EXPOSING CRIMINAL ACTIVITY IN RICHARD NIXON’S WHITE HOUSE
AT 2:30 ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 1972, THREE Washington, DC, police officers caught five men attempting to place listening devices inside Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in the nation’s capital. The men wore business suits and rubber surgical gloves.
That event opened Pandora’s box on a scandal that ultimately revealed that the Richard Nixon White House was at the center of the most widespread system of political corruption ever revealed to the American people. The break-in led to revelations about misuse of campaign contributions, laundered money, political sabotage, deception, immorality, and any number of illegal activities. After two years of actions by the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of the US government, President Nixon was forced to resign from office.
The stunning abuses of power didn’t expose themselves through their own volition. The Washington Post and two young reporters who worked for it demonstrated, perhaps more clearly than at any other time in history, the value of the Fourth Estate joining the official branches of the government to serve the American people.
More than a Third-Rate Burglary
By sheer instinct, the Washington Post placed the burglary story on page one—Washington is a political town, and it was an election year. That initial story didn’t speculate on the larger significance of the break-in, but, by noting the bizarre details, the story hinted that perhaps this was more than a routine crime. “The men had with them at least two sophisticated devices capable of picking up and transmitting all talk, including telephone conversations. In addition, police found lock picks and door jimmies, almost $2,300 in cash, most of it in $100 bills with the serial numbers in sequence.” The story also reported that the men carried forty rolls of unexposed film, two cameras, and three pen-sized tear gas guns.1
Two days later, White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler refused to comment on what he dismissed as a “third-rate burglary.” Ziegler’s statement prompted the Post to editorialize—with what ultimately proved to be remarkable prescience—that although it was possible that the break-in was the work of a foreign government, “the finger naturally points, in a time of intense and developing political combat, to the Democrats’ principal and natural antagonist; that is to say, it points to somebody associated with or at least sympathetic to—we may as well be blunt about it—the Republicans.”2
The Post assigned two reporters to the Watergate story. Bob Woodward, twenty-nine, had graduated from Yale and spent five years in the navy before focusing on a career in journalism. Post editors farmed him out to a suburban weekly until the persistent reporter started calling a Post editor at work, at home, and on vacation. The Post hired Woodward as a local reporter in 1971. Carl Bernstein, twenty-eight, had worked as a copy boy at the Washington Star and then dropped out of college to come to the Post in 1966, assigned to cover suburban Virginia.
Woodward was sent to the arraignment of the Watergate burglars and sat in the front row of the courtroom when the judge asked James McCord, one of the defendants, what he did for a living. When McCord whispered “CIA,” Woodward’s antennae began to quiver. From that moment on, the reporting duo never let up. Bernstein later recalled, “We just very logically, through many hours, did the kind of reporting they teach in J-school, the kind that when I was a copy boy I watched other reporters do—that is, not to let anything fall through the cracks.” The dogged reporters held on tight to the biggest story of the era—a story that not only made them journalistic legends but also changed the course of American history.3
© Associated Press
Flushing Out the Evidence
Woodward and Bernstein—who soon became known informally as Woodstein—got their first break when they found that the address books of two of the burglars contained the name E. Howard Hunt. In one book, the letters “W. H.” came after Hunt’s name, and, in the other, “W. House” followed the name. With some fancy telephoning, Woodward connected the burglary to the White House. His Post story gave readers a glimpse of how the resourceful reporter’s detective work had caught the White House consultant off guard, stating, “When Hunt was asked by a reporter yesterday why two of the suspects had his phone number, he said, ‘Good God!’ He then paused and said, ‘In view that the matter is under adjudication, I have no comment.’ He then hung up the telephone.”4
It was the first of a series of page-one stories the Post published, beginning two days after the break-in and reaching a climax in late October, only a few weeks before the presidential election.
