Bernstein asked about one of them, Robert Odle, presently director of personnel at CRP and a former White House aide. The committee had identified Odle as the man who had hired McCord as its security coordinator.
“That’s bullshit,” the former official replied. “Mitchell wouldn’t let go of a decision like that. Mitchell would decide, with advice from somebody who knew something about security.”
The hiring of McCord would almost certainly have involved at least one other person, he said—a Mitchell aide whom he described as the former Attorney General’s right-hand man, Fred LaRue. Bernstein jotted down the name (spelling it La Roue) as he was told more about him.
“I would expect that if any wiretaps were active up to the time of the break-in, LaRue would have known about them.”
The former official offered an additional thought. Murray Chotiner, the President’s old friend and specialist in low-road campaign tactics since the days of Nixon’s congressional campaigns against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas was in charge of something called “ballot security.” Although officially undefined, the job’s purpose was to prevent the Democrats from stealing the election, as the President and his loyalists (as well as some Democrats) maintained had happened in 1960.
Later that afternoon, David Broder, the Post’s national political reporter and columnist, gave Bernstein the name of an official of the Republican National Committee and suggested that he be contacted. Broder described the official as a “very straight guy” who might know something because he was among those engaged in planning security arrangements for the GOP convention. CRP had said that McCord had worked as a consultant on convention security.
“The truth is that McCord has never done security work of any kind for the convention,” the party official told Bernstein. “What he has been doing, I assume, is taking care of security for the Committee to Re-elect. All they care about at CRP is Richard M. Nixon. They couldn’t care less about the Republican Party. Given the chance, they would wreck it.”
Did the party official believe the denials of involvement by John Mitchell and CRP?
The man laughed. “Bob Dole and I were talking on the day of the arrests and agreed it must be one of these twenty-five-cent generals hanging around the committee or the White House who was responsible. Chotiner or Colson. Those were the names thrown out.”
Bernstein had not expected anyone closely tied to the Nixon administration to speak with such scorn and derision of the men around the President. He walked across the room to tell Sussman about it. The city editor thought the information was interesting. Then, uncomfortably, he told Bernstein he was taking him off the Watergate assignment because the Virginia desk could no longer spare one of its two political reporters in an election season.
Bernstein returned to his desk feigning unconcern but in a foul mood. The Post owed him almost four months of vacation. Until the break-in, he had planned to use it that summer on a cross-country bicycle trip. He decided to make a last attempt to stay on the Watergate story. He wrote a five-page memo outlining what he called the “Chotiner Theory” and sent copies to Sussman, Woodward and Harry M. Rosenfeld, the Post’s metropolitan editor.
“It is a long shot, to be sure,” the memo began, “but . . . Colson is Chotiner’s successor at the White House. . . . Colson might well be tied up in some aspects of ‘ballot security’ with Chotiner. That could mean evaluating whatever information Chotiner is coming up with.”
The next day, Rosenfeld told Bernstein to pursue the Chotiner Theory and see what else he could learn. *
At a press conference that same afternoon, June 22, President Nixon made his first public comment on the break-in. “The White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident,” he said.
Bernstein and Woodward lingered over the phrase “this particular incident.” There were already too many coincidences which couldn’t be dismissed so offhandedly: An attorney in Washington had said he could positively identify Frank Sturgis as one of the several men who had attacked Pentagon Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg outside a memorial service for the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in May. One suspect’s address book contained a rough sketch of hotel rooms that were to be used as headquarters by Senator McGovern at the Democratic convention. An architect in Miami had said that Bernard Barker had tried to get the blueprints of the convention hall and its air-conditioning system. Hunt’s boss at the Mullen firm, Robert Bennett, had been the organizer of about 100 dummy campaign committees used to funnel millions of dollars in secret contributions to the President’s re-election campaign. McCord had been carrying an application for college press credentials for the Democratic convention when he was arrested. He had recently traveled to Miami Beach. Some of the accused burglars from Miami had been in Washington three weeks before their arrest, when the offices of some prominent Democratic lawyers in the Watergate office building were burglarized.
Within an hour of the President’s statement, reporters were told by Devan L. Shumway, the public-relations director of CRP, that John Mitchell had ordered an in-house investigation of the break-in at Democratic headquarters.
On July 1, nine days after the President’s statement, Mitchell resigned as manager of the Nixon campaign, explaining that his wife had insisted he quit.
Woodward asked several members of the Post’s national staff, which was handling the story, if they believed the resignation was unconnected to Watergate. They did.
The next day, metropolitan editor Harry Rosenfeld frowned and told Woodward: “A man like John Mitchell doesn’t give up all that power for his wife.”
• • •
Shortly after the name of Charles Colson first came to Bernstein’s attention, a fellow reporter told him that he had once dated a young woman who worked at the White House. In Colson’s office, he thought. Bernstein reached her by telephone. She had worked for one of Colson’s assistants, not Colson himself. She had come to know Howard Hunt slightly.
