Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  6 Ben would later say that, throughout the fall of 1972, Williams was a constant source of reassurance for him, too. “The kids have got to be right because [the Nixon people are] lying so much,” Williams would tell him. “If they’ve got nothing to hide, why are they lying so fucking much? And the reason is because you’ve got them.”

  7 An FBI memo written the day of Woodstein’s confrontation with Silbert and Lano holds that it was “an outrageous lie” that Lano had been a source of any kind for Bernstein. Lano swore out an affidavit that he never told Bernstein anything, and that on their phone call on the 24th, Bernstein had been fishing and Lano’s use of Haldeman’s name had simply been “confirming that he knew what Bernstein was talking about.” Could be true, but Lano could also just have been covering his ass.

  Z

  Ben’s office, March 23, 2011, 12:10 P.M.

  B: Don’t feel that you have to protect me.

  Me: I appreciate that.

  B: You and I have a great relationship, and there’s nothing you can do in this book that’s going to change it. So just follow your nose.

  Ben’s defiance aside, the Haldeman story was a serious blow. Carl’s secret source at CRP had told him that the administration would jump on them if they made a single mistake, that that was “the way the game is played.” And now the administration was jumping, with both feet. As Bob put it to me, “We got crushed.”

  As the Post scrambled to respond to the administration’s denials, world events also turned in the administration’s favor. The October 27 front page of the Post carried a two-line banner headline, “Peace ‘Within Reach,’ U.S. Says; Hanoi Discloses Nine-Point Plan.” Realizing that the peace-is-at-hand moment in Vietnam would swallow just about anything else, the Nixon people craftily sent Clark MacGregor out to sit for a televised interview with Elizabeth Drew on PBS, in which MacGregor admitted to the existence of the slush fund and named five people who had either authorized or received payments from it. Much of what MacGregor revealed had been previously denied by the White House, and some of the information corroborated much disputed Woodstein accounts. But Ben refused to put MacGregor’s revelations on the front page of the paper, saying that it would look like they were “grinding it in.” Bob knew that The New York Times had already decided to run the MacGregor story on the front page, and he was angry that Ben wouldn’t do the same. He thought it was a political decision, not a journalistic one, and he was probably right. Ben stood by Carl and Bob, but in the wake of their mistake the balance of power had shifted.

  A few days later, still desperate for a way to regain their standing, Bob set the flowerpot with the flag in it at the back of his balcony, the signal for a meeting with Deep Throat.

  “Well, Haldeman slipped away from you,” Deep Throat said when they met that night. He was upset. “From top to bottom, this whole business is a Haldeman operation,” Throat whispered. “He ran the money. Insulated himself through those functionaries around him.” They had moved on Haldeman too soon, and now nobody around Haldeman would be willing to talk. “Everybody goes chicken after you make a mistake like you guys made,” he said.1

  Though Throat castigated Bob throughout their meeting, in one stroke he had also finally and explicitly confirmed that Haldeman had been in control of the fund. When Bob got back to the Post, he and Carl wanted to write the story immediately, but again Ben was hesitant. Then George McGovern appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday, October 29, citing the Haldeman mistake as fact, at which point everybody at the paper realized that they needed to put out some kind of correction or clarification.

  A Time story out the day of the 29th reported that Chapin had admitted to the FBI that he had hired Segretti, and it gave Woodstein the pretense they needed. Their story, “Magazine Says Nixon Aide Admits Disruption Effort,” ran on the front page the next morning. The opportunity to set the record straight about their own reporting came seven grafs in: “Time’s account also said ‘no hard evidence could be developed to support a charge by The Washington Post that H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, was one of those with control over a fund that paid for spying and disruption.’ ” The reporters noted that Sloan had told them that his denial was strictly limited, and that federal sources of theirs had confirmed that although Sloan hadn’t named Haldeman to the grand jury, Haldeman had in fact been authorized to make payments from the fund. “One source went so far as to say ‘this is a Haldeman operation,’ and that Haldeman had ‘insulated’ himself, dealing with the fund through an intermediary.”

