Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  After he hung up with Berger, Clawson called Ben. This was something that Ben could get excited about. Not only was it a big Watergate story, but it involved the personal sexual escapades (or at least attempted escapades) of a former employee who had forsaken the Post for the belly of the beast. Ben knew that he had the advantage, even without the late-night-drink aspect: “Clawson, given a certain amount of booze,” Ben once said, “… will tell you that I was his hero.”

  The location of Clawson’s conversation with Berger wasn’t relevant to the story, but that didn’t prevent Ben from letting Clawson twist awhile on the phone, as he begged Ben not to put it in. It’s a great scene in the movie, one that Robards plays with raised-eyebrow perfection. Bernstein later said privately that Ben was “so excited,” once he’d talked to Clawson, “because [he] knew finally this day that he had everybody. And he was showing a kind of kid-like gleeful thing at various times.” Ben spent most of the afternoon out in the newsroom, near Berger’s desk, or near Woodward’s or Bernstein’s, roaming around, trying to figure out what people knew.

  That night, around 6:00, the reporters and editors gathered in Ben’s office for a final meeting. The three story ideas had been whittled down to two, and after reading through the initial copies of each of those stories Ben made the decision that only he could make: instead of two partial stories, they would go with “one big ball-breaker” that incorporated everything that they had found out over the previous few days. As Bob later remembered it in an interview with Alan Pakula, Ben had said, “This is one story, fellas. You’ve got one story. Put it all together.”

  “It wasn’t his opinion,” Bob told Pakula. “It was an instruction.”

  Ben went over to his typewriter and wrote two long paragraphs about the Canuck letter, and then watched over Bernstein’s shoulder as Bernstein sat at his own desk and typed out the lede of the story, two paragraphs that (miraculously) no editors changed:

  FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

  The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice Files, were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential contenders and—since 1971—represented a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.

  “This was a declaration of war on the White House,” Bob told me. “Essentially saying, ‘You have a secret campaign to fuck with democracy … to decide who the Democrats are going to nominate.’ ” More broadly, Bob told me that the moment this story became one story was the moment where “We understood Watergate.” Ben would later describe the October 10 story as the “seminal work” of the entire Post effort; Carl called it “the most important story.” It was the first time where they pulled the camera back and took in the bigger picture. They had spent so much time on the particulars—this fund, that fund, who wrote what check—that they hadn’t put all the pieces together in the most basic way, to say outright: This is what these people were up to. This is how nefarious it really was, and is.

  And this is what we’re up against.

  The first few grafs are also interesting purely as an example of how meticulously Woodstein used language. As they described it later, nobody had actually told them that what they were about to report “represented the stated conclusions of the federal investigators.” They knew only, by putting various puzzle pieces together, that FBI and Justice had uncovered enough information to substantiate the story’s claims. “We were hanging by threads sometimes,” Bob told me.

  And so if you look at even just the first four words of the story— “FBI agents have established”—you see how thoughtful the choice of “established” is. All it means is that FBI agents have information in their files that could lead them to that conclusion; they’ve established it, in other words, whether they know it or not. But it went in the newspaper just the same, one of the bigger reportorial and analytical leaps that they had made.9

  The ball breaker went out over the wires at 7:00 P.M. on October 9, which gave newspapers that subscribed to the Washington Post–Los Angeles Times news service a chance to run the story. This was an option that most regional papers had routinely neglected to exercise during much of the summer and fall. The Post was usually, or at least mostly, on its own in its Watergate coverage. Not so this time. After seeing the Post’s story, The New York Times put together its own version for the front page, “largely quoting the Post,” as Ben noted in his memoir. “There are many, many rewards in the newspaper business, but one of the finest comes with reading the competition quoting your paper on its front page.” These were the moments Ben lived for.

  Both reporters would tell Alan Pakula, in preparation for the movie, that Ben had been particularly brilliant that day, first with Clawson and then later with the decision to turn the two stories into one. “He made two quick, great decisions,” Bernstein said. It was now clear to everybody at the paper that this was going to be the most important series of stories that The Washington Post had ever run, and that the major decisions were going to be made in Ben’s office from there on out. Howard Simons had played a major role, probably the major role, up to that point, but now even he acknowledged that they would all be waiting for the final nod from Ben.

  The next morning, after the story ran in the paper and all hell had broken loose at the White House, Ben approached Bob at his desk and told him that they needed to have a chat. Carl was out of town, so Ben and Bob went alone over to the Montpelier Room at the Madison Hotel, just across 15th Street from the Post. They sat at a corner table, and Ben grilled Bob on where the stories were coming from, who the sources were (though not to the point of revealing names), poking every which way. He hadn’t known the details up to this point, but now that he was betting the paper on them he wanted to know what he could.

