A story the next day named Jeb Magruder, the deputy director of CRP, and Herbert L. (Bart) Porter, the scheduling director, as two of the people who withdrew more than $50,000 from a “secret fund” that financed intelligence-gathering activities against the Democrats. “There is no indication that the money allegedly withdrawn by Porter and Magruder was used directly to finance the Watergate bugging,” the story conceded, but the noose was tightening.
A big September 20 story reported that two other top campaign officials, Robert Mardian and Fred LaRue, had “directed a massive ‘house-cleaning’ in which financial records were destroyed and staff members were told to ‘close ranks’ in preparing a public response to the [Watergate] incident.” These are the first public traces of the cover-up, which was what would ultimately ensnare the Nixon White House. The authority of the reporting is on a completely different level from the reporting of a week or two before.
The “slush fund” was proving to be the key to the entire operation. A CRP spokesman, by way of response to the September 20 story, would say only that the Post’s sources were a “fountain of misinformation.” This was one of the nondenial denials that everybody at the Post was starting to get used to, and in a certain sense it only egged them on. In All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein refer to this story as a dangerous one. The Post was going deeper than the grand jury had.
On the morning of September 28, Carl and Bob rode out to see Hugh Sloan, the former treasurer of CRP, at his home in suburban Virginia. He had become a willing source, in large part because he was protective of his direct boss, Maurice Stans, the finance director at CRP. As the reporters pressed him, Sloan revealed that Stans had been one of five people with “authorizing authority” over the slush fund. That didn’t mean that Stans knew what each batch of money was being spent on, Sloan insisted, only that he could approve the outlays. Sloan then revealed that John Mitchell, the former attorney general of the United States and the former director of CRP, had been the first person in charge of the secret fund, beginning in 1971, while he was still serving as attorney general. Woodstein knew this was big—Mitchell had likely broken the law while serving as the ultimate arbiter of it—but they desperately wanted all five names. Sloan would confirm only that Stans, Mitchell, and Magruder had been three of the five, and when he wouldn’t budge Woodstein returned to the Post to meet with their editors.
This is the first meeting in Ben’s office in the book version of All the President’s Men, which isn’t an accident. Bob and Carl use this meeting as an opportunity to introduce who Ben is, “an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner,” a man who could curse at a reporter and then slip into perfect French, or put out his cigarette “in a demitasse cup at a formal dinner party … and leave the hostess saying how charming he was.”2
In the meeting, the reporters presented what they knew, and then what they thought they knew and would be able to prove with more digging—namely, that H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, was probably one of the five people in control of the fund. If they could get all five names, they’d be able to write the definitive version of events. As they rambled on about the possibilities for the story, Ben interrupted them.
“Listen, fellas, are you certain on Mitchell?” he asked.3 “Absolutely certain? Can you write it now?” When they said yes, he stood up and said, “Well then, let’s do it.”
“The reporters understood Bradlee’s philosophy,” Woodstein wrote later. “A daily newspaper can’t wait for the definitive account of events.”
Before dispatching the reporters to write the story, Ben reminded them that they were now taking a step into the big leagues. Everybody in the room knew what that meant. And then, Ben said simply, “Go.”
Years later Bob and Carl would tell Ben that the thing they remembered best about that meeting was “Go.” That fits with the iconic, ballsy image of Ben. But from an editorial perspective the more illuminating aspect of their conversation is Ben’s identification that the Mitchell component was news, and that they should break it off and run it as a separate story. “He was right and we didn’t even realize it,” Carl would say later. Instead of thinking about their larger theories and waiting for all of the pieces to fall into place, they should go with what they had and keep the story moving. This really was “Bradlee’s philosophy,” as Carl and Bob understood it, and as I do, too. If you know it and you can prove it, you use it before somebody else does.
Later that night, after the story had already been sent to the composing room to be set in type, Bernstein called Mitchell to give him a chance to respond. It was about 11:30, and Mitchell was woozy—maybe drunk, maybe just groggy. Carl read him the lede of the story: “John N. Mitchell, while serving as U.S. Attorney General, personally controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to gather information about the Democrats, according to sources involved in the Watergate investigation. Beginning in the spring of 1971, almost a year before he left the Justice Department to become President Nixon’s campaign manager on March 1, Mitchell personally approved withdrawals from the fund, several reliable sources have told the Washington Post.” Mitchell’s initial response was, “Jeeeeeeesus,” and when Bernstein kept reading Mitchell just kept saying “Jesus.” Then it got more colorful from there, as Woodstein’s interview with Ben revealed a year later:
BW: The one maybe you’ll specifically remember is [that] Mitchell controlled the secret fund, that Katie Graham is going to get her tit caught in the wringer.
B: Yes, I remember that very well. I remember being called at twelve o’clock at night by you—
CB: Saying use it but take “tit” out.
B: Yeah. I remember that vividly.
BW: Let’s get this specifically.
B: Well, I remember you calling me saying that you had reached Mitchell, and let me see if I can, “You’re going to run that crap? It’s all been denied. If you run that Katie Graham is going to get her tit [caught] in a big wringer …”
CB: “Fat wringer.”