  Woodstein knew that they and the Post could now stand fully behind their reporting, which was a source of great relief for everybody at the paper but particularly for the two young reporters, who had worried about losing their jobs. But that certainty came at a price: to save their own hides, Woodstein had broken a rule with a source for the second time in five days. Bob’s agreement with Deep Throat held that the information Throat provided was on deep background and, therefore, explicitly unquotable.

  “I had very bad feelings about quoting [him] so directly,” Bob would write years later in The Secret Man. “It really was contrary to the rules we had established of deep background. But I was frantic to get a story in the paper correcting our mistake.”

  Playing a little bit fast and loose with journalistic conventions while taking on a massive governmental cover-up and conspiracy seems like an inevitability in some ways. And the truth is that in All the President’s Men (and, later, in The Secret Man) Bob and Carl fessed up to almost everything questionable that they’d done. They didn’t have to, but they did, and it makes them more human and compelling to know that when confronted with the hard questions they didn’t always come down on the comfortable side.

  The general logic of the reporters’ justification of their tactics throughout the book is “No harm, no foul.” Sure, they might have lied to some of their sources in order to try to provoke those sources into “confirming” information that the reporters didn’t actually have, but it was in the service of exposing a deeper truth and therefore justifiable. The same went for Bernstein’s numerous admitted violations of the Post’s policy that all reporters had to identify themselves before soliciting information from sources, or Woodward’s questionable quotation of Deep Throat. This kind of justification came up against its most severe test toward the end of 1972, when Ben and the rest of his editorial team made an ethical and legal decision that would dwarf all of the other, smaller ones, and nearly land Carl and Bob in jail.

  On November 7, 1972, with the Post’s Watergate team back on its heels, Richard Nixon was reelected by one of the largest margins in the history of presidential politics, sweeping every state in the union except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Outside D.C., the general public still hadn’t really caught on to Watergate, despite the Post’s front-page treatment of the scandal. Nixon was overwhelmingly popular and there were bigger issues—Vietnam, the economy—than what seemed (to most) to be low-level political hijinks not connected to Nixon himself. Most regional newspapers ignored the Post’s stories, and in fact tended to give more coverage and credence to White House denials than to what the Post had reported.

  In the wake of the mistake on Haldeman and Nixon’s overwhelming victory, the Post’s trail on Watergate stories officially went cold. Nixon had a new hand, and so did his men. Four days after the election, Chuck Colson went on the attack in a speech to the New England Society of Newspaper Editors in Kennebunkport, Maine. He blasted Ben and the Post with renewed vigor, referring to Ben as “[t]he self-appointed leader of what Boston’s Teddy White once described as ‘that tiny little fringe of arrogant elitists who infect the healthy mainstream of American journalism with their own peculiar view of the world.’ ” He went on:

  If Bradlee ever left the Georgetown cocktail circuit, where he and his pals dine on third-hand information and gossip and rumor, he might discover out here the real America. And he might learn that all truth and all knowledge and all superior
wisdom just doesn’t emanate exclusively from that small little clique in Georgetown, and that the rest of the country isn’t just sitting out here waiting to be told what they’re supposed to think.

  As Ben said later, “That’s some pretty personal shit.” Of all the low moments, this was a pretty low one. The Post wouldn’t break another major story about Watergate until December 8, four and a half weeks after the election. Bob always likes to say of this period that Ben threatened to “hold our heads in a pail of water” until they came up with a story.

  In their desperation for something—anything—that they could use, the Watergate team at the Post made the decision to allow Woodstein to approach the grand jurors in the criminal case, to see if they could peel one off. The grand jury had already heard all of the government’s evidence, and the trial of the five burglars and Hunt and Liddy was scheduled to begin in January. This was a dubious enterprise, no matter how you slice it. Whether it was illegal for the reporters to approach the grand jurors or not, it was definitely illegal for grand jurors to leak information to reporters.

