn’t hide.
I am still half-convinced that if Nixon had not bugged himself, if there had been no record of the president’s most private conversations, Nixon would never have resigned. There would have been no “smoking gun”; there would not have been enough votes to impeach; Nixon would have survived, scarred beyond recognition, but still president.
My friend Ed Williams secretly coveted Nixon as a client. He used to joke that he would collect all the tapes in a pile on the South Lawn and set them afire. While the smoke was still wafting skyward, Williams would say with drama and style, he would have the president tell the press that he had made a terrible mistake. He had wanted the tapes to preserve the vital history of his administration. Now he had been convinced that innocent people could be hurt, since most of them were unaware they were being taped. And so he had destroyed them. Pure Ed Williams-Walter Mitty fantasy, but fascinating to contemplate.
Of course, the existence of the taped conversations was the Fail-Safe revelation of Watergate. Once they were known to exist, they could probably not be destroyed, despite Fast Eddie’s fantasy advice, because destruction would constitute obstruction of justice, itself an impeachable offense. And they could not be ignored—by the politicians, by the press, or by the people.
The Washington Post had played the key role in keeping Watergate on the national agenda, almost alone for the first nine months. From the break-in on June 17, 1972, until Judge Sirica revealed his “surprise” on March 23, 1973 (McCord’s revelation of White House involvement), the Post had been the engine behind the efforts to find out the truth behind Watergate. After McCord’s letter, other engines kicked in—the Senate Watergate Committee and its hearings, other newspapers, especially the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, plus Time magazine, the Washington Star-News, and Newsweek, and finally the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives and its dramatic impeachment hearings.
What exactly was the role of The Washington Post7. I have spent many hours trying to penetrate all the truths and the mythology created by the great, new American urge to celebrate the men and women involved in the news, and come up with the answer to that question.
First, Watergate happened . . . without The Washington Post. Men in rubber gloves, loaded down with hundred-dollar bills, sophisticated electronic-eavesdropping devices, and walkie-talkies, broke into the office of the Democratic National Committee, and the Post had nothing to do with the burglary.
Second, the energy of The Washington Post and particularly the skill and persistence of Woodward and Bernstein fixed Watergate forever in history. Together, we kept it on the national agenda. And there the arrogance and immorality of the men around Richard Nixon were slowly illuminated—first by the Post, and later by many other individuals and institutions.
But Woodward and Bernstein had done the heavy lifting that brought the story to that dramatic pass—with state-of-the-art support from Katharine Graham, the owner-publisher, and four of the senior editors: managing editor Howard Simons, Metro editor Harry Rosenfeld, city editor Barry Sussman, and myself. Katharine’s support was born during the labor pains that produced the Pentagon Papers. Early on in Watergate, she would come down to the city room and ask us if we were sure we knew what we were doing. Once she asked me—not in jest—“If this is such a great story, where are all the rest of the press?” But before too long she was coming down before she left almost every night, and generally once or twice more every day. What did “we” have for tomorrow, and what were “the boys” working on for the next day or two?
The boys had one unbeatable asset: they worked spectacularly hard. They would ask fifty people the same question, or they would ask one person the same question fifty times, if they had reason to believe some information was being withheld. Especially after they got us in trouble by misinterpreting Sloan’s answer about whether Haldeman controlled a White House slush fund.
And, of course, Woodward had “Deep Throat,” whose identity has been hands-down the best-kept secret in the history of Washington journalism.
Throughout the years, some of the city’s smartest journalists and politicians have put their minds to identifying Deep Throat, without success. General Al Haig was a popular choice for a long time, and especially when he was running for president in the 1988 race, he would beg me to state publicly that he was not Deep Throat. He would steam and sputter when I told him that would be hard for me to do for him, and not for anyone else. Woodward finally said publicly that Haig was not Deep Throat.
Some otherwise smart people decided Deep Throat was a composite, if he (or she) existed at all. I have always thought it should be possible to identify Deep Throat simply by entering all the information about him in All the President’s Men into a computer, and then entering as much as possible about all the various suspects. For instance, who was not in Washington on the days that Woodward reported putting the red-flagged flower pot on his window sill, signaling Deep Throat for a meeting.
The quality of Deep Throat’s information was such that I had accepted Woodward’s desire to identify him to me only by job, experience, access, and expertise. That amazes me now, given the high stakes. I don’t see how I settled for that, and I would not settle for that now. But the information and the guidance he was giving Woodward were never wrong, never. And it was only after Nixon’s resignation, and after Woodward and Bernstein’s second book, The Final Days, that I felt the need for Deep Throat’s name. I got it one spring day during lunch break on a bench in MacPherson Square. I have never told a soul, not even Katharine Graham, or Don Graham, who succeeded his mother as publisher in 1979. They have never asked me. I have never commented, in any way, on any name suggested to me. The fact that his identity has remained secret all these years is mystifying, and truly extraordinary. Some Doubting Thomases have pointed out that I only knew who Woodward told me Deep Throat was. To be sure. But that was good enough for me then. And now.
