The Pentagon Papers

by Katharine Graham

  There was a lot we—and the public—still didn’t know, but we were on the road to finding out, helped along in the spring of 1973 by a federal grand jury’s indictment of former Attorney General John Mitchell and former Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans on charges of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice for impeding an SEC investigation of international financier Robert Vesco, in exchange for a secret Vesco contribution of $200,000 cash to Nixon’s 1972 campaign. The televised Senate Watergate hearings and early calls for impeachment, coming from conservatives—including Barry Goldwater—as much as or more than from liberals, also helped.

  The continuing efforts of the Post, and, finally, other newspapers and other media as well, and the Congress and the courts helped expose the size of the iceberg. There began a steady stream of revelations, with more and more evidence of scheming and political chicanery coming to light. Wiretaps of several journalists were revealed. We were told by many people that the Post’s building was bugged and even that I was being followed. Some of this was clearly an overreaction in an environment rife with paranoia. We did a sweep of our phones throughout the building and in my office and the offices of key editors, but turned up nothing. I’m fairly sure that my phones were never tapped, nor do I believe I was ever followed, but the atmosphere was so infected that this kind of suspicion didn’t seem irrational at all.

  In June 1973, Woodward and Bernstein wrote that the White House had maintained a list of “political enemies” in 1971 and 1972, and the disclosure surprised few of us. By that time, many people—several of my friends among them—regarded it as an honor to be on it. The list was yet another sign of the peculiar mentality of the small group of men running the country. I can’t remember whether my name actually appeared on it, but it was clear to me that I was on it whether my name was written down or not.

  A month later, a seismic Watergate event occurred—the turning point, the pivotal moment. In the course of his testimony before the Senate investigating committee, Alexander Butterfield, another Haldeman aide, revealed that there was a voice-activated recording system in the White House. Consequently, the vast majority of conversations the president had had in the Oval Office were on tape, a fact the president himself had clearly lost sight of; or perhaps he assumed that no one knew and that therefore the existence of the system would never become public knowledge. However, someone had to have installed this thing as well as run it, and that someone was Alexander Butterfield. As Woodward later said, it was yet another “incredible sequence of events, and luck for us and bad luck for Nixon. Wrong decisions, wrong turns. But full disclosure of it hung by that fragile thread that could have been cut hundreds of times.”

  Without the tapes, the true story would never have emerged. In fact, I believe that we at the Post were really saved in the end by the tapes and the lucky chance that they weren’t destroyed. After the discovery of the tapes, people actually began waiting in the alley outside our building for the first edition of the paper, giving additional meaning to the phrase “hot off the presses.” Everyone was now following the story.

  Who knows why Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes? He seemed to think that they were valuable and that he could defend their privacy, which for a long time he tried to do. On July 25, the president announced he would not release the tapes to Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed by Attorney General Elliot Richardson, because it would jeopardize the “independence of the three branches of government.”

  Unaccountably, during this time I was still attempting to maintain relations even with Vice-President Spiro Agnew, which in retrospect seems to me undignified, considering the awful slamming we were taking from him. I think my behavior was a combination of a rational idea—that it was better to be talking to people who hated us or disapproved of us than not—and that good old-fashioned encumbrance of mine, the desire to please. Someone had sent me a funny photograph of an old shed somewhere in New York on which had been painted “Ted Agnew likes Kay Graham. Pass it on.” I thought it was hilarious, and did just that, passed it on to the vice-president, saying, “I thought this sign…might amuse you as it did me. The man who sent me the snapshot of the ‘graffiti’ told me that the shed later burned—thus destroying the evidence! I guess things in life—or in graffiti—often come full circle. I promise to keep it a secret.”

  Even more peculiarly, Agnew wrote back: “I can find no fault with the sentiment of the graffiti. It is difficult to admire a newspaper that characterizes one as Caligula’s horse, but I think you are charming.” How embarrassing!

  A separate drama began unfolding around Agnew. Only ten days after I had written him the sniveling little note, Agnew announced that he had been informed he was under investigation for possible violations of criminal law, and two days later, on August 8, he held a press conference to trot out the usual denials of wrongdoings.

  As the investigation continued, the Post, on September 22, wrote that, despite his statements that he would never quit, the vice-president was plea-bargaining. Agnew’s lawyers tried to learn the source of certain damaging leaks by issuing subpoenas to Post reporter Richard Cohen and others who had been running stories about him. I later used quite plain language to describe what Agnew was trying to do: “Freed of legalese, he wanted to know who in government was fingering him, so he could deal with them personally or have the President fire them.”

  The strategy our lawyers worked out to protect Cohen and the paper was to put all of his notes relating to Agnew in my possession, and in my affidavit to the court I asserted that I had ultimate responsibility for the custody of the notes. In fact, I was prepared to go to jail if need be to defend the notes and the source. This time the possibility of jail seemed more realistic. I was traveling, and called between planes to hear, with relief, that Agnew had pleaded no contest to one count of income-tax evasion while governor of Maryland, which meant that I was off the hook. On October 10, Spiro T. Agnew resigned as vice-president.

