All the President's Men

by Woodward, Bob

  Woodward decided that it was time to meet Magruder. He went up and introduced himself. Magruder was friendlier than he had expected. “I only have one objection to what you and that fellow Bernstein did. That is these visits you paid some of my people at night, banging on their doors late and not identifying yourselves.” Woodward said that he and Bernstein had always identified themselves and were always courteous. “Dirty reporting,” Magruder said. “Now, it may not have been you, but Bernstein did. I know.”

  Always the politician, Woodward thought: Magruder was not willing to confront him, but passed it off on Bernstein, who wasn’t there. Woodward said that visiting people after working hours was not dirty at all and was necessitated by the unwillingness of Magruder and dozens of other people to answer questions about Watergate. Magruder turned to walk away and then looked back to Woodward. “It’s none of your business,” he said, summarizing CRP’s point of view.

  Silbert put Magruder through 33 minutes of tame, respectful questioning. Magruder testified that, as John Mitchell’s first assistant, he was so busy supervising 25 campaign division heads and 250 full-time employees and spending between $30 and $35 million that he just couldn’t be overly concerned with Gordon Liddy. Magruder said he didn’t even get along with Liddy. Liddy had a different management style. Magruder said it as if a disagreement over management styles was the most serious thing that could ever come between two people, though Liddy had once threatened to kill him. Liddy sat rocking back and forth in his chair while Magruder spoke.

  Hugh Sloan, former Nixon campaign treasurer, walked nervously into the courtroom and took the stand. He looked even thinner—“He’s down to skin and bones,” his mother told a reporter from the New York Times. Silbert’s perfunctory questioning was cold and distant. Sloan said that he had paid out about $199,000 in cash to Liddy. Silbert did not ask who had ordered Sloan to hand out the money.

  After Silbert finished his interrogation, Sirica sent the jury from the courtroom and asked Sloan 41 questions of his own. To one, Sloan replied that he had been worried about the large disbursements to Liddy. So he had checked with Maurice Stans, who in turn had verified the expenditures with John Mitchell, who in turn had said that Liddy should be given the cash.

  “You verified it with whom?” Sirica asked.

  Sloan repeated his answer.

  Before completing his questioning, Sirica made it clear he didn’t believe Sloan’s testimony that he had given out so much money without asking the purpose of the expenditures. Amazed at Sloan’s apparent naïveté, Sirica asked, “You’re a college graduate, aren’t you?”*

  During Silbert’s closing argument, Liddy sat in his chair rocking slowly, a smile on his face, as the prosecutor pictured him as the “Mr. Big” of Watergate. Liddy—the ex-FBI agent, the former prosecutor who had made a career of cops-and-robbers. This time the cop had turned robber. Silbert paused, obviously pleased with the sound of his words. Liddy gave a quick, animated wave to the jury, exactly like the one he had given the first day of the trial.

  It took the jury less than 90 minutes to find Liddy and McCord guilty of all counts against them. Liddy stood impassive with his arms folded defiantly as the court clerk read the jury’s verdict, repeating the “guilty” six times. McCord stood stoically as the word was pronounced eight times, once for each count. Sirica ordered both jailed without bond. Before he was escorted out of the courtroom, Liddy embraced his attorney Peter Maroulis, patted him on the back affectionately, and gave one last wave to the spectators and the press before he was taken away.

  Bernstein and Woodward wrote a lengthy news analysis summarizing the trial. Under the headline “Still Secret: Who Hired Spies and Why,” they noted that the 16-day trial was marked by questions that were not asked, answers that were not given, witnesses who were not called to testify, and some lapses of memory by those who were.

  The reporters were convinced that the prosecutors had not thrown the case. More likely, they had been lied to, they had fallen victim to the subtle pressures exerted through the White House and Justice Department. Most of all, they had failed to understand the workings of CRP and the White House and the style of the President’s men.

  Three days after the verdict, Judge Sirica held a hearing in his courtroom and set bond for Liddy and McCord at $100,000 each. He sternly criticized Silbert. “I have not been satisfied, and I am still not satisfied that all the pertinent facts that might be available—I say might be available—have been produced before an American jury.”

  Defending his own conduct, he said: “I don’t think we should sit up here like nincompoops. I’ll put it this way—I have great doubts that Mr. Sloan has told us the entire truth in this case. I will say it now and I indicated that during the trial.

  “I felt that neither of you—government or defense—asked Mr. Sloan any questions. I had a right to question him to see that all the facts were brought out.

  “Everyone knows that there’s going to be a congressional investigation in this case. I would frankly hope, not only as a judge but as a citizen of a great country and one of millions of Americans who are looking for certain answers, I would hope that the Senate committee is granted the power by Congress by a broad enough resolution to try to get to the bottom of what happened in this case. I hope so. That is all I have to say.”