Bet me that when I die, there will be something in my obit about how The Washington Post “won” eighteen Pulitzer prizes while Bradlee was editor. That will be bullshit, of course, on several different levels.
First, as a standard of excellence the Pulitzer prizes are overrated and suspect. My credentials for that statement are that for eleven years, from 1969 to 1980, I was a member of the advisory board of the Pulitzer prizes, which ratifies or overrules awards made by Pulitzer Prize jurors. I resigned one year before the end of my second six-year term, to make way for The Washington Post’s William Raspberry, the board’s first black member. The powers that be wanted a black and they had agreed on Raspberry, but they obviously could not have two people from the Post on a thirteen-person board. So I made the deal to keep a Post person on the board for another twelve years, I thought. But Bill resigned in 1986; after six years he declined to run for another three-year term. It is this board, political and establishmentarian, that clouds the prizes. Mind you, it’s better to win them than lose them, but only because reporters and publishers love them. In my experience, the best entries don’t win prizes more than half the time.
Second, members of the advisory board, largely publishers and editors of newspapers competing for the prizes, or waiting to buy the newspapers competing for the prizes, are deeply enmeshed in conflicts of interest. Votes are subtly, if not openly, traded between advisory board members, and while lobbying is allegedly frowned upon, the crime is lobbying and losing.
And finally, newspapers themselves win only one Pulitzer a year: the prize for public service. Reporters win all the rest. By itself The Washington Post won only one Pulitzer Prize during my twenty-seven years, and it goddamn near didn’t win that.
Pulitzer juries meet in early spring, in the Pulitzer Prize Office of the Journalism School of Columbia University. Pause for a moment to reflect on the conflicts of interest hidden in that single sentence. Pulitzer, as in Pulitzer Prize, was Joseph Pulitzer, grandfather of Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., during my time the chairman of the advisory board, and publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a regular supplicant for Pulitzer prizes. Columbia University has long had a Sulzberger on its board of trustees, and Columbia Journalism School is a regular beneficiary of Sulzberger generosity. The Sulzberger family, of course, controls the New York Times, a regular supplicant for, and winner of, Pulitzer prizes. One of my “favorite” moments as a member of the advisory board came during a long argument about who should win in the last of the categories to be decided that day. When the board’s sentiment seemed to be drifting toward one candidate, the board’s paid secretary, Richard T. Baker, reminded us all: “If we do that, it would mean that the New York Times would be blanked this year.” God Save Us All.
In the spring of 1973, the jurors met in New York and voted to award Washington Post reporters three Pulitzer Prizes, an almost unheard-of feat. The prize for commentary went to David Broder, for his column on the American political scene. The prize for foreign reporting was shared by our Moscow correspondent Bob Kaiser, now the Post’s managing editor, and our Belgrade correspondent, Dan Morgan, now a staff writer for the Post’s national desk. And the prize for local spot news—a story reported and written on deadline—went to Bill Claiborne for his coverage of a violent prison riot. The prisoners had asked for Bill to serve as an intermediary, and he walked into the jail unprotected and unafraid.
Neither Woodward and Bernstein individually, nor the Post itself, was on the list of five newspapers recommended by the jury in the public service category, the biggest of the Pulitzer Prizes. In other words, the public service jurors believed that at least five newspapers had produced more important public service reporting during 1972 than The Washington Post. The jury had deliberated early in 1973, after McCord had told all to Judge Sirica, and the Watergate defendants had already been sentenced.
I was really furious. The reporting had been extraordinary, in the face of unparalleled lying by the President of the United States and his staff. It had produced a Senate investigation, about to start, and God knows what else, and it seemed incredible that colleagues didn’t agree.
But I was also in a shit sandwich, as we graduates of ancient universities like to put it. I was more than ready to try to persuade Katharine Graham and my peers on the paper that this was worth pulling the paper out of the prize business once and for all. But I felt I couldn’t in good conscience ask Broder, Kaiser, Morgan, and Claiborne to forego what the world regarded as the premier prize of our profession. For the same reason I felt I couldn’t risk offending my fellow advisory board members by telling them what I thought of the jurors’ decision.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to. As I entered the hallowed hall of the Journalism School Library for the ritual pre-meeting coffee and danish, Scotty Reston of the New York Times and Newbold Noyes of the Washington Star came up to me with a sense of urgency. They had been thinking things over and they had concluded that they should overrule the public service jury, and give the Post the Public Service Award. “You damned well deserve it,” Noyes said, gracefully, for as our local competition he couldn’t be happy to see the Post get this kind of kudos.
