All the President's Men

by Woodward, Bob

Woodward hoped to do better with Senator Ervin, but the Senator was more interested in finding out what Woodward and Bernstein knew.

  On the way into Ervin’s inner office, Woodward noticed on a secretary’s desk a typed sheet of paper listing the Senator’s appointments for the day. Sy Hersh of the New York Times had been there several hours earlier. Woodward wondered how Hersh had handled the situation. When was a reporter justified in turning over information to an investigating committee? Or giving advice to a Senator? If the reporter was convinced that he could not make use of a valuable piece of information, was it all right to make a trade?

  Bernstein and he seemed to be running out of steam. Could their information help others in the search?

  Senator Ervin was sitting behind a heavy wooden desk in the center of his office, a rumpled, hulking figure with a huge ham of a face. He looked as if he would be more comfortable in a front-porch rocker than in the standard-issue beige swivel chair he overfilled. Great heaps of paper were strewn chaotically across the desk. He leaned back and began speaking, head jerking, jowls jiggling, bushy eyebrows twittering—like some great bird of prey trying to lift off without losing his kill.

  The moment of truth arrived after a few minutes of gracious comments. “Any leads or sources of information you might be willing to share with us, it certainly would be appreciated and held in the strictest of confidence. I give you my word on that. We’d be mighty grateful for your help,” Ervin said.

  Information from Deep Throat and Z and some other bits and pieces might help the investigation, conceivably could even send it on its way, Woodward thought. But he couldn’t give it. The best he could do would be to suggest possible lines of inquiry.

  Identifying sources, he told the Senator, was out of the question. There was one person—not necessarily a source—who had told them he would cooperate with any legitimate investigation: Hugh Sloan. A staff member wrote it down. The reporters stories, Woodward continued, contained many names and incidents that needed more checking. The key was the secret campaign cash, and it should all be traced; every indication pointed toward a massive Haldeman undercover operation, of which the Watergate break-in and the dirty tricks of the ‘72 primaries were only parts; unless one of the seven convicted conspirators decided to cooperate, nothing resembling the whole story would come out; the reporters’ own stories had only scratched the surface; they did not completely comprehend what had happened, and was still happening, but the enormity of what the President’s men had done seemed staggering.

  “I’ll be content if we discover Mr. Magruder’s role,” Ervin said wearily. The Senator is an expert on the government’s vandalism of people’s rights, especially the right of privacy.

  Ervin began talking about the separation of powers, his belief that a certain article and certain section of the Constitution meant exactly what it said about the power of Congress. That, he said, was how he intended to investigate Watergate—by getting a resolution passed that would grant a special select committee the broadest possible subpoena power. Then the committee would subpoena whatever documents and people were necessary—in the Executive Branch and elsewhere.

  Like whom? Woodward asked.

  “Now, I believe that everyone who has been mentioned in your and Mr. Bernstein’s accounts should be given an opportunity to come down and exonerate himself,” Ervin said. “And if they decline, we’ll subpoena them to ensure they have a chance to clear their names.” He smiled, barely able to contain himself as his eyebrows danced.

  Even the CIA?

  Elbows resting on the arms of his chair, Ervin gave a big, affirmative nod.

  And the White House? Haldeman? That would be one for the books, the White House chief of staff hauled before the Congress he so despised.

  “Mr. Haldeman or Mr. Whomever.” Ervin said. “Anybody but the President.”

  He was serious. Woodward was sure the White House would be equally serious. The first question was whether a resolution granting such power could be passed. Ervin thought it could. Woodward asked if he could write that the Senator planned to subpoena some of the President’s top aides.

  “If you don’t mention names and only say you know my thinking, I don’t have any objection,” Ervin said. “Just don’t quote me directly.”*

  Woodward wrote a story outlining Ervin’s intention to summon the President’s aides and to challenge the claim of executive privilege. The battle lines were being drawn.

  • • •

  On February 5, Senator Ervin introduced a resolution to allocate $500,000 for a Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to investigate the Watergate break-in and related allegations. The powerful Senate Democratic Policy Committee had given the resolution its unqualified support, and the only impediment now would be a last-minute White House-Republican maneuver. The day of the vote, February 7, Woodward arrived on the Hill about 8:30 A.M. to see if one was developing. In the Senate cafeteria, he was chatting with the administrative assistant to a Republican Senator.

