Scout 249, the closest marked police unit to the scene, was low on gas, so the call at the Watergate fell to Cruiser 727, a set of plainclothes cops. A few minutes later they arrived at the Watergate and went inside. The spotter who was part of the criminal operation saw this from his post at the Howard Johnson motel across the street, but he didn’t realize at first that the plainclothes cops were police. It wasn’t until they were upstairs and turning the lights on in the offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters with their guns drawn that the spotter realized what had happened, and by then it was too late.
At 2:30 that morning, the intruders were arrested. The police had been expecting a bunch of kids looking for dope money, not five men in business suits and rubber gloves who were as scared as they were. In the burglars’ possession were a walkie-talkie, two cameras and forty rolls of unexposed film, lock-picks, bugging devices, tiny tear-gas guns, and roughly $2,300 in cash, most of it in sequential $100 bills. This was not your average break-in.
As the first details about the case seeped out in the Post and other papers, it was clear from the CIA connections that it was a story but it wasn’t at all clear just how far up the chain it would go. At the time, Nixon was well ahead in the polls and he and the men around him were seen as reputable, competent people who couldn’t possibly have been involved in such an inept and low-yield operation. Even Bernstein didn’t think it went all the way to Nixon yet.
Day by day, week by week, Bob and Carl and the other reporters on the staff kept digging up little pieces of information: before Watergate, Howard Hunt had “showed a special interest” in Teddy Kennedy;7 Bernard Barker, one of the burglars, had tried to acquire the plans for the Miami Beach convention hall where the Democratic convention was to be held later that year. The Post, like other papers, referred to the whole situation as the “Watergate caper,” connoting frivolity and harmlessness, nothing more than political fun and games. Everybody was pecking around the edges, following the scent of possible dirty tricks, but nobody knew what the whole story was. Toward the end of July, Woodward went on vacation, and Bernstein went back to covering the Virginia legislature.
Two developments got everybody going again. The first was that Newsday, an afternoon paper on Long Island, reported that G. Gordon Liddy, a finance lawyer for CRP, had been fired by campaign manager (and former attorney general) John Mitchell in June for having refused to answer questions from the FBI about Watergate. Liddy would eventually be indicted for his role in the Watergate burglary; this was the first shoe dropping. The second development was that Walter Rugaber of The New York Times wrote two stories that opened up the money trail. On July 25, he reported that Miami telephones listed under the name of Bernard Barker had placed at least fifteen phone calls to CRP, more than half of which had been placed between March and June.
Howard Simons had been following all of this closely, and when he saw the Times story he was upset. He marched across the newsroom to Barry Sussman’s desk with the Times in his hand and asked him, point-blank, “Why didn’t we have that?” He wanted Sussman to put two reporters on the case, full time, a small Watergate desk. Woodward was an obvious choice; Bernstein, less so. Later that day, when Sussman told Simons that he wanted to assign Bernstein as the other reporter, Simons is reported to have screamed.
After some digging on the phone, Carl discovered that the Dade County state’s attorney had subpoenaed some of the burglars’ Miami records as part of his own investigation to see if any state laws had been broken. The prosecutor referred Bernstein to his chief investigator, who said that in addition to the telephone logs he also had some of Barker’s bank records. Bernstein made a date to come down a few days later to look at them. Before he could get there, Rugaber got there, and on July 31 The New York Times reported that four cashier’s checks issued from the Banco Internacional in Mexico City had been deposited in Barker’s account in April, the same account from which the burglars had drawn their serially consecutive $100 bills. Rugaber didn’t know what it meant, other than that perhaps the Nixon campaign had been laundering money through Mexico to conceal the identity of some of its contributors.
Bernstein was already on his way down to Miami the day that Rugaber’s second story ran in the Times. He read it on the airplane. When he landed, figuring the Times had them beat, he called Sussman and asked if he should stay in Miami or go on to Mexico City. Sussman told him to stay, arguably the most important decision made by any Post editor during the initial phase of Watergate. Bernstein’s scheduled visit with the investigator later that afternoon uncovered a $25,000 check from a man named Kenneth H. Dahlberg that had also found its way into Barker’s account. (Rugaber had seen that check but hadn’t known what to make of it; the Mexican angle seemed the more promising one.)
Bernstein called the details of Dahlberg’s check in to Woodward, and Woodward did some sleuthing. The Post librarian found a picture of a man named Kenneth H. Dahlberg standing next to Hubert Humphrey, the former vice president and senator from Minnesota, so on a chance Woodward contacted directory assistance in Minneapolis and asked for a number for Kenneth H. Dahlberg. When he received one he called it, and Dahlberg himself answered. After a few quick questions, Bob asked about the check.
“I turn all my money over to the committee,” Dahlberg told Bob, in reference to CRP. “I’m a proper citizen, what I do is proper.” Dahlberg hung up and then called back through the Post’s main switchboard, just to make sure Woodward was actually a Post reporter, and then he revealed that he served as the Midwest campaign finance chairman for Nixon. At a meeting in Washington, Dahlberg had personally turned the check over to the treasurer of the committee, Hugh Sloan, or to Maurice Stans, the committee’s finance chairman.