With my eye on the three prizes and four prizewinners already awarded us by the juries, I muttered my appreciation and shut up. And the first order of business after the meeting was called to order was to vote on giving the Post the Public Service Award. I had to leave the room, as board members have to do if they have any connection with any paper nominated for a prize.
Three more times I had to leave the room, while the advisory board debated awarding prizes for commentary, foreign reporting, and spot local reporting.
And two out of those three times, the bastards overruled their jurors again, this time to take prizes away from the Post. Broder kept his, but prizes awarded by the Pulitzer jurors to Bill Claiborne, and to Bob Kaiser and Dan Morgan, were cruelly rescinded by the advisory board while I was in forced seclusion. Mind you, “these bastards” were all my friends, and those of them still alive are still my friends. But there I was, back in that familiar sandwich: for fear of losing the two we had won, I couldn’t risk complaining too loud about the two we had lost.
For all my grousing, my spirits were soaring. Whatever the hell we had been trying to do at the Post was damn well working. The new hires like Broder and Haynes Johnson were proving to be the best in the business. Katharine Graham, God bless her ballsy soul, was going to have the last laugh on all those establishment publishers and owners who had been so condescending to her, and all those Wall Street types turned statesmen who warned her every day that we were going too far, were going to respect her, not use her. Fritz Beebe, who had made everything happen for me, was going to know about what we had wrought together before he died too young one month later, of cancer.
Woodward and Bernstein were pleased, of course, when I saw them next morning, but not overjoyed. They sidled into my office “to talk,” and it was quickly obvious that they had more on their minds than a mutual back-scratching session. They didn’t dare get to their point right away, but pretty soon it spilled out. How come the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to the newspaper, rather than to them, Woodward and Bernstein, who had done by so much the lion’s share of the reporting?
The answer was perfectly simple: newspapers win the public service Pulitzer prizes, not reporters. I told them their names will be forever associated with the story and the Pulitzer. In materials submitted with the prize announcement, the Pulitzer Committee stated that The Washington Post from the outset refused to dismiss the Watergate incident as a bad political joke, a mere caper.
The Post “mobilized its total resources for a major investigation, spearheaded by two first-rate investigative reporters, Carl Bernstein, and Robert Woodward,” the announcement read. “As their disclosures developed the Watergate case into a major political scandal of national proportions, The Post backed them up with strong editorials, many of them written by Roger Wilkins, and editorial cartoons drawn by the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Herbert A. Block (Herblock).”
In fact, many others on the staff played critically important roles, especially the editorial page editor Phil Geyelin, and his deputy Meg Greenfield, and the wondrous cartoonist Herb Block. Editors, especially Simons, Rosenfeld, Sussman, and Len Downie, who was to succeed Rosenfeld as the Metro editor, and twenty years later succeed me as executive editor. Reporters like Larry Meyer. None of us, least of all Woodward or Bernstein, yet had the faintest understanding of the shadow that the Watergate reporting would cast over journalism. Woodward and Bernstein themselves were going to become cult heroes in the annals of journalism, and stay cult heroes. So it was easy to forgive them their desire to maximize their own contribution. But it was already maximum.
For the Post, people in the know, people in power, were already speaking of the New York Times and The Washington Post in the same breath, instead of just the New York Times. That had been a secret, unspoken goal of mine ever since I had returned to the paper.
Refusing to bottom out, Nixon fought one of the longest rearguard operations in the history of political warfare. The taping system was shut down in the White House on July 18, 1973. but the damage was done.
After two months of government efforts to spring the tapes and the White House efforts to resist them, the month of October 1973 felt like a newspaper career all by itself:
• The vice president, Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland, resigned in disgrace after pleading nolo contendere to tax evasion, and thereby avoiding trial on charges of bribery and corruption.
• Gerald R. Ford, of Michigan, the House Minority Leader, was nominated to succeed Agnew.
• Nixon finally succeeded in getting Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox—“that fucking Harvard professor,” Nixon called him—fired by Solicitor General Robert Bork, after Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused and resigned in protest, and after Acting Attorney General William Ruckelshaus also refused to fire him, and resigned. For good measure the president abolished the whole office of the special Watergate prosecutor. What General Al Haig called a “firestorm,” the rest of the world called the Saturday Night Massacre.
• In the last week of October, forty-four Watergate bills were introduced in the House of Representatives, twenty-two specifically calling for the start of an impeachment investigation. I had tried to banish the word “impeachment” from the Post’s city room, figuring it would look bad to read a story about how everyone at the Post was talking impeachment. Now, everyone in Washington was talking impeachment.
The world had known since August that the voice of Middle America, Spiro T. Agnew, was under investigation by a Republican U.S. Attorney in Baltimore, the first sitting vice president in American history to be formally placed under criminal investigation. The Wall Street journal’s Jerry Landauer and The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen revealed on August 8 that the investigation centered on old-fashioned political corruption charges—conspiracy, extortion, and bribery. The president, about to face obstruction of justice charges himself, wanted to force Agnew’s resignation, but without offending the party’s right wing, whose support he would need in his own defense in the months to come.
