Further, that Mardian, LaRue and the committee’s lawyers had advised certain individuals “to stay away from certain areas” when questioned by the FBI, the prosecutors and the grand jury. Sloan was quoted anonymously as saying that campaign workers were “never told in so many words, ‘Don’t talk.’ . . . It was always ‘Hold ranks’ or ‘Keep the ship together.’” And, still further, that other employees had said their superiors suggested specific responses to questions that would be asked by investigators. FBI interviews were conducted in the presence of either the committee’s lawyers or Mardian. Several employees with knowledge of damaging information were suddenly promoted in the weeks immediately following the Watergate arrests. Employees of the committee had been forbidden to talk to the press without specific clearance, even so much as to state their job titles. One employee had said she had been followed to a luncheon appointment with a reporter, and had been interrogated afterward about their conversation.
After Bernstein had finished, he reached Sloan by phone and read him the draft. Sloan confirmed virtually the entire story.
Bernstein added a few details, including an account of Liddy’s “bad apple” speech to his colleagues on the Monday after the break-in.
Woodward and Bernstein took the draft to Rosenfeld. At 44, Rosenfeld had been a foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post. Brash and tough at times, he is extremely skillful at locating holes in stories written by his reporters. Since the week following the Watergate break-in, Rosenfeld had been the hard-sell artist, persuading Bradlee and the other senior editors (after satisfying himself) that the reporters had touched every base in their stories. From the day in 1970 when he moved from the foreign desk to become metropolitan editor, Rosenfeld’s mission had been to raise the local staff from its second-class citizenship at the Post. Seizing on the potential of the Watergate story, he had fought for it to remain with the metropolitan staff and had won—resisting attempts by the national editors to take over.
Rosenfeld runs the metropolitan staff, the Post’s largest, like a football coach. He prods his players, letting them know that he has promised the front office results, pleading, yelling, cajoling, pacing, working his facial expressions for instant effects—anger, satisfaction, concern.
He was born in pre-Nazi Berlin and came to New York City when he was ten. He made a successful effort to forget his German and speaks English without any trace of an accent. Rosenfeld went to work for the Herald Tribune after his graduation from Syracuse University and has always been an editor, never a reporter. He was inclined to worry that too many reporters on the metropolitan staff were incompetent, and thought even the best reporters could be saved from self-destruction only by the skills of an editor. His natural distrust of reporters was particularly acute on the Watergate story, where the risks were very great, and he was in the uncomfortable position of having to trust Bernstein and Woodward more than he had ever trusted any reporters. Aware that much of the story was out of his hands, he tried to exercise what control he could: he hovered around the reporters’ typewriters as they wrote, passed them questions as they talked on the phone to sources, demanded to be briefed after they hung up or returned from a meeting. Now, gulping down antacid tablets, Rosenfeld grilled Bernstein and Woodward to find out how solid this latest story was. He was reassured by Bernstein’s conversation with the FBI agent. At least the FBI had the same allegations on paper. Rosenfeld always felt better when he knew that somewhere, no matter how inaccessible, there was a piece of paper that could support a story.
And it was a dangerous story. The Post was, in effect, making its own charges—not only against the campaign officials, but also concerning the thoroughness of the FBI and grand-jury investigations. The charges were, in some ways, more serious than those handed down in the indictment, four days earlier.
His interrogation completed, Rosenfeld approved the story. Bernstein called CRP for its ritual comment. The notation “Insert Denial” was marked between paragraphs two and three—right after the descriptions of Mardian and LaRue as the head housecleaners.
The committee’s press office did not respond for more than an hour and a half. The reporters were certain that there would be, at least, some assertion that Fred LaRue and Robert Mardian had been models of probity in their efforts to re-elect the President.
Bernstein had a healthy fear of Mardian, having spent several years covering the New Left, the anti-war movement, demonstrations, riots, freaks, flower children, druggies, crazies, old and new radicals, during the time Mardian was head of the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department.
It was the division in charge of government wiretapping. And Mardian had supervised the unsuccessful prosecutions in many of the administration’s celebrated conspiracy or “political” trials, in which defendants and lawyers alike had been placed under electronic and other means of surveillance.
Finally, Van Shumway called with CRP’s response to the story. “The sources of the Washington Post are a fountain of misinformation,” he said.
Bernstein waited. That was the whole statement.
Because the story’s implications were the opposite of the message contained in the indictments, Bernstein and Woodward expected it would receive considerable attention. But, for the most part, the nation’s major news outlets either ignored it or focused on denials by Mardian, who refused to talk to the Post.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Mardian’s description of the Post story as “the biggest lot of crap I have ever heard in my life.” The Washington Star-News carried three paragraphs on the end of another Watergate story, and quoted Mardian as calling the Post story “a lie” and denying that he or other campaign officials had conducted a “housecleaning” to destroy documents.
Clark MacGregor told an audience in New Hampshire that it was “important the press not discuss this [Watergate] in such great detail as to possibly prejudice any trial.”