  What’s the White House strategy? Woodward asked.

  “What makes you think there is one?” the aide asked. “Don’t know who thought up the idea,” he added, “but there will be an amendment to broaden the investigation so that it covers the ‘64 and ‘68 campaigns.”

  That figured. “Politics as usual,” not for the first time, would be the White House’s response.

  “They’re trying awfully hard,” said another Republican aide. “Word came down to make a big push.”

  Woodward called the White House from a phone booth in the press gallery. “Of course we’re doing it,” a source there told him. “You’d think those dolts on the Hill would have the sense to do it themselves, but they can’t find their way to the john without help. Haldeman’s got half the staff here revved up on it. It’s the order of the day. We’re all supposed to make calls to people we know in the Senate.”

  Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, the minority leader, rose to declare that Ervin had introduced the “broadest resolution I’ve ever seen.” He called its charter of authority “wild, unbelievable,” and said the resolution could lead to “blackmail” by members of the Senate Watergate committee staff. “There was wholesale evidence of wiretapping against the Republicans” in the 1968 campaign, Scott charged, without citing it. John Tower of Texas and Barry Goldwater of Arizona joined in, but no one offered a concrete example or made a specific charge.

  The Democrats voted down every amendment to Ervin’s resolution proposed by the minority. When the final vote was called, the Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues and the resolution passed unanimously, 77-0. Veteran Senate reporters told Woodward that the unanimity was merely a Republican recognition of the power of the Democratic majority. Woodward was not so sure. The men on the floor were sharp interpreters of the political winds.

  Woodward was exhilarated. The system was showing signs of working. As he left the Capitol, he asked a Republican Senator about a man he had noticed near the floor throughout the crucial tests on the amendments. Oh, the Senator said, that was the Justice Department lawyer the White House sent over to draft the amendments.

  • • •

  The trial, Z’s statements and the last meeting with Deep Throat had sent Woodward and Bernstein back to square one—Liddy and Hunt. If they could find out what Hunt and Liddy had done at the White House and exactly what the Plumbers’ mission entailed, perhaps they could understand why Hunt and Liddy were willing to go to jail.

  Several days after the Senate vote, Woodward headed for a luncheon appointment with a friend of Howard Hunt’s at the Hay-Adams Hotel. They met in the lobby and went into the main dining room. Woodward had been trying for months to get this man out to lunch. Now that he had finally succeeded, it would not pay to push him too hard. His value as a source was incalculable now.

  Woodward ordered a beer and a hamburger.

  The characters in Hunt’s novels were always ordering dishes Woodward had never heard of and t
elling the chef how to prepare them. Hunt’s friend, who seemed to share these gourmet tastes, asked the waiter how omelettes were made at the Hay-Adams. Woodward resisted saying, “With eggs.” The waiter checked with the kitchen and reported back. The answer was unsatisfactory. The man ordered braised lamb, and broccoli with Hollandaise—providing both were fresh.

  He then proceeded to make it clear that he thought Howard Hunt ridiculous. “Once, during the Florida primary, Howard had some fliers printed saying that Mayor [John V.] Lindsay, of New York, was having a meeting and there would be free beer. Howard handed these fliers out in the black areas, and of course there was no meeting or beer, so the blacks would come for their beer and leave hating Lindsay. Howard thought this was the greatest thing since Chinese checkers.”

  The lamb arrived and was pronounced adequate. “Now we know what Howard’s wiretapping squad was really like. Just rank amateur. Well, he told me that he had developed a team of some really heavy people who could conduct electronic eavesdropping—said they could install a sweep-proof bug that was voice-activated and could be picked up a hundred yards away. You know, the Watergate bug was like a crystal set, powered with flashlight batteries—heavy team, my ass. This Hollandaise isn’t fresh.” He cast his fork angrily on the table and signaled the waiter. “Since June 17, Howard always refers to ‘they’ when he talks about the White House and Watergate. ‘They ordered me to leave town,’ ‘They wanted this project,’ ‘They ordered me to come back,’ etc. Howard accepted it. But Dorothy [Hunt’s late wife] was furious and kept saying, ‘They ordered him to do this and it is wrong for them to prosecute him.’ ”

  What projects had Hunt worked on for the White House? Woodward asked.