  Meanwhile, President Nixon’s troubles continued to mount, not helped at all by the Agnew crisis. On August 15, he had made another televised speech, delivering his fifth major statement on Watergate, calling it a “backward-looking obsession” and trying to deflect interest away from it by suggesting that the nation let the courts deal with it and turn its attention instead to “matters of far greater importance.”

  A week after that, on August 22, the same day Nixon made Kissinger secretary of state following the resignation of Bill Rogers, he also accepted the blame for the White House “climate” that led to the break-in and the cover-up. Events were proceeding apace. On August 29, Judge Sirica ordered the president to turn over to him for his private examination the tapes involving Watergate. Nixon and his lawyers appealed the order. The battle was joined in earnest when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld Sirica. Nixon then came up with the peculiar idea of providing tapes to the federal courts and Senate investigators with a personally prepared summary to be verified by Senator John Stennis. Special Prosecutor Cox, rightly, rejected the idea. The next day, October 20, Cox defended his decision not to compromise with the president about the tapes.

  That night the Buchwalds had arranged a tennis party for Art’s birthday. Several of us were either already at or on our way to an indoor tennis court when we heard the stunning news of what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Attorney General Richardson had been told by the president to fire Cox; when he refused, he himself was fired. Richardson’s deputy, Bill Ruckelshaus, also refused to fire Cox, and he, too, was fired. Finally, the third-ranking officer at the Justice Department, Robert Bork, consented to and did fire Cox. By that point, every journalist had left Art’s party to head back to work.

  So dramatic and unexpected were the events that night that we were all really shaken. It’s hard to realize now how fast everything was unfolding. With Leon Jaworski succeeding Cox as special prosecutor, the House Judiciary Committee met to consider impeachment proceedi
ngs against Nixon. Eventually, the many impeachment resolutions that were introduced in the House of Representatives seemed to induce the president to release the tapes Cox had insisted on.

  Yet the Post remained under attack—and the attack was becoming much more public. By this time I had warmed up to a degree of toughness of which I probably wouldn’t have been capable the year before. I am not a good combatant. Generally I hate fights and would like to run from them, but when there is no choice, I feel able to take action. I was much more willing to go on the offensive than to be defensively polite, particularly in my letters to readers and others who wrote complaining about our coverage. For example, whereas earlier I may have been somewhat sympathetic with readers who wrote about the sharpness of Herblock’s pen, in the later stages of Watergate I had no patience with those who complained that he was being unfair to the president. To one scathing letter, I responded, “We have been heavily attacked for biased reporting by many individuals, who, when confronted with the facts, have since resigned from the government.” I wrote to a man in Florida in October 1973, facetiously thanking him for sending me a copy of an ad from the Miami paper suggesting that we belonged in jail and asking him, “If we are exaggerating minor peccadillos, why has the majority of the White House staff had to be unloaded?”

  At some point, I even engaged in a behind-the-scenes back-and-forth with Clare Booth Luce. Personally I admired her, but I was not in accord with her extremely conservative views. She sometimes overdramatized things in speeches. In a major address to the Newspaper Publishers Association convention, she said she had written a speech but was troubled about it and thinking about it as she went to bed. That night, she said, the spirit of her late husband, Henry Luce, came to her and told her to tell the truth about Watergate. She then attacked the Post for our reporting and for hiring “enemies” of the president. After the speech, I told a friend that Phil Graham had appeared to me in the night and told me to tell her to “shove it.”

  —

  ON DECEMBER 28, I was lunching outside the building—a rare occurrence—with Meg and Phil Geyelin at an Italian restaurant when I got called to the telephone by Alexander Haig, who was then White House chief of staff. He was calling from Nixon’s California home—or the “Western White House,” as it was called, since the president spent a great deal of time there. I vividly recall sitting on the stairs in a dark, narrow passageway where the phone was located, furiously scribbling notes on a scrap of paper I’d hastily grabbed from my purse.

  Haig heatedly complained about two page-one stories by Woodward and Bernstein. The first had said that “Operation Candor,” the name that had been given to the president’s attempt to defend himself, had been shut down, and that two of the president’s closest advisers, who had stuck by him, no longer believed in him. The second story said that the president’s counselors had been supplying lawyers for Haldeman and Ehrlichman with documents and evidence that the White House was submitting to the special prosecutor’s office. Haig was outraged, calling the articles “scurrilous and untrue” and referring to the second piece as “a patchwork of thievery.”

  Late in January 1974, I went to a dinner at the Clark MacGregors’ for the new Vice-President and Mrs. Gerald Ford, which says a lot about where MacGregor was, at least by then. It’s interesting, too, that the Fords were willing to have dinner with me even though he was Nixon’s new vice-president. Also, I was seated at dinner next to Haig, who seemed to be feeling more friendly toward me with each new revelation from the White House.

  The following week, on February 6, members of the House of Representatives voted 410 to 4 to proceed with the impeachment probe and to give the Judiciary Committee broad subpoena powers. Trying to keep all his hatred of the press, and particularly of the Post, within the confines of the White House proved too much for the president. He attended Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s ninetieth-birthday party and told reporters waiting outside that she had no doubt managed to keep young “by not being obsessed by the Washington scene,” adding, “If she had spent all of her time reading the Post or the Star she would have been dead by now.”

