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 chic neighborhoods, and hob-nobbing at the same Georgetown parties.
It didn’t help that the next day the Post’s second seminal article appeared, reporting, based on Woodward’s meeting with his main source, that the fifth person who was authorized to approve payments from the secret dirty-tricks cash fund was none other than H. R. Haldeman, the president’s chief of staff. When Dwight Chapin, the president’s appointments secretary, had been linked by the reporters to the secret fund, they had had to find ways to explain to the American people who Chapin was, and that he saw the president every day; it had been difficult to make the connection between this fund and those in power in the White House. But this second story—with its two-column, large-type headline, “Testimony Ties Top Nixon Aide to Secret Fund”—was altogether different. This was Haldeman, the most powerful man in Washington after the president, the president’s alter-ego and right-hand man. This article would move the Watergate story line right through the front door of the White House.
The story noted that Haldeman’s participation was known to federal investigators and known from accounts of sworn testimony before the federal grand jury. In this story, with all its high visibility, the reporters unfortunately made one of their only errors throughout the long months of reporting. The substance of the story was true; the error was not of fact but of assumption. Woodward and Bernstein had assumed that Hugh Sloan, former CRP treasurer and former Haldeman aide, had told the grand jury about the secret fund. He had, in fact, told Woodward and Bernstein about it, and the only reason he hadn’t told the grand jury was that he hadn’t been asked. Sloan, through his attorney, denied the Post’s story the next morning, setting off repercussions everywhere, including more denunciations of the paper by Ron Ziegler at the White House, who unequivocally denied the story, accused the Post of being politically motivated, and attacked Ben Bradlee for being anti-Nixon.
Some of the strongest reverberations were felt at the Post. Harry Rosenfeld, who had worked on this particular story up until deadline, believed that the tie to Haldeman meant that Nixon was really at the bottom of it all. As Harry said, “If Haldeman is doing it, Nixon is doing it. There is no line between Haldeman and Nixon.” Harry was apoplectic at the idea that the reporters had gotten the story wrong. He and Howard Simons were discussing corrections and desperately looking for Woodward and Bernstein, who were nowhere to be found. (Ironically, those two turned out to be meeting with a publisher to discuss the book they intended to write about Watergate.) When they were finally located, the reporters, with Rosenfeld, who refused to retract the story until he knew more, went down to the courthouse. The next day we did retract the part of the story that said Sloan had told the grand jury of Haldeman’s connection to the fund, but the substance of the story remained.
—
I WAS FEELING beleaguered. The constant attacks on us by CRP and people throughout the administration were effective and taking their toll. During these months, the pressures on the Post to cease and desist were intense and uncomfortable, to say the least. But, unbelievable as the revelations were, the strong evidence of their accuracy is part of what kept us going.
Many of my friends were puzzled about our reporting. Joe Alsop was pressing me all the time. And I had a distressing chance meeting with Henry Kissinger just before the election, at a big reception of some kind. “What’s the matter? Don’t you think we’re going to be re-elected?” Henry asked me, seeming quite upset. I assured him that I could read the overwhelming polls as well as anybody and hadn’t the slightest doubt that Nixon would be re-elected. Henry later told me that, although he was never part of any actual discussions that related to threats, he knew Nixon wanted to get even with a lot of people after the election. Maybe this had been his way of warning me. In any case, the implications in Henry’s exclamation added to my tension.
Readers, too, were writing me, accusing the Post of ulterior motives, bad journalism, lack of patriotism, and all kinds of breaches of faith in our effort to get the news to the people. It was a particularly lonely moment for us at the paper. Other organizations were beginning to report the story, but we were so far ahead that they couldn’t catch up; Woodward and Bernstein had most of the sources to themselves. The wire service and AP sent out our stories, but most papers didn’t even run them, or buried them somewhere toward the back pages. Howard used to get on the phone to his editor friends around the country to tell them they were missing a big story. Because an exclusive story usually remained so for only about twenty-four hours before everyone jumped on it, I sometimes privately thought: If this is such a hell of a story, then where is everybody else?