B: “Fat wringer.”4 And I debated calling Mrs. Graham [Woodward laughs] to see how she felt about her arrangements being in the Washington newspaper, then I asked you, “Was he drunk?” I think. And I think you replied that he might have been, and then I asked you several questions in my charming, inimitable manner as to whether you were taking notes, whether you didn’t make it up. Then I remember deciding to run it, and I think I got you to reread it several times and it seemed to be that Katie Graham was going to get caught in or get—
BW: Leaving “tit” out.
B: Leaving “tit” out. We just felt that the publisher’s arrangements—it was my decision to leave her arrangements out.
When Ben got the call from Bernstein he was in bed with Tony, and he remembers being stunned by what Mitchell had said and pillow-talking with Tony about it. “I did think it was funny,” he said later, “and I thought it was ballsy to go ahead and run it.” Even this late in the story, Ben wasn’t quite sure that he entirely trusted Bernstein. On the phone Ben made Carl read his notes back twice to see if any of his wording changed.
The story, with Mitchell’s censored quotation appearing in the seventh graf, ran the next morning. This was one of the shortest of the major stories during Watergate, probably because Ben had given them so little time to think about it and execute it. Instead of piling on facts to make their case, Carl and Bob got straight to the point.
After it ran, Ben began to let the reporters know that he was interested and, more important, that he wanted to win. When the Los Angeles Times scooped everybody the next week with a firsthand account of the bugging from Alfred Baldwin, the lookout on the night of the burglary, Ben made it clear that he wasn’t overly pleased. “I would like to have had that one,” he told them. It used to be Simons5 or Rosenfeld or Sussman who would bust their balls if they got scooped. Now, increasingly, it was Ben.
“Mitchell kind of intrigued him,” Bob told David Halberstam a few years later. “
And you have a sense of Bradlee, when he’s interested in a story, he’s prowling around, you know, do it for him. It gets very personal.”
In late September, Bernstein had received a tip about a man named Donald Segretti, a young California lawyer and Army veteran who had been hired by the Nixon campaign to disrupt Democratic political activities across the country. One of their bright ideas was to infiltrate Democratic campaigns by offering to spy on one Democratic candidate on behalf of another—while reporting to the Republicans the whole time. The thinking went that if they disrupted the Democratic primary enough, and created enough infighting, no candidate would be able to regroup in time to be able to mount a real challenge to Nixon.
Bernstein eventually confirmed, through a Justice Department source, that the Watergate investigators were aware of Segretti as a political saboteur. The term that the official had heard for Segretti’s activities was “ratfucking.” Another Justice Department official said that political sabotage of the type that Segretti had coordinated was “basic strategy that goes all the way to the top.” Once he had confirmation, Bernstein wanted to write the story right away, but Bob wanted to check it with someone first.
Few figures have loomed larger in recent journalistic history than Deep Throat, Bob’s famed secret source. He is a huge part of the mystique of Woodward and Bernstein, the Post, and Watergate, and for more than thirty years his identity was the best-kept secret in Washington. Until 2005, when Mark Felt, the former assistant director of the FBI, stepped forward, nobody at The Washington Post knew his identity except for Bob, Carl, and Ben—and Ben didn’t find out until after Nixon resigned. In 1972, Bob identified Throat to his bosses only as somebody high up in the Justice Department, and when Throat’s information checked out the Post’s editors learned to trust him. (Howard Simons came up with the name, which honored Bob’s “deep background” ground rules with Felt6 and made an irresistible connection to a pornographic movie of the same name that had come out earlier that year. Simons also dubbed Woodward and Bernstein “Woodstein.”)
Because of Felt’s high position at the FBI, he was reluctant to talk on the phone or meet in person at any obvious location. According to Bob’s descriptions of their relationship, he and Felt worked out a system by which they would signal each other during the day and then meet that night in a deserted parking garage in Rosslyn, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from downtown D.C. If Felt wanted to talk, he would mark a page of Bob’s New York Times (delivered to Bob’s apartment house lobby each morning) with the appointed hour. If Bob wanted to talk to Throat, he would move a flowerpot with a red flag in it to the rear of his apartment balcony. Other arrangements obtained at times, but this was the main way they signaled for meetings with each other.
On October 8, Bob and Deep Throat would have one of their most important meetings in all of Watergate. After hearing Carl’s information about Segretti, Bob didn’t think there were enough specifics for a story and wanted to check with Throat. There wasn’t time to put out the flowerpot—Bob was returning from New York City too late in the day for that—so by a different prearranged signal Bob called Throat at home and (without saying who he was) asked for a garage meeting that night.
Throat didn’t know anything about Segretti specifically. “I don’t know about Segretti—I just don’t know. I can’t tell you anyway,” he said, according to Bob’s confidential memo written up the next morning. But Throat did confirm—and even went beyond confirming to explain, something he didn’t usually do—that there was a massive political sabotage operation run out of the White House during the 1972 presidential campaign. More than fifty people had been involved. Segretti would have been just a piece of it.