  Later in February, Haig invited Meg, Ben, and me to lunch at the White House—clearly a kind of reaching out. The whole feeling in early 1974 was the opposite of what we had experienced during the preceding months of strain, worry, and anguish. By this time, we were all undoubtedly on a high because we had been vindicated. Still, our satisfaction was to a large extent vitiated by dismay at the extent of what really was going on in the Nixon White House.

  After I’d been to the country for the weekend, Meg asked me, with just the right note of incredulity in her voice, “Have you heard the latest?”—and then proceeded to tell me of the backdating of the deed for the papers Nixon had given as a gift to the National Archives for the proposed Nixon Library. The deed had been falsely backdated to before the effective date of a law curbing tax deductions for such gifts. Nixon had claimed deductions of nearly half a million dollars over four years. I also remember that my reaction then was “How wonderful.” I realize that sounds vindictive, but the fact is that, after we had been under assault for so long, it naturally felt good to have such revelations unfolding one after another, far beyond our reporting or even our wildest imaginings. Meg said, “The next time you make one of your speeches saying, ‘This certainly gives us no satisfaction. We are only doing our bounden duty,’ God will strike you dead.”

  Again, we were happy to have everything corroborated further when, on March 1, 1974, indictments were handed down by a grand jury for seven former Nixon-administration and campaign officials for allegedly conspiring to cover up the Watergate burglary.

  What next? On May 9, the House Judiciary Committee began formal hearings on the possible impeachment of Nixon. Though some of my friends, including André Meyer, suggested that the Post was trying to “extract every last drop of blood” from the president, I believed that we were following and reporting the impeachment process in a reasoned and dispassionate way, and replied to André, “I hardly see how anyone, no matter how ill-intentioned, could pervert this…to ‘extracting every last drop of blood.’…It really has more to do with what is best for the country now and in the future, than it has to do with this president—who no longer matters, whereas the country does.” Privately, I felt that impeachment was right, but my personal opinion didn’t get mixed up in the paper’s ongoing reporting.

  In mid-May it was revealed that Nixon’s talk with Haldeman and Dean about economic retaliation against The Washington Post Company’s television-station licenses had been cut from the tape before its release. This was widely reported in the papers, including our own. As a result, I received a contrite letter from Joe Alsop, who, on the whole, had continued to stick by the president and with whom I had had a serious argument about whether the administration was connected to the license challenges. Joe wrote me:

  You’re dead right and I was nearly dead wrong. This was my first reaction to the extraordinarily interesting story by Bernstein and Woodward on the President’s threat of retaliation against the Post. I cannot tell you how much I admire the enormous courage that you have all shown, particularly you and Ben. Whether the final outcome will be happy, I cannot possibly say, and I sometimes have my doubts. But the fact is that a very dangerous system had grown up in the White House, which would have threatened this country if it had continued. It was destroyed by you and the other leaders of the Post and the Post reporters almost single-handed….So I send you all my warmest congratulations, and also my apologies for giving our miserable President the benefit of the doubt—which now turns out to be a completely wrong thing to do.

  It was a generous letter from Joe, one I’m sure he wrote with a great deal of sadness and lamentation for something irretrievably lost.

  Watergate continued on its way toward an ending none of us could have imagined two years earlier. Even as late as the summer of 1974, amazing as it may seem after all that had been revealed and all the constit
utional processes that had taken place—the grand juries, the courts, the congressional committees—Nixon was still blaming the press for his predicament, saying at one point that, if he had been a liberal and “bugged out of Vietnam,” the press would never have played up Watergate. Despite Nixon’s protestations to his supporter Rabbi Baruch Korff that Watergate would be remembered as “the broadest but thinnest scandal in American history,” it went on being revealed as anything but.

  On July 8, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in a historic special session in the case of the United States v. Richard M. Nixon. What was at stake was whether the Court would order the release of the White House tapes. The next day, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino divulged many of the differences between what the White House had released and what the committee had found on certain tapes, indicating that Nixon had played an active role in the cover-up, which was still going on.

  On July 24, 1974, events moved inexorably forward as the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had no right to withhold evidence in criminal proceedings and ordered him to turn over the additional White House tapes that had been subpoenaed by Jaworski. On July 27, 29, and 30, respectively, the House Judiciary Committee adopted three articles of impeachment, charging President Nixon with obstruction of justice, failure to uphold laws, and refusal to produce material subpoenaed by the committee.

  Editorially, the Post did not come out for resignation, as many other papers did. We believed, as an independent paper, that people would behave wisely and judiciously if given the information necessary to make their decisions, and that the process should be allowed to work.

  Finally, on August 5, the long-anticipated “smoking gun” turned up. Three new transcripts were released by the White House, recounting conversations between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, 1972, six days after the original break-in. The tapes showed that the president had personally ordered a cover-up and that he had directed efforts to hide the involvement of his aides in the break-in through a series of orders to conceal details about it known to himself but not to the FBI. This was such a dramatic and obviously final development that I left Martha’s Vineyard, where I had gone for my August vacation, and flew immediately to Washington.