Bearing the full brunt of presidential wrath is always disturbing. Sometimes I wondered if we could survive four more years of this kind of strain, of the pressures of living with an administration so completely at odds with us and determined to harm us. As I later wrote to Isaiah Berlin, “The idea of living with that gang in the White House whacking at you for four more years was depressing beyond words.” I couldn’t help speculating about what condition we’d all be in—including the paper—at the end of it. The best we could do while under such siege, I felt, was to keep investigating, to look everywhere for hard evidence, to get the details right, and to report accurately what we found.
Just as the stresses of loneliness were at their most extreme, immediately before the election, we got a break. CBS, in the persons of Walter Cronkite and Gordon Manning, then a producer and an ex–Newsweek editor, decided to run two long pieces on Watergate on the evening news. Basically, the story had not appeared on television. To begin with, it wasn’t easy for television to report Watergate in sound bites—there were few if any picture opportunities, and it was an extremely complicated, hard-to-follow story, full of names of people unknown to the public. There were many different threads to the story, and it was difficult to see how it all came together. And then, as I was soon to learn firsthand, television and radio were vulnerable, relying as they do on a government agency for their licenses to operate. The three television networks all owned local radio or television stations from which a large part of their profitability derived, so it took even more than normal courage for them to take on the government. But Cronkite, who was the supreme authority on his show, decided to go ahead. Manning, who knew Ben from Newsweek, tried to get his help for CBS’s program, and was startled and dubious when Ben told him we had no documents, no paper trail of evidence, and couldn’t help.
The first piece aired on the evening of Friday, October 27, and took fourteen of the twenty-two minutes of that night’s network news—more time than had ever been given to any single story—filled largely by quoting the Post and the government’s various replies to the paper’s charges. I will never forget my joy and relief to have CBS News behind us, piecing the story together and carefully explaining to a national audience what had happened, what had been proved, and what had not. Cronkite gave us great credit, and the still photos of the Post and its headlines in the background helped enormously. The show ran eleven days before the election.
Also watching the CBS Evening News was the White House tough guy, Chuck Colson, who was assigned to oversee the networks. Colson became known for saying that he would walk over his grandmother if it was necessary to do a job. He had gotten wind of the show, called Frank Stanton, and then gone straight to Bill Paley. Stanton had worked hard at CBS to protect press freedoms and the news division, but Paley had not experienced calls from angry presidents or their flunkies, so he flinched at Colson’s call and in turn summoned the head of news, Richard Salant, and leaned on him very hard about the evils of the piece that had already been aired and the necessity of killing the
proposed second part, to be run the next night. After a fight within CBS News, Salant compromised, and on the grounds of repetition of what had already appeared on the network, the second piece was cut from fourteen minutes to eight.
In the end, the length of the report didn’t really matter: CBS had taken the Post national—even against Bill Paley’s frightened will.
I spent the day after the first CBS story aired at Glen Welby with a large group of guests, including my friend Pam Berry (by then Lady Hartwell), Clay Felker, Dick Holbrooke, and, most interestingly, Peter Peterson, Nixon’s secretary of commerce at the time, and his then wife, Sally, a liberal Democrat. Sally was quite vocal in her views, and there were several awkward moments during the weekend, particularly when she announced emphatically that she would be voting for McGovern—which actually was known to the White House—and made remarks openly critical of the administration, at one point saying, “Nixon has no balls.” We all squirmed, but it was also noticeable that Pete didn’t come to his boss’s defense.
In the middle of a tennis game, Pete was called to the phone by a White House operator, who had placed the call for Haldeman. Having to locate Pete at my house undoubtedly was a factor in the administration’s later getting rid of him. It was not a winning card to be weekending at Glen Welby, although Henry Kissinger didn’t seem to suffer within the administration even though he went on coming to my house—but not to the Post—during Watergate.
