The place was filled with Hollywood stars and I’m afraid I was a little goggle-eyed by it all. Sinatra is an easy guy to talk with. He’s genuinely interesting, and is interested in people. He was relaxed and very friendly at the hotel bar where people didn’t recognize him and he could be alone with friends. He was on edge at the Candy Store as would-be starlets, etc., came by to glad-hand or smile at him or otherwise annoy him. He’s a guy who obviously enjoys his privacy and his friends.
When we left, he drove his own Chevrolet (FAS-1) home, after telling Pete, “Only six more days until the greatest ever. We’re gonna win, baby, we’re gonna win big, B-I-G.”
Pete, Tom, his girl friend and I went back to Pete’s penthouse suite next to the Vice President’s, had a nightcap amid almost unbelievable opulence, and I went down to my room, to bed. It was 4:00 A.M. What a day! What a night! It was worth a little lost sleep.
CHAPTER XIII
Watergate
In the end, Nixon’s 1972 non-campaign was a triumph of public relations. Agnew was calm and conciliatory. The President was Presidential. Peace was at hand. The press had become too weak, frightened, and demoralized to try to dent the Administration’s handsome veneer. There was only one problem. A small crack in the veneer had appeared in June and was rapidly growing into a fissure. Through this crack one could catch glimpses of the inside of the White House and see how the Administration really worked. The Watergate case brought in a small flock of new reporters, tough investigative types who were not about to be put off by Ronald Ziegler and his wonderful public relations machine. They studied the crack in the veneer like archeologists poring over a hieroglyph, and they slowly began to piece together the real story of the Nixon campaign.
At first, the case made very little sense to anybody in the press. How could you explain the fact that five men in rubber gloves, all of them formerly involved in anti-Castro causes, had broken into the headquarters of the Democratic Party to install bugging devices? Who were they working for? Could it have been the bizarre, “third-rate burglary” the Administration claimed it was, and nothing more?
As late as October 5, Jack Nelson and Ron Ostrow of the Los Angeles Times, two of the best investigative reporters in the business, wrote resignedly that “Justice Department officials involved in the investigation have said that the real motivation for the bizarre incident may never emerge.” Five days later, it did. On October 10, two young Washington Post reporters named Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward revealed that the Watergate break-in “stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s reelection and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.” The campaign, they said, had been going on for many months and was aimed at destroying the candidacies of major Democratic contenders.
Had it not been for the Post’s determination to make sense of the Watergate, the courts and the Senate might not have been moved to explore the ugly ramifications of the break-in. And the Post might not have succeeded in cracking the case if the assignment had not gone to Bernstein and Woodward. They were both highly motivated, and it was said that their motivation sprang from desperation as much as from ambition. In June 1972, neither one of them seemed to be getting very far at the Post. Woodward, twenty-nine, was a handsome, soft-spoken, neatly dressed Midwesterner, a former Young Republican who had gone to Yale and spent five years in the Navy. During his nine months at the Post, he had done minor investigative stories and earned a reputation as a tireless worker, the office grind. But many of his colleagues claimed that he couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag.
Carl Bernstein, twenty-eight, was a native Washingtonian with dark disheveled hair and an agressive, gregarious manner. A former copy boy for the Washington Star, he had dropped out of the University of Maryland at nineteen to become a full-time reporter. He had been on the Post for six years, covering courts, police headquarters, city hall, and doing some investigative stories. His rise on the paper had abruptly slowed down one afternoon when the city editor caught him napping on a couch in the District Building’s pressroom. Now he was the Virginia political correspondent, one of the least exciting positions on the paper. His career, like Woodward’s, needed a boost. But they were both on the metropolitan staff, and most of the best stories—the front-page articles about the government and politics—went to the national staff. Then came Watergate. As a local crime story, it was given to the metro staff. Since Bernstein and Woodward had some experience in investigative reporting, they received the assignment. They jumped on the Watergate story as if it were the last train to salvation.
“You know,” a veteran reporter at the Post said later, “if that story had been given to our national staff, we probably would have lost it. These were two city-side guys with nothing to lose and they just Worked their asses off.”
If they found out more information about the Watergate case than anyone else, it was because they worked harder. Woodward had recently been divorced and Bernstein was separated from his wife, waiting for a divorce to come through. So, unlike many reporters, they were not settled into a cozy suburban existence with family obligations and a keen desire to leave the office by six o’clock. They worked twelve to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Often, they did not leave the office until three in the morning. In four months they contacted over a thousand people.
Two months after the election, I had supper with Bernstein and Woodward in the darkwood, Tudor dining room of the Hay-Adams hotel. Earlier in the year, Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor, had forbidden them to talk about their work, but now they could talk about it in general terms. For investigative journalists, they looked surprisingly dapper in their suits and ties. Having become friends over the course of the investigation, they often finished each other’s sentences.
How did they get their stories?
