About four that afternoon, June 19, 1973, Woodward went to Colson’s law office to see David Shapiro, Colson’s law partner and his chief legal adviser for Watergate matters. The new law firm of Colson & Shapiro had offices in a modern building a few blocks from the White House. Shapiro greeted Woodward heartily, offering him a thick, chubby hand and an overstuffed, light brown leather chair. It was ridiculous, Shapiro said, even to think that Colson would do such a crazy thing. A bespectacled young attorney in the firm named Judah Best* was brought in by Shapiro to meet Woodward. He told him it would be unfair to write a story even mentioning such a flimsy allegation. Working his hands heavily, Best frowned and grimaced as he maintained that Howard Hunt was under pressure and clearly unstable. Shapiro and Best worked on Woodward for about 45 minutes, trying to plant the seeds of doubt. Shapiro then went to his desk, called his secretary and instructed her to tell “him” to come in. Moments later, the door opened and in came Colson, wearing blue pin-striped pants, dark blue shirt and blue polka-dot tie. He had a gigantic pot belly. He looked wounded and tired as he shook hands with Woodward. He didn’t say much, but just stared at Woodward.
“You can’t do this to this man,” Shapiro said, standing behind his desk. Colson said nothing. He looked like he was about to weep. There was none of his usual overbearing manner. “You’re out to destroy him,” Shapiro said.
Woodward said he was not out to destroy anyone.
“Come on, you can admit it,” Shapiro said.
The lawyers argued that it would have been illogical for Colson to order Hunt to burglarize Bremer’s apartment because Colson was in close contact with the FBI that night. They said Colson had urged the Bureau to make a speedy, thorough investigation.
“Would it have been logical for me to push in the FBI and simultaneously order Hunt to Milwaukee?” Colson asked.
Woodward figured the tape recorder was going and he chose every word. He remarked that the Watergate case was already crowded with illogic.
“The charge is absolutely untrue and I’ll swear it is untrue under oath,” Colson said.
Colson seemed hurt by Woodward’s unwillingness to accept his statement as definitive proof.
Woodward recorded Colson’s denial in his notebook.
Shapiro then produced copies of a report about a lie-detector test Colson had voluntarily taken that vindicated him of complicity in the Watergate bugging. Woodward was also handed a “Memorandum for the File,” dated June 20, 1972, the day the Post had first identified Howard Hunt as a suspect. Memoranda for the file are often called “cover-your-ass memos.” The one handed to Woodward, with the subject heading “Howard Hunt,” said in part: “I talked to him [Hunt] on the telephone the night Governor Wallace was shot simply to ask him for his reactions on what he thought might have been the cause of the attempted assassination. Hunt was known as something of an expert on psychological warfare and motivations when in the CIA.” In a covering memo, Colson had noted, however, “I cannot be sure that my memory is all that precise.”
Shapiro gave Woodward two more memos unrelated to the Colson-Hunt-Bremer story. One was dated October 11, 1972, the day after Bernstein’s and Woodward’s major espionage-sabotage story. The memo was written by Ken Clawson and addressed to Colson. Referring to the mention of his name in connection with the Muskie Canuck Letter, Clawson had written that he would spend the second Nixon administration “paying back the Washington Post.” The other memo indicated that Haldeman had tried to blame Colson, not Clawson, for authorship of the letter.
Woodward asked for copies of the two memos on the Canuck Letter.
There was a long silence.
Woodward repeated his request.
Another silence. Then one of the lawyers said something about being able to work out something and Woodward would be able to get copies in the near future.
Were they offering a deal? It was not explicitly stated, but the suggestion of a trade was in the air. What would happen if Woodward said there would be no story on the Bremer allegation? Would one of the attorneys say it would then be possible to let him have copies of the memos? Maybe Woodward was listening for it because he was pretty certain that this was the way Colson did business. Woodward wanted to turn off any such suggestion. He said it sounded like something was being offered, but that he knew it wasn’t.
All three spoke at once. Of course, they wouldn’t think of that. They would never do that, it would be an insult to think so or imagine so.
Woodward saw how they operated. If he hadn’t been listening for it, he wouldn’t have realized that a trade had been offered. That is the way bribes must work, Woodward thought, so that only someone listening for it would hear it. He couldn’t test the situation. If he were to step close to a deal, they could destroy him.
Shapiro and Colson started grinding on Woodward again. That was the price he had to pay, Woodward guessed. He had to listen; maybe there was a reason, maybe he would be convinced. He got in a question occasionally. Why were you in touch with the FBI so much? he asked Colson.
“The President was agitated and wanted the political background on Bremer,” Colson said. Informed of the shooting, the President became deeply upset and voiced immediate concern that the assassin might have ties to the Republican Party or, even worse, the President’s re-election committee. If that were the case, Colson noted, it could have cost the President the election.
The meeting with Shapiro and Colson had taken almost two hours, and there wasn’t time to get the story into the paper that day. Just before deadline the following evening, Woodward called Shapiro and told him that the story was going. Woodward had promised to let him know.