  “Aside from Watergate? Well, Howard once made some vague reference about going to—where was it, where was that woman in the ITT affair? Dita Beard, where did she go?”

  Denver, said Woodward.

  “Yeah, Denver. Howard went to Denver. It was part of a White House project to show that the ITT memo was a forgery. Dita Beard was in the hospital there in Denver, and Howard went out to talk to her.”

  What other projects?

  “Not too long after he had gone to work at the White House, Howard said that Colson and others had big plans to knock Ed Muskie out of the race and he would be working on that, too.”

  Hunt’s friend was getting a little nervous. He suggested that they get to know each other better before any more information was passed on.

  What about research on Teddy Kennedy? Woodward asked. The reporters had already written about that last July.

  “Right. Howard said that just after he went to work at the White House he went to Massachusetts—the Boston area, I think—and saw a man who supposedly knew about Kennedy. I just can’t remember the fellow’s name. Howard went up there and this guy supposedly knew about some of Kennedy’s sexual escapades. Howard used his alias, Ed Warren, I remember that, and tape-recorded the interview with this guy.”

  The man ordered a custard, and as he handed the menu to the waiter, he spilled his glass of water. He glared at the waiter as if it were his fault and told him what the Hay-Adams could do with its Hollandaise.

  As they sipped coffee, he snapped his fingers, “Cliff DeMotte,” he said. “That was the guy in Boston that Howard saw. He works for the federal government there, some agency. D-E-M-O-T-T-E.”

  Woodward spent the next two hours on the phone at the office trying to locate Cliff DeMotte. He had the Boston operators check their directories twice, then began calling personnel locators at federal agencies. A woman in the GSA personnel office found it: Clifton DeMotte, GS-12,* assigned to the Navy construction battalion center in Davisville, Rhode Island. Woodward reached DeMotte early the next morning at work and guessed right: the FBI had interviewed DeMotte after finding his number in Hunt’s toll-call records.

  “That’s a confidential interview,” DeMotte said, sounding a little shaken. “I’m not supposed to talk about it with the press.”

  Woodward said he already had most of the information and wanted to review it because the FBI got things screwed up so often.

  “I didn’t know it was Hunt at the time,” DeMotte said. “He used the name Ed Warren. I didn’t know it was Hunt until the FBI came and showed me pictures and it sure was Ed Warren, but they said it was Hunt.” DeMotte, 41, had been public-relations director for the Yachtsman Motor Inn in Hyannis Port in 1960 when candidate John Kennedy had used the hotel as a press and staff headquarters for his presidential campaign. “Hunt wanted to know if I’d heard of any women-chasing by the Kennedy boys . . . if I’d heard of any scandal-type material. He wanted me to do work on Chappaquiddick. He gave me a book to read to see if it stirred my memory. It didn’t.” The book was Jack Olsen’s The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, the same one Hunt had checked out of the White House library. He had visited DeMotte in July of ‘71, within a week or two of being hired at the White House.

  DeMotte had provided Hunt with some “strictly hearsay” information about hell-raising by Kennedy staff members. “It was old, from way back in 1956,” DeMotte said. “[John] Kennedy had some real swinging parties and used state-police cars to transport these people. Once they sent a police car to get a restock of booze.

  “I tried to persuade Hunt that it was a waste of his time. . . . But he said he represented some group that he couldn’t tell me about. He said he was a writer. I thought he was a hell of a James Bond operator. . . . We had supper and a drink in the motel. He seemed dedicated to something, either the country, the group or himself. . . . I spent a restless night and tried to find him in the morning for a cup of coffee, but he was gone.”

