All the President's Men

by Woodward, Bob

  “There has been nothing as long as I have been press secretary where we have ever involved ourselves in a program of destruction of the free press. We respect the free press. I respect the free press. I don’t respect the type of shabby journalism that is being practiced by the Washington Post, and I have stated that view to you.”

  • • •

  Lunch was nerve-racking and strained. Woodward and Bernstein were too preoccupied to discuss anything coherently, much less writing a book. If the situation was deteriorating as badly as they feared, they would probably offer their resignations to the paper. There is little demand in journalism or book publishing for discredited reporters. They hardly touched their food, and instead gulped down cup after cup of coffee.

  When the meeting ended, they stepped into the hotel’s old, oak-paneled elevator. Herbert Klein, the White House director of communications, was inside. All three stared at the floor in silence as the elevator descended. At the lobby level, Klein stepped out hurriedly and strode to a White House car waiting in the driveway.

  Bernstein and Woodward held copies of the Post over their heads as they walked back to the office in the rain.

  Wire-service summaries of Ziegler’s briefing were in their typewriter carriages when they returned. The self-confidence and ferocity of Ziegler’s attack and his flat denial of the Haldeman story were more signs that something had gone terribly wrong.

  Physically and mentally, the reporters were in no condition to deal effectively with the crisis. They were tired, frightened and confused.

  Soaked and shivering, Woodward called Sloan’s attorney again. This time he reached him and asked him to explain the meaning of his denial.

  “Your story is wrong,” Stoner said icily. “Wrong on the grand jury.”

  Woodward was at a disadvantage: he couldn’t betray Sloan’s confidence and tell Stoner that his own client had been one of the sources.

  Was Stoner certain that Sloan hadn’t named Haldeman before the grand jury? Woodward tried to say it suggestively.

  “Yes,” said Stoner. “Absolutely certain.” He anticipated the next question: “The denial is specifically addressed to your story. No, he has not said it to the FBI. No, he has not said it to any federal investigators.”

  Woodward was breaking into a cold sweat. Had the entire thing been a set-up? He had not expected antagonism from Hugh Sloan’s attorney.

  He tried another approach. Leaving aside the question of whom Sloan might have divulged it to, was the story’s essential fact correct? Did Haldeman indeed have control of the fund?

  “No comment.”

  Wasn’t that the important question?

  “No comment. I’m just not going to talk about information my client may or may not have.”

  Squirming in his chair, Woodward considered their plight. Christ, what were they going to do? He asked Stoner if he could offer any guidance that might help resolve the impasse. But Stoner wasn’t giving anything.

  Woodward directed Stoner’s attention to the Post’s repeated recognition that Sloan was not criminally involved in Watergate. It had been the first newspaper to say so. It had said explicitly that Sloan had quit his job because he was honest.

  Stoner said he appreciated that fact but Woodward sensed that the lawyer was getting impatient. Woodward needed time to think. He stalled.

  Did the Post owe Stoner’s client an apology for misrepresenting what he had told the grand jury?

  Stoner said that no apology was necessary.

  Woodward paused. Maybe he should ask if Haldeman deserved an apology. But suppose Stoner said yes. A printed apology would probably have to appear. The thought was horrible.

  Painful as the answer could turn out to be, Woodward asked if an apology to Haldeman was in order. He couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

  “No comment.”

  Woodward told Stoner that the Post had a responsibility to correct an error.

  No comment.

  If an apology was called for, it would be given. No comment.

  Woodward raised his voice to impress on Stoner how serious it was when a newspaper made a mistake.

  Finally, Stoner said he wouldn’t recommend making any apology to Bob Haldeman.

  For the first time since the radio report of the denial by Sloan’s lawyer, Woodward relaxed a little.

  He asked whether Sloan had been asked by the grand jury or investigators whether Haldeman controlled the fund.

  No comment.

  Could the FBI’s investigation have been so bad, he wondered aloud, and the grand jury’s investigation so inadequate that Sloan was never asked about Haldeman?

  No comment.

  That left them dangling, Woodward said.

  Stoner said he sympathized with their precarious position.

  Woodward couldn’t argue with that. There was nothing left to say. Both reporters were losing their composure. Woodward couldn’t contact Deep Throat until that night at the earliest. Bernstein couldn’t reach Sloan. The whole office was in limbo; a pall had descended over the newsroom. Other reporters watched silently as the tension built. Bradlee and Simons occasionally came out of their offices to tell the reporters to stay cool, touch all bases. Sussman looked agonized. Rosenfeld kept shuttling between his office and the reporters’ desks, demanding to be kept informed of every nuance as they backtracked their conversations with the sources.

  At 3:00 P.M., Bernstein and Woodward left the office to find the FBI agent who had confirmed the Haldeman story two nights before. They found him in a corridor outside his office. Bernstein approached him and attempted to ask if the reporters had misunderstood.

  “I’m not talking to you,” the agent said, backing away.

  Bernstein moved toward him as the agent backpedaled in the corridor. Inexplicably, the agent seemed to be smiling. This was no fucking joke, Bernstein told him. The agent turned and walked quickly to the end of the corridor, then turned down another.