Later that night, Colson called Bernstein to protest. The allegation was “an utterly preposterous one,” he insisted, and added that he did “not believe that it could be an accurate report of any testimony that the Senate committee has received.”
Bernstein told him it was accurate.
Even if it accurately reflected Hunt’s testimony, Colson said, it would be irresponsible to print it because Hunt had been under “great duress” when he met with the Senate committee.
Bernstein said he would include Colson’s observations in the story.
Colson played heavily on what he described as Bernstein’s civil-libertarian instincts, pleading with him to keep the story out of the paper. When Bernstein said no, Colson called him a “vicious hypocrite.”
• • •
Since June 17, 1972, the reporters had saved their notes and memos, reviewing them periodically to make lists of unexplored leads. Many items on the lists were the names of CRP and White House people who the reporters thought might have useful information. By May 17, 1973, when the Senate hearings opened, Bernstein and Woodward had gotten lazy. Their nighttime visits were scarcer, and, increasingly, they had begun to rely on a relatively easy access to the Senate committee’s staff investigators and attorneys. There was, however, one unchecked entry on both lists—presidential aide Alexander P. Butterfield. Both Deep Throat and Hugh Sloan had mentioned him, and Sloan had said, almost in passing, that he was in charge of “internal security.” In January, Woodward had gone by Butterfield’s house in a Virginia suburb. No one had come to the door.
In May, Woodward asked a committee staff member if Butterfield had been interviewed.
“No, we’re too busy.”
Some weeks later, he had asked another staffer if the committee knew why Butterfield’s duties in Haldeman’s office were defined as “internal security.”
The staff member said the committee didn’t know, and maybe it would be a good idea to interview Butterfield. He would ask Sam Dash, the committee’s chief counsel. Dash put the matter off. The staff member told Woodward he would push Dash again. Dash finally okayed an interview with Butterfield for Friday, July 13, 1973.
On Saturday the 14th, Woodward received a phone call at home from a senior member of the committee’s investigative staff. “Congratulations,” he said. “We
interviewed Butterfield. He told the whole story.”
What whole story?
“Nixon bugged himself.”
He told Woodward that only junior staff members had been present at the interview, and that someone had read an excerpt from John Dean’s testimony about his April 15 meeting with the President.
“The most interesting thing that happened during the conversation was very near the end,” Dean had said. “He [Nixon] got up out of his chair, went behind his chair to the corner of the Executive Office Building office and in a barely audible tone said to me he was probably foolish to have discussed Hunt’s clemency with Colson.” Dean had thought to himself that the room might be bugged.
Butterfield was a reluctant witness. He said that he knew it was probably the one thing that the President would not want revealed. The interrogators pressed—and out floated a story which would disturb the presidential universe as none other would.
The existence of a tape system which monitored the President’s conversations had been known only to the President himself, Haldeman, Larry Higby, Alexander Haig, Butterfield and the several Secret Service agents who maintained it. For the moment, the information was strictly off the record.
The reporters were again concerned about a White House set-up. A taping system could be disclosed, they reasoned, and then the President could serve up doctored or manufactured tapes to exculpate himself and his men. Or, having known the tapes were rolling, the President might have induced Dean—or anyone else—to say incriminating things and then feign ignorance himself. They decided not to pursue the story for the moment.
All Saturday night, the subject gnawed at Woodward. Butterfield had said that even Kissinger and Ehrlichman were unaware of the taping system. The Senate committee and the special prosecutor would certainly try to obtain the tapes, maybe even subpoena them.
Kissinger doesn’t know, Woodward reflected. And he thought, Kissinger probably knows almost everything, and he wouldn’t like the idea of secret taping systems plucking his sober words and advice out of the air—whether for posterity or some grand jury. How will foreign leaders feel when they learn of hidden microphones? Woodward thought about knowing something that Kissinger didn’t know. Ziegler was also in the dark, apparently.
Woodward called Bradlee. It was about 9:30 P.M. and Bradlee sounded as if he might have been sleeping. Woodward outlined Butterfield’s disclosures. As he read, his voice tripped several times. Maybe he was overreacting. Bradlee was silent.
“I just wanted you to know,” Woodward said, “because it seems important. We’ll go to work on it if you want.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Bradlee said with slight irritation.
“How would you rate the story?” Woodward asked.
“B-plus,” Bradlee said quickly.
B-plus, Woodward thought. Well, that isn’t much.
“See what more you can find out, but I wouldn’t bust one on it,” Bradlee said.
Woodward apologized for calling on a Saturday night.
“No problem,” Bradlee said cheerfully. “Always glad to hear what’s up.”
They hung up. Woodward concluded that he’d been too anxious.
• • •
The Senate committee moved quickly. On Monday, on national television, Butterfield reluctantly laid out the whole story of the tapes before the Senate committee, and the country.
• • •
“Okay,” Bradlee said the next morning. “It’s more than a B-plus.”
