Bradlee had scanned the memo and made an open-fisted gesture, jerking his arm. “Quit beating yourself off, kid,” he told Bernstein, “and get some information.”
Bradlee’s frustration was understandable. The election had not stilled the White House guns. The self-confidence that flowed from the electoral triumph had emboldened the President’s men. The post-election offensive was led by Charles Wendell Colson, the 41-year-old former Marine Corps captain and a White House commandant on political warfare.
About a week after the election, Colson traveled to Kennebunkport, Maine—very near Edmund Muskie’s summer home—to address the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. He opened the speech by noting that his home state, Massachusetts, was the only one that had gone for George McGovern. The President, he joked, had decided to mend some fences and locate a new federal installation in Massachusetts—a nuclear-waste disposal center in Harvard Square.
Assuring his audience that “the First Amendment is alive and well in Washington,” he accused the Post of McCarthyism, and called Bradlee “the self-appointed leader of what Boston’s Teddy White* once described as ‘that tiny little fringe of arrogant elitists who affect the healthy mainstream of American journalism with their own peculiar view of the world.’ . . .
“If Bradlee ever left the Georgetown cocktail circuit, where he and his pals dine on third-hand information and gossip and rumor, he might discover out here the real America. And he might learn that all truth and all knowledge and all superior wisdom just doesn’t emanate exclusively from that small little clique in Georgetown and that the rest of the country isn’t just sitting out here waiting to be told what they’re supposed to think.”
Bradlee read Colson’s speech in his office and walked over to Woodward’s desk. “They’re really kicking it at me,” he said. “That’s some pretty personal shit.”
Woodward thought he was ruffled.
“I know it’s there,” Bradlee said.
Woodward recognized an admonition to dig harder.
“I know it’s there,” Bradlee repeated.
Later, Bradlee told an interviewer that he’d been “ready to hold both Woodward’s and Bernstein’s heads in a pail of water until they came up with another story. That dry spell was anguish. Anguish.”
In the four weeks following the election, the reporters went chasing around as if their heads were in a pail of water. They were learning things, but were unable to make any meaningful stories out of what information they got. . . . Magruder’s secretary told Bernstein she did not understand why she had not been interviewed by the FBI. . . . John Dean had sat in on all the FBI interviews with White House personnel, a Justice Department attorney said, and the prosecutors were upset about it. Dean had also received copies of the FBI reports for the Watergate investigation. . . . A secretary at the Mullen firm told Woodward that Dorothy Hunt, wife of Howard Hunt, was saying that “Howard is being made a scapegoat.” . . . A middle-echelon White House aide said: “Dwight Chapin walks around as if he’s just packed his bags” . . . and the big election victory seemed muted, other White House aides were saying, and Watergate was number-one priority with the President, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Colson. . . . Some presidential aides who were normally insiders were saying they didn’t know what was going on. . . .
There were discussions in the White House of releasing a report on Watergate, a “White Paper” to lay out the facts, but it had been discarded as too risky. . . . A prominent Washington lawyer who had high political connections told Woodward: “I understand that someone is taking care of Hunt and McCord either through CRP or the White House; someone from the White House got to Judge Richey through the back door and got him to help the administration; a Republican governor said he could get to Richey and word came back that there was no need, it had already been done.”* . . . A close friend of John Mitchell’s described the former Attorney General as “essentially a very decent man who didn’t have any use for the kind of Mickey Mouse stuff that Haldeman and Colson and the others were dreaming up.” . . . One of the President’s former top aides argued that Haldeman “would have been delinquent” if he had not set up a procedure to gather political intelligence for the President. . . . A ranking Justice Department official observed: “From what I hear, some of my best friends should be in jail.” . . . At least a dozen people said that Jeb Magruder was finished and would not get an administration job that required Senate confirmation. . . . An Assistant Attorney General was convinced that the Dean investigation was “a fraud, a pipeline to Haldeman.” . . . Mrs. Graham was told by a close friend who had ties to the administration that the phones of several Post reporters and news executives were tapped. A sweep which was conducted by electronics experts for a fee of $5000 turned up nothing. . . . The government had inexplicably failed to execute search warrants for the homes of the five arrested burglars. . . . A former Internal Revenue Service official related keen White House interest in some tax investigations of the President’s friends: “Nothing I could put my finger on fully, but the message was coming over.” . . . Disillusioned campaign workers at CRP referred to a “cover story” that had been told to the prosecutors. . . . Hunt and Liddy had been members of the “Plumbers,” a secret White House team investigating leaks to the news media. (The White House had no comment in the summer when Time magazine said there was such a group.)
• • •
One late November Saturday night, a Post editor asked for a word with Woodward in a deserted section of the newsroom. One of his neighbors had told him that his aunt was on a grand jury. His neighbor thought it was the jury on Watergate; she’d made some remark about knowing all about it. “She’s a Republican, but she says she really hates Nixon now. My neighbor thinks she wants to talk.”
A few days later, the editor handed Woodward a slip of paper with the woman’s name and address. Bernstein and Woodward went to Rosenfeld, who seemed to like the idea of a visit but suspended final judgment until he had checked with Bradlee for a policy decision. Bradlee asked the Post’s lawyers.