  12

  Now, WOODWARD NEEDED to signal Deep Throat for a meeting. Shortly after the election, he had moved from his cramped efficiency apartment to a two-bedroom flat in a restored building two blocks from the Post. He had told Deep Throat at their last meeting that the new apartment had no balcony for the flower pot and flag. Worse, the neighbors said that people were forever having their newspapers taken from in front of their doors. Woodward had taken the apartment only after he had thoroughly inspected the building’s less obvious assets: back stairways, fire exits and window sills. A new signal system was adopted at the end of the unhappy meeting on Haldeman. It would be a one-way communication, initiated by Woodward, who would place his yellow kitchen wastepaper basket upside down on the fire escape.

  But the system hadn’t even been tested before serious problems developed. Woodward’s upstairs neighbors liked to dance—often between one and four A.M. He banged on the thin ceiling with a broom handle and begged his new neighbors to consider at least a sock hop, but that only rallied the nocturnal dancers. He was not superstitious, but he did believe that in a person’s life there were bad cycles which had to be forcefully arrested. His tailspin had begun with the Haldeman story; the frustrations had built during November and December. Better to move than tempt fate further. So, the only time he had turned the trashbasket upside down was in late December and only to tell Deep Throat that he was moving again. Deep Throat was uncommunicative at their brief meeting, advising him to sit tight and see how the Watergate trial developed.

  Woodward found a new apartment on the top floor of a high-rise temple of formica-and-parquet luxury in Southwest Washington, near the Potomac; he got himself a new flower pot and was back in business.

  Service was inaugurated on January 24, after Woodward had spent several delicious nights reveling in the silence of his new quarters. He went through a basement exit into a rear courtyard and over a wall onto a side street—mindful of Mrs. Graham’s warning about surveillance and Deep Throat’s increasing apprehension. It took him a half-hour to find a cab, and when he got out about half a mile from the garage, the driver didn’t have change for a $10 bill. Angrily, he told the hack to keep the $10.

  Deep Throat was waiting. He looked worn, but was smiling. “What’s up?” he asked mock-offhandedly, and took a deep drag on his cigarette. Just once, Woodward wished, Deep Throat would really tell him what was up—everything, no questions asked, no tug of wills, a full status report. The reporters had speculated on the reason for Deep Throat’s piecemeal approach; they had several theories. If he told everything he knew all at once, a good Plumber might be able to find the leak. By making the reporters go else
where to fill out his information, he minimized his risk. Perhaps. But it was equally possible that he felt that the effect of one or two big stories, no matter how devastating, could be blunted by the White House. Or, by raising the stakes gradually, was he simply making the game more interesting for himself? The reporters tended to doubt that someone in his position would be so cavalier toward matters affecting Richard Nixon or the Presidency itself. More likely, they thought, Deep Throat was trying to protect the office, to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost. Each time Woodward had raised the question, Deep Throat had gravely insisted, “I have to do this my way.”

  That night, it was the familiar pattern. He would respond only to new information; he would not be towed on a fishing expedition about the Plumbers, the guilty pleas in the trial or the riddles of Z.

  Afraid he would leave the garage empty-handed, Woodward turned to a subject he and Bernstein were about to write on—Mitchell and Colson. He quickly reviewed the strains of circumstantial detail that seemed to bring the two men close to the conspiracy.

  Deep Throat seemed impressed by the groundwork they had done. Suddenly he walked to the front of one of the cars in the garage and, standing erect, placed his gloved hands authoritatively on the hood as if it were a rostrum. “From this podium, I’m prepared to denounce such questions about gentle Colson and noble Mitchell as innuendo, character assassination, hearsay and shoddy journalism. The questions themselves are fabrication and fiction and a pack of absurdities and cometh from the fountain of misinformation.”

  Woodward, who was very tired, started laughing and couldn’t stop. Deep Throat “Ziegler” continued the denunciation: “ . . . that small Georgetown coterie of self-appointed guardians of public mistrust who seek the destruction of the people’s will—”

  The levity was interrupted by a noise. Deep Throat ducked behind a car. Woodward walked up the ramp guardedly. A very convincing old drunk was leaning against the wall, shivering. Woodward made sure he was real, then gave him a $10 bill and told him to find a hotel room. It was brutally cold. Woodward returned to the lower level.

  The interruption had unnerved Deep Throat. “Colson and Mitchell were behind the Watergate operation,” he said quickly. “Everyone in the FBI is convinced, including Gray [L. Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI]. Colson’s role was active. Mitchell’s position was more ‘amoral’ and less active—giving the nod but not conceiving the scheme.

  “There isn’t anything that would be considered as more than the weakest circumstantial evidence. But there’s no doubt either. ‘Insulation’ is the key word to understand why the evidence can’t be developed.”

  He outlined four factors that might lead to the “inescapable conclusion” that Mitchell and Colson were conspirators: “One, the personalities and past performance of both. This way of life wasn’t new to them. Two, there are meetings and phone calls at crucial times—all of which Colson and Mitchell claim involved other matters. Three, there’s the tight control of the money, especially by Mitchell, who was getting details almost to the point of how much was spent on pencils and erasers. Four, there is the indisputable fact that the seven defendants believe they are going to be taken care of. That could only be done convincingly by someone high up, and somehow it has been done convincingly.”