• In early August, Woodstein reported that the burglars had been paid with Nixon campaign funds: “A $25,000 cashier’s check, apparently earmarked for President Nixon’s re-election campaign, was deposited in April in a bank account of one of the five men arrested in the break-in.”5
• By mid-September, the intrepid reporters implicated the former US attorney general, the country’s top law enforcement official, who had by then become Nixon’s campaign manager: “Funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by several principal assistants of John N. Mitchell and were kept in a special account of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.”6
• In early October, Woodstein exploded the story into something far larger than a mere burglary. They reported that Nixon’s entire reelection strategy was based on playing “dirty tricks” on Democratic presidential contenders, including fabricating slanderous letters about both heterosexual and homosexual affairs: “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.”7
• By mid-October, the tenacious reporters connected White House aide Dwight Chapin, who met daily with the president, to the political espionage: “President Nixon’s appointments secretary served as a ‘contact’ in the spying and sabotage operation against the Democrats.”8
• And, finally, in late October, Woodstein showed that both the Watergate burglary and the campaign of political sabotage were financed by a secret fund controlled by the president’s closest aide. In short, they had traced the trail of political corruption to the very doors of the Oval Office: “H.R. Haldeman, President Nixon’s White House chief of staff, was one of five high-ranking presidential associates authorized to approve payments from a secret Nixon campaign cash fund.”9
After four months of nonstop investigation, the newsmen had uncovered solid evidence that what the White House had dubbed a “third-rate burglary” was, in fact, the tip of the iceberg in the most astonishing abuse of power in the history of the presidency.
Pushing the Limits of Investigative Reporting
None of the bombshells came easy. Observers who’ve studied Woodstein’s reporting have praised the men’s energy, creativity, and tenacity.
When Post editors initially forced the independent young reporters to become a team, neither danced on the top of his desk. They were, indeed, a journalistic odd couple. Woodward was a registered Republican who drove a Karmann Ghia and shopped at Brooks Brothers, while Bernstein was as close to the counterculture as a reporter could get and still keep his job at a somewhat stodgy newspaper—shoulder-length hair, rumpled clothes, loose tie.
The techniques they used were those of all good journalism. Bernstein said, “You knock on a lot of doors; you make a lot of telephone calls.” One of their key steps was obtaining a list of the names and home addresses of the 300 men and women who worked for the Committee for the Reelection of the President. The reporters then visited some fifty CREEP staff members at their homes. “The big factor is going out and talking to people,” Woodward said. “If you call somebody at the White House on the telephone and ask for an appointment, they’ll tell you no. But if you’re standing out there on their front porch, facing them, they may let you in.”10
Potential sources, most of them committed members of the Republican Party, resisted talking to the reporters. One pleaded, “Please leave before they see you.” Another said, “I know you’re only trying to do your job, but you don’t realize the pressure we’re under. Please go.” The persistent reporters often returned half a dozen times before they finally gained the trust of reluctant sources. Indeed, Bernstein said he had so many doors slammed in his face that he felt like a door-to-door magazine salesman—“For every sale, you had 50 rejects.”11
The aggressive reporters begged, lied, badgered sources, and, on occasion, broke the law. While a grand jury was hearing charges against White House officials, for example, Woodward went to the court clerk’s office and asked to see the names of the jurors. He was legally permitted to read the names but not to take notes. So Woodward memorized the names and then went to a men’s room and wrote them down. The reporters called one of the jurors at home, which was against the law. The juror refused to discuss the case with them, but Federal Judge John J. Sirica later wrote, “Had they actually obtained information from that grand juror, they would have gone to jail.”12
Although the reporters never depended on a whistle-blower for insider information, they relied heavily on the most famous anonymous source in the history of American journalism: Deep Throat. A good friend of Woodward before the Watergate break-in, he was described as an executive branch official with “extremely sensitive” antennae that picked up every murmur of conspiracy at the country’s political nerve center. Deep Throat, named after a pornographic film popular at the time, never gave the reporters any new information, but he confirmed dozens of facts that Woodward and Bernstein had heard elsewhere but needed to verify with a second source before printing. Deep Throat also steered the reporters away from various false leads.
Woodward and his mysterious source met dozens of times, often in the wee hours of the morning to avoid detection. They developed an elaborate system of signals right out of a spy novel. When the reporter wanted to initiate a meeting, he moved a flowerpot with a red flag in it to the rear of his apartment balcony, meaning the two men would meet at 2 a.m. in a specific underground parking garage. When Deep Throat wanted to set up a meeting, he drew clock hands indicating the rendezvous time on page 20 of Woodward’s morning copy of the New York Times.