Attorney General Richardson hoped Agnew would resign after the evidence was described to him: various Maryland contractors and engineers were ready to testify that they had made direct payments to the vice president before and after he took office. In plain English, they gave him green money in brown paper bags, as he was running off at the mouth about the “nattering nabobs of negativism”—the press.
But Agnew sent his lawyers to court to claim that the Justice Department was leaking information damaging to the vice president in an attempt to force him out of office. Agnew subpoenaed the notes of reporters covering his case, including the Post’s Richard Cohen.
It was in a motion to quash those subpoenas that our lawyers, Ed Williams and Joe Califano, developed what was known in the Post city room (with admiration and affection, if not awe), as “the Gray-haired Widow Defense.” Namely, reporters don’t own their own notes (and therefore can’t produce them in answer to a subpoena), the newspaper’s owner owns the notes, just as she owns other newspaper property. In our case, it was Katharine Graham, gray-haired and widowed, and a grandmother to boot, who had volunteered. In Califano’s immortal words: “The judge would throw Bradlee or Cohen in jail so fast it would make your head swim. Let’s see if he has the balls to put Kay Graham in the clink.”
But, more’s the pity, the landmark defense died before it was born. Unbeknownst to any of us, Agnew was trying to cop a plea, and the government—represented by Richardson and the state prosecutor—was ready to deal. Agnew was sentenced to three years probation and fined $10,000.
It is a measure of the darkness of the Watergate cloud that in only a few days, Agnew was history. The country welcomed the new vice president, and returned to their seats to await the start of the final act.
Many in the Washington press corps got word about the Saturday Night Massacre at the Arlington YMCA tennis courts, just across the Potomac River in Arlington, where Art Buchwald was hosting his annual mixed-doubles tennis tournament. One by one guests were called to the telephone and returned with news about the latest firing. Finally the games had to be canceled: too many players rushed back to their offices.
I was having dinner at Chez Camille’s, a favorite restaurant near the Post, and was called to the phone four times, before I gave up and went back to the office.
At the root of the Saturday Night Massacre lay Archie Cox’s determination to get the Nixon tapes and the president’s determination to keep them. Two days after he learned of their existence in July from Alexander Butterfield’s testimony to the Ervin Committee, Cox had requested from J. Fred Buzhardt, the special White House Watergate counsel, the tapes of nine conversations between Nixon and John Dean, Haldeman, Mitchell, and Ehrlichman. No way, came the reply from University of Texas law professor Charles Alan Wright, serving with Buzhardt as the president’s counsel in the fight for the tapes. The Ervin Committee got the same answer.
Cox then subpoenaed Nixon’s lawyers, asking them to produce nine tapes of presidential conversations and meetings in court. The president refused to obey. On August 29, Judge Sirica ruled that the tapes should be turned over to him. Nixon appealed, and on October 12, the Court of Appeals backed Sirica. Now, instead of appealing the decision to the Supreme Court, Nixon decided to fire Cox.
The trouble with that idea was simple: the law creating the office of the special prosecutor decreed that only the Attorney General could fire Cox, and Richardson had given his word to Cox that he would not dismiss him except for “extraordinary improprieties.” Now Richardson told the White House that he would resign rather than fire Cox.
Nixon would have to persuade Richardson to go back on his word, or fire him and find an Attorney General who would fire Cox, but first he tried one last-gasp compromise, the so-called Stennis Plan. The administration would summarize “relevant portions” of certain tapes and submit the summaries to Sirica. Senator John Stennis, a conservative Democrat from Mississippi, would be allowed to listen to the tapes themselves and authenticate the summaries to Judge Sirica. And Cox would agree not to try for more tapes. This was Nixon’s plan, “not . . . to intrude on the independence of the Special Prosecutor”; but neither Cox nor Richardson would play ball.
The morning after the Saturday Night Massacre, Cox held a press conference detailing how the White House had obstructed his every effort to get information, and right after that Richardson was ordered by Haig to fire Cox. He said he would not be able to do that and asked for an appointment to see the president and resign. He got it instantly, and he quit.
Haig then called Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus and ordered him to fire Cox, saying, “Your Commander-in-Chief has given you an order.” Ruckelshaus refused, and he quit. The third in command at Justice was Solicitor General Robert Bork. He is said to have told Richardson and Ruckelshaus that since the White House would eventually find someone at Justice to fire Cox, he would do it, and then he, too, would resign. Richardson persuaded him to withhold his resignation so there would be someone to run the department.