Bernstein and Woodward consulted the Post’s library copy of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Grand jurors took an oath to keep secret their deliberations and the testimony before them; but the burden of secrecy, it appeared, was on the juror. There seemed to be nothing in the law that forbade anyone to ask questions. The lawyers agreed, but urged extreme caution in making any approaches. They recommended that the reporters simply ask the woman if she wanted to talk.
Bradlee was nervous. “No beating anyone over the head, no pressure, none of that cajoling,” he instructed Woodward and Bernstein. He got up from behind his desk and pointed his finger. “I’m serious about that. Particularly you, Bernstein, be subtle for once in your life.”
He instructed them to get in touch with him the moment the visit was over. “Get to a phone booth and call me—no matter what happens.”
They drove to her house. She wasn’t there. Woodward called Sussman at the office and asked him to pass the word to Bradlee.
The next morning, the reporters drove across town, knocked at thewoman’s door and identified themselves. She invited them inside. They did not mention the grand jury, and said simply that they had heard she knew something about Watergate.
“It’s a mess, I know that,” the woman said. “But how would I know anything about it except for what I read in the papers?”
It took 10 minutes to figure out that the woman was indeed on a grand jury at the courthouse, but not the Watergate one. They thanked her and left.
The episode had whetted their interest. They knew the outlines of the information they needed. They lacked the details a cooperative grand juror could probably supply. That afternoon, Bernstein called the chief prosecutor, Earl Silbert, and asked for a list of the 23 grand jurors. Silbert refused flatly, rejecting Bernstein’s contention that the membership of the jury was a matter of public record.
Woodward asked a friend in the clerk’s office if it was possible
to get a roster of the Watergate grand jury. “No way whatsoever,” he was told. “The records are secret.”
Next morning, Woodward took a cab to the courthouse.
The clerk’s office employed about 90 people. Woodward started at one end of the large complex of file rooms and after half an hour had found someone willing to direct him to a remote corner of the main file area where lists of trial and grand juries were kept. He identified himself to another clerk as a Post reporter and said he wanted to look through the file. The clerk looked at Woodward suspiciously. “Okay,” he said, “but you aren’t allowed to copy anything. You can’t take names. No notes. I’ll be watching.”
Woodward started going through the file drawers and finally found the master list of 1972 grand juries. Two grand juries had been sworn in on June 5. He remembered that the foreman of the Watergate grand jury had an Eastern European name and worked for the government as an economist or something like that. He found the right name on Grand Jury Number One, sworn in on June 5, 1972.
Each of the grand jurors had filled out a small orange card listing name, age, occupation, address, home and work telephones. Woodward began sifting through the cards, then glanced over his shoulder. The clerk was sitting at his desk, about 15 feet away, staring at him. Woodward took the first four cards, set them face up in the bottom of the file drawer and began studying the names, ages, addresses, phone numbers and occupations. It took about 10 minutes to memorize the information. He asked the clerk where the men’s room was.
Inside the washroom, Woodward went into a stall, took a notebook from his jacket pocket and wrote out what he had memorized. Priscilla L. Woodruff, age 28, unemployed. Trying to visualize what each of the grand jurors looked like helped him keep track of the information. Naomi R. Williams, 56, retired teacher and elevator operator. Julian L. White, 37, janitor at George Washington University.
Woodward drew a mental picture of a coat of arms and the name of Haldeman etched beneath a pair of crossed daggers guarding a throne: George W. Stockton, he wrote in his notebook, Institute of Heraldry, Department of the Army, technician, age 53. He hitched up his trousers. Four down, 19 to go.
Woodward memorized the next five cards. Straining not to look guilty, he asked the clerk where the chief judge’s chambers were.
The man frowned. “You’re sure spending a lot of time with those files. I’m not so sure that you’re allowed to even look in there.”
Woodward said he would be back—as soon as he had checked something with the chief judge. Upstairs, in a third-floor washroom, he wrote down the five names and the other information. That left 14. At the rate he was going, the job would take all morning.
On the third try, he was able to memorize six cards. Returning from the lavatory to the file room, he asked the clerk when he went to lunch. “I don’t go out for lunch,” the man said curtly. The perfect clerk, Woodward thought ruefully: even eats at his desk. He needed to get the rest this time because the clerk was getting impatient. It took nearly 45 minutes to memorize the last eight names and accompanying details.
At the office, he typed a list of the jury members and the accompanying data. In Bradlee’s office, the editors and Bernstein and Woodward eliminated nearly half the members of the grand jury as too risky. Low-grade civil servants—especially older ones, for instance—were accustomed to doing things by the bureaucratic book, checking with their superiors, rarely relying on their own judgment. Military officers the same. They were looking for the few least likely to inform the prosecutors of a visit. The candidate would have to be bright enough to suspect that the grand-jury system had broken down in the Watergate case and be in command of the nuances of the evidence. Ideally, the juror would be capable of outrage at the White House or the prosecutors or both; a person who was accustomed to bending rules, the type of person who valued practicality more than procedure. The exercise continued with Bernstein, Woodward and their bosses trying to psych out strangers on the basis of name, address, age, occupation, ethnic background, religion, income level. The final choices were left to the reporters.