  This lunch was the genesis of the lasting impression of Ben that Woodstein captured in their book, as Bob later told Pakula:

  He turned to the waiter and ordered sort of, “I’ll have this and I’ll have that,” this and that, in French, very quickly, and then just turned around and said, “By the way our cocks are on the chopping block.” And he is able to traffic and to think in those two worlds. If you wanted to say that those two worlds are on one end and the other, and he travels in all the ones in between.

  The mythic, omnivorous beast of Bradlee. But the larger point was true: his cock was on the chopping block now, and so Ben was going to drill down in ways that he never had before. After they’d talked for about an hour, with Ben at least marginally satisfied with how well Bob and Carl were handling their sources and the information that those sources were providing, Ben asked the question that defines, perhaps more than any other, who he was as an editor and as a person. As they were wrapping up, he turned to Bob and said, “Now what have you guys got for tomorrow?”

  * * *

  1 The lead story is the right-most story above the fold in a newspaper, and theoretically is weighted as the heaviest and most important news story; the off-lead is the left-most story above the fold and second in importance, though depending on the makeup of the page these things can take slightly different forms.

  2 The hostess in this particular story, often told by Howard Simons, was actually Kay Graham herself. “Howard still can’t get over the fact that Ben put out a cigarette in a cup of coffee at Mrs. Graham’s house and got away with it,” Haynes Johnson told Alan Pakula.

  3 The dialogue in this scene is quoted from All the President’s Men.

  4 The quotation, as it ran in the next morning’s paper: “All that crap, you’re putting in the paper? It’s all been denied. Katie Graham’s gonna get caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ! That’s the most sickening thing I ever heard.” Years later, Art Buchwald, Ben’s great friend, had a gold tit made as a gift for Kay. (“Can’t
you imagine Buchwald going in there and ordering it?” Ben said to her years later.) And a dentist from Anaheim, California, sent her a wringer. When she wore them both together, Ben would routinely beg her to take them off.

  5 A number of editors at the Post claimed that Simons basically “explained” the Watergate story to Ben in the early stages, that Ben (like most readers) had a hard time tracking all of the details. By October of 1972, he no longer required any explanations.

  6 Journalistic rules can be a bit hard to follow, and interpretations vary. Generally speaking: “On the record” means you can quote a source, by name; “on background” means that you can quote the source without naming them (e.g., “a close friend says,” or “a high government official revealed”); “on deep background” means that you cannot quote the source at all and cannot name or identify them either, but you can use the general information provided to deepen your reporting; and “off the record” means that you can’t use the information at all, in any way, unless you can somehow get other sources to confirm it.

  7 The Nixon men had code names for the various operations against Muskie. “Ruby I” and “Ruby II” involved installing spies in Muskie’s campaign, while “Sedan Chair I” and “Sedan Chair II” involved hiring people to pull political pranks at Muskie’s campaign appearances.

  8 The thing most people don’t realize is that the dirty tricks operation worked. The Republicans feared Muskie and Teddy Kennedy the most, and wanted explicitly to run against McGovern, whom Nixon summarily defeated in a landslide.

  9 According to his book, In Nixon’s Web, acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III received a copy of Woodstein’s October 10 story and wrote “Have we?” next to the lede. Beside at least two other claims about the FBI in the story, Gray wrote, “Did we?” Clearly the man at the top hadn’t come to the same conclusions as Bob and Carl had. A memo Gray commissioned to look into his questions concluded that Woodstein’s opening sentence was “pure conjecture on the part of the news reporters,” and that several other statements were “absolutely false.” Gray ridicules much of Woodstein’s reporting in his book.

  FALL

  Tuesday story in Post “cast a pall over entire committee.”

  “I keep thinking it’s over, and then you guys call w. something else.”

  He said that if we make any error then they will jump on us. “That’s the way the game is played.”

  —Bernstein’s memo of an interview with confidential CRP source, October 12, 1972

  On the morning of October 10, at the White House, press secretary Ron Ziegler didn’t know quite what to do. The press corps was after him about the Post story that morning, and all he had to offer was, “I have nothing further to say to you about the story that ran,” or some variation. He referred reporters to Ken Clawson’s denial and CRP’s denial, which had been included in the story. The official statement from CRP, in its entirety: “The Post story is not only fiction but a collection of absurdities.”

  “May we film you denying these stories or saying you have nothing further to add to this?” one reporter asked.

  “No,” Ziegler said.

  Later: “I am not leaving anything open. I am just telling you I have no further statements or comments or information to provide you on the story that ran in The Washington Post this morning.”

  Toward the end, Ziegler brought out the first in what would become a legendary series of verbal acrobatics in the press room. A reporter asked, “Has anyone in the White House, since publication of the story in The Washington Post, Mr. Dean or otherwise, talked to Mr. Clawson to find out whether this story is true or not, whether he did this or did not do this?”

  “I would just conclude this by saying, giving you my final comment on the subject, that Mr. Clawson has already issued a statement on the subject.”

  “That is not my question,” the reporter shot back. “I wondered whether anybody at the White House checked with him.”