  How sweeping was the belief that Colson and Mitchell were involved?

  “No disagreement anywhere,” Deep Throat said. “The White House knows it, the FBI brass knows it.” He rubbed his neck and moved the palm of his hand upward across the stiff bristle on his chin. “Involved up to here.” The hand went up higher. “But it’s still un-proven. If the FBI couldn’t prove it, I don’t think the Washington Post can.

  “What obviously makes this a Mitchell-Colson operation is the hiring of Liddy and Hunt. That’s the key. Mitchell and Colson were their sponsors. And if you check you’ll find that Liddy and Hunt had reputations that are the lowest. The absolute lowest. Hiring these two was immoral. They got exactly what they wanted. Liddy wanted to tap the New York Times and everybody knew it.* And not everybody was laughing about it. Mitchell, among others, liked the idea.”

  Deep Throat became contemplative. “Liddy and McCord should realize that no one can help them because it will be too obvious. Any congressional investigation is going to have a big problem unless they get someone from the inside to crack. Without that, you come up with lots of money and plans for dirty tricks but no firsthand account or detailing of what happened at the top.” The White House, he said, was developing plans to make sure no congressional investigation could succeed. Part of the strategy would involve a broad claim of executive privilege to prevent investigators from subpoenaing White House and Justice Department records.

  What about manipulation of the original Watergate investigation?

  “The attempts to separate the Watergate and the espionage-sabotage operation are a lot of bullshit,” Deep Throat said. “They amount to the same thing. If the other stuff like [Segretti] had been pursued, they would have found plenty that was illegal.”

  Woodward asked if Deep Throat thought the reporters had enough for a story on Mitchell and Colson.

  “That’s for the paper to decide, not me,” he said. “But if you do it, it should be done quickly. The longer you wait, the more confident they get that they can attack safely.”

  This meeting with Deep Throat produced the most serious disagreement between Bernstein and Woodward since they had begun working together seven months earlier. The question was whether a convincing and well-documented account of Mitchell’s and Colson’s roles could be written. Woodward drafted a story based on the following lead:

  Federal investigators concluded that former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and Charles W. Colson, special counsel to the President, both had direct knowledge of the overall political espionage operation conducted by the men indicted in the Watergate case, according to reliable sources.

  Bernstein reworked the story three times, detailing virtually everything they had learned in seven months about Mitchell, Colson and the nature of the federal investigation. Its thrust was that a former Attorney General and a special counsel to the President had escaped prosecution as conspirators because they had insulated themselves well and because the investigation had been tailored to define the conspiracy in the narrowest terms.

  Each time Bernstein completed a version, Woodward said he didn’t think it should run until they had better proof. Bernstein argued that the story was legitimate, that the newspaper didn’t have to offer definitive evidence but, in this instance, could report the conclusions of investigators who reached as high as L. Patrick Gray.

  The argument became so heated that they would occasionally retreat to the vending-machine room off the newsroom floor and shout at each other. Bernstein accused Woodward of playing into the hands of the White House by holding back on the story. Woodward accused Bernstein of the same by trying to push a story into the paper that could lead to a damaging attack by the White House. But the old rule applied: If either objected to a story, it did not go into the paper.

  • • •

  Shortly after his meeting with Deep Throat, Woodward got a call from the office of Senator Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina, a 76-year old constitutional scholar and a formidable power on Capitol Hill. Ervin wanted to talk about Watergate, an aide said.

  On January 11, Ervin had acceded to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield’s request that he preside over a thorough investigation of Watergate and the 1972 presidential campaign. The agreement seemed to indicate that some investigative machinery would be established on Capitol Hill beyond the preliminary inquiry that Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure had been conducting since October 1972.

  Unless a congressional subcommittee quickly exercised power of subpoena to obtain records and documents in areas that the federal investigators seemed to be ignoring, Kennedy had told Bernstein in an interview just after the Se
gretti stories had appeared, the opportunity for a truly comprehensive investigation would probably go down the chute and into the shredder. Kennedy had decided to undertake an investigation. The Senator had professed to know little, if anything, more than what he had read in the papers. “But I know the people around Nixon,” he said, “and that’s enough. They’re thugs.”

  The White House was circulating the line that Kennedy was out to settle old grudges and launch a 1976 candidacy. Kennedy, face tanned and his hair doing a little back-flip over his collar, tossed it back. His inquiry would be a “holding action.” The preliminary investigation would be conducted by both the majority and the minority staffs behind closed doors. It would avoid any suggestion of a witch hunt or a Kennedy crusade. There was no percentage in it for him, Kennedy maintained; the White House would go with everything it had to smear him. Chappaquiddick would be brought up endlessly. He was sure the President’s men had a ready store of other information on him, “nickel-and-dime stuff,” he said uncomfortably. “They haven’t come up with anything really new.”

  When Kennedy’s subcommittee formally began its investigation, the reporters tried to stay in close touch with the Senators and their staff. But Kennedy’s ship did not leak. They learned nothing.