But the president miscalculated the reaction to the Saturday Night Massacre. The abolition of the special prosecutor’s job was greeted by a storm of public protest. Such a storm that Haig had to find a new special prosecutor, and he found the distinguished Houston attorney, Leon Jaworski. Harvard Law Professor Raoul Berger, the recognized authority on impeachment, came right out and said it: “. . . after the events of the past few days, he must be impeached,” and went on to talk about the president’s “attempt . . . to set himself above the law. We just cannot permit that. It’s the road to tyranny, dictatorship, Hitlerism. Democracy cannot survive if a president is allowed to take the law into his own hands.”
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, juggling Middle East peace efforts and Soviet threats, warned in a press conference that “one cannot have crises of authority in a society for a period of months without paying a price somewhere down the line,” and propounded a politics of faith instead of a politics of skepticism. The press countered with accusations that the administration was manufacturing tension with the Soviets to draw attention away from Watergate.
At a press conference, reporters questioned the president more aggressively than any president has ever been questioned—before or since. And finally Nixon blew up: “I have never heard or seen such outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting in 27 years of public life. I am not blaming anybody for that. Perhaps what happened is that what we did brought it about, and therefore the media decided that they would have to take that particular line. But when people are pounded night after night with that kind of frantic, hysterical reporting, it naturally shakes their confidence.”
He closed by saying, “Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry at those he respects.”
Finally Cox’s successor Leon Jaworski tried to pry the tapes loose. And loose they came with the help of Judge Sirica, the Court of Appeals, and ultimately the Supreme Court itself.
In late November, the administration had to admit that there was an 18½-minute gap in the tape of one conversation between Nixon and Haldeman . . . only three days after the Watergate burglary. Experts selected by the Court and the White House found that the gap had been caused when a segment of the conversation was manually erased between five and nine times. Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods took the blame. Even so, edited and unedited, bleeped and unbleeped, tapes dribbled out one by one, until the smoking gun—transcripts of three conversations between Nixon and Haldeman—was revealed months later.
The editing of the tapes that were released was self-serving, and the omissions were critical, it was learned when all the tapes were finally made public. For instance, one of the passages omitted had the president saying: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, coverup, or anything else, if it’ll save it—save the whole plan. That’s the whole point.”
In February 1974, the House voted, 410 to 4, to establish an impeachment inquiry. On March 1, the major Watergate indictments were returned against H. R. Haldeman; John Ehrlichman; Charles Colson; John Mitchell; Gordon Strachan, staff assistant to Haldeman; Robert Mardian, political CRP coordinator; and CRP lawyer Kenneth Parkinson.* Nixon was named as an unindicted coconspirator by the grand jury (though that was not revealed until June 6). In a grandstanding press conference at the end of April, the president produced folders filled with 1,200 pages of what he called the “transcripts,” but they were edited transcripts, not true transcripts—and there were no transcripts at all of eleven of the forty-two subpoenaed tapes. The New York Times and The Washington Post rushed out quickie paperbacks, adding “expletive deleted,” “limited hangout,” “the big enchilada” (Ehrlichman describing Mitchell) to the Watergate vocabulary, as Barry Sussman noted in his book Great Coverup, but not much else. Most of the juicy stuff, and all of the smoking guns, had been edited out.
Through the spring and early summer of 1974, Nixon and his lawyer, James St. Clair, locked horns with the Watergate special prosecutor and the House Judiciary Committee over access first to forty-two tapes, and finally to sixty-four more tapes. The president fled town twice in June and July, first to the Middle East and then to a summit in Russia. But no sooner had he returned than the Supreme Court settled the tapes question once and for all: By a vote of 8-0 (abstaining Justice Rehnquist, who had been an assistant attorney general in the Nixon administration, and would be Chief Justice in the Reagan administration), the Court ruled the president had to turn over the tapes.
The president was now just about out of options. If he didn’t comply with the Supreme Court order to turn over the tapes, he was going to be impeached. Guaranteed. But the trouble with turning over the tapes was that they would prove the president’s intimate and continuous involvement in Watergate, once and for all time. The evidence had seemed overwhelming to most reasonable men, but not to die-hard Nixon supporters. They wanted a “smoking gun,” before they abandoned their chief.
And they got it in spades: the tape of a 95-minute conversation between President Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on June 23, 1972—only 48 hours after the Watergate break-in.
Haldeman, talking about their own investigation into the break-in: “We’re back in the problem area, because the FBI is not under control, because [Patrick] Gray doesn’t exactly know how to control them, and . . . their investigation . . . goes in some directions we don’t want it to go. . . . Dean . . . concurs now with Mitchell’s recommendation that the only way to solve this. . . is for us to have [Lt. General] Vernon Walters [deputy director of the CIA] call Pat Gray and just say ‘Stay to hell out of this, this, ah, business here. We don’t want you to go any further on it . . .’ the thing to do is get them to stop.”
