The muckraker tried to persuade Sturgis not to become further involved in White House criminality. He warned that Nixon’s men were “trying to protect themselves at your expense”—that Sturgis was “being taken for a ride”—and that he had a “duty to his country, [a] duty to his family,” not to go silently to jail. The burglar was shaken by Anderson’s plea but also realized that “Jack was looking for a scoop.” Sturgis returned to his meeting downstairs. For hours, the conspirators argued passionately about what to do. After midnight, Hunt finally persuaded them “to follow orders like good soldiers” and stick together, “one for all and all for one.”
Four days later, the Watergate burglars pled guilty to the charges against them. Like Hunt, they falsely testified that no higher-ups had been involved in the break-in, that they had operated entirely on their own and were not being pressured or paid for their silence.
Jack Anderson knew better. But he had promised Sturgis that he would protect this secret and did not publish it. On January 14, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story: the burglars were being regularly paid in laundered funds that apparently came from Nixon’s campaign. The article freed Anderson to report that Hunt was funneling one thousand dollars a month to the conspirators as hush money.
Judge Sirica was incensed. It was embarrassingly clear that the burglars were taking the blame to protect those above them, committing perjury to cover up an ongoing criminal conspiracy. But for now, the judge was powerless to stop the obvious farce taking place in his courtroom. The Watergate cover-up was continuing to hold.
16
DISGRACE
On January 20, 1973, Richard Nixon took the presidential oath for the last time, smiling broadly and giving crowds his familiar V-for-victory salute. Without irony, the President pledged to “restore respect for law” and, in an obvious echo of his late rival John F. Kennedy, proclaimed: “Ask not just what will government do for me, but what can I do for myself?”
Four days later, the Nixon administration launched its long-awaited plan to prosecute Jack Anderson. It was triggered by an FBI informant who passed on an outlandish rumor that the columnist was about to pay $100,000 to $200,000 for stolen government records about federal mistreatment of Native Americans. In fact, the “Merry-Go-Round” had been reporting about this subject for weeks, thanks to leaks from militants who had filched thousands of files from the Bureau of Indian Affairs during a takeover of its Washington headquarters two months earlier. “Day after day we published stories pieced together from these documents,” Anderson wrote, and “I occasionally yielded to the temptation to make sport of the tribulations of the FBI, whose agents were tripping over their nightsticks in a dozen states, and had gotten no closer to the Indian documents than the quotations they read in our column.” The administration was not amused and soon set a trap to try to catch Anderson as he received more classified records.
On the morning of January 31, barely a mile from the White House, a squad of FBI agents surprised Anderson’s reporter Les Whitten as he helped his Indian sources load three boxes of documents into his yellow Vega hatchback. “Oh my God,” Whitten exclaimed, “police!” The agents “came swarming out of neighboring cars and doorways like ants from a rotten log,” Whitten recalled. “I was scared totally and completely shitless.” He was arrested and handcuffed—his pen and reporter’s pad confiscated—and driven downtown to be fingerprinted and booked.
The Nixon Justice Department charged Whitten with possession of stolen government documents, the felony indictment that the President had long wanted to file against Anderson himself. If convicted, Whitten could be behind bars for a decade. “They were out to get Jack in their net,” Anderson’s legman realized, “but instead of getting the big fish, they got the little fish: me.” For five hours, in a suit and trench coat, Whitten sat in jail on a hard bench. His two Indian informants were also locked up on the same charges.
Anderson hurried to the federal courthouse in downtown Washington. As Whitten was arraigned, Anderson became so angry that he stood up to address the presiding magistrate. “Be quiet,” his lawyer whispered, “you’ll get us in more trouble.” The columnist silently sat down. Afterward, on the steps of the courthouse, Anderson was less restrained and thunderously denounced the arrest as an “outrageous violation of the First Amendment . . . Never in my 25 years in Washington has the government gone to such lengths to block the free flow of information to the public . . . All of us on my staff are ready to join Les Whitten in jail, if we must, before we will stop digging out and reporting the news.”