“I had suspicions about the whole bunch of them, especially Colson, because he was so overprotective of the President and very defensive about him,” she said. “He was always rushing up and down with papers, but was very secretive.” Hunt, however, “was really nice, a pleasant man, personable. He was one of the few people around who took the time to make you feel like part of it all,” and occasionally he would take her to lunch. Although hired as a consultant, “he worked there almost every day. He’d take off and go to Florida once in a while . . . and there were trips to California.” That was in the summer and early fall of 1971. Hunt was just as secretive as Colson, she said, “but somebody in the office told me that Howard was doing investigative work on different things, including the Pentagon Papers.” She had gotten the impression that he had not been working on “declassification” of the papers, as the White House had said, but instead on finding out how they had been leaked to the press.
“At about the same time,” she said, “I noticed a book on Chappaquiddick on his desk, so I asked about that. He was doing investigative work on that case, too, on Kennedy. They weren’t willing . . . they never gave me a whole lot of information.”
Who told her that Hunt was investigating Kennedy?
Another secretary in Colson’s office. Then she had seen other papers and books on Hunt’s desk dealing with Senator Kennedy and the automobile accident at Chappaquiddick. She remembered that one was a paperback, “something simple like ‘Kennedy and Chappaquiddick.’ ” Some of the material had been checked out from the White House library, she thought. And one of Colson’s aides—she couldn’t remember which one—had also told her Hunt was investigating Kennedy. “It was verified up the line,” she added.
Bernstein called the White House and asked for the librarian. He was put through to Jane F. Schleicher, an assistant librarian. Identifying himself as a reporter, he asked her if she remembered the name of the book on Senator Kennedy that Mr. Hunt had checked out.
“I think I do remember something a
bout that,” the librarian replied. “He took out a whole bunch of material” on the subject of Senator Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. Mrs. Schleicher added that “I thought I had it in my notes” and asked Bernstein to call back after she had a chance to check the records.
“I think the book you probably mean is the one by Jack Olsen, The Bridge at Chappaquiddick,” Mrs. Schleicher said on the second call. Bernstein asked when Hunt had borrowed the book. Mrs. Schleicher asked him to hold the line. When she returned to the phone a few minutes later, she sounded agitated. “I don’t have a card that Mr. Hunt took that out,” she said. “I remember getting this book for someone, but there is no card on Mr. Hunt taking it out.” There was no card on the book at all; she had never had any requests from Hunt. She referred Bernstein to the press office. She didn’t know who Hunt was.
Woodward then called her and asked about the Kennedy material. “I had no business giving that out [to Bernstein],” she replied.
Woodward dialed the White House switchboard again and asked for a young presidential aide he had once met socially. They talked for an hour. Assured that his name would not be used, the official told him that Hunt had been assigned by the White House to conduct an investigation of Kennedy’s private life. He would not say who had ordered the investigation, but he left the clear impression that Colson was among those who knew of it. The official remembered that Hunt had received some material about Kennedy from the Library of Congress.
Bernstein and Woodward took a cab to the Library of Congress and found the office that handles White House requests for material in the library. Speaking to the reporters in a hallway, rather than his office, a librarian informed them politely that White House transactions were confidential. Eventually, the reporters found a more cooperative clerk and spent the afternoon in the reading room sorting through thousands of slips of paper—every request since July 1971, when Hunt was hired by the White House.
Woodward called Ken Clawson and told him about Bernstein’s conversation with the librarian. When Clawson called back, he said he had talked with Mrs. Schleicher. “She denies that the conversation [with Bernstein] took place. She said she referred you to the press office both times.” Hunt, he said, had never received any White House assignment dealing with Senator Kennedy. “He could have been doing research on his own,” said Clawson. “You know, he wrote forty-five books.” Howard Hunt wrote spy novels.
Bernstein called the former administration official and was told, “The White House is absolutely paranoid about Kennedy.” The President, White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman and Colson had been “obsessed” with the idea of obtaining information that could damage a Kennedy candidacy.
Bernstein and Woodward wrote a story reporting that Hunt had been investigating Kennedy while employed at the White House. The importance of the story, the reporters were thinking, was that Hunt was no ordinary consultant to the White House, but a political operative.
Harry Rosenfeld was enthusiastic and took the story to Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor. Bradlee came out of his glassed-in office at the far end of the newsroom and sat down in a chair near Bernstein’s desk. He was holding a copy of the story in his hands and shaking his head. It was the reporters’ first encounter with Bradlee on a Watergate story. The Wall Street Journal once described him as looking like an international jewel thief. Bradlee, 50, had been an intimate friend of President Kennedy and was sensitive to stories about the Kennedy family.
Leaning back, he said now, “You haven’t got it. A librarian and a secretary say this fellow Hunt looked at a book. That’s all.”
Woodward told him that a responsible White House source had explicitly said Hunt was conducting such an investigation.
It was near deadline. Other reporters were watching the scene.
“How senior?” Bradlee asked.
Woodward was a little unsure about the rules on disclosing sources to the executive editor. Do you want the source? Woodward asked unsteadily.
“Just tell me if he’s at the level of Assistant to the President,” Bradlee said.