  In advance of the decision, Ben called his lawyers, Joe Califano and Edward Bennett Williams, to get their advice. (After leaving the Johnson administration, where he and Ben had squared off on Walter Washington and the Kerner Commission, Califano had joined Williams’s law firm and now helped represent the Post.) “The toughest questions we had with Ben,” Califano told me, had been “can they talk to grand jury members. And we kept telling him no. I’ll tell you, from my point of view and Ed’s point of view, after a while, anytime Ben would call either of us, we’d go right to the other guy’s office. Because we figured if he were getting the no answer from one of us, he’d just try the other one.” Califano laughed. “Or he’d rephrase the question.”

  Ben’s recollection is slightly different. “I recall asking them if there was a law against going to the grand jury,” he told Evan Thomas for his book The Man to See, a biography of Williams. “They said it violated no law, but they didn’t say go ahead and do it, either. My guess is that Ed blurred it, and I blurred it.” When I asked Ben if this was how he still remembered it, he said yes.

  Ben okayed a preliminary sortie with the aunt of a Post editor’s neighbor. She was rumored to be on the grand jury, but it turned out to be a different grand jury. A few days later, Bob went to the courthouse and talked one of the clerks into showing him the grand jury list, although the clerk wouldn’t allow him to take notes. So, bit by bit, Bob memorized the list, excusing himself every few minutes via one pretext or another and then going to the bathroom to write out the names, addresses, ages, occupations, and telephone numbers of the grand jury members in his notebook. (Ben loves this part of the story, Bob’s tenacity and resourcefulness.)

  After a long meeting at the Post, Ben and the rest of the Watergate editors decided to allow Bob and Carl to try to contact the grand jurors, with the admonition that they identify themselves as Post reporters and not attempt to strong-arm anybody. Woodstein spent the first weekend of December of 1972 ringing the doorbells of the grand jurors who appeared, from the basic information that Bob had memorized and copied down, to be the most susceptible targets. According to their book, they struck out.

  That would have been it, the end of the story, if one of the grand jurors hadn’t informed the prosecutors on Monday morning that a Post reporter had made contact. Judge John Sirica wasn’t pleased, and Williams intervened to try to steady the situation. (They were old friends; Williams was godfather to one of Sirica’s kids.) The next morning, Williams summoned Carl and Bob to his office, where he told them that Sirica was angry and that he had barely been able to keep them out of jail.2

  Two weeks later, on December 19, Sirica called the reporters into his courtroom.“I was ready to take them to task for their tampering,” Sirica would write in 1979, in his memoir To Set the Record Straight:

  But the prosecutors urged me not to punish the reporters. They pointed out that the grand juror who was contacted had been faithful to his oath not to discuss the case and had turned the reporter away without saying anything.… I settled on a stiff lecture in open court, reminding everyone present that to approach a grand juror and solicit information about a case being investigated was to ask for a citation of contempt. I praised the grand jurors for their refusal to cooperate and recessed the proceeding to let the message sink in.

  Carl and Bob were in the clear, but their consciences weren’t.3 As they would write in their book, they hadn’t done anything explicitly illegal but they had “chosen expediency over principle” and had “dodged, evaded, misrepresented, suggested and intimidated, even if they had not lied outright.”

  “I agree,” Sirica wrote, of the reporters’ own uneasy assessment of themselves. “Had they actually obtained information from that grand juror, they would have gone to jail.”

  Ben made no apologies. “I remember figuring, after being told that it was not illegal and after insisting that we tell no lies and identify ourselves, that it was worth a shot,” he wrote of the grand jury episode in his memoir. “In the same circumstances, I’d do it again. The stakes were too high.”

  On March 3, 2011, I asked Bob about his and Carl’s tactics directly. I laid out the long list of questionable stuff that they had done, including the visits to the grand jurors.