Everyone in the room had private doubts about such a seedy venture. Bradlee, desperate for a story, and reassured by the lawyers, overcame his own. Simons doubted out loud the rightness of the exercise and worried about the paper. Rosenfeld was concerned most about the mechanics of the reporters not getting caught. Sussman was afraid that one of them, probably Bernstein, would push too hard and find a way to violate the law. Woodward wondered whether there was ever justification for a reporter to entice someone across the line of legality while standing safely on the right side himself. Bernstein, who vaguely approved of selective civil disobedience, was not concerned about breaking the law in the abstract. It was a question of which law, and he believed that grand-jury proceedings should be inviolate. The misgivings, however, went unstated, for the most part. The reporters’ procedure would be to identify themselves, tell the juror that they had learned from an anonymous mutual acquaintance that he or she knew something about Watergate and ask if he or she was willing to discuss the matter. They would leave unless the juror, without prodding, volunteered something. Nothing would be said about the grand jury unless the juror mentioned it.
Bradlee, addressing them in a final briefing before bivouac, repeated the marching orders: “No strong-arm tactics, fellas. Right?”
Working separately over the first weekend of December, Woodward and Bernstein attempted the clumsy charade with about half a dozen members of the grand jury. They returned with no information and a clear impression that the prosecutors had warned the jurors to beware of jokers bearing press cards. Only one person volunteered that he was on the grand jury, and he explained to Woodward that he had taken two oaths of secrecy in his life, the Elks’ and the grand juror’s, and that both were sacred trusts. The others said they didn’t know anything about Watergate except what they had learned from the media. One told Bernstein: “Watergate? Oh yeah, that fancy apartment down in Foggy Bottom. . . . I heard about it on the television, all that break-in business and stuff; there’s no place safe in this city.”
Until he heard about the Elk, Bernstein had feared that his partner with the fantastic memory had wasted it on the wrong list.
On Monday, Bradlee called the reporters into his office for an urgent meeting. He shut the door, a gesture often reserved for such delicate matters of state as firings. “The balloon is up,” he said. At least one of the grand jurors had told the prosecutors he’d been visited by a Washington Post reporter. One of the prosecutors had called Edward Bennett Williams, the Post’s principal attorney. The prosecutors had gone to Judge Sirica with the juror’s complaint and Williams had advised Bradlee to have his reporters sit tight.
They asked Bradlee how much trouble Williams thought they were in.
“You’re not going to get an award,” said Bradlee. “Williams said that it’s up to the Judge.” But he was worried. John Sirica, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, was known as “Maximum John” because of the stiff punishments he imposed.
Late in the afternoon, Bradlee told the reporters to be in Williams’ office at nine the next morning. “Things look a little better,” he said. “Williams talked to Sirica and to the prosecutors; he thinks he can keep you out of the slam.”
The next morning, Williams was pacing around his handsome office. “John Sirica is some kind of pissed at you fellas,” he said. “We had to do a lot of convincing to keep your asses out of jail.” Williams had pledged there would be no more Post contact with grand-jury members. The prosecutors, too, had interceded in the reporters’ behalf, recommending to Sirica that no action be taken because none of the grand jurors had imparted any information. But Sirica was still fuming, Williams said, and would probably lecture them, at a minimum. “Stay in touch and keep your noses clean,” he warned. The Judge could be very unpredictable.
• • •
The reporters returned to more conventional sou
rces. A few nights later, Bernstein signed a Post car out of the office garage and drove to an apartment several miles away. It was about eight o’clock when he knocked on the door. The woman he was looking for answered, but when he told her his name, she did not open the door. She slipped a piece of paper underneath it with her unlisted telephone number written on it. “Call me later this evening,” she said, adding, “Your articles have been excellent.”
The woman was in a position to have considerable knowledge of the secret activities of the White House and CRP. Bernstein had attempted to contact her before, but she had rejected every approach. He drove back to the office and dialed the number. Her voice was unsteady, nervous. “At this point, I don’t trust a soul,” she said. “But I respect your position.” She asked if Bernstein was calling from a safe phone. He was at the desk of a reporter on the Maryland staff; he thought so.
“I’m forced to agree 100 percent with Ben Bradlee; the truth hasn’t been told,” she said.
Bernstein printed the letter Z on the top sheet of a blue memo pad; X had been retired with the Bookkeeper. “My boss calls it a whitewash,” said Z. “Two years ago, I never would have believed any of this, but the facts are overwhelming.” She advised him to reread carefully the reporters’ own stories. “There is more truth in there than you must have realized—many clues. You’re doing very well, but you could do a lot better. It’s a question of putting on more pressure.”
She refused to be interrogated, and laid down the ground rules: She would point the reporters in the right direction to help them fill in some of the right names in the right places—certain hints, key avenues to pursue. She would answer questions only in the most general way, if at all. Much of what she called her “message” might seem vague, partly because even she didn’t understand things completely, and because the information would be difficult to sort out.
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