Nixon: “All right, fine. . . . How do you call him in? I mean you just . . . Well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things. . . . You call them in.”
Haldeman: “Good deal.”
Nixon: “Play it tough. That’s the way they play it and that’s the way we are going to play it.”
Haldeman: “OK, we’ll do it.”
Nixon: “Say [to Helms and Waters] ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that’—ah, without going into the details. Don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, just say, ‘This is a comedy of errors,’ without getting into it, ‘the president believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’ And, ah, ‘Because these people are plugging for keeps,’ and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, ‘Don’t go any further into this case. Period.’”
• The tape proved that Nixon lied when he claimed that he didn’t know—until nine months later—that any of his staff had been involved in Watergate.
• The tape proved that Nixon had lied when he said questions of national security were involved in this conversation.
• The tape proved that Nixon had approved the plan for the CIA to call off the FBI’s Watergate investigation, and that he lied when he said he hadn’t.
• The tape put the president smack in the middle of the cover-up, beginning at least with Day Two.
Woodward and Bernstein wrote in The Final Days that Buzhardt called Haig in San Clemente after listening to the fatal tape to say, “It’s the ball game. . . . We’ve found the smoking pistol.” Buzhardt told Haig—as he had before—he thought the president should resign. But the president fought against his lawyer’s conclusion, as he fought his special counsel, St. Clair, who now advised him to turn over the tapes.
None of the tapes had yet been produced in compliance with the Supreme Court ruling, when the House Judiciary Committee started voting on articles of impeachment. But even without the smoking gun, twenty-seven members of the judiciary, including six Republicans, voted for the first article of impeachment on July 27, charging the president with obstruction of justice in attempting to cover up Watergate. There were II votes against impeachment, all Republicans. On July 29, the second article of impeachment was voted (accusing the president of misusing his powers to violate constitutional rights of U.S. citizens), with one more Republican joining those in favor of impeachment; and on July 30, a third article of impeachment was approved for defying subpoenas. The vote was 21 to 17, with two Democrats voting against and two Republicans voting for it.
Barry Goldwater had never liked Nixon personally, but had tried almost instinctively to believe that there was less to Watergate than met the eyes of most of the people he did like. By July 1974, he had stopped pretending. He told his colleagues that the Nixon presidency was finished. He had finally read the real transcripts of the real tapes themselves—though not the “smoking gun” tape—instead of relying on his “expert.”
Some GOP senators were urging Goldwater and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott to go down to the White House and tell Nixon he had to resign. Goldwater was reluctant, but he knew he had to be ready to do it. On the afternoon-of Monday, August 5, 1974, Dean Burch, Nixon’s political counselor, brought Goldwater a copy of the killer tape. And the senator blew his stack, angry at himself for having supported Nixon for so long.
James Cannon in Time and Chance freezes the moment Nixon knew he was doomed. It was July 23, when Nixon called Governor George Wallace of Alabama to ask him to persuade Alabama Congressman Walter Flowers to vote against impeachment. Wallace told the president he felt such a call was inappropriate, because he, Wallace, was no longer with the president.
“There goes the Presidency,” Nixon said to Al Haig, according to Cannon.
But these historical precisions were not yet available to us daily historians. At the Post we were frustrated almost to the breaking point, not wanting to miss the ending of the story in which we had such a proprietary interest, but not wanting to screw that ending up by reporting rumors that had every chance of being only half-true and misleading.
About this time, I invited Senator Goldwater to a Redskins game, and he showed up with a thirty-page “analysis” of the tapes, written, he said, by “one of the smartest lawyers this town has ever seen.”
Goldwater and I had become pals from the day we first met during his run for the presidency in 1963—strange bedfellows to our other friends. I didn’t care for most of his judgments, nor he for mine, but I found in him basic virtues—loyalty, dignity, friendship, outspoken honesty—that I much admired. Once he persuaded me to debate him at some black-tie reunion of his conservative pals in Orange County. The Goldwater faithful showed up in droves, convinced they were going to see a pig-sticking. When Goldy started his remarks by saying something incredibly complimentary about me, his pals groaned their disapproval, and the pig-sticking never got off the ground.
After the game (Redskins 33, 49ers 9), I read the analysis, and found it just awful and dishonest, leaving out virtually all conversations that didn’t fit the analyst’s conclusion that Nixon was an innocent, and taking out of context bits of conversations that helped. Next time I saw Goldwater, I asked him if he had read the documents, and he smiled sheepishly, and said no. I didn’t know then what I know now: Goldwater was poorly served by what was generally agreed to be the worst staff on the Hill.