“People seem to have a conception of our sources as the classic Jack Anderson leaker-who-mails-documents-in-the-night,” Woodward said with a smile. “But our sources weren’t like that.”
They used sources in the FBI, the Justice Department, and even the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), but none of these sources was a leak. Bernstein and Woodward got their information through the tedious, time-honored methods of investigative reporting: get a piece of information and then use it to pry loose more information.
“Some of the sources,” said Bernstein, “are responsible people who have no ax to grind but know that we have a piece of the story and want to help make the story accurate. We’d say to somebody, ‘Well, we know this fund existed—but suppose it all went for legitimate use?’
“And he’d say, ‘Well, if it all went for legitimate use, why did so-and-so get X thousand dollars to go for such-and-such a thing?’
“You knock on a lot of doors and you make a lot of phone calls, and people put you on to other people,” Bernstein went on.
“We started a policy of going to visit people in the evening without phoning them first,” said Woodward.
“Nine times out of ten, people wouldn’t let us in the door,” said Bernstein. “But sometimes it worked. The theory was that there were a lot of people who worked in places where the last thing in the world they would want was a visit from somebody named Woodward or Bernstein. And if you call them on the phone, they’re gonna say no.”
“But instead you show up at their homes and show that you’re well-dressed and civilized …” said Woodward.
“And you convince them that you’re interested in the truth and not in any preconceptions,” added Bernstein. “You tell them that if you’ve been in error, they’re in a position to show you where you went wrong. We didn’t think we were in error very often, but it’s an effective introduction.”
“Some people let us in for an hour and told us absolutely nothing,” said Woodward.
“Sometimes,” said Bernstein, “you wouldn’t learn anything substantial from the source, but you’d learn some
thing about how a certain office worked. It all added up.”
They pieced the mosaic together bit by bit. At the beginning, they did not even know what they were looking for, and they arrived at the picture of a massive sabotage campaign only after compiling countless scraps of seemingly meaningless information. Although Newsday, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine all contributed valuable information to the Watergate story, the bulk of the story emerged in seven watershed articles by Bernstein and Woodward. In barest outline, here is what the articles said:
—August 1. A story researched mainly by Bernstein reported that a check for $25,000, given to Maurice Stans, the finance chairman of the Nixon campaign, by Kenneth Dahlberg, the campaign finance chairman for the Midwest, had later ended up in the Florida bank account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the Watergate burglars. This was the first article to show a definite financial link between the Committee to Re-elect the President and the Watergate bugging.
—September 16. Bernstein and Woodward revealed that the money that paid for the Watergate bugging had come from a “secret fund” of more than $300,000. The fund had been kept in the safe of Nixon’s chief fund raiser, Maurice Stans, and was controlled by principal aides of former campaign manager John Mitchell.
—September 17. Bernstein and Woodward reported that two officials of the Committee to Re-elect the President, Jeb Magruder and Herbert Porter, had each withdrawn $50,000 from the secret fund.
—September 29. John Mitchell had personally controlled the secret fund, Bernstein and Woodward reported.
(In the course of writing this story, Bernstein phoned a CREEP campaign official for comment and received one of the non-denials which the Nixon people were so adept at constructing. So he decided to phone Mitchell himself. Sitting at his metal desk, which was decorated with photographs of Tricia’s wedding and Martha Mitchell dressed as Catherine the Great, Bernstein reached Mitchell in New York at 11:25 P.M. After apologizing for calling at so late an hour, Bernstein told Mitchell the gist of the story the Post was about to run.
“All that crap, you’re putting it all in the paper?” said Mitchell. “It’s all been denied. Jesus. Katie Graham [Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Post] is going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ, that’s the most sickening thing I’ve ever heard.”
Then Bernstein told Mitchell that the Committee to Re-elect the President had issued a statement on the matter.
“Did the Committee say that you could go ahead and publish that story?” Mitchell asked, as if CREEP had some sort of veto power over newspapers. “You fellows got a great ball game going. As soon as you’re through paying Ed Williams [Edward Bennet Williams, attorney for both the Post and the Democratic party], we’re going to do a story on all of you!” Like many people around Washington, Mitchell mistakenly believed that Bernstein and Woodward were getting all of their information from Williams, who was handling the Democrats’ Watergate lawsuit.
The Post published Mitchell’s response, omitting his reference to Katharine Graham’s anatomy.)
—October 10. Bernstein and Woodward reported that the Watergate bugging incident was only one part of a massive Republican spying and sabotage campaign that had been going on since 1971. The article detailed the activities of one of the saboteurs, Donald H. Segretti, and charged that Ken Clawson, a White House aide, had forged a letter accusing Edmund Muskie of condoning a racial slur on Franco-Americans. The celebrated “Canuck letter” had been published in February by the Manchester Union Leader and had hurt Muskie in the New Hampshire primary.
—October 15. Bernstein and Woodward reported that Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary and one of his closest aides, had been Donald H. Segretti’s contact in the White House. The story was based on a signed statement from a lawyer who knew Segretti.
