“In Miami, Young thinks Segretti met with Hunt and Chapin and also was asked—don’t know by whom—to recruit and organize Cubans for an assault on the Doral Beach Hotel and make it look as if they were working for McGovern. Segretti refused because he felt it would be blatantly illegal and violent.”
For months the reporters had been picking up information suggesting that the Nixon forces had made routine use of provocateurs in demonstrations, and that such things had been planned for the conventions. But they had assumed that all bets were off after Watergate. Yet there had been an assault on the Doral Beach Hotel in Miami, and there was some evidence that there had been provocateurs in the crowd. Woodward remembered Deep Throat’s words four nights before: These are not very bright guys. Somehow the bungling seemed reassuring—it tempered the frightening implications of how far the Nixon forces were willing to go to achieve their ends. Where would their efforts have ended had not the Watergate burglars been so incredibly stupid as to retape the stairwell doors on June 17, leading a security guard to call the cops? Or if Howard Hunt, the supposed master spy, had exercised the elementary caution of using pay phones?
Woodward went into Sussman’s office. The city editor and Bernstein were agonizing over how tantalizingly close they were to establishing Segretti’s contact with Chapin. Meyers’ information from Young established the connection. But Young was not yet willing to go on the record. They went over Woodward’s notes.
That afternoon, Bernstein reached Young at his office in Los Angeles. They talked for more than an hour. Young told him: “Segretti called me in a panic in August. It was about two weeks before the Republican convention. He said he had just been visited by the FBI, and wanted to talk to me very quickly. He was worried because there had been no prior warning that he would be contacted by the FBI. He had felt he would be given such a prior warning, that he would be briefed as to what to say. He wouldn’t say who was to brief him, just that they were the people he was working for. He was afraid of being left out on a limb, sacrificed without any protection or coverage. He wanted some advice as to what he should do. . . .
“Don told me that he was paid from a trust account in a lawyer’s name. He said the lawyer was a high-placed friend of the President and he was instructed to guard that name zealously. . . . He would never divulge any names.”
Bernstein pressed for anything Young could remember about the lawyer. Young thought.
“Oh, yes, he once said the lawyer was in the Newport Beach area.”
Kalmbach lived in Newport Beach and maintained his offices there.
A high-placed friend of the President; a lawyer; Newport Beach . . .
How had Segretti characterized his political activities to Young?
“Segretti said to me that he was engaged in activities that he called ‘political hijinks,’ that this was part of the President’s re-election drive, that it was supposed to create trouble and problems for various Democratic candidates. . . .
“After he was summoned to the grand jury, he tried to get in touch with his people [who were] in Miami Beach [for the convention]. He was in an absolute panic, even more concerned than when the FBI first visited him. He felt he should have been given prior warning. He was trying to call Chapin. I said, ‘Have you talked to Dwight about this?’ He gave an evasive answer and said he couldn’t get hold of anyone. He was very concerned with Dwight’s name.
“Then I got a call around midnight from him saying he was on his way to Miami, that he had made contact—he wouldn’t say with whom—and they had told him to come to Miami. He said in Miami that he was shown an FBI report of his interrogation—both of them. . . . And he was told to tell the truth [before the grand jury], not to perjure himself, not to worry about it.
“He was to stick to just what he had told the FBI, which was not any damaging material, just about the phone calls from Hunt and some small activities he was doing, some innocuous thing about being involved in some campaign activities, none of the stuff that hit the paper later. When he reported to wherever they report, the U.S. Attorney interrogated him ahead of time in an office and thoroughly went into everything.
“But in the grand jury, the questions went along on a very easy scale: just the innocuous stuff and some things about Hunt. Nothing about the lawyer. Nothing about whom he was working for. But then, he said, a woman member of the grand jury asked a question about who paid him and whom he knew on the White House staff. Then, he said, the names came out, especially Dwight Chapin’s. He didn’t mention the other names [to Young]. He said he did tell the grand jury the name of the lawyer on the West Coast who paid him.”
