For the next few days, the Watergate story was mostly quiet on the front page of the Post. The Oakland A’s won the World Series, talks in Vietnam seemed headed for a truce. Then, on Wednesday, October 25, 1972, the Post dropped its biggest bomb yet:
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“Of all the quicksand I have been in,” Ben wrote to a friend seven years later, “50 percent of it could have been avoided if the headlines had been right.” He wasn’t referring specifically to the Haldeman story of October 25, 1972, but he could have been. The headline that led the paper that morning, “Testimony Ties Top Nixon Aide to Secret Fund,” was wrong, although the bulk of the lede graf was correct:
H. R. Haldeman, President Nixon’s White House chief of staff, was one of five high-ranking presidential associates authorized to approve payments from a secret Nixon campaign cash fund …
That was all true. The mistake came only in the final clause of that long first sentence, echoing the headline above:
… according to federal investigators and accounts of sworn testimony before the Watergate grand jury.
The fourth paragraph carried Haldeman’s denial, issued through the White House press office: “Your inquiry is based on misinformation because the reference to Bob Haldeman is untrue.” Woodstein and their editors included the denial in the story but didn’t think much of it; it felt as vague and tossed off as most of the denials that had eventually been repudiated by new developments in the story.
They didn’t realize they were wrong until the morning the story ran. Hugh Sloan, their main source and the man whose testimony to the grand jury the headline (and most of the story) hung on, stood beside his lawyer as the lawyer said, “We categorically deny that such a statement was made to the grand jury.” Suddenly, in a rapidly disorienting experience that Bob later likened to an automobile accident, air was rushing out all around them.
Woodstein had hunched that Haldeman was the fifth person in control of the fund for a while. It just made sense. The Chapins and the Strachans and the other mid-level functionaries at the White House and CRP were all tied into Haldeman. He had basic and fundamental control over what happened at the White House, from who saw the president to how the president’s orders were executed. There was no way that Watergate or any other political espionage campaign could have gone on without his knowledge or authorization, but the reporters had never been able to prove it. They were always sticking insinuating sentences into their stories—“Chapin was the number one assistant to Haldeman”—only to have the editors strike them out.
“I thought we were aiming higher and higher and I suspected that you guys … had them in your targets, maybe even before you should have,” Ben told Carl and Bob a year later. “Maybe you knew it but you couldn’t prove it, and I was determined to keep it out of the paper until you could. Even when I was absolutely convinced in my mind that there was no way that any of this could have happened without Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and Nixon … I was going to do everything in my power to be sure that we didn’t clip him before we had him.”
In the days leading up to the major story of the 25th, Woodstein had worked all of their sources. Bob went to Deep Throat and fished, telling Throat (though it wasn’t yet true) that they were going to run a story naming Haldeman as the fifth person in control of the fund. Deep Throat didn’t bite. He told Bob, “I won’t be a source on a Haldeman story,” that he wouldn’t and couldn’t name Haldeman himself. Bob thought Deep Throat’s palpable fear and caginess meant that Haldeman had to be the right name.
A few days later Carl and Bob went out to visit Hugh Sloan. Using one of their familiar tactics—pretending to know something that they didn’t actually know, to see if the source would confirm it—Bernstein told Sloan that he knew the fifth person in control of the fund was Haldeman. Like Throat, Sloan refused to be a direct source on a Haldeman story. When the reporters asked him if he had named all five people in control of the fund to the grand jury, Sloan said yes.3 By process of elimination—Was it Colson? Was it Ehrlichman?—they ended up right back at Haldeman again. Sloan then told them, somewhat coyly, that he would have “no problems” if they wrote a story suggesting that Haldeman had been one of the five.
From there Bernstein called Angelo Lano, the Watergate case agent in the Washington field office of the FBI. Using more of the same blustering tactics, claiming that he was working on a story about the FBI’s ineptitude, Bernstein prodded Lano into confirming (as Bernstein interpreted it, at any rate) that the FBI had encountered Haldeman’s name in its own investigation, and that Sloan had named Haldeman to the grand jury. When Bernstein circled back to make sure he was right about Haldeman, Lano said, “Yeah, Haldeman. John Haldeman.”
The “German shepherds,” as they were known, were Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—easily enough confused, but still. Bernstein had already hung up by the time he realized what had happened, so he called back. According to Bernstein, Lano confirmed that it was Haldeman and said that he always had trouble with first names.