—October 25. The team reported that H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, Nixon’s closest aide, was one of five “high-ranking presidential associates” authorized to make payments from the secret fund.
Each of these articles contained revelations that should have been devastating. Bernstein and Woodward had, after all, traced a plot to sabotage the Democratic party right into the inner sanctums of the White House. Yet somehow the Watergate affair failed to “sink in;” its sinister implications never registered on the public’s imagination. A Gallup poll taken around the time of the election found that 48 percent of the American public had never heard of the Watergate affair, and most of the rest didn’t care about it.
During the fall campaign, George McGovern’s staffers kept hoping that the Post’s progressively more spectacular disclosures on the Watergate affair would destroy Nixon at the polls. But Bernstein and Woodward never had any illusions that their articles would turn the election around.
“We knew where we were getting the information, where it was locked up, where and if it might come out,” Woodward said at the Hay-Adams in January. “And we were quite convinced that maybe it never would come out, that this was something that would go unproven and hang like a black cloud. Like the ITT affair. If you asked the average American about the ITT, he would say, yes, it seemed to smell bad, but he didn’t know exactly what was illegal or what was wrong. It was the same way with Watergate.”
“Also, it was a very complicated thing for the reader to grasp,” Bernstein added. In the weeks after the election, Bernstein and Woodward lamented the fact that they had never found time to write one comprehensive story on the Watergate, pulling together all their findings to produce a clear narrative. They were sorry, too, that they had not had a better understanding of the inner structure of the White House.
“If we had known then what we know now about the White House,” Bernstein said in January, “a lot of what we were writing would have made much more sense to us and our readers, and it would have taken us a good deal farther. For instance, we found out very early that Haldeman was one of those who had authority to disburse funds from the secret fund—and that turned out to be the link that we made between Haldeman and whatever dirty tricks were going on. But in fact, there were much more substantive links. And eventually, when we began to see how the White House operated, we began to perceive that this whole thing was a Haldeman operation.”
“And then,” said Woodward, “we got somebody at the Justice Department to say, ‘Yeah, this whole damn thing is a Haldeman operation.’ ”*
“You simply had to find out how the White House worked,” said Bernstein. “And you had to find out that the Committee for the Re-election of the President had nothing to do with the Republican National Committee, but was wholly a creation of the White House; and that the people in the key positions at the Committee for the Re-election of the President were former members of Haldeman’s staff and Justice Department people who had worked with Mitchell. That was the key.
“If we’d understood the White House set-up, we could have found people to talk to, perhaps. Like anywhere else, there are factions in the White House. If we had understood something about the allegiances that had developed in the White House, I think we would have had access to more information.”
The two reporters learned these things painfully and slowly because nobody they consulted in the White House press corps knew anything about the inner workings of the White House. For instance, when Time reported in its October 23 issue that a White House aide named Gordon Strachan had helped to hire Donald H. Segretti, Bernstein and Woodward tried to find out more about Strachan’s role.
“We could find out about Strachan from the time he was born through the time when he knew Segretti, right up to the time he went to the White House,” said Bernstein. “After that, we couldn’t find out a damn thing about the guy. Nobody we asked in the White House press corps had even heard of him. This guy Strachan was Haldeman’s chief political aide, he was the liaison for Haldeman to the Committee to Re-elect the President, and they didn’t even know the guy’s name. The problem was that this Administration h
ad never been reported from the inside by anyone in any really coherent fashion—with the possible exception of John Osborne. It wasn’t entirely the reporters’ fault because that place is impregnable—you can’t even get a White House phone directory without going through some extraordinary measures. But what I’m saying is that if we had known more about the White House hierarchy, we could have put our findings into perspective; we could have made the articles mean more.”
But nothing Bernstein and Woodward could have done would have made the Watergate case sink in. The problem lay elsewhere. The main trouble was that very few news organizations joined the Post in tracking the Watergate case. Failing to dig up the information themselves, they refused to print the Post stories. Some snubbed the Post articles out of petty rivalry; others feared the Administration or favored Nixon in the Presidential race. The Washington Star-News† acted according to a time-honored wire-service practice: if your competitor beats you on a good story, try to tear his story apart. The Star-News had four full-time reporters on the case and they struck out. So the Star-News reacted by ignoring some of the Post stories and trying to discredit others.
Since the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post are rivalrous partners in the same news service, the Times often underplayed the Post stories; in late October, the Los Angeles Times’ newly appointed Washington Bureau chief, John F. Lawrence, wrote a “reassessment” of the Watergate story which managed to suggest that some of the Post stories were based on shaky information.‡ The New York Times buried the first story of the Watergate break-in on page 50 and wasted a lot of time chasing leads on Cubans in Miami. Finally, when the Post dropped its bombshells in October, the Times panicked and began turning up some valuable information. But it, too, often gave slight attention to the Post stories.
The Boys on the Bus Page 31