As Bob put it to me later, the Segretti material alone was a five or a six on the Richter scale, but the extra dimension of a massive political sabotage operation brought it straight up to a ten. At the end of their meeting, when Bob said that he needed specifics if he was going to put this all in a story, he asked Deep Throat about something called the Canuck letter. Throat told him it had been a “White House operation” from top to bottom.
The Canuck letter was a different piece of the puzzle, and an important one. Ed Muskie, the senator from Maine, had been one of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in early 1972. As the Senate Watergate Report would later reveal, the Republican political saboteurs ran riot on Muskie’s campaign and effectively knocked him out of the race. Some disruptions were relatively small—sending huge batches of unordered pizzas to Muskie campaign events, that kind of thing—but the Canuck letter was big.7 In late February of 1972, as Muskie was preparing to campaign in New Hampshire, the Manchester Union Leader (a right-wing newspaper run, coincidentally, by the man who bought Ben’s old paper, The New Hampshire Sunday Times) printed a forged, poorly spelled letter claiming that Muskie had made a derogatory remark—“Canucks,” but spelled “Cannocks”—about “Franco-Americans.” The following day, the Union Leader reprinted a derogatory story about the drinking and smoking habits of Muskie’s wife, Jane. The day after that, as David Broder noted on the front page of the Post, Muskie broke:
With tears streaming down his face and his voice choked with emotion, Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) stood in the snow outside The Manchester Union Leader this morning and accused its publisher of making vicious attacks on him and his wife, Jane.
The Democratic presidential candidate called publisher William Loeb “a gutless coward” for involving Mrs. Muskie in the campaign and said four times that Loeb had lied in charging that Muskie had condoned a slur on Americans of French-Canadian descent.
In defending his wife, Muskie broke down three times in as many minutes.…
Now they had what they thought were three stories: Segretti, which Bernstein would write; White House involvement in the Canuck letter, which Bob would write; and a more sweeping story about the “basic strategy” of ratfucking, written by both of them.
A chance encounter in the newsroom that morning changed things yet again. A National reporter named Marilyn Berger walked up to Carl as he was taking a break from writing and asked him if he and Bob knew about the Canuck letter. They did, but they’d just found out about the White House’s possible involvement in it that morning from Deep Throat. Why was she asking? Because Ken Clawson had told her that he had written it, Berger said.
Ken Clawson had been a reporter at the Post for four years before leaving to join the Nixon administration as a deputy director of communications in early 1972. Ben knew him well, though Carl and Bob didn’t. Clawson had wanted to be National editor, and when the job went to Dick Harwood, as Ben once put it, Clawson “gave up” and took the job at the White House.
Berger said that two weeks before, at the end of September, she and Clawson had been having a drink in her apartment and that Clawson had told her personally that he’d written the Canuck letter. “He really practically blurted [it] out,” she would say later. When she asked him why, according to the memo she made after their conversation, he replied that Nixon’s campaign was most afraid of Muskie as a candidate, and that they wanted him out of the race.8
In a private interview with Kay Graham long after Watergate, Berger said that she hadn’t told Ben right away because she was scared of him. “I really was,” she said. “I was afraid of his building up the story to more than I was ready to.” She had wanted to discuss Clawson’s admission with David Broder first, but Broder had been out of town on a political trip. As soon as Broder got back to the office, Berger told him about what Clawson had said, and he urged her to share it with “the boys.” That was what had brought her across the newsroom to Carl.
After Berger delivered the news, Woodstein and Broder sat down with her to ask precisely what had happened.
“Why did he tell you?” Bob asked.
“You know why he told her,” Carl said.
“Why did he tell you that?” Bob asked again.
“He was trying to impress me,” Berger
admitted. “He wanted me to go to bed with him.”
“What did you think?” Carl asked, wondering why Bob had persisted.
“I just wanted her to say it,” Bob said.
From there, the reporters took the story to Ben. He was upset that Berger hadn’t told them all sooner, but he also admired her for eventually coming clean, given that the incident had taken place in her apartment, with a married man, and alcohol was involved. “It was not an easy story for her to tell,” he said a year later. “I remember putting her through a really kind of rough course of sprouts and being absolutely convinced that Clawson said it but not being convinced that Clawson did it.” (The running sexist joke in the newsroom was that “it only sounds like ‘I wrote the letter’ if you’re on your back.”)
Berger was uncomfortable with her name being used in the story that Bob and Carl were drafting. “Do you have to use my name as a source?” she remembered asking Ben. “If [Clawson] had told Haynes Johnson, would you have said, ‘told Haynes Johnson’?”
“No,” Ben said. “And if it were Haynes Johnson he wouldn’t have waited two weeks to tell us about it.”
At Ben’s suggestion, Berger asked Clawson out to lunch at the Sans Souci, a favored French haunt for people at the Post. At lunch, Clawson told her that he wished that she hadn’t told Woodstein about it, that he would deny it “on a stack of Bibles over his mother’s grave,” according to Berger’s recollection. When Woodward called Clawson later that day, Clawson claimed that Berger had misunderstood him, that he had never admitted writing it in the first place. Then Clawson called Berger back, saying that he’d be ruined if the details of the story came out. It would not look good if his late-night drinks with a comely reporter ended up on the front page of The Washington Post.
Yours in Truth Page 17