Deep Throat’s identity remained a secret for three decades, as it wasn’t until 2005 that W. Mark Felt publicly identified himself as the iconic source. Felt had been, during the period when Woodstein was investigating Watergate, the second highest official in the FBI. When he finally identified himself as Deep Throat, Felt was ninety-one years old and had lost much of his memory after having suffered a stroke.13
Going It Alone
The Washington Post played a key role in exposing the Watergate scandal, and the journalistic triumph was essentially a solo performance. Throughout the first six months after the break-in, the Post was virtually the only news organization to commit its investigative might to uncovering the details of the story. Indeed, many of the nation’s leading newspapers, news magazines, and TV networks not only didn’t follow the story themselves but also accused the Post of overplaying it. “For months we were out there alone on this story,” said Post Managing Editor Howard Simons. “We used to ask ourselves: ‘Where are the AP, the UPI, the New York Times, Newsweek?’ It was months of loneliness.”14
Why didn’t other news organizations pick up on the burglary’s implications earlier? Most Washington reporters were playing what critics call “mouthpiece journalism”—writing stories based on the official statements from the government’s army of public relations flacks. In one scathing assessment of correspondents covering the president, Bill Moyers, President Johnson’s press secretary, said, “The White House press corps is more stenographic than entrepreneurial in its approach to news gathering. Too many of them are sheep.”15
Television news did a particularly abysmal job of covering Watergate. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, this story didn’t translate easily into visual images. Most elements of the Watergate story involved backroom strategizing that lent itself only to headshots of the presidential aides involved—not good television. “It’s not the kind of story we do best,” said Frank Jordan, NBC’s Washington bureau chief. “It’s not visual, and it’s also very complicated.”16
Critics pointed out that the most serious repercussion of most news organizations downplaying Watergate was that it didn’t become a major issue in the 1972 presidential election, which Nixon won by a landslide.
Standing Firm
From June 1972 until January 1973, the only journalists investigating the Watergate story seemed to be working inside a beige brick building on 15th Street in Washington, DC. That commitment extended far beyond Woodward and Bernstein. Indeed, the two persons who ultimately bore the hefty burden of responsibility for the Washington Post’s relentless pursuit of the story were executive editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham.
Bradlee, buoyant and personable, had built the Post into one of the best newspapers in the world; Graham, soft-spoken and genteel, was the stereotypical iron butterfly—she never flinched. The executive editor and publisher formed their own mutual-admiration society. Bradlee said of his boss, “She’s got the guts of a burglar.” Graham said of her top editor, “Ben Bradlee had never let me down. I had no reason not to have confidence in him.”17
Continuing to support the Watergate investigation became increasingly difficult, however, because, throughout the months immediately after the break-in, the White House admitted nothing, denied everything, and fought back—first with verbal attacks and then by calculated efforts to punish the Post.
Graham was shocked at the vehemence of Nixon’s attack. “The most astonishing thing was the vindictiveness in the government—sometimes at the personal level—to me or Ben. You know, ‘We’re going to get you!’—it really got rough.” A graphic image illustrating that roughness came in a telephone conversation between Bernstein and Mitchell on the night before the Post was to publish the story implicating the former attorney general in the burglary. Bernstein called Mitchell at home to ask him if he wanted to make any statement for the story. Mitchell responded angrily, “Are you going to run this? If you are, Katy Graham’s tit is going to get caught in a wringer.”18
The attacks intensified after the Post reported that Chief of Staff Haldeman had participated in the political corruption—the story that came closer than any other to implicating Nixon himself. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, a fierce media critic, responded to the charge by lambasting the Post’s Watergate reporting as “journalistically reprehensible” and stating, “I deny that there is any secret fund.”19
This was the point at which Bradlee’s and Graham’s trust was tested most gravely, because Woodward and Bernstein had, in fact, made a mistake. In the lead sentence of the Haldeman story, they said he was authorized to approve payments from a secret fund, according to “sworn testimony before the Watergate grand jury.”20
Wrong.