On Public Television’s Thirty Minutes With, Richard Kleindienst was questioned by Elizabeth Drew, the Washington correspondent of the Atlantic, about the Post’s story. The Attorney General didn’t know if any records had been destroyed; he hadn’t any idea why anybody at CRP would want to tear up documents. If Mardian and LaRue had destroyed records, he said, an obstruction of justice might indeed have taken place.
5
BERNSTEIN AND WOODWARD thought that signs were beginning to point unmistakably toward John Mitchell, former Attorney General of the United States. Since his original declaration of CRP’s innocence on June 18, Mitchell had been a subject of almost continual inquiry by the reporters, and they now knew that the prevailing opinion at the committee was that Mitchell was involved.
After his resignation as Nixon’s campaign manager, Mitchell had continued to help direct the re-election effort. A CRP official had told the reporters that Mitchell helped draft many of the non-denial denials which were being issued in response to their stories. Mitchell had been questioned by the grand jury.
And there was his wife. Since June 22, when she had telephoned Helen Thomas of United Press International to say that she was “sick of the whole operation” and had threatened to leave her husband, Martha Mitchell’s outbursts had been a bizarre aspect of the Watergate affair. Three days after that initial call, she had telephoned again to declare that she was a political prisoner: “I’m not going to stand for all those dirty things that go on. If you could see me, you wouldn’t believe it. I’m black and blue.”
The Mitchells had moved back to New York and were living at the Essex House on Central Park South. Woodward took the last night flight to New York on September 21, hoping to catch Mrs. Mitchell at home the next morning, after her husband had left for the offices of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander, the law firm in which he and Richard Nixon had both been partners.
At nine the next morning, Woodward asked the clerk for the room number of J. N. Mitchell. No one was registered under that name.
He went to a telepho
ne booth down the street and called the Essex House. “Give me the room where the Mitchells are staying at once, hurry,” he said.
“Room 710,” the switchboard operator said, ringing the extension. A man answered the phone. He asked who was calling, and Woodward identified himself as a Post reporter. Mrs. Mitchell couldn’t come to the phone, the man said, and hung up.
A few minutes later, Woodward took the elevator to the seventh floor and walked to Room 710, which was the Marriott Suite, according to a brass plate on the white door. He moved on to the end of the hall and knocked on a door. No one answered—which was exactly what Woodward hoped: he could stand in front of the door all day, if necessary, as if waiting for someone to open it.
He had talked to Mrs. Mitchell once, in 1971, when she had called him after he had written a story about the smokestacks of a huge generating plant that were polluting the exclusive air in the vicinity of the Watergate. Checking city records, Woodward had discovered that among the formal complaints was one from Martha Mitchell, Watergate resident. He had tried to call her before he wrote the story to ask if she knew that the offending smokestacks were fed by the monster engines which supplied electrical power to the White House and the Justice Department. But he couldn’t reach her. Mrs. Mitchell had called him the morning the story appeared, and Woodward had found her refreshing.
Honey, she said, she didn’t care if her John and Mr. President had to work by candlelight, she had learned enough back in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to know that human beings should not be subjected to direct hits from anybody’s waste.
That had been almost a year ago. She had been considered something of a truth-teller in Washington, though a little wiggy perhaps. Now, Woodward thought, Martha Mitchell was becoming the Greek chorus of the Watergate drama—sounding her warnings to all who would hear.
Woodward had waited in the hallway for about 20 minutes when the Mitchells’ security guard, a large black man, left the suite and took the elevator down. Woodward went down to a telephone booth in the lobby and called Room 710. Martha Mitchell answered. She sounded jovial and happy for the chance to chat. They talked about Washington, politics, the upcoming election, Manhattan . . . The operator broke in, saying it would take another five cents to keep talking.
“I wouldn’t want Katie Graham to spend another nickel on me,” Mrs. Mitchell said.
Woodward popped a quarter into the pay phone. But she was starting to sound anxious, and said she had to run. Woodward took the elevator back to the seventh floor.
After a few minutes, some hotel maids knocked on the door of 710. Martha Mitchell let them in. Woodward raced to 710 as the door was shut and knocked. Mrs. Mitchell, probably expecting another maid, opened it again. She was wearing a print blouse, blue slacks and white sandals.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said, “you caught me with grease on my face.”
During a 15-minute chat, with vacuum cleaners whirring in the background, Mrs. Mitchell said she planned to write a book about her experiences in Washington and that she was much happier “making my family a non-political entity.” The subject of Watergate made her visibly nervous. Each time Woodward raised a question about it, she said, “I don’t know,” “You tell me,” or, “That comes out in the book I’m writing.” And then she began fidgeting. She would not elaborate on her earlier pronouncements—made by phone to reporters in the middle of the night—about “dirty politics” or “this cops-and-robbers business.”
She would talk about the upcoming election, though. She predicted that President Nixon would win the election by “the biggest landslide in the history of the country . . . getting 99.9 percent of the vote.
“I think there shouldn’t be an election. If you ask me, the President should have a seven-year-term and, boom, then put him out. They start running again after they’re in office two years. I don’t care which party you’re talking about.”
Woodward wrote a brief story for the Post’s Style section. But it had been a wasted trip.