Now it was definite. The Justice Department had had the information that the President’s appointments secretary and his personal lawyer were involved and had done nothing to follow up. Bernstein again wondered how the prosecutors could have been manipulated to accept such a decision. “He told the prosecutors truthfully everything that he knew,” Young had said. Bernstein asked Young for other specific details of what Segretti had told him.
“He mentioned a letter or pamphlet for mailing to all members of the Democratic State Central Committee in California—a scurrilous attack on Humphrey, blaming him for the war, calling him a two-time loser, giving the impression it was put out by McGovern people. He said there were some others doing the same thing. He said, ‘I’m just a small fish, a cog, one of many doing the same thing.’ ”
And Chapin?
“My impression is that Don and Dwight are very close. As close as good friends could be. They kept contact over the years. He mentioned that he called Dwight at his home in connection with this. But he’s been somewhat secretive with me.”
How much had he said about Howard Hunt?
“When the FBI came to see him the first time, he learned that his phone number had turned up on a bill to an individual named Howard Hunt. He said he knew Hunt by a different name—an assumed name, a pseudonym—but that he knew he was Hunt. Hunt would always talk in a very whispery, conspiratorial voice, he said, and he thought Hunt was very odd. Hunt seemed to add even more intrigue than was already there, he said.”
The conversation had been off the record, but Young said he would consider putting it on, provided he received legal advice that no violation of the attorney-client privilege was involved. Segretti had never retained him as counsel, had sought him out only as a friend, Young said. He and Bernstein and Woodward and Meyers would stay in touch daily.
On Friday, October 13, Young agreed to go on the record. Woodward went over the details with him a final time, pressing to find if there was any possibility that Young could be wrong or exaggerating Segretti’s dealings with Hunt and Chapin. The answer was no.
Meyers was dispatched to get a sworn statement from Young affirming that the contents of the interviews with Meyers, Bernstein and Woodward were accurate representations of what Segretti had told him.
At last there was going to be a story based almost completely on on-the-record statements that could not be attacked by the White House as coming from anonymous sources.
For two days, Woodward had been trying to telephone Chapin at his office in the White House, a few steps from the Oval Office of the President. His calls, for the first time, were held up at the switchboard while he was asked who was calling and from what number. After about 20 seconds, the calls were put through, but when he reached Chapin’s office, a secretary would say Chapin was busy and take a message. The calls were not returned.
There remained one major hurdle: Meyers had described Larry Young as a defender of “radicals and cop killers.” No phrase was more likely to raise a red flag in Harry Rosenfeld’s office. The metropolitan editor bluntly said he was not about to stake his reputation or that of the Washington Post on the word of “some hippie lawyer.”
Happily, Larry Young’s credentials were in order. Woodward made a dozen telephone calls to the West Coast and spent hours talking to members of the bench and bar who vouched for Young’s standing as
a respected and responsible representative of the legal profession. Woodward even found out what kind of clothes Young wore (modish but tasteful) and how long his hair was (shorter than Bernstein’s). Rosenfeld was satisfied.
Bernstein began writing the story and Woodward left to make a round of visits at the Justice Department. After several strikeouts, he found a lawyer familiar with the case, alone in his office. Woodward was invited in and sat down. An informal late-Friday-afternoon mood prevailed. They began chatting about Tuesday’s story—the espionage and sabotage in the primaries.
“Yes, we got Segretti through the records of Hunt’s phone calls,” the lawyer said. “The Bureau made random checks on a large portion of Hunt’s calls—there were more than 700 calls altogether. One of them was to this guy Segretti. Let me emphasize that the dirty tricks were probably not illegal and here at Justice we’re sticking to the Watergate bugging itself in the investigation. . . . But I’m worried about the case. The Bureau is acting funny . . . there is interest in the case at the top.” He wouldn’t say where the top was.