17
IN THE FIRST WEEK of November, Woodward moved the flower pot and traveled to the underground garage. Two weeks earlier, the President had fired special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had subpoenaed nine presidential tape recordings. Attorney General Eliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, his deputy, had resigned. In the shattered inner circle of the White House, the President’s aides were saying that the special prosecutor had been fired because the President feared that Cox was going to prosecute him. Then, with Cox gone, the President bowed to public opinion and a court order and surrendered seven of the tapes. Two had never existed, his lawyers said.
Deep Throat’s message was short and simple: one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures.
Bernstein began calling sources at the White House. Four of them said they had learned that the tapes were of poor quality, that there were “gaps” in some conversations. But they did not know whether these had been caused by erasures. Ron Ziegler told Bernstein there were no gaps or erasures in the tapes. A story that asserted the opposite would be “inaccurate.” Bernstein proposed that the story could be held if Ziegler would pledge, on his honor, that he was absolutely sure. “We deal in facts, not honor,” Ziegler replied.
The story quoted anonymously Deep Throat’s remark that there were gaps of “a suspicious nature” which “could lead someone to conclude that the tapes have been tampered with.”
On the afternoon of November 21, Ziegler phoned Bernstein back. The President’s lawyers had announced in Judge Sirica’s courtroom that one of the tapes contained an 18½-minute gap. “I’m giving you my word that I didn’t know about this when we had our other conversation.”
Bernstein and Woodward did not disbelieve him. They knew from a number of sources that the President had refused for months to let any of his White House aides listen to all the tapes—even while he was claiming that their full disclosure would vindicate him.
Richard Nixon, his subordinates were saying, had become a prisoner in his own house—secretive, distrustful even of those who were attempting to plead his cause, combative, sleepless. One of the men who had been closest to him throughout his presidency told Woodward helplessly, “The only people he will talk to candidly about Watergate are Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp”—the millionaire businessmen who were his long-time personal friends.
At Disneyworld in Florida, the President told an audience of editors on national TV, “I am not a crook.”
• • •
On December 28, General Alexander Haig, the White House Chief of Staff, reached Katharine Graham by telephone in a Washington restaurant. He was calling from San Clemente to discuss two of the reporters’ stories on the Post’s, front page that morning. The first said that Operation Candor, the name given the campaign by the President to defend himself, had been shut down, and that two of the President’s most trusted advisers, who had steadfastly maintained his innocence, were no longer convinced of it. The second story said that the President’s lawyers had been supplying attorneys for H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman with copies of documents and other evidence that the White House was submitting to the special prosecutor’s office.
Haig characterized the stories as “scurrilous,” accused the Post of “disservice” to the nation, and appealed to Mrs. Graham to stop publishing such accounts.
Haig himself, the reporters soon learned, had come to doubt the wisdom of the President’s course. For more than six months he and Henry Kissinger had been urging the President to cut his ties with the three former aides who had been the closest to him and were now the primary targets of the special prosecutor’s investigation—Halde-man, Ehrlichman and Colson.
Instead, the President had built his legal defense in concert with the three, and had continued to meet with them and talk with them on the telephone. During the summer of 1973, Kissinger had tried to persuade the President to disavow his former aides publicly and to accept a measure of responsibility for Watergate. The suggestion had been angrily rejected by Ron Ziegler. “Contrition is bullshit,” he had responded to the presidential speechwriter who brought him Kissinger’s recommendation.
By late February 1974, the special Watergate prosecution force had obtained guilty pleas from Jeb Magruder, Bart Porter, Donald Segretti, Herbert Kalmbach, Fred LaRue, Egil Krogh and John Dean. Eight corporations and their officers had pleaded guilty to charges of making illegal contributions to CRP. In Washington, Dwight Chapin was under indictment for perjury. In New Yor
k, John Mitchell and Maurice Stans were on trial, charged with obstruction of justice and perjury.
On March 1, the Washington grand jury that had indicted the original conspirators and burglars of the Democratic National Headquarters in 1972 handed up its major indictments in the Watergate cover-up case. It charged seven of the President’s former White House and campaign aides with conspiracy to obstruct justice: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Mitchell, Strachan, Mardian and lawyer Kenneth Parkinson.
A week later, a second Washington grand jury handed up indictments in the conspiracy to burglarize the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Those charged were Ehrlichman, Colson, Liddy and three Cuban Americans, including Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, who were among the original Watergate break-in defendants.
Acting for the full House, to which the Constitution gives the “sole power to impeach,” the House Judiciary Committee had begun the first investigation in more than one hundred years into such possible action against a President. The chief Watergate grand jury turned over to Judge Sirica, in addition to the seven indictments, a briefcase containing a report and the accompanying evidence of what Deep Throat, and others, assert to be a staggering case against the President. Since the prosecutors had argued strongly that the Constitution precludes the possibility of indicting an incumbent President, the grand jurors recommended that both be turned over to the House committee.
On January 30, the President had delivered his annual State of the Union Message to a joint session of the House and Senate, the justices of the Supreme Court and the members of the Cabinet, as well as to other guests and a national TV audience. “One year of Watergate is enough,” he declared at the conclusion, and he implored the country and the Congress to turn to other, more urgent, matters.
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