That night, Bob wrote the story for the front page. “Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds,” the headline read on August 1, with this lede: “A $25,000 cashier’s check, apparently earmarked for the campaign chest of President Nixon, was deposited in April in a bank account of one of the five men arrested in the break-in and alleged bugging attempt at Democratic National Committee headquarters here June 17.”
Bernstein had found the money.
The August 1 story was a turning point. It’s also the best concrete example of the Post’s direct influence on the machinery of government and the inquiries that would lead to Nixon’s resignation. Critics of the Post often claim that the paper didn’t do anything but print leaked details of the investigation, but that isn’t true. In some instances the Post’s reporting was the impetus for the investigation itself—no small feat—and this August 1 story is a prime example. On the day the story ran, Philip Hughes, the director of the Federal Elections Division of the General Accounting Office, declared that the GAO was going to conduct a full audit of CRP’s finances. He explicitly cited the Post’s reporting as the basis for his audit request.
On August 2, Woodward wrote a follow-up story about the GAO on his own but decided to put Carl’s byline on the story alongside his. The story noted, with some satisfaction, that the GAO audit had been undertaken “because of an article in yesterday’s Washington Post.” Up until then, the two reporters had been jealously protecting their own information and suspiciously eyeing the other guy, wondering if he would try to run off with the story. As of August 1, that was over, at least in a formal sense. Nearly every Watergate story that either man worked on for the rest of the paper’s coverage of the scandal would carry the names of both men.
The difficulty with Watergate from the start—in terms of reporting, but also in terms of making the story understandable and compelling to an average reader—was how complex it was. That’s a big part of why it played out the way it did, how it could stay on the back burner for weeks and then, as the pieces fell into place, suddenly boil over. You can see why, particularly in August and September of 1972, Carl and Bob had the story mostly to themselves.
Take that August 1 story. It had the general outlines, but you couldn’t prove causal relationships
. As it happened, Dahlberg’s check hadn’t actually directly funded Watergate. His check had been converted to cash because the CRP finance people were trying to avoid a new April 7 reporting deadline on campaign contributions and were simply using Barker as a conduit. On August 9, Bob and Carl ran a story on the front page of the Post, “Stans Denies GOP Money Funded Watergate Break-In,” providing this very explanation. The August 1 story had been right and wrong at the same time, right on the substance but wrong on the implication. These kinds of things happened all the time.
On August 12, Carl and Bob ran a standard process story about the civil suit that the Democratic National Committee had filed against the burglars for invasion of privacy—yet another confusing aspect of Watergate. The civil suit was brought by Lawrence O’Brien, the chairman of the DNC, and sought $1 million in monetary damages for invasion of privacy as a result of the bugging. The discovery process for that case was public at first, except as it pertained to the criminal investigation … which was essentially impossible to determine.8 The deeper point is that there were parallel investigations, criminal and civil, which meant that there were a number of people digging around who were occasionally willing to share tidbits with inquisitive reporters. The August 12 story was otherwise unremarkable except for one significant feature: up until then, all of the jumps for the Watergate stories had been labeled either “Bugging” or “Incident.” (“See INCIDENT, A8.”) That morning, a new jump appeared, and would appear for the duration: “See WATERGATE, A7, Col. 1.” The scandal had a name.
The rest of August was a slow, steady drip. On August 22, Woodstein reported that the GAO had discovered violations in the handling of nearly $500,000 in campaign contributions and expenditures at CRP. The story was notable because it was the first appearance of the term “slush funds,” which would become so important in September and October. That same day, the Republican Party nominated Richard Nixon for a second term as president of the United States.
A week later, on August 29, Nixon held a press conference at the Western White House (his home in San Clemente, California), where he rejected requests from Democrats for a special prosecutor. He referred to an internal (nonexistent) investigation run by White House counsel John Dean and claimed, “I can say categorically that his investigation indicates that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” He was lying through his teeth. “What really hurts in matters of this sort,” he went on, “is not the fact that they occur, because overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong. What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.”
* * *
1 Upon hearing McCord mention the CIA, Bob said “Holy shit” out loud to himself, the first of many.
2 Either the burglars or the reporters had the order of Hunt’s name wrong. He was actually E. Howard Hunt, the “E” standing for Everette.
3 Bob later told an interviewer that Hunt had an “ ‘I’m packing my bags’ quality to his voice that I’ve never heard before really in my life.”
4 All the President’s Men has supplied the basic narrative structure of the Post’s involvement in Watergate ever since it was published in 1974. I can’t fault Ben too much, given that I have also relied heavily on that book—in large part because Ben, Bob, and Carl all referred me to it when they couldn’t remember things. In the endnotes that accompany this book online, I have been careful to cite every specific instance in which I’ve quoted from All the President’s Men, but in some ways it’s impossible to cite the determinative role that that book has played in nearly every account of Watergate since its publication.
5 The Watergate complex is a set of five modernist buildings in downtown Washington, D.C., overlooking the Potomac River. There are three apartment buildings, an office building, and a joint hotel/office building. The DNC headquarters were on the sixth floor of the joint hotel/office building; the burglars stayed at the hotel.