  Bernstein and Woodward had already determined their course of action. If the agent didn’t stand by his remarks, they were going to talk to his boss and demand an explanation. It now seemed clear that Sloan had not told either the FBI or the grand jury about Haldeman.

  Bernstein waited a moment, then ran after the agent and cornered him in the hallway. This was a deadly serious business, he told him, not some G-man version of hide and seek. They wanted some answers—immediately. Woodward walked up and joined the discussion. He was holding a folded copy of notes typed from Bernstein’s conversation with the agent. It was time for some straight answers or the matter would be taken up with his boss, Woodward told the agent.

  The agent was no longer smiling. He looked panicked. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said. “I’ll deny everything. I’ll deny everything.”

  Woodward unfolded his copy of the notes and showed them to the agent. They didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, he said. They just needed to know what, if any, error they had made. And they needed to know that minute.

  “I’m not talking to you about Haldeman or anything else,” the agent said. “I can’t even be seen talking to you two bastards.”

  Bernstein tried to calm him. Something had gotten screwed up, and they needed to know what; there was no reason to suspect each other of being devious or acting in bad faith.

  The agent was sweating, his hands were trembling. “Fuck you,” he said and walked into his office.

  The reporters spotted one of the agent’s superiors in the hallway. Their next move represented the most difficult professional—unprofessional, really—decision either had ever made. They were going to blow a confidential source. Neither had ever done it before; both knew instinctively that they were wrong. But they justified it. They suspected they had been set up; their anger was reasonable, their self-preservation was at stake, they told each other.

  Bernstein and Woodward walked over to the agent’s superior and shook hands. The three of them needed to go somewhere and talk, Woodward
said.

  What was the problem?

  The reporters told him about Bernstein’s telephone conversation with the agent concerning Haldeman. Both had been on the line. Woodward showed him the typed notes.

  The man read them hurriedly. They could see his anger building. “You realize that it’s against the law for one person to monitor a call that goes across a state line,” he told them.

  The reporters said they would readily accept the consequences if they had violated the law. But the immediate issue was Haldeman and whether they had been wrong.

  The superior marched off without saying another word.

  In a few minutes, the agent came rushing down the hall toward the reporters. “I’m ordering you two to stay in this building,” he said, pointing and waving a finger in the air. “You’re not to leave.”

  As he went racing off, Bernstein and Woodward agreed that the agent had no authority to order them to stay in the building unless he arrested them. They decided they had better call Sussman and get some advice. Woodward thought it might be a good idea to get a lawyer to join them.

  They walked out of the building to a pay phone across the street and called Sussman. He suggested that they return to the Post, observing that it was absurd that the agent should order them around. “Did he arrest you?” Sussman asked. Bernstein said no. Rosenfeld was on the line too, calling the agent various names and saying they would teach him not to dick around with the Washington Post.

  The reporters decided to ignore the advice and went back to the agent’s boss. Maybe there was a way to straighten it out. He was in his office. A secretary admitted them at once. The boss sat behind a large desk; the agent stood next to him. His superior ordered the agent to leave. “Now, exactly what is this all about?” he asked as the door closed.

  Unless they could determine the accuracy or inaccuracy of the Haldeman story, they might have to use the name of any source who had knowingly misled them. They were obliged to defend themselves. They wanted to know if the agent had purposely given them false information.

  More important, Bernstein said, they had to know how they had made such a mistake. They still did not understand. Was Haldeman one of the five, or wasn’t he? Had Sloan said he was, or hadn’t he? They thought that their problem was not the substance of the report, but the mention of Sloan’s grand-jury testimony.

  “We’re not discussing the case,” the boss said.

  The reporters tried again. If they were wrong, a correction and an apology were required. Whom should they apologize to? What should they say?

  “You’re getting no answers from here,” the man said.

  Half an hour later, the reporters were in Bradlee’s office again, with Sussman, Rosenfeld and Simons.

  “What happened?” Bradlee asked, leaning over his desk and extending upturned hands toward Bernstein and Woodward. They explained that they still did not know.

  Woodward observed that they had the option of naming their sources because any agreement with a source was broken if he had given bad information. Rosenfeld was unsure. Bernstein was against it.

  Bradlee signaled for quiet. “You’re not even sure whether you’ve got it right or wrong.” He was agitated, but displayed no anger. “Suppose you name sources—they’ll just deny it and then where are you? Look, fellas, we don’t name our sources. We’re not going to start doing that.”

  Bernstein felt relieved. Rosenfeld looked dispirited, but stayed calm. He suggested going back to each one, talking with Deep Throat and Sloan and anyone else they could find. Then, in a day or two, they could see where they were.

  The reporters said they were virtually certain that Sloan must not have given testimony about Haldeman before the grand jury. Woodward suggested writing that much, at least, and acknowledging their error.

  Bradlee grimaced. “You don’t know where you are. You haven’t got the facts. Hold your water for a while. I don’t know whether we should believe Sloan’s attorney even now. We’re going to wait to see how this shakes out.”