Now, more than ever, it was clear why the Watergate investigation had been so narrowly focused that the prosecutors had not pursued other crimes—no matter how obvious—unless they were directly connected to the bugging.
Woodward read aloud some notes on the Chapin-Segretti connection, and suggested they might explain high-level interest. He didn’t know if the attorney would be surprised or not.
After some hesitation, the attorney said: “That’s essentially what we’ve been told.”
Woodward said that he was a little afraid of the story because it led straight into the White House—to the gatekeeper at the Oval Office, which was one of Chapin’s functions.
The lawyer smiled. “I’ve wondered several times why you would worry so much about Chapin, who is much lower than Mitchell and Stans. What you’ve been told, we’ve been told about Segretti and Chapin. I can talk about it a little more freely because it really doesn’t have anything to do with Watergate. It was part of the investigation, technically still is, but it’s separate and we’re not pursuing it. . . .”
About 5:00 P.M., the reporters and editors met to discuss the Chapin story. It would be too long to finish in a couple of hours; they would hold it for Sunday. The Justice Department had turned away from investigating the real conspiracy of Watergate; had focused on the narrow burglary and bugging at Democratic headquarters—the IOC (Interception of Oral Communications), as the Feds called it—and ignored the grand conspiracy directed by the President’s men to subvert the electoral process.
Woodward called a casual acquaintance at the White House to get some background on Chapin. “He is one of those guys like Haldeman and Pat Buchanan [one of the President’s speechwriters and the author of the White House daily news summaries] who got on the Old Man’s bus very early and followed it through the ups and downs,” he was told. “Chapin is the guy who made sure the Old Man’s suit came back from the cleaners during the campaign. . . . He made sure everyone had coffee and made the apologies when the President was late, including calls to Mrs. Nixon and the girls. He probably gave the President a back rub if he needed one during the ‘68 campaign. . . . Dwight is nice to everyone, always says hello.”
The decision to hold the story for Sunday had been made after Woodward had called the White House on Friday for comment. About 8:00 P.M., three hours after he’d been told the substance of the story, deputy press secretary Gerald Warren called back. “I have a statement from Dwight Chapin,” he said:
As the Washington Post reporter has described it, the story is based entirely on hearsay and is fundamentally inaccurate. For example, I do not know, have never met, seen or talked to E. Howard Hunt. I have known Donald Segretti since college days, but I did not meet with him in Florida as the story suggests, and I certainly have never discussed with him any phase of the grand jury proceedings in the Watergate case. Beyond that, I don’t propose to have any further comment.
Chapin, busily answering charges that had not been leveled against him, ignored the main point: that he was Segretti’s contact. “Fundamentally inaccurate” was employed much as “collection of absurdities” had been to describe the initial Segretti-espionage-sabotage story. Along with the old “hearsay” red herring.
The “hearsay” charge rankled. The Post had a sworn statement from Larry Young.
At 9:00 P.M., when Bernstein sat down to write, he had three versions of the Young interviews—his own, Woodward’s and Meyers’. The clutter on his desk was hopeless, so he moved to three vacant desks near his own and laid out five yards of notes. By 7:00 A.M., he had 15 pages which quoted extensively from Young. Only the biographical details on Chapin remained to be written.
He flopped down on a couch in the sports department and got less than two hours of uncomfortable sleep before being awakened by a copy aide. Bernstein wanted the story to be completed early so it could be reviewed by Rosenfeld, Simons and Bradlee without any last-minute hassles. He had looked through the library at the Post for more background on Chapin. There was only one half-page handout, issued by the 1968 Nixon campaign organization. It said that Chapin had been graduated from USC, and had worked for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency under Bob Haldeman. Bernstein added details from Meyers’ notes.
At about 9:30 A.M., he called the former administration official he had talked to the week after the Watergate arrests. The man knew Chapin well. “If Dwight has anything to do with this, it means Haldeman,” he said. Chapin was no self-starter. “He does what two people tell him to do: Haldeman and Nixon.”