Woodward didn’t know much about titles. He described the person’s position. Bradlee was not impressed. He took out his pen and began editing the story, changing the lead paragraph to read merely that Hunt “showed a special interest” in Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick accident. He crossed out a paragraph on the White House attitude toward a Kennedy candidacy.
Rosenfeld asked Bradlee if the story could go on page one.
Bradlee said no. “Get some harder information next time” he said as he walked off.
• • •
Meanwhile, Howard Hunt had not been seen since the day he had spoken briefly on the telephone to Woodward. The FBI had assigned 150 agents to the search. On July 7, the same day the Hunt-Chappaquiddick story appeared in the Post, Hunt came in from the cold. Several days later, Bernstein spoke to a Washington lawyer who knew William O. Bittman, Hunt’s attorney.
Bittman, the lawyer said, had received $25,000 in cash in a brown envelope to take Hunt’s case. The man was disturbed. Bittman was a highly respected member of the bar, a partner in the prestigious firm of Hogan and Hartson, a former Justice Department attorney who had successfully prosecuted Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the Teamsters’ Union.
“It’s good information, that’s all I can tell you about it,” the man said. There was one other thing. At least $100,000 in CRP’s budget was earmarked for “Convention Security,” he said. “The money is the key to this thing.”
Bernstein called Bittman. He would not say how he had been retained.
Had he gotten $25,000 cash in an envelope? Bernstein asked.
Bittman could not discuss any aspect of his involvement in the case, he said, but to Bernstein’s surprise, he did not specifically deny it.
Nevertheless, Woodward and Bernstein could not find anyone else who had even heard the story about money in a brown envelope. They spent hours and hours getting nowhere, and not just on that question.
Officials at the White House and CRP were in the business of sending reporters on wild-goose chases. There had been leaks that the Watergate break-in was the work of anti-Castro Cubans out to prove that the Democrats were receiving contributions from Cuba.*
The Watergate story had stalled, maybe even died. The reporters could not understand why. Bernstein’s administration contact, the former official, was also unable to get any useful information and joked—or so Bernstein thought—that the White House had “gone underground.”
Bernstein, protesting, was shipped back to Virginia politics. Woodward decided to take a vacation.
On July 22, the day Woodward left for Lake Michigan, the Long Island afternoon paper Newsday reported that a former White House aide named G. Gordon Liddy, who had been working as a lawyer for the campaign committee, had been fired by Mitchell in June for refusing to answer FBI questions about Watergate.
Liddy, 42, had come from the White House as CRP’s general counsel on December 11, 1971, and had later been appointed finance counsel, handling legal advice on campaign finances and contributions. Like McCord, he was an ex-FBI agent, but Devan Shumway, the committee’s spokesman, said Liddy’s duties were unrelated to security or intelligence gathering.
At the White House, Ken Clawson acknowledged that in late 1971 Liddy had worked there on “law enforcement” problems, as a member on the staff of John D. Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s principal assistant for domestic affairs.
Three days later, on his day off from Virginia’s political wars, Bernstein received a call at home from Barry Sussman. Could he come in? The New York Times had a front-page story reporting that at least 15 calls had been placed from Barker’s phones in Miami to CRP. More than half of the calls were made between March 15 and June 16 to a telephone in an office shared by Liddy and another lawyer.
Bernstein had several sources in the Bell system. He was always reluctant to use them to get information about calls because of the ethical que
stions involved in breaching the confidentiality of a person’s telephone records. It was a problem he had never resolved in his mind. Why, as a reporter, was he entitled to have access to personal and financial records when such disclosure would outrage him if he were subjected to a similar inquiry by investigators?
Without dwelling on his problem, Bernstein called a telephone company source and asked for a list of Barker’s calls. That afternoon, his contact called back and confirmed that the calls listed in the Times had been made. But, he added, he could not get a fuller listing because Barker’s phone records had been subpoenaed by the Miami district attorney.
You mean the FBI, or the U.S. Attorney’s office, don’t you?
“No, the phone company in Miami said it was the local district attorney,” the man said.
Why should a local district attorney be interested in the records? Before rewriting the Times story, Bernstein called the U.S. Attorney in Miami, who said that he had made no such request.
Bernstein then began phoning the local district attorneys in the Miami area. On the third call, he reached Richard E. Gerstein, the state’s attorney for Dade County—metropolitan Miami. His office had subpoenaed the records and was trying to determine if Florida law had been violated by persons involved in the break-in. Gerstein did not know what was in the records, but his chief investigator, Martin Dardis, would. Gerstein would instruct Dardis to cooperate if the Post would not reveal that it was dealing with his office. That evening, Bernstein received a phone call from Dardis.
Dardis was in a hurry and didn’t want to talk on the telephone. He had subpoenaed some of Barker’s telephone and bank records, and Bernstein was welcome to fly down to Miami and discuss them. Bernstein asked him if he knew the origin of a sum of $89,000* that Assistant U.S. Attorney Silbert said had been deposited in and withdrawn from Barker’s bank account in Miami that spring.
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