6 This was so colossally stupid that the FBI, according to Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, suspected that there had been double agents involved—i.e., that somebody within the bugging team itself might have wanted the team to get caught.
7 Woodstein’s story initially alleged that “Howard Hunt conducted an investigation” into Kennedy; Ben, in his famous walk across the newsroom that introduces him in the film version of All the President’s Men, forced them to change it to “showed a special interest.” As it turned out, their story was correct, and Ben had toned it down and knocked it off page one out of what Bernstein perceived to be loyalty to the Kennedys. When they reminded Ben of this fact after their reporting had been proven to be correct, he admitted, “You bastards have got me now.”
8 On August 22, Judge Charles Richey decided to seal all pretrial testimony in the civil case, to protect the rights of people who might later be charged in the criminal case; Edward Bennett Williams represented Lawrence O’Brien and the DNC. “I don’t remember a conversation I had with Williams in which I didn’t thank him for the deposition that he just sent over,” Ben once said of the period after the depositions were sealed. “I said, ‘We’re missing page seventy-eight on the Mitchell deposition.’ Always said that. He’d say, ‘Fuck you.’ ”
GO
So there came a time when it seems to me, not to be conceited about it, but where I made all the decisions. And that wasn’t initially, but there came a time, and why or when, I don’t know, I’d have to reflect on it.
—BCB memoir interview, May 16, 1990
Ben has sometimes claimed that he was “hooked” on the Watergate story as early as June 20, when he heard about Hunt’s “Good God!” and the switchboard operator. But it wasn’t until Carl found Ken Dahlberg’s check in Miami that Ben really started to clue in to how big the Watergate story could be. (Still: Ben wasn’t in the office when the big August 1 story ran. He was on a three-week vacation at his country place in West Virginia and wouldn’t return to the paper until the middle of August.)
As the story grew, Ben naturally began to take more of an interest in the reporting. The National staff of the paper, where all the hotshots worked—people like Haynes Johnson, David Broder, Dick Harwood, Jim Hoagland, and Bill Greider—was Ben’s bailiwick. Those were the people he cultivated, the group he had worked so hard to build when he first came over to the paper, and he saw them as an extension of himself. As a rule Ben didn’t spend much time attending to the Metro staff. “They were the lords of the manor,” Metro editor Harry Rosenfeld told me, of the National staff, “and we were the field hands.”
“You never know when you make a decision what you know when you’re going to sit back and reflect [on it],” Ben told Bob and Carl in their private interview in the summer of 1973. “I suspect if I had known on July 17, or June 17, the play of this story … you guys would have been lucky to have a hunk of it. And I would have been wrong, but there is no way I could have made any other decision.”
One of the great accidents of luck and timing with regard to the Watergate story, from an internal Post perspective, is that Ben stayed out of the direct management of the coverage for as long as he did. Had he come in earlier, he would no doubt have insisted on putting one of his heavy hitters on the story. But nobody on the National staff was willing to work as hard, and with the same desperation, as Carl and Bob were. It’s always silly to play “ ‘If’ history,” as Bob calls it, but Watergate could never have happened the way it did if Ben had gotten deeply involved earlier. By the time the story reached Ben’s front burner Carl and Bob had claimed it as their own.
On September 15, 1972, the Watergate grand jury indicted G. Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt, and the five burglars who had been caught in the act. Only two days before, Woodstein had reported that Maurice Stans, the finance chairman of the reelection campaign, had “personally approved the secret—and perhaps illegal—transfer of campaign funds through Mexico.” A suitcase full of cash, as much as $700,000, had been flown in to Washington by an oil
executive and delivered to CRP headquarters on April 5, just two days before the new disclosure deadline. Yet the grand jury, and the prosecutors running the criminal investigation, decided to indict only those lowest to the ground and closest to the break-in at the Watergate itself.
After the indictments were handed up, a Justice Department official described the investigation as “in a state of repose.” The entire Watergate story might well have died there. A criminal case against anybody other than the people who had been caught red-handed seemed highly unlikely, if not impossible.
But Carl and Bob weren’t about it to let it die there, and neither was anybody else at the Post. Two days later, on September 17, Woodstein published one of their most important stories to date as the off-lead in the paper.1 Headed “Spy Funds Linked to GOP Aides,” this was the lede graf:
Funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by several principal assistants of John N. Mitchell, the former manager of President Nixon’s campaign, and were kept in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President, The Washington Post has learned.
This was a significant advance, linking the campaign manager’s office at CRP and the Watergate burglary more explicitly and with harder evidence than the reporters had managed before. More striking even than the content is the story’s tone. Often Carl and Bob would base a story on a paragraph or two of new information and then spend the rest of the article making their case about the entire burglary again, retelling the story with the same old details. The September 17 story is written authoritatively, strongly, with minimal hedging on facts. It’s hard to read the story now as anything other than a declarative statement by Woodstein and by the Post that, low-level indictments notwithstanding, this thing wasn’t over.
Yours in Truth Page 16