Pete remained a friend of mine throughout our reporting of Watergate. In fact, he told me that after the Post’s late-October stories my name came up in White House staff meetings even more often than before. Having heard plenty of comments that they were going to “get” me, Pete came to my office by himself one day to say, “Kay, I don’t know what the truth is, but there is a group of very angry people who feel you are out to get them. I hope you are using rigorous journalistic standards. If you are wrong, it’s serious; they will get you.” I appreciated the spirit in which Pete courageously came to see me and assured him that I heard what he was saying—and that we were being careful.
Indeed, we were. We always did our best to be careful and responsible, especially when we were carrying the burden of the Watergate reporting. From the outset, the editors had resolved to handle the story with more than the usual scrupulous attention to fairness and detail. They laid down certain rules, which were followed by everyone. First, every bit of information attributed to an unnamed source had to be supported by at least one other, independent source. Particularly at the start of Watergate, we had to rely heavily on confidential sources, but at every step we double-checked every bit of material before printing it; where possible, we had three or even more sources for each story. Second, we ran nothing that was reported by any other newspaper, television, radio station, or other media outlet unless it was independently verified and confirmed by our own reporters. Third, every word of every story was read by at least one of the senior editors before it went into print, with a top editor vetting each story before it ran. As any journalist knows, these are rigorous tests.
Yet, despite the care I knew everyone was taking, I was still worried. No matter how careful we were, there was always the nagging possibility that we were wrong, being set up, being misled. Ben would repeatedly reassure me—possibly to a greater extent than he may have actually felt—by saying that some of our sources were Republicans, Sloan especially, and that having the story almost exclusively gave us the luxury of not having to rush into print, so that we could be obsessive about checking everything. There were many times when we delayed publishing something until the “tests” had been met. There were times when something just didn’t seem to hold up and, accordingly, was not published, and there were a number of instances where we withheld something not sufficiently confirmable that turned out later to be true.
At the time, I took comfort in our “two-sources” policy. Ben further assured me that Woodward had a secret source he would go to when he wasn’t sure about something—a source that had never misled us. That was the first I heard of Deep Throat, even before he was so named by Howard Simons, after the pornographic movie that was popular in certain circles at the time. It’s why I remain convinced that there was such a person and that he—and it had to be a he—was neither made up nor an amalgam or a composite of a number of people, as has often been hypothesized. The identity of Deep Throat is the only secret I’m aware of that Ben has kept, and, of course, Bob and Carl have, too. I never asked to be let in on the secret, except once, facetiously, and I still don’t know who he is.
This attention to detail and playing by our own strict rules allowed us to produce, as Harry Rosenfeld later said, “the longest-running newspaper stories with the least amount of errors that I have ever experienced or will ever experience.”
—
THE IMPACT OF our October stories and the CBS broadcast continued to reverberate—on Nixon and his administration, and on us. There was a good deal of evidence that the campaign to undermine public confidence in the Post and in any other news medium thought to be hostile to the administration was intensifying. The investigation of such a tangled web of crime, money, and mischief would have been hard enough under the best of circumstances, but it was made harder given the unveiled threats and major and minor harassments by a president and his administration. Chuck Colson was quoted by a Star reporter as saying: “As soon as the election is behind us we’re going to really shove it to the Post….Start coming around with a breadbasket because we’re going to fill it up with news….And that’s only the beginning. After that, we’re really going to get rough. They’re going to wish on L Street that they’d never heard of Watergate.”
I particularly loathed reports that personalized the whole dispute, implying that some sort of personal vendetta had poisoned the relationship between the Post and the administration. I had already begun to hear a chorus of rumors concerning my own feelings about Nixon, a chorus that warmed up with some help from Senator Dole, who made a charge, picked up and carried all over the airwaves, saying that I had told a friend that I hated Nixon. Dole made the leap to saying that that was the reason the Post was writing all the negative Watergate stories.
I detested the assumption and impression that we were out to get Nixon, that we somehow had it in for him and for the Republicans. Many people misunderstood the role of the Post, believing that we got some sort of enjoyment “out of kicking the president and the Republicans,” or “extracting every last drop of blood,” as I heard more than once. Far from its being our aim or purpose, we got no pleasure from it. As I wrote someone, “It’s the only government we have and it would be a lot bigger pleasure not to have to report the kind of things we do.”