The media naturally swarmed to a story about the jailing of one of its own. u.s. arrests aide of jack anderson, the New York Post blared in a banner headline that filled nearly half of its front page. One Chicago editor condemned Whitten’s arrest as “awful,” another as “very dangerous.” The “FBI is conducting a vendetta against Anderson,” a Wisconsin newspaper warned. Journalists began wearing “Free Les Whitten” buttons. Herblock, the syndicated cartoonist, drew a sketch of Whitten in handcuffs surrounded by FBI agents who reported to their boss: “Great news, chief! We’ve got the cuffs on one of Jack Anderson’s men.”
The criminal charges were undeniably newsworthy. After all, the federal government was prosecuting the press not for publishing confidential documents but merely for receiving them, a new and far more draconian method of going after media critics. Even in the Pentagon Papers case—which involved serious questions of national security—criminal charges were filed only against those who leaked the documents, not the reporters who received them. In effect, Nixon’s men were moving to criminalize unauthorized disclosures to journalists.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats denounced the arrest. Senator Edmund Muskie warned that the “administration has opened up a new front in its campaign against the First Amendment.” Another lawmaker stated that the Nixon Justice Department “has achieved the censor’s dream: it has found the means to strike at the dynasty of muckrakers.” Anderson and Whitten were invited to testify at congressional hearings.
Meanwhile, the columnist decided to pursue a novel legal strategy. He made a lunch date with Interior Secretary Rogers Morton, whose department oversaw the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and turned on the charm. “You’ve done more for the Indians than any Interior secretary in history,” Anderson crooned. “If you could slip me some confidential memos on what you’ve done, I could write a credible story.” Morton fell for the flattery and handed over a government document containing the same low-level classification as the files Whitten was holding when he was arrested. “Rogers Morton is going to make a great witness for the defense,” Anderson told his staff after the luncheon. The muckraker’s strategy was to undercut the administration by making any prosecution for receiving confidential documents seem selective and arbitrary.
But before Anderson could even make this argument in court, the facts in the government’s case started to unravel. Whitten’s source, a mild-mannered Sioux lawyer with horn-rimmed glasses named Hank Adams, had always insisted that he was on his way to return the stolen papers when FBI agents arrested him and that he had invited Whitten along simply to cover the event as a news story. FBI officials had dismissed this “lame story,” but the government was now forced to admit that Adams had indeed scheduled an appointment with federal officials for the very morning he was arrested with Whitten. Furthermore, the boxes of documents turned out to have been marked with the name and phone number of the FBI agent to whom they were to be delivered and Adams produced a receipt signed by the same FBI agent for other stolen records that he had recently returned to the government.
This new evidence destroyed the FBI’s case and seemed proof that Whitten’s arrest was a setup. “Would one of the most sophisticated reporters in town be carting around stolen documents in the street in broad daylight if he were engaged in some clandestine activity?” The Washington Post asked. The FBI’s “undercover agent knew the documents were in Mr. Adams’ apartment” the night bef
ore the arrest, the Post pointed out, so “why did the FBI wait until Mr. Whitten was there to spring the trap?” Because the FBI’s real objective was to arrest the legman during the short window when the records were in his presence before being returned to the government. “If they really thought they had a case,” Anderson observed, “obviously they would have followed [Whitten] and waited until he put [the papers] in his house or brought them to my office, but they knew” the documents were already “on the way” back to the government, “so they arrested” him first while they still could.
On February 14, Anderson testified before a federal grand jury and swore under oath that he never paid money for the leaked files. The irascible columnist astonished the panel with a little reverse psychology by begging the grand jurors to prosecute his legman: “He was just doing his job, I said, and we were prepared to go to trial. The government doesn’t own the news, I told them, adding that I didn’t think any jury in the United States would disagree with that. I was ready to win a court fight that would set a precedent and make sure no one ever did this to a reporter again.”
