Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  This was the moment of truth. I told him I was starting to believe that this had struck such a deep chord with Bob because maybe there was some portion of the Deep Throat story, as presented in the book and in the movie, that wasn’t quite straight. Maybe it was some of the flowerpot and garage stuff that had always struck me—struck everybody I knew—as implausible. Who knew. But, like Ben, I had never doubted the big stuff, and so you go along with some of the more questionable details because everything else about the story turned out to be true.

  Ben’s face registered no reaction until I finished talking. Then he smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “That’s all I was saying,” he said.

  My worry fell away in a great rush, and as it left I felt a very deep connection between Ben and me, more powerful than any moment I have ever had with him, before or since. With his whole body, even more than with his words, he was telling me that I had nothing to be afraid of, that he was with me. People who know Ben well talk about these moments of telescopic intimacy with him, where he makes you feel that you’re standing at the center of the world and he’s right there with you. I had never felt it for myself, until now.

  After a few minutes Sally came in, and with time growing short I asked if I could go upstairs to look for the interview tapes. Barbara had told me that they would be microcassettes, probably grouped together. Sally and I went up to Ben’s den and looked around, but they weren’t there. After some minutes of fruitless searching, we started to head back down the stairs. As we reached the landing between the second and third floors, we heard the front door open and Bob coming in. I waited on the landing with Sally, figuring it would be better for Bob to have time to greet Ben without me sitting there watching. I was not unmindful of the fact that I would be appearing at the meeting from inside the house, that I had been the first one there. After a couple of beats I walked downstairs and joined them in the dining room.

  Bob didn’t look like he’d slept a lot. There was something frantic about him, something off. We shook hands but only in the most perfunctory way. He was there to get down to business, so I prepared to do the same.

  Within a minute or so we had taken our places at the table in Ben’s dining room. Ben sat at the head, with his back to the fireplace; Bob sat to Ben’s right, with his back to the front windows; and I sat to Ben’s left, facing Bob across the table. We were going to have it out. Two of the most legendary journalists in the history of the country, with a lot on the line … and me. What am I doing here? I thought to myself, not for the first time.

  There was no small talk. Bob had brought a thick manila folder with him, which he set down heavily on the table in a way that he meant for us to notice. When Ben asked what it was, Bob said, “Data.” Then he asked Ben what he thought of the whole situation.1

  “I’ve known this young man for some years now,” Ben said, meaning me, “and I trust his skills and his intent.” Then he looked down at the transcript of his interview with Barbara, shrugged, and said, “Nothing in here really bothers me, but I know there’s something in here that bothers you. What’s in here that bothers you?”

  Bob went into his pitch, which he repeated over the course of the forty-five-minute meeting. He would read the “residual fear in my soul” line out loud, and then say to Ben that he couldn’t figure out why Ben would still have had doubts about any aspect of his reporting in 1990, sixteen years after Nixon had resigned. This was the unresolvable crux of the problem, and one that they circled for the duration of the meeting: how could Ben have doubted the flowerpots and the garage meetings, when the rest of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting had turned out to be true? Bob thought this was inconsistent, and hurtful. Ben didn’t. Bob tried everything to get Ben to disavow what he had said, or at least tell me I couldn’t use it. Ben wouldn’t do either of those things. After Bob had made his pitch four or five times, Ben said, “Bob, you’ve made your point. Quit while you’re ahead.”

  Bob turned to me. You know me and the world we live in, he said. People who don’t like me and don’t like the Post are going to seize on these comments as a way to knock me and all of Watergate. In his interview with Barbara, Ben had spoken of “the fuckers out there” who have always wanted to prove that Deep Throat never existed: “If they could prove that,” Ben had said, “that would be a devastating blow to Woodward and to the Post, never mind that Nixon resigned but it’s the Post’s version would be called into account. It would be devastating, devastating.”

  “Don’t give fodder to the fuckers,” Bob said to me, and once he lit on this phrase he repeated it a couple of times. The quotes from the interview with Barbara were nothing more than outtakes from Ben’s book, Bob said. Ben hadn’t used them in his book, and so I shouldn’t use them in mine, either.

  That argument didn’t make sense, and I said so. I told Bob I would think about what he had said, but I couldn’t promise him anything. He told me it was his “strong recommendation” that I not use the quotes, then that it was his “emphatic recommendation.” Then, when that got no truck, he tried a direct command: “Don’t use the quotes, Jeff.”

  “So you think this is the big story for your book, huh?” he said at one point.

  “I think it’s interesting,” I said.

  “Come on,” he said. “Come on.” He wasn’t buying it. My editors must be thrilled, he said. I told him the truth: from the moment I had come across them I had known that Ben’s doubts about Deep Throat were interesting; of course they were interesting. You’d have to be a fool not to acknowledge that.

  As I defended myself, I turned to look at Ben, wondering what he was making of all of this. He was sitting back in his chair, smiling at me.