  He smiled. “I wouldn’t be too literal-minded about that,” he said. “I mean, it was a dicey, high-wire thing to do. But that’s what we did. That’s what the whole enterprise was.”

  Twelve days later, Bob gave a talk at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, to a crowd of nearly two hundred. He was asked about James O’Keefe, the young provocateur who had recently and surreptitiously filmed high executives at National Public Radio speaking ill of Republicans and Muslims.4 “I don’t think [what O’Keefe did] is the highest form of journalism, and I wouldn’t do it,” Bob said. “There are laws against entrapment, and I think there’s not only a legal basis for that but a moral basis that you want to represent who you are and get it clean.

  “In the Watergate investigation, Carl Bernstein and I went to talk to grand jurors,” Bob said, by way of explanation. “We had legal advice saying we could do it. It was very risky. It’s something I’m not sure I’d do all the time, but when you’re convinced the system of justice has collapsed, I think you have to be very aggressive. But we didn’t say we were from the U.S. attorney’s office. We identified ourselves as Washington Post reporters—and we got nothing from the grand jurors.”

  Ben’s Watergate files weren’t the most organized part of his archive. There were bits here, other pieces there—much like the story itself. It took me a long time to put everything together, to align the dates on the memos with contemporaneous developments in the news. Memos that at first hadn’t seemed all that interesting began to make more sense as I considered them in context.

  One of the more tantalizing of these memos, from the start, was a dense seven-page document with two initials and a date at its top. It was hard to read, a faint copy of a typewritten document, and all over the map in terms of substance. In my notes from the first time I read it through, I had written to myself, “Seems to be some kind of juror,” but there was no year in the date and I had no concept of what that might have meant. The memo had more than one hundred data points in it, short statements that Carl had taken down in seemingly rapid-fire style. (The author identifies himself as “CB” in the memo, Carl’s usual MO, and by comparison with other memos this one clearly came from Carl’s typewriter.) I slotted it in my “Bernstein” file as a good example of Carl’s thoroughness, Woodstein’s hunger for the story.

  In February of 2011, I realized that in order to write believably about Watergate I was going to have to understand the story in a way that I hadn’t up until then. I was going to have to spend as long as it took to read every single one of the newspaper stories and all of the relevant books. In order to know what I had, and what to say about Ben’s role in all of it, I
couldn’t just focus on the major episodes that everybody has already written about a thousand times.

  And so I read through all the newspaper stories from 1972 and the first half of 1973, up to the point where Haldeman and Ehrlichman have resigned and the Post has won the Pulitzer and Nixon’s presidency has begun to hang visibly in the balance. After that, I went back to read the appropriate chapters in all the various books, and then I reread the Watergate memos I had found in Ben’s files. Then, and only then, I read All the President’s Men start to finish for the fourth time. If there was anything in it that I didn’t understand, which had always been the case before, I wasn’t going to put the book down until I understood it.

  Everything went smoothly until I reached the book’s accounting of the grand jury episode. After the meeting with Williams, where Williams warned the reporters that Sirica was pissed and that they’d better cease all contact with grand jurors immediately, Woodstein wrote that, chastened, they “returned to more conventional sources.” Bernstein visited an unnamed woman at an apartment who wouldn’t talk to him in person but slipped her number under the door. “Your articles have been excellent,” she told him. She was “in a position to have considerable knowledge of the secret activities of the White House and CRP,” they wrote. Apparently Bernstein had tried to interview her before, but she had rebuffed him.

  Now he had her number, and she was willing to talk. He returned to the Post and placed the call. “I’m forced to agree 100 percent with Ben Bradlee; the truth hasn’t been told,” the woman said. Carl began taking notes, identifying the woman only as “Z”. She told him to read their own reporting carefully. “There is more truth in there than you must have realized,” she said. She told him that she wouldn’t cooperate in the way that a normal source might, answering only some questions and then only vaguely. “Your perseverance has been admirable,” she told Bernstein. “Apply it to what I say.” She sounded, he thought, “like some kind of mystic.”