  “The matter was denied by Mr. Clawson and that stands on the record,” Ziegler said.

  “Is that a White House denial?”

  “It is a denial by the individual involved.”

  “Is it a denial by the White House?”

  “It is a denial by Mr. Clawson and one with which I do not disassociate myself.”

  The next major story ran that following Sunday, October 15. Ben had been on Bob and Carl for something big, something to show that the Post wasn’t going to back down after staking its new claim on the 10th. The Sunday story was big. The three-column story, “Key Nixon Aide Named as ‘Sabotage’ Contact,” led the paper and named Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, as Segretti’s contact in the spying and sabotage operation against the Democrats. For the first time, Woodstein had followed the trail of breadcrumbs through the gates of the White House itself, to one of Bob Haldeman’s key aides.1

  That same Sunday, Time magazine—one of the Post’s only real competitors on Watergate—reported that Chapin hadn’t just been the “contact”: Chapin had hired Segretti, and the president’s personal lawyer, Herbert W. Kalmbach, had paid Segretti for his services. Since the Post had a rule that they wouldn’t print information from another publication unless they could verify it themselves, Bob quickly confirmed through other sources that Kalmbach had paid Segretti, and that Kalmbach had also been one of the five people with control over the slush fund. They now had four of the five. The next morning, October 16, “Lawyer for Nixon Said to Have Used GOP’s Spy Fund” was the off-lead of the Post’s front page.

  If the October 10 story had been a declaration of war, the stories from the Post and Time on the 15th and the 16th were the battle cry, one that was joined in turn by the White House and Nixon’s campaign staff. The Post’s reporting had been hitting closer and closer to home, and finally the White House struck back.

  First up was Ziegler. At a press briefing on the morning of the 16th, when asked whether the president was concerned about the recent reports about Chapin, Ziegler said, “The president is concerned about the techniques being applied by the opposition in the stories themselves.… The opposition has been making charges which are not substantiated; stories are being written which have not been substantiated.” When asked who the opposition was, he said that he thought the opposition was clear—unmistakably referring to the Post. He could have gone after Time, too, but everybody knew whom he meant.

  “I will not dignify with comment stories based on hearsay, character assassination, innuendo, or guilt by association,” he said, phrases that other Republican spokesmen would echo throughout the day. “That is the White House position; that is my position.” Later he added, “It goes without saying that this administration does not condone sabotage or espionage or surveillance of individuals.” (Note what a nondenial even this is: “condone” is such a curious word to choose. Sometimes we don’t condone our own behavior, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t do it.)

  Senator Bob Dole, who doubled as the chairman of the Republican National Committee, went on the attack that afternoon in a speech before an audience of black Republicans at a hotel in downtown Washington. “Given the present straits in which the McGovern campaign finds itself,” Dole said, “Mr. McGovern appears to have turned over the franchise for his media attack campaign to the editors of The Washington Post.” He insisted that, thus far, there had been “enormous headlines about political disruption and very little proof.” The Post was in league with “the desperate politicians whose fortunes they seek to save,” and had become McGovern’s “partner in mudslinging.”

  Later that same day, Clark MacGregor—the director of CRP and Nixon’s campaign manager—held a “press conference” in which he read a prepared statement that had been given to him by the White House: “The Post has maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate—a charge the Post knows—and half a dozen investigations have found—to be false.” After finishing with his statement, which als
o accused the Post of having a “celebrated double standard [that] is today visible for all to see,” MacGregor walked out of the room without answering any questions.

  That night, in response to inquiries from media across the country, Ben wrote out his own statement:

  Time will judge between Clark MacGregor’s press release and the Washington Post’s reporting of the various activities of CRP. For now it is enough to say that not a single fact contained in the investigative reporting by this newspaper about these activities has been successfully challenged. MacGregor and other high administration officials have called these stories “a collection of absurdities” and the Post “malicious,” but the facts are on the record, unchallenged by contrary evidence.

  “I understated it before,” Ben told Carl and Bob when he showed them his statement. “This is the hardest hardball that’s ever been played in this town.”2

  Two days later The New York Times reported that Segretti’s credit card or phone had been used to make several calls to Chapin’s home in Bethesda, and also to the White House and to Howard Hunt. This was pretty hard evidence that Segretti had reported to Chapin, or at least kept him informed, and that the White House had been aware of what he was doing. That morning, Ziegler denied that anyone presently employed at the White House had “directed activities of sabotage, spying [or] espionage” against Democratic presidential candidates. When reporters made clear that “direction” and “involvement” were two different things, Ziegler said, “If anyone had been involved in such activity, they would no longer be at the White House because this is activity that we do not condone and do not tolerate.” As Peter Osnos noted with sober neutrality in the Post the next morning, “Although Ziegler’s statement appeared to be the firmest denial yet of reports linking White House aides to the alleged GOP sabotage campaign, it fell short of satisfying questioning reporters.”