Incredibly, I was still in touch with John Ehrlichman from time to time, so I wrote him on the day before the election:
A short while back you threw me a message over the fence, and I genuinely appreciated it. Here is a message I want to send you.
Among the charges that have been flying over the past few weeks, many have disturbed me for the general misunderstanding they suggest of the Post’s purposes in printing the stories we do. But none has disturbed me more than an allegation Senator Dole made….It was that the Post’s point of view on certain substantive issues was explained by me as proceeding from the simple fact that I “hate” the President.
There are so many things wrong with this “anecdote,” that one hardly knows where to begin in correcting them. But I would begin with the fact that I cannot imagine that the episode ever took place at all or that I ever expressed such a childish and mindless sentiment—since it is one that I do not feel.
I want you to know that. And I also want you to know that the fiction doesn’t stop there. For the story suggests, as well, that somehow editorial positions on public issues are taken and decisions on news made on the basis of the publisher’s personal feelings and tastes. This is not true, even when the sentiments attributed to me—unlike this alleged and unworthy “hate
” for the President—may be real.
What appears in the Post is not a reflection of my personal feelings. And by the same token, I would add that my continuing and genuine pride in the paper’s performance over the past few months—the period that seems to be at issue—does not proceed from some sense that it has gratified my personal whim. It proceeds from my belief that the editors and reporters have fulfilled the highest standards of professional duty and responsibility.
On this I know we disagree. I am writing this note because I think we have enough such areas of sharp and honest disagreement between us not to need a harmful and destructive overlay of personal animosity that I, for one, don’t feel and don’t wish to see perpetuated by misquotation! (My turn, it seems.)
I genuinely meant what I wrote Ehrlichman. I have a faint memory of talking to Stew Alsop once about how, as the months progressed, I was certainly feeling more and more negative about Nixon, but I had no such personal feelings about Nixon as a politician and couldn’t imagine that I had said anything like Dole’s quote in his speech, much less that my feelings toward the president would inspire the Post’s editors and reporters.
—
THOUGH THE editorial-page editor and his deputy and writers were certainly not in agreement with George McGovern’s views and policies, the Post’s editorial page, which didn’t endorse, had vaguely seemed to favor McGovern—partly because it was so unsympathetic to Nixon. Candidate McGovern had used the Watergate story only somewhat tentatively. Ironically, he, too, felt that the coverage he received in the Post had not been ample enough or accurate or fair—a feeling shared by almost every candidate about almost every paper anywhere and at any time.
To no one’s surprise, President Nixon was re-elected by a landslide, with 61 percent of the vote and forty-nine out of fifty states—evidence of how little impact Watergate had had and how very powerful were these angry and vindictive men in the White House and connected with the president elsewhere. However, instead of becoming more secure with his victory in hand and working to unite the country, Nixon immediately turned to vengeance and to strengthening his hold on power. In a speech at his victory dinner with members of the administration, he mentioned The Washington Post several times. He asked everyone in the upper echelons of his administration to resign and set out to replace anyone—even “good Republicans”—who might not agree with him implicitly. One of the first victims was Pete Peterson, who was politely fired soon after the election. The Wall Street Journal ran an article at the time speculating openly on what had been on all our minds, that Peterson might have been knifed by the White House inner circle. The article quoted someone from the White House as saying, “How can you trust a guy who has dinner with Kay Graham?” Tom and Joan Braden had a goodbye party for Pete, which was reported in the Post by Sally Quinn. At the party, Pete, by this time fed up with the treatment he’d received from the administration, gave a highly irreverent response to the toasts. He described being sent for to go to “Mount David” and being quizzed about his dubious friends in a loyalty test. “Finally, Peterson told the guests,” according to Quinn, “he failed the physical test. His calves were too fat and he could not click his heels.”
The Pentagon Papers Page 6