The reporters were right in stating that Haldeman was authorized to approve payments from the fund, but the allegation hadn’t been made before the grand jury. “It was a mistake,” Woodward later admitted. “It was the worst moment in all of this.” The error had evolved from a hasty conversation with the treasurer of CREEP, who’d resigned when he’d learned of the committee’s sordid political antics; the treasurer’s information was accurate, but he hadn’t given it as testimony because the grand jury hadn’t asked him to. Five days after publishing the erroneous detail, the Post corrected its mistake in a page-one story.21
It was a crippling error because fellow journalists who hadn’t been keeping up with the Watergate story now used the mistake to criticize the Post. Referring to “sensational disclosures” and Republican denials of the existence of any secret fund, the New York Times grouched, “There has been no public indication that either the President or any of his close advisers played roles in or had advance knowledge of an illegal assault upon the opposition party.”22
White House officials began the punishment phase of their anti-Post campaign immediately after the election. The paper’s society reporter was excluded from important White House events, and Post reporters on various national beats found once-cooperative sources no longer willing to talk to them. Nixon administration officials also began to feed stories to the Post’s competition, including granting the Washington Star exclusive interviews with the president.23
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Nixon was using—actually misusing—the power of his office to retaliate against the Post. His target was two Florida television stations owned by the Washington Post Company, and his vehicle was the Federal Communications Commission, the governmental organization that licenses TV stations.
According to secret Oval Office tape recordings that later became public, the president instructed his aides, three months after the Post began its Watergate investigation, to have political supporters in Florida try to block the license renewal of the two stations, claiming they weren’t providing the community-service programming the FCC required. Nixon told Haldeman, “The Post is going to have damnable—damnable—problems out of this one. They have television stations, and they’re going to have to get them renewed.”24
Shortly after that conversation, Nixon supporters formally challenged the two stations’ license renewal applications. The finance chairman for Nixon’s 1972 campaign in Florida filed the challenge against WJXT-TV in Jacksonville; partners of a close friend of Nixon’s best friend, Bebe Rebozo, filed the challenge against WPLG-TV in Miami. Both stations ultimately had their licenses renewed, but only by spending a great deal of time and money documenting that they had, in fact, fulfilled the community-service requirements.25
In the taped Oval Office conversation, Nixon also directed his aides to use his presidential powers to retaliate against the Post’s lawyer. Nixon said, “I would not want to be in Edward Bennett Williams’s position after this one. We are going to fix that son of a bitch.” Nixon said he was willing to spend all of the $5 million left in his campaign treasury “to take the Washington Post down,” adding, “I don’t care how much it costs.”26
By the first of the year, the Post began feeling the impact of the White House campaign—in its pocketbook. The value of a share of Post stock dropped from $38 in December to $21 by May. Katharine Graham couldn’t prove that the White House was putting pressure on Wall Street, but the publisher suspected exactly that.27
The Press Joins Forces with the Other Estates
Though the Washington Post deserves enormous praise for its efforts, the Fourth Estate alone didn’t expose the Watergate scandal. The political corruption was of such monumental proportions that it demanded the combined effort of all four arms of government—unofficial as well as official.
The judicial branch’s opening salvo came in September 1972 when the five burglars plus their two bosses—E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy—were indicted. And Judge Sirica publicly announced that he was “not satisfied” that the seven indictments told the full story. James McCord then broke ranks with his fellow burglars and told Sirica he wanted to talk in exchange for a lighter sentence. McCord’s testimony confirmed much of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting.
Other crucial activities by judicial officials included a federal grand jury indicting Nixon’s closest aides—including Mitchell, Haldeman, and Chief Domestic Affairs Adviser John D. Ehrlichman—while naming Nixon a “coconspirator,” followed by Sirica demanding that he be allowed to hear Nixon’s secret Oval Office tape recordings, and then the US Supreme Court supporting Sirica.
The legislative branch’s role in exposing Watergate first rose to prominence in February 1973 when the Senate voted to establish a committee to investigate charges of corruption in the 1972 election. The Senate’s role in the revelations dominated the country from May to August 1973 as hearings were televised live for thirty-seven days.