Most of us now felt Nixon would be impeached if he did not resign, and so we concluded that he would resign, but throughout the last week facts were hard to come by. But maybe for the first time, we were feeling that we could afford to wait for the news to happen. We no longer worried that Watergate would remain unresolved. It would be resolved, and in a way that vindicated our reporting. Nixon was going to go one way or another. Goldwater was yelling as much to me. “He’s going to go,” he said. “I’m not sure even he knows how or when. But I know for damn sure that if you guys come out with a story that he has made up his mind to resign, he won’t.” Goldwater was asking us (he was asking me) to report whatever rumors we chose to report—and we reported plenty—but to say only that the president hadn’t made up his mind.
I was really torn. First off, we did not know what he was going to do, or how he was going to do it. And yet, we all had had so much riding on Watergate for so long, I was going to make damn sure we did nothing to jeopardize our position.
Here are the Post’s page-one banner headlines from Tuesday, August 6, 1974, through resignation. August 6: “PRESIDENT ADMITS WITHHOLDING DATA; TAPES SHOW HE APPROVED COVER-UP”; August 7: “NIXON SAYS HE WON’T RESIGN”; August 8: “NIXON RESIGNATION SEEN NEAR”; August 9: “NIXON RESIGNS.”
Goldwater was working privately on the GOP hierarchy, arguing that “the best thing that he can do for his country is to get the hell out of the White House.” On Wednesday, August 7, Goldwater, Scott, and House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes were ushered into the president’s office at 5:00 P.M. Goldwater was the group’s spokesman, and he followed Haig’s advice to him, and his own advice to me: play it cool, no ultimatums, no recommendations.
At first Goldwater had estimated Nixon’s strength in the Senate at 12 to 15 votes. Now, he tightened the screws, telling the president that he had taken a nose count that morning. “I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from the older Southerners,” he added.*
“Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them,” Goldwater went on. When they met the press forty-five minutes later, Goldwater lied. He said they had taken no nose counts, and that most of the senators, including himself, had not made up their minds.
And the president had lied to the Republican leaders. He had made up his mind to resign, and gave the news to his saddened family just before 7:00 P.M. that evening.
We went to press that night saying only that Nixon’s resignation seemed imminent, although we all felt he would resign next day. All day on the 8th, beginning at 9:30 A.M., when the White House reserved TV air time for 9:00 P.M. that night, the signs piled up that Nixon was going to resign. A meeting between the president and the congressional leaders was scheduled for early evening. Yellow plastic lines went up around the Fords’ house in Alexandria. Someone heard that a military plane was flying Chief Justice Burger back from Europe—presumably to swear in the new president. I had decided that from that morning until further notice, no television cameras, no still photographers, and for the next forty-eight hours, no non-Post reporters would be allowed in the city room. I wanted no stories that might have suggested elation, vindication, or anything but professionalism. Our reputation had been on the line for more than two years. We had been at the center of the most important political story of our lives, and we were all exhausted. I wanted to be sure that we didn’t intrude on the story in the final moments.
We had a twenty-four-page supplement, “The Nixon Years,” in type for the moment of need, and we had laid out page one with a huge “NIXON RESIGNS” across eight columns. We didn’t have type big enough to fit, so we set “NIXON RESIGNS” in the largest type we had, printed the two words on glossy paper, then photographed them, enlarged them, and spaced them to fill out the 168-point type, the first since March 5, 1953: “STALIN IS DEAD.”
When it finally happened, when the president said, “Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow,” I remember folding my hands together between my knees and laying my forehead down on my desk for a very private “Holy Moly.”
It is no mean feat under great pressure to get the fruits of a 9:00 P.M. press conference into the first edition of a morning newspaper. A reporter must take notes and quotes from the TV screen until about five minutes before the end, when he must start his story. The pros generally complete the first edition story within minutes of the end of the press conference, and Carroll Kilpatrick performed that feat:
Richard Milhous Nixon announced last night that he will resign as the 37th President of the United States at noon today.
Vice President Gerald R. Ford of Michigan will take the oath as the new President at noon to complete the remaining two years of Nixon’s term.
After two years of bitter public debate over the Watergate scandals, President Nixon bowed to pressures from the public and leaders of his party to become the first President in American history to resign.
We had no picture symbolizing the dramatic moment for the first edition, but we had White House photographer Ollie Atkins’s remarkable, poignant picture of the president tightly clasping his daughter, Julie Eisenhower, before his resignation—played half the page wide and half the page deep—for the later editions.
After Kilpatrick’s lead, Jules Witcover wrote a column entitled “Ford Assumes Presidency Today.” Dick Harwood and Haynes Johnson wrote “A Solemn Change,” an evocative piece about the mood and meaning of it all:
When the day finally came, the anger and tensions and recriminations that had so enveloped this capital for weeks had been subdued in the solemnity of change. A sense of calm and a tenuous spirit of conciliation began to emerge.
I dragged my weary bones down one floor to the composing room, not wanting to let go of the most important single newspaper edition I ever had anything to do with. George Kidwell was making up page one, and he made sure I had nothing to do except practice reading the lead type upside down.