The next day, the grand jurors took the unusual step of throwing out the FBI arrests. Prosecutors had to drop all charges against Whitten and his sources. A “Merry-Go-Round” party celebrating the legal triumph was covered in the society pages of the press. FBI officials were disgusted. Anderson had “manipulated the situation beautifully,” Deputy Director Mark Felt complained, “wrapping himself in a cloak of martyrdom” as he “played his ‘injured innocence’ role to the hilt.”
But the Nixon administration found a way to exploit its bungled case by secretly subpoenaing Anderson’s telephone records, which then made it possible for the government to trace his confidential informants. In all, the FBI obtained paperwork of more than three thousand calls made from Anderson’s office and home and rushed them by Telex to twenty-three field offices around the country; agents then contacted the newsman’s sources demanding to know why they were talking to him. Anderson soon found out and denounced the government for using his legman’s “false arrest” as a “pretext” to “get a court order to pry into our telephone calls” in a “massive FBI investigation into our operations.” Anderson also filed a motion in federal court, where Judge John Sirica—already suspicious of the Nixon administration’s Watergate cover-up—expressed incredulity that the FBI insisted on holding on to Anderson’s phone records when Whitten’s arrest had already been dropped. The judge ordered the government to destroy the Anderson phone logs.
The columnist was convinced that the White House was to blame for his legal difficulties. Anderson accused White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman of issuing a secret order to “nail” him by having federal prosecutors “make a case against us.” Nixon press secretary Ronald Ziegler adamantly denied the charge, calling it “wrong, wrong, wrong.” But the newsman insisted that one of his sources had witnessed Haldeman picking up the phone and instructing authorities to “pin a crime on Anderson. When asked what crime,” the reporter wrote, “Haldeman asked the FBI to find one.”
Anderson held acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray personally responsible and decided to make an example of Nixon’s nominee. Abandoning any pretense of objectivity, the muckraker lobbied senators to oppose Gray’s confirmation as permanent FBI director. Anderson invited himself to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he denounced Gray as “a political hatchetman for Richard Nixon” whose “prime interest” was not law enforcement but “pleasing the President.”
Anderson even blackmailed a key legislator, Senate Majority Whip Robert Byrd, when he initially expressed reluctance to oppose Gray. “Bobby,” Anderson told the West Virginia senator, “I’ve got more newspapers in West Virginia than Pat Gray has.” The “message was clear; if I ever found any dirt on him, I had an audience in his home state that would love to read about it. There was a pause and then he said, ‘All right. What do you want me to do?’ ” The influential Byrd agreed to lead the opposition to Gray. Armed with questions supplied by Anderson, Byrd exposed Gray’s complicity in the Watergate cover-up. Nixon’s nominee for FBI director had to resign.
Anderson was not gracious in victory. “Pat,” he told Gray, “do your successor a favor. Tell him that the reason you were never confirmed as head of the FBI was because you sent one of Jack Anderson’s reporters to jail.”
In March 1973, Judge John Sirica handed down maximum prison sentences for the Watergate conspirators: twenty years for Gordon Liddy, thirty-five for Howard Hunt, and forty for each of the individual burglars. Faced with such lengthy confinement, wiretapper James McCord broke his silence and implicated higher-ups, who in turn did the same, one by one connecting top officials of the Nixon White House to the criminal conspiracy. The appointment of a special prosecutor and aggressive hearings by the Democratic Congress, armed with subpoena power, eventually overwhelmed the President and his men. A news frenzy ensued, fueled by leaks from all sides as the media became Washington’s unofficial back channel for communication. Journalists passed on intelligence to government investigators, who reciprocated in turn. “I leaked all the time,” Senate counsel Sam Dash later acknowledged. “Everybody did.” The drama played out in the nation’s daily newspapers and broadcasts.
It was a heady time for the handful of reporters who had focused on Watergate when the rest of the media had dismissed it. Once hunted by the Nixon administration, they were now the hunters, and it was the President’s men who had become the prey. Jack Anderson received “jubilant” calls from Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who met separately with Seymour Hersh of The New York Times to exchange encouragement and gossip. During an animated dinner of Chinese food punctuated by marijuana smoke, the three young newsmen made a pact to build on, rather than ignore, each others’ Watergate stories. After one “Woodstein” scoop, the Times reporter phoned to offer sarcastic kudos to his Post competitors: “You fucker,” Hersh yelled at Woodward, “you fucker!”