  Bradlee then turned to his typewriter to write a statement for all the news organizations that had been calling that afternoon for a comment. The two-ply paper flew through his typewriter and onto the floor like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie. After a number of false starts, he issued the following statement: “We stand by our story.”*

  • • •

  Bernstein and Woodward sat tight and didn’t do a story for the next day. But others did. Many papers which had not carried the Haldeman story gave prominent notice to the White House’s denial. Ben Bagdikian later wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that “the first information readers of the Chicago Tribune received of the Post’s Haldeman story was not the morning it broke . . . but the next day on page 7, under the headline ‘Ziegler Denounces Post Spy Stories, Denies Link.’ ”

  Peter Osnos, who had recently returned to Washington from a tour as the Post’s Vietnam correspondent, put together a front-page story on the statement by Sloan’s attorney and the White House denial.

  At 8:45 P.M., Bernstein finally reached Hugh Sloan by telephone. Bernstein explained their dilemma: they realized they were in error, but they weren’t sure where.

  Sloan was sympathetic. “The problem is that I do not agree with your conclusions as you wrote them.”

  * He was later to recall: “I issued two statements in that one year—both on Watergate. . . . Geez, what options did I really have? By this time I was up the river with these two reporters. I can remember sitting down at the typewriter and writing about thirty statements and then sort of saying, ‘Fuck it, let’s go stand by our boys.’ ”

  Haldeman had indeed controlled the fund, but the matter had not come up in the grand jury, right?

  “Bob Haldeman’s name has never come up in my interviews with the grand jury. Our denial is strictly limited to your story. It just isn’t factually true. I never said it before the grand jury. I was never asked. I’m not trying to influence your pursuit of the story. The denial was strictly low-key, purposely low-key.”

  Sloan’s message seemed clear, though not explicit. Haldeman had controlled the fund; the matter had not come up during his grand-jury testimony. Either the reporters had misunderstood what Sloan had told them about the grand jury earlier that week or Sloan had misinterpreted their question.

  The telephone conversation with Sloan was at least a hopeful sign; if the reporters could re-establish beyond any doubt that Haldeman controlled the fund, and could explain the error, their credibility might not be totally destroyed. Bernstein and Woodward were exhausted. They tried to analyze the steps that had led them to such a monumental blunder.

  They had assumed too much. Persuaded by their sources, and by their own deductions, that Haldeman loomed behind “Watergate,” they had grasped a slim reed—the secret fund. The decision had some justification. The Nixon campaign’s cash had been the tangible key that had unlocked the secret activities. But they had taken shortcuts once they had themselves come to be convinced that Haldeman controlled the fund. They had heard what they wanted to hear. The night Sloan confirmed that Haldeman was one of the five, they had not even asked whether Haldeman had exercised his authority, whether he had actually approved any payments. They had not asked Sloan specifically what he had been asked before the grand jury, or what his response had been. Once Sloan mentioned the magic words, they had left and not called back. They had not asked him to say it again, to be sure they understood each other. In dealing with the FBI agent, they had compounded their mistakes. Bernstein’s questioning had been perfunctory. He should have attempted to get the agent to mention the name himself, in his own context. If the agent had failed to do so, then the confirmation route might have been acceptable. The Haldeman-Ehrlichman mix-up should have served as a warning that the agent might have been saying more than he knew. Bernstein’s ruse of accusing the FBI of ineptitude in order to provoke the agent had been bad judgment. Bernstein had not dealt with the agent enough to know how reliable he
was, or how he would react.

  They had realized that confronting the agent’s boss was unethical as soon as they had done it. They had endangered the agent’s career, betrayed his trust and risked their credibility with other sources.

  There were other miscalculations. Bernstein should not have used the silent confirm-or-hang-up method with the Justice Department lawyer. The instructions were too complicated. (Indeed, they learned, the attorney had gotten the instructions backward and had meant to warn them off the story.) With Deep Throat, Woodward had placed too much faith in a code for confirmation, instead of accepting only a clear statement.

  • • •

  The next afternoon, October 26, several hours after Henry Kissinger met with the press in the White House to declare that “peace is at hand” in Southeast Asia, Clark MacGregor entered the Washington studios of the National Public Affairs Center for Television to be interviewed. From the administration’s point of view, it was a perfect opportunity to adjust its public posture to hard realities and correct some of the misstatements that might haunt the White House later, particularly since anything MacGregor said would be overshadowed by Kissinger’s announcement.

  MacGregor confirmed the existence of a CRP cash fund for clandestine activities, though he quarreled with the term “secret” and insisted that disbursements from the fund had not knowingly been spent for illegal activities. He maintained that the money in Stans’ safe had been used to determine if there were organized efforts to sabotage Nixon’s primary campaign. He named five persons who had authorized or received payments: Mitchell, Stans, Magruder, Porter and Liddy.

  MacGregor’s remarks seemed to salvage some of the credibility the reporters had lost in the Haldeman debacle. The day before, Ziegler had denied the fund’s existence.

  Bradlee ruled it off page one, which already had another Watergate story. “That would look like we’re grinding it in on their day of peace at-hand,” Bradlee told Woodward, who had been lobbying for the front page.