It also was the legislative branch that brought Watergate to a climax when the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted three articles of impeachment in July 1974, charging Nixon with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress for defying committee subpoenas.
Although the executive branch was the last to become actively involved in the Watergate scandal, its participation was the most dramatic because the president himself stood at the head of executive departments and agencies. In May 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson appointed a special prosecutor, Harvard law professor Archibald Cox, to investigate Watergate. The executive branch then soared into the eye of the Watergate hurricane in October 1973 with what was later dubbed the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Judge Sirica wanted to hear the White House tapes, but Nixon refused to release them. When an appeals court ruled in Sirica’s favor and Cox indicated he’d continue to seek the tapes, Nixon told Attorney General Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. When Nixon next ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, Ruckelshaus also resigned. Nixon then named Solicitor General Robert Bork acting attorney general, and Bork fired Cox.
The executive branch in the state of Maryland also played a role in the historic events when the federal attorney in Maryland informed Vice President Agnew in August 1973 that he was being investigated on charges of committing bribery, extortion, and tax fraud while he’d been governor. Agnew eventually resigned, admitting that he’d falsified his income taxes, and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford was appointed vice president.
The White House Collapses
The dam broke in early 1974. A panel of experts named by Judge Sirica said eighteen and a half minutes in one of the tape recordings had been erased. The gap occurred three days after the break-in, prompting critics to accuse Nixon of destroying evidence that would have proven that he’d known about the break-in before it occurred.
When Nixon was finally forced to release the tapes, the American people heard that their president was a mean-spirited, lying, foul-mouthed bigot. Although the tapes didn’t prove that Nixon knew about the break-in in advance, they left no doubt that he helped plan the cover-up. This was the “smoking gun” that stilled all doubts that Nixon had broken the law. Before the impeachment process could be completed, Nixon, on August 9, 1974, became the only US president in history to resign from office.
Reprinted courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/The National Archives and Records Administration.
Reporters as All-American Heroes
Watergate was a disturbing tale of political corruption in which President Nixon and the men around him orchestrated a massive effort to subvert both the election process and the presidency. Nixon and his aides were revealed as amoral villains who, to feed their hunger for power, came dangerously close to destroying the democratic form of government.
The American people, however, prefer happy endings to sad ones. So as the nation struggled to put the dark days of Watergate behind it, people searched through the rubble for heroes. They ultimately found their white knights in the form of two youthful reporters.
Newsweek dubbed Woodward and Bernstein the “Dynamic Duo,” and the media criticism journal Columbia Journalism Review praised two of its own as the “Davids who slew Goliath.” The rise to fame by the All-American heroes clearly produced dividends for the news media as an institution. As opinion polls confirmed, it was clear that the public felt new respect for reporters. Schools of journalism around the country burst at the seams with Woodstein wannabes, and, more than at any other time in US history, journalists were lauded as the saviors of democracy.28
Fame is often accompanied by wealth, and Woodward and Bernstein quickly realized that tradition. Before Watergate, the annual salaries of the pair of local reporters totaled less than $30,000. Two years later, their combined incomes had soared beyond the $1 million mark. Their first money-making venture was writing All the President’s Men, the bestselling book about their Watergate experiences. Even more profits—and more fame—followed when Robert Redford, one of the most popular film stars of the day, read the book and dubbed it “the greatest true detective story of all time!” Redford, a Democrat known for supporting liberal causes, urged Warner Brothers to transform the book into a major motion picture. In the 1974 box office hit, Redford starred as Woodward while Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman portrayed Bernstein.29
The Washington Post was honored with the Pulitzer Prize. According to the citation, “The Washington Post from the outset refused to dismiss the Watergate incident as a bad political joke, a mere caper. It mobilized its total resources for a major investigation, spearheaded by two first-rate investigative reporters, Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward.”30
At no time in US history had the importance of the news media been more dramatically illustrated than during the bleak chapter that began on that early morning in 1972 when five men broke into the Watergate office complex—and the country would never be the same.