  Bob closed by making a personal appeal to Ben. “You’re this legend,” he said. “You’re the editor.” Ben’s doubts in 1990, sixteen years after Nixon had resigned, were going to mean something to people. Bob would have to answer old questions that, with Mark Felt’s confession in 2005, had begun to feel like settled history. Ben did his aw-shucks routine, trying to downplay what his doubt might mean, but he knew what Bob was saying was true. He had clearly made the basic calculation that Nixon’s resignation, and the reporting that had contributed to it, weren’t contingent on whether Deep Throat had watched Bob’s balcony for flowerpot updates, or on how many times they had whispered to each other in a deserted parking garage. That was on Bob and Carl, not on Ben or on the Post.

  At the end of the meeting, when Bob asked Ben for his final opinion, Ben turned to him and said, “I’m okay with it, and I think I’m going to come out of it fine. So you two work it out.”

  Without Ben’s intervention there would be no way to work it out, and Bob knew it. When we got up from the table, he hugged Ben and then walked out.

  Two days after the meeting I went down to Ben’s office to talk it over with him. “So I went on my sleuthing efforts to try to put some resolution on this Woodward thing,” I said as I walked in.

  “Why has Woodward got his bowels in an uproar?” Ben growled.

  “I think it’s very strange, I have to be honest with you. But you want to know something strange?”

  “What?”

  “This was one of those interviews you did with Barbara, right? For your book, of which there are maybe twelve or thirteen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I just went down and looked in the tapes. Every single one of them is there but this one.” I had gone with Carol to the seventh floor, where Ben’s papers were being vetted for sale. I wanted her as my witness so nobody would think anything fishy had gone on. She was as surprised as I was when the one I was looking for was the only one that was missing.

  “What does that mean?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me your suspicions. Do you think Woodward’s got it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. He laughed, and then I laughed. The Watergate parallels were a little much. “I mean, I don’t think that’s crazy. His reaction to this thing was off the
charts.”

  “Off the charts!” Ben sang. “It suggests that he’s really worried. That it might be true.”

  “I mean, I have to tell you, Ben, that’s not what my book’s about. My book’s about you. I’m not trying to unearth some … you know?”

  “I know that.”

  “But his response was so out of proportion to what was there.” All Ben had ever called into question in the interview with Barbara were some of the Hollywood aspects of the Deep Throat relationship. He never said that he had doubts about the information Deep Throat provided, or about the stories Bob and Carl had written. We were both a bit mystified.

  The most important thing to me was to thank Ben for his support before, during, and after the meeting. I had said it to him that day, but I wanted to say it again because it had been my lifeline since.

  “Well, I was also being very true to myself,” he said. “I mean, I wasn’t taking sides except that I was telling the truth as I knew it.”

  “Right. What Bob wanted you to say was that you never had doubts. He was there to try to get you to say that and there was no way you were going to say that.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ben said. “I mean, it’s ridiculous. If he could prove that I had no doubts, he’d prove that I was a jerk.”

  I wanted to be crystal clear about it, so I just went ahead and asked him. “You said what you said in 1990, and there’s a record of it …”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you don’t retract it?”

  “I don’t.”

  In the wake of the meeting with Bob, I had spent two full days reading all the conspiracy theories about Deep Throat, from the marginally credible to the patently absurd. Even in the wake of the revelation in 2005 that Mark Felt, the number two man at the FBI, had been Deep Throat, questions remain.

  Bob and Carl have always maintained, when they first started reporting on Watergate, that the fear on the part of the CRP employees they visited had convinced them that they were on to something. Bob’s histaminic reaction to Ben’s doubt, the palpable fear, had aroused my suspicions. So had the fact that I already knew that Bob and Carl had disguised a grand juror as somebody else in All the President’s Men. If they were willing to dress Z up, might they not have hung something extra on Deep Throat, too? It was an idea that could be thought, as Ben would say. I can’t say they did. But I also won’t say they didn’t. Any prospect for proof beyond doubt died when Mark Felt lost his memory.

  I played out a couple of theories for Ben but it didn’t feel right. “That’s not the book I’m writing,” I said, and he agreed. “I know you were just standing up for the truth, and I do feel I’m on the side of the truth.”

  “Well, I appreciate your saying that,” he said. “But that’s the way I am. I wouldn’t—it’s inconceivable to me that in his preparation for all of this, to strengthen his case, he didn’t neaten things up a little. We all do that! Jesus Christ!”

  “If something was coming from here, coming from there, to put it all into one thing that’s basically right …”

  “He thinks that it is a critical and fatal attack on his integrity,” Ben said. “And I don’t think it is.… You should, I think—well, I’m not going to tell you what to do.”

  “No, but I hear you. I know what you mean.”

  “Just do it in passing. It’s just a little fact.”

  “Right. But the problem is that his reaction has made it more than something that’s in passing, you see?”

  We went back and forth again, but then Ben wanted to make something clear: “There’s nothing in it,” meaning what he’d said to Barbara in 1990, “that attacks the verity of his research.”

  “Zero.”