  The Post’s editions for February 10 carried a story saying that Howard Hunt had investigated Edward Kennedy’s personal life during a period when the White House most feared a Kennedy candidacy. This time, Bradlee did not hesitate to put the story on page one.*

  • • •

  The DeMotte story was only a small step in establishing what Hunt and Liddy had done at the White House. The reporters were more interested in Hunt’s trip to see Dita Beard in Denver. She was the author of the famous memo which showed that there was a connection between ITT’s promise of several hundred thousand dollars to help the Republican convention and a favorable anti-trust settlement.

  Several days after his lunch with Hunt’s friend, Woodward went to the Justice Department for a cup of coffee and some Watergate conversation. After an hour, Woodward asked about Hunt’s Denver trip. Some ground had already been cleared. The Long Island paper News-day had just reported that Chuck Colson had sent Hunt to visit Mrs. Beard at a hospital in Denver at the height of the ITT scandal in 1972. Newsday had no explanation for the trip.

  The Justice Department official walked across the room to a file cabinet and took out a manila folder. He opened it and began reading. Under oath, Colson had acknowledged to Watergate prosecutors that he had sent Hunt to Denver, just before March 17, 1972, to visit Dita Beard. The official was reading from a deposition the prosecutors had taken from Colson in private—to spare the President’s special counsel the embarrassment of appearing before the grand jury, he said.

  Woodward tried to disguise his surprise. Fortunately, the man was studying another section of the deposition. He looked up at Woodward meekly. “Colson was never asked the reason he sent Hunt to see her. He said it had nothing to do with Watergate, so the matter was dropped. But Hunt used the same alias he used in Watergate—Edward Hamilton—when he saw her in the hospital. And he wore—you’re not going to believe this . . .” The official gave a little laugh—“He wore a cheap, dime-store, reddish-colored wig. Apparently, it was the same wig found in the Watergate Hotel the day after the arrests.”

  At the office that evening, Woodward read the clips on the ITT affair. On February 29, 1972, columnist Jack Anderson had published the Dita Beard memo, sending political shock waves through the White House during President Nixon’s visit to China. On March 17, just after Colson ha
d dispatched Hunt to Denver, Mrs. Beard issued a statement from her bed at the Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital in Denver, disowning the memo as a “forgery” and “a hoax.” Her statement that evening was the first suggestion that the memo was not genuine, but there was no explanation of why she had waited almost three weeks to disavow it—during which time Richard Kleindienst’s nomination as Attorney General was thrown into doubt. Mrs. Beard had previously confirmed the memo’s authenticity, line by line, to Anderson’s assistant Brit Hume.

  Woodward found three persons who put her denial into a new context—a White House official, a Republican politician with close ties to the White House, and an executive of the private investigative agency Intertel. All told essentially the same story:

  Colson had coordinated the united White House-ITT strategy. Initially, both the administration and the corporation had tried to picture Dita Beard as a drunken crackpot and sought to discredit Jack Anderson. The effort had failed. ITT had hired Intertel, which also did work for the Howard Hughes organization, to make a technical inspection of the memo. Intertel established that the memo was probably written on a typewriter in Mrs. Beard’s downtown Washington office, but that it would be almost impossible to prove. Robert Bennett, who represented Howard Hughes’ interests in Washington, passed this information on to Howard Hunt, his employee, for transmission to Colson.

  It was the old “insulation” story. Intertel’s findings had cleared the way for the memo to be labeled a forgery. Colson, Hunt’s other employer, dispatched Hunt to Denver. Mrs. Beard then issued a statement denying she had written the memo. (“I—and in a greater sense the whole American government—are the victims of a cruel fraud. . . .”) Her words got back to the White House, from Hunt to Bennett to Colson. It was like Tinker to Evers to Chance. Colson-Chance then flipped the good news to Hugh Scott, who read Mrs. Beard’s denial on the Senate floor that same day.

  There was one other person who could tell Woodward more about what had gone on. But Dita Beard was nowhere to be found. Woodward reached her attorney, who said he would pass questions on to Mrs. Beard. A few hours later, the attorney called back to say that Mrs. Beard had recently suffered “a relapse” of the heart ailment that had sent her to the hospital in the midst of the ITT affair. Woodward recalled that she had also suffered a relapse in the midst of her bedside questioning by Senators from the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1972.