Woodward and Sussman arrived at the office that Saturday at about 10:00 A.M. and began going over Bernstein’s draft. There was no problem with the lead; it was the same as read to the White House:
President Nixon’s appointments secretary and an ex-White House aide indicted in the Watergate bugging case both served as “contacts” in a spying and sabotage operation against the Democrats, a California attorney has said in a sworn statement.
Sussman was concerned that the top section of the draft did not adequately stress Chapin’s position in the White House, that it conveyed the impression that he was merely some flunkey calendar-keeper who worked out of a closet. He typed out a new second paragraph:
The appointments secretary, Dwight L. Chapin, 31, meets almost daily with the President. As the person in charge of Mr. Nixon’s schedule and appointments, including overall coordination of trips, Chapin is one of a handful of White House staff members with easy access to the President.
Bernstein was pleased with the addition. But he protested when the next paragraph, describing Chapin as a functionary who responded to orders from Haldeman, was struck from the draft.
Anger turned to anguish when the following paragraph was struck—an observation that Larry Young’s description of the Newport Beach lawyer who allegedly paid Segretti “appears to fit Herbert W. Kalmbach, the President’s personal attorney and former deputy finance chairman of the Nixon campaign.”
Woodward had tried to reach Kalmbach on Friday and been told by Kalmbach’s secretary that no member of the firm would comment to reporters on anything. Now Bernstein was prepared to argue strenuously, but Woodward joined the editors and said he preferred to kill the paragraph until Kalmbach was contacted, or until another source specifically identified Kalmbach as Segretti’s paymaster. Bernstein conceded that they should be able to confirm Kalmbach’s tie to Segretti within a few days, as well as to identify the President’s lawyer as one of five persons with overall control of the secret funds that had financed the campaign of espionage and sabotage.
A new paragraph was added, quoting Young as saying that the money for Segretti’s activities, including a $20,000 annual salary, was paid from a “trust account in a lawyer’s name . . . a highly-placed friend of the President, and [that Segretti] was instructed to guard that name zealously.”
Despite the deletions, the story—headlined “Key Nixon Aide Named a
s ‘Sabotage’ Contact”—broke new ground. Almost four months after the break-in at Democratic headquarters, the spreading stain of Watergate had finally seeped into the White House.
8
BERNSTEIN HAD LEFT Washington Saturday night to spend the rest of the weekend in the Virginia countryside, horseback riding. When Woodward awoke Sunday, the radio news was quoting the Post story, as well as a press release from Time magazine dealing with the Segretti-Chapin connection: Time’s story was better than the Post’s in some respects. Though it was based on anonymous government sources and lacked any personal account such as Young’s, it had several additional details: Chapin had hired Segretti—not merely served as his “contact.” Another USC alumnus, Gordon Strachan, the political aide to Haldeman, also had a hand in hiring his old classmate. Segretti had been paid more than $35,000 by Herbert W. Kalmbach, the President’s lawyer.
Woodward, his Sunday shot to hell by Time magazine—not for the first nor the last time, he was sure—went to the office and started working the telephone.
Late in the afternoon, he reached a Justice Department attorney whose overriding interest seemed to be getting back to the television set to watch a football game. He hurriedly confirmed that Kalmbach was indeed the paymaster for Segretti’s secret activities. Woodward didn’t even have time to ask him about Gordon Strachan.
Woodward called Hugh Sloan. Working around the edges, the two talked for a few minutes about Kalmbach’s role in the campaign. Kalmbach had resigned as deputy finance chairman on April 7, the date the new campaign finance disclosure law took effect. Until Maurice Stans resigned as Secretary of Commerce, Kalmbach had been in charge of fund-raising for the President’s re-election, although Stans was doing political work while still at Commerce. There was very little about the financial side of the Nixon campaign that Kalmbach did not know, Sloan said, even after he resigned his position.
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