Pushed off his perch by his new rivals, Anderson unsuccessfully tried to reach back to old-fashioned investigative techniques from his past. He had his staff rifle through the trash of Watergate prosecutors, but it yielded nothing of value, despite painstaking efforts to piece together the shredded paperwork. At the same time, an Anderson legman tried to eavesdrop on the secret testimony of a Nixon aide by pressing a stethoscope to an adjacent wall, but even boring a hole through the barrier was not enough to make the muffled sounds audible. Anderson’s staff also dispatched a handsome college intern to a well-placed bar to “try romancing” potential female sources who “like to drink a lot and screw.” That failed as well. When a Watergate conspirator sought money from Anderson to tell his story, the columnist turned him down, but he got sucked in by another Nixon advisor who successfully peddled disinformation exonerating himself while heaping blame on his White House rivals. Eventually, Anderson even published a column suggesting that the President had a secret Swiss bank account where he received “mysterious” cash payments, although no credible evidence ever emerged to back up the allegation.
In any event, the bank that most interested Senate investigators was not in Switzerland but in Florida: the Key Biscayne Bank, run by Nixon’s best friend, Bebe Rebozo. Anderson had already disclosed that Rebozo had squirreled away $100,000 in cash there for the President from Howard Hughes. Now Anderson learned that portions of the money had been secretly funneled to Nixon’s brothers and secretary. This sensitive information came from a longtime informant, a lawyer who was now representing one of the President’s fund-raisers. But the columnist couldn’t report the story without burning his source, who was bound to secrecy by attorney-client privilege. What to do? Anderson passed the intelligence to the Senate Watergate Committee, which subpoenaed Nixon’s fund-raiser and confirmed that the Hughes cash was spent on diamond earrings for the First Lady and on improvements at the Nixon family’s Florida vacation home. But before Anderson could publish the blockbuster story in his
column, Bob Woodward reported it in The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, in a desperate effort to contain the growing Watergate scandal, the President offered to share some of this secret cash with his top advisors, to help pay their legal bills. Once again, Nixon turned to hush money, using the very same slush fund that had gotten him in trouble in the first place. “It was not the amount of money” that was the main problem, one writer realized. “It wasn’t even that it was dirty money. It was the very fact that it was Hughes money, the kind of money Nixon had been caught with before, the kind of money that had once cost him the White House. In a desperate effort to keep it from happening again, he had made it happen again.” The President’s paranoia had become self-fulfilling.
For a quarter century, Jack Anderson had fueled Richard Nixon’s fury more than any other journalist. But as Nixon’s presidency crumbled, the crusading columnist struggled to break news about his longtime enemy. “Jack’s column in these months had some important Watergate stories,” Brit Hume said, “but he did not lead the way, as he had on so many other stories about government misdeeds. All at once, though, Jack caught up. And in so doing, he got himself into a jam far more ominous than any he had ever been in before.”
In April 1973, Anderson published a series of columns that quoted extensively from transcripts of secret testimony before the Watergate grand jury. Although Anderson trumpeted his “revelations” as “startling,” their substance was comparatively unimportant because most of the key facts had already been reported elsewhere through verbal leaks to other journalists. Still, the fact that Anderson had obtained a copy of the closely guarded transcripts was startling, because these minutes were so sensitive that authorities kept them locked under tight security. Extraordinarily few people had access to the documents—only prosecutors and the clerks who recorded the minutes in the first place—and under the law, it was a crime to divulge them. Court personnel rushed to compare their transcripts with what was published in the “Merry-Go-Round,” the FBI reported, and “determined they were identical, even down to the punctuation”—from ungrammatical questions posed by grand jurors to stammering answers from witnesses. The government was forced to acknowledge publicly that the Anderson minutes were indeed authentic.
Poisoning The Press Page 37