  “It’s just a little …”

  “A few of the bells and whistles. Were all the bells and whistles those exact bells and whistles?”

  “Where he had 90 percent,” Ben said, “he was going for 100 percent, and it’s that last lunge that drubs you.”

  We joked around for a minute or two and then walked out front to Carol’s desk. After some small talk there he dispatched me as he always does, with a backslap and his standard admonition to “keep the faith.”

  The admonition rang particularly true that day. My faith in what I was doing, and in who Ben really was, was different now. When Ben told me to follow my nose, he meant it. When he told me he wouldn’t interfere with what I was doing, he meant that, too. That hadn’t been lip service, even when following my nose struck close to home. Ben wasn’t going to back down, and he didn’t expect me to back down, either.

  I was reminded of the final moment of Ben’s interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes in August of 1974, right before Nixon resigned. Wallace tells Ben that people are going to come after the press if Nixon resigns.

  “And what can the press do about it, if anything?” Wallace asks.

  “Hunker down,” Ben says.2 “Hunker down and go about our business, which is not to be loved but to go after the truth.”

  * * *

  1 No ground rules were ever established for this meeting, which means that I am free to report what was said. I did not record it, but immediately after the meeting I wrote out a six-thousand-word memo of everything that occurred. All of the information in this section comes from that memo; as a result, a word or two in the quotations might be inexact, but the substance is correct.

  2 “HUNK-uh.”

  MOUNTAIN TOP

  K: But it was when it started to unfold, not when we were going up, nobody quite believed it then. I mean there was a lot of skepticism even among people who wanted to believe, and people weren’t that convinced we were right until it started to unfold. And then euphoria, I mean we were all on a high all the time.…

  B: We had staff meetings about overt expressions of joy. And we had a staff meeting about gloating. And a staff meeting that castration would occur if anybody mentioned impeachment.

  K: When we did it the strain we were in—it really in fact wasn’t out to get him, or gloat, it was the fact that our reporting was turning out to be visibly accurate. So I mean in fact it was not—we were, obviously we were having a great deal of satisfaction, shall we say, but …

  B: We were having a good time.

  K: Yes, yes.

  —Ben and Kay, September 20, 1990

  On January 30, 1973, G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord, the lone remaining defendants in the Watergate criminal case, were found guilty after a sixteen-day trial and ninety minutes of jury deliberation. (Hunt had already pled guilty, as had the four other burglars—who, as it turned out, were being paid by CRP to remain silent.) Though Woodstein and Seymour Hersh, of The New York Times, had reported the payoffs to the four burglars more than two weeks in advance of the verdict, the trial had come and gone without implicating anybody at the White House. The cover-up was becoming visible, but it was still working.

  What turned the tide, for the Post and for the public’s understanding of the case, was the confirmation hearings of acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III for the position of permanent director. Those hearings began on February 28, and on March 5 Gray submitted a batch of supplemental paperwork to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Included in those documents was an FBI summary of the first month of its Watergate investigation, which included allegations that officials at CRP had attempted to hinder the FBI’s investigation from the start. Whenever CRP employees were interviewed by the FBI, lawyers representing the committee had insisted on being present as well. CRP employees later revealed that they had been afraid, under those circumstances, to tell the truth.

  Also in the FBI summary, which Woodstein described in a Post story on March 6, was an acknowledgment that Hunt and Liddy had traveled around the country, “contacting former CIA employees for the purpose of setting up a security organization for the Republican Party dealing with political espionage.” As Woodstein couldn’t help but note:

  On Oct. 10, The Washington Post reported that the Watergate bugging stemmed from an
extensive undercover campaign of espionage and sabotage directed against the Democrats and conceived in the White House. The White House declined to comment on the Oct. 10 report, which described Hunt’s role in the undercover campaign, and Nixon re-election committee [sic] said the Post story was “not only fiction but a collection of absurdities.”

  The FBI had known privately what Woodstein had reported publicly and been slammed for.

  An even larger vindication for the Post came the next day. In order to answer certain complicated questions from senators on the Judiciary Committee, Gray had crafted a typewritten statement. In that statement, which Gray provided to the committee on March 7, he affirmed that Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer, had admitted to the FBI that he and Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s former appointments secretary, had arranged for the payment of more than $30,000 in campaign funds to Segretti.

  This confirmed the stories that had run in the Post immediately after the Segretti story on October 10. Now it was no longer a matter of the Post’s word versus the White House’s, as it had been since September of the previous year. Bob and Carl and Ben and everybody else at the paper might always have known they were right, but now with the help of Pat Gray they could prove it. By all accounts Ben was over the moon that day, roaming around the newsroom and declaring that Pay Gray had saved the free press.

  That morning at the White House the questioning of Ron Ziegler took a decidedly different turn. A wire service reporter asked Ziegler whether he was ready to apologize to the Post for the previous year’s denials on the stories about Kalmbach and Chapin.

  “My comments stand,” Ziegler said.

  “Are you not commenting because the White House finds this embarrassing?” a reporter asked a bit later.