Woodward and Bernstein, and the Metro editors led by assistant managing editor Len Downie, who had taken over day-to-day control of the story, the men who had taken us all this way almost by themselves, had gone strangely silent after writing the story three days earlier about the smoking gun tape. The National staff was the best in the business at sweep and meaning, but the Metro staff did the landmark reporting, and the whole world knew it.
From June of 1972, the night of the break-in, to August of 1974 and Nixon’s resignation, the Watergate story and The Washington Post were inextricably linked. Nixon—not the Post—“got” Nixon, but the Post’s reporting forced the story onto the national agenda, and kept it there until the world understood how grievously the Constitution was being undermined. Inside the Post, the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein was overwhelmingly important. The care and determination of the editors involved—Bradlee, Simons, Sussman, Downie, and Rosenfeld—was vital, especially in our refusal to let the story die. The support of the owners—especially under the hostile threats of the administration—was state-of-the-art, never equaled in journalism to my knowledge.
Newspapering deals with small daily bites from a fruit of indeterminate size. It may take dozens of bites before you are sure it’s an apple. Dozens and dozens more bites before you have any real idea how big the apple might be. It was that way with Watergate.
The politicians involved quickly paid a terrible price. Whatever else they accomplished in their lives, the leads of their obituaries stressed and will stress their infamous roles in Watergate:
The death of Richard Milhous Nixon, the most controversial and paradoxical of all American presidents, occurred 20 years after he became the first American chief executive forced to resign his office under threat of impeachment. . . .
—The Washington Post, April 23, 1994
H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, 67, President Richard M. Nixon’s White House chief of staff and key figure in the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign from his presidency, died of cancer yesterday at his home in Santa Barbara, California.
—The Washington Post, November 13, 1993
Richard Nixon was disgraced and devastated, relegated to his own special Hell, forced out of office to avoid impeachment, and no one to blame but himself. The zealots—Charles Colson, John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, Howard Hunt, and Gordon Liddy—were disgraced and jailed, done in by their sense that they were above the law, and the arrogance they shared with Nixon. The amateurs—sanctimonious veterans of business, like Attorney General John Mitchell and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, and the rosy-cheeked neophytes like John Dean, Dwight Chapin, Donald Segretti, Egil Krogh, and Jeb Magruder—were victims of their own indiscriminate ambition.
But for the politicians who rode the wave into Washington after Watergate, the lessons they seem to have learned have boiled down to this: Don’t get caught. And they haven’t learned that lesson all that well. (Nixon once told political expert Len Garment, his friend and lawyer, “You’ll never make it in politics; you don’t know how to lie.”) In the ten years immediately following Nixon’s disgrace, the number of federal officials convicted of federal crimes rose from 43 in 1975 to 429 in 1984. And that doesn’t even include the Iran-Contra scandals and cover-ups.
It is on the young people of America and on the press itself—especially on The Washington Post—that the legacy of Watergate has been most profound.
At first Watergate pushed the press up the ladder of national esteem. The best journalists were already respected, especially the Washington correspondents and the foreign correspondents. But Watergate gave local journalists—specifically at The Washington Post—an almost heroic cast, especially to the youth of America. Students in high schools and colleges waiting to make those dreaded career decisions became fascinated by journalism. Journalism school enrollments shot up. It is one of the great ironies that Richard Nixon, of all people, attracted an entire generation of able, young, tough activists into journalism, a business he never understood and never liked. And with them came the reform politicians who were so appalled by the excesses of the Nixon administration in 1973 and 1974.
We were at stage center, like it or not. And our first efforts to stay pure and uncorrupted were naive, at best, and ineffective. We had banned all public discussion of impeachment for the months it was slowly coming out of the closet. I had beseeched all concerned not to do anything that might be interpreted as gloating, or even pleasure. This was hard.
After Nixon resigned, we banned all cameras, lights, and (non-Post) reporters from the newsroom, and made it stick. Our efforts to keep our own reporters and editors off television collapsed. When one reporter declines to talk to another reporter, war is declared, and before peace breaks out, everyone is talking to everyone else. Common sense is lost in the din.
The new folk heroes, Woodward and Bernstein, became an overnight industry, profiled in magazine after magazine, giving speeches all over the country, and working overtime on their books. Carl and Bob interviewed all of us who had been involved with Watergate coverage, and one by one we were subjected to the same techniques that had so bugged Bob Dole and Clark MacGregor. You really haven’t been interviewed until you have sat across from Woodward and Bernstein. Bob with his square, all-American mid-western 4-H friendliness disguising, for the most part, the relentless determination that is his trademark. Carl with his Hippy, conspiratorial, Rolling Stone exterior disguising his inventive, intuitive, analytical technique.