• • •
The Sloans’ daughter, Melissa Madison Sloan, was born on September 25 at Washington’s Georgetown Hospital. Bernstein talked by phone with Hugh Sloan the next day. He sounded relaxed, his mind far away from the troubles of Watergate and CRP. Bernstein had been trying to see Sloan again for days. But on the morning after the birth of his daughter, even mentioning Watergate seemed wrong. They chatted for a few minutes about the baby, her mother—she was understandably ecstatic, Sloan said—and the grandparents, who would be coming into town that week.
Perhaps sometime Sloan could find a few minutes to sit down with the reporters, Bernstein suggested. Sloan said he’d try, and suggested that Bernstein call back in a couple of days.
That afternoon Bernstein debated with himself for a while, then called a florist and ordered flowers sent to Georgetown Hospital. He was concerned that his gesture might be misunderstood. There was no denying that his motivation was touched by self-interest. But there was also the fact that he felt warmly toward the Sloans, especially Mrs. Sloan. He hoped the flowers wouldn’t arrive while Maurice Stans or one of their friends from the White House was there.
Two days later, Bernstein called Sloan. Sloan might have some time the next morning, but he didn’t really see how he could be very helpful. . . . Well, if the reporters had some information that he could confirm or steer them away from, that would be all right. He wouldn’t be violating any trust in doing that. Could they check with him early the next morning?
Bernstein called him before eight.
Sloan said he had to clean up the house before his in-laws arrived, but if the reporters could get out to McLean quickly, they could stop by for a few minutes.
Sloan was dressed in sport clothes and, except for the broom he was holding in his hand, he still looked like the Princeton undergraduate he once had been. He shook hands with Woodward, who immediately volunteered to help clean up the house. Sloan declined the offer and offered coffee. A framed Christmas card picturing the President and Mrs. Nixon at home in the White House hung near the kitchen table. There was a scrawled message from the Chief and First Lady.
In the living room were more mementoes: another Christmas card, White House matchbooks with the Presidential Seal (Bernstein lit a cigarette and pocketed one), souvenirs from the ‘68 campaign.
Sloan sat in a high-backed upholstered chair, tapping his coffee cup lightly with a spoon as he talked, rarely sipping from the cup, his face drawn. He was shy.
They were discussing Maurice Stans’ office—who worked there, the lines of authority. Sloan was devoted to Stans. People who thought Stans would knowingly have anything to do with political espionage did not really know the Secretary, he said. Stans was in anguish. He had allowed himself to be maligned in the press to protect the political people. He had never known what the money withdrawn by Liddy and Porter and Magruder was to be spent on.
Did that mean that Stans had known of the outlays beforehand?
Sloan hesitated. He was trying to plead Stans’ case and instead was getting him in deeper.
The Bookkeeper had refused to say whether Stans knew of the withdrawals when they took place. Bernstein tried playing devil’s advocate, suggesting that Stans would have been derelict had he not asked to be kept informed of disbursals of money from his own safe. Sloan agreed. Then he said that Stans had given his approval before Liddy, Porter and Magruder were authorized to make withdrawals from the fund. But that he had not given his authorization until after he had received assurances from the political managers of the campaign that they wanted the money disbursed.
Who were these political managers?
Sloan was uncomfortable with the question. It was enough to know that Stans had not acted on his own, he said.
Woodward jumped at the opening. In other words, a group of people in the political management of the campaign had the ultimate authority to approve disbursements from the secret fund?
That was right, Sloan said, but he did not want
to go into it further.
Get those names and it will all be over, Bernstein was thinking.
Sloan was more interested in talking about the Mardian-LaRue story on CRP’s housecleaning. He was curious about how the reporters had gotten their information. It was consistent with his own deductions, but he was surprised that anyone in a position to know things firsthand would have talked so explicitly.
Bernstein’s stomach began a slow dance of panic. He had been under the impression that Sloan had confirmed almost the whole story on the basis of firsthand knowledge, not deduction. Other sources had confirmed the underpinning of the story, true, but much of it rested primarily on what Sloan had said, and now he seemed to be backing off. They went through the story again, handicapped by not having it in front of them. As they took it point by point, Woodward and Bernstein relaxed a bit. Very little, if anything, that Sloan had said before was deduction. He was not sure that he would have characterized all the specifics in the story as evidence of a “housecleaning,” but that was a matter for the reporters’ judgment. He hadn’t known much about Odle; that, however, was of small concern because that information had come from somewhere else. Nothing in the story was at variance with what he understood to be true, Sloan said finally.
The discussion kept moving around the edges of the secret fund. Was there any chance that the money had been authorized for legitimate activities? For routine intelligence-gathering projects, such innocuous tasks as recording the opposition’s speeches and clipping newspapers? To almost every question dealing with the fund, Sloan would answer that circumstances had forced him to “assume the worst,” and then would ask the reporters what they thought. He had been at the White House, at CRP, and had worked in campaigns before, but maybe they knew things that would cause him to redirect his thinking.
They did not. Their thinking was directed toward the political side of the committee, particularly John N. Mitchell. Bernstein reminded Sloan of his remark that Mitchell had almost certainly known of the cash outlays from the secret fund. Was he one of those “authorized,” as Sloan had put it a few minutes earlier, to approve disbursements?
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