Now they had three sources, or so they thought. In retrospect it’s hard to believe that what Deep Throat had told Bob was an actual confirmation of their story. Even Bob himself said to Carl afterward that he thought it was a “yes and no” confirmation, whatever that means. He had asked Throat to warn him off if the Haldeman story was bad and Throat hadn’t warned him off; there was room for ambiguity there. Regardless, Throat hadn’t said anything (or been asked anything) about grand jury testimony. As Bernstein understood it, Angelo Lano had actively confirmed that Sloan had named Haldeman in front of the grand jury, but then Lano had gotten the name wrong at the end. And Sloan himself said that he had named everybody to the grand jury, hadn’t he?
That night Woodward, Bernstein, Sussman, Rosenfeld, Simons, and Ben all met in Ben’s office. Harry Rosenfeld remembers that Ben “start[ed] to cross-examine them very very sharply. And in that cross examination somehow the notes don’t quite show what the story shows, and Bradlee’s cross examining … shows that Sloan doesn’t quite say what they’re saying, and I’m embarrassed because I’ve represented the story as being every bit as good as they say it is, and now here’s my top editor finding out gaps that I didn’t find out.”4 Barry Sussman writes in his book, The Great Cover-up, “Bradlee began asking questions the way a prosecutor would … I don’t remember any of us aside from Bradlee asking questions, and there was no small talk. When he was done, he asked the rest of us whether we felt we should run the story. We all said yes. ‘Okay, go,’ Bradlee said.”
Simons apparently still had a few doubts. He was known around the paper for saying, “When in doubt, leave it out,” and he was a little less prone than Ben to allow excitement about a “holy shit” story to obscure his news judgment. He felt that something was fishy, and he asked Woodstein if they could get another source.
They had only about twenty minutes before the first edition deadline. Bernstein contacted a source in the Justice Department, but the source refused to answer any direct questions. Thinking on his feet, Bernstein told him that they already had it from three sources. All he needed was confirmation, or a heads-up if they needed to hold off. He devised a system, what Ben would later describe as “a gimmick that plowed new—and unholy—ground in the annals of journalism.” Bernstein would count to ten, and if the lawyer was still on the phone after Bernstein reached ten it meant that their story was accurate. When Bernstein got to ten and the lawyer was still there5—this is the famous scene in the movie, where Dustin Hoffman goes sprinting through the newsroom to intercept Jason Robards just as the elevator door closes—the story was sent down to the composing room.
What happens next is one of the better scenes in the film, and certainly Robards’s best scene. In a sense the movie presents the stakes for Ben in the aftermath of their mistake better than any of the books or interviews.
It’s the next day, the day the Haldeman story runs and the denials start to pour in, and all of a sudden Robards appears in
the newsroom. The camera zooms uncomfortably close on his face, there’s a beat, and then he bellows “Woodstein!” The two reporters scurry across the newsroom and into his office. As the television plays Sloan’s lawyer’s denial of their story, their huge brass ring of a story, Robards glares at each of them. We hear the television coverage shift to Ron Ziegler at the White House, but the camera stays with Robards.
“Why is the Post trying to do it?” we hear Ziegler ask rhetorically in the background.
Robards’s eyes are glued to Woodward, who is off camera.
“You have a man who’s the editor of the Washington Post …”
Robards blinks slowly, masterfully, knowing what’s about to happen before it does, and then coolly switches his gaze to the television, where Ziegler continues, “… by the name of Ben Bradlee. I think anyone who would want to honestly assess what his political persuasions are would, I think, come to the conclusion quite quickly that he is not a supporter of President Nixon.
“I respect the free press,” Ziegler says. “I don’t respect the journalism, the shabby journalism, that is being practiced by the Washington Post.”
Robards never says a word, but his emotion is clear. For all of his ranting and raving and cursing throughout the movie, this is his most powerful and revelatory scene. It’s the moment where Robards lets you in, literally in the blink of an eye, to the weight that his character is under, that Ben was under. The attacks were becoming more personal now. Though it’s not in the film, the night before Bob Dole had launched a personal attack against Ben in a speech in Maryland, calling him a “Kennedy coat-holder” and “a small-bore McGovern surrogate,” including a nasty threat that “[Ben] and his publication should expect appropriate treatment—which they will with regularity receive.”
Now, the very next day, when the stakes were highest, his two Metro reporters had let him down. Dole’s was just the first salvo in a series of public attacks against the Post, and against Ben, for their mistake.
“No one can imagine how I felt,” Ben wrote in his memoir. “We had written more than fifty Watergate stories, in the teeth of one of history’s great political cover-ups, and we hadn’t made a material mistake. Not one. We had been supported by the publisher every step of the way, and she had withstood enormous pressure to stand by our side. Pressures from her friends as well as her enemies. And now this …
“It was a jackass scheme,” he concluded, “and I should have caught it. All along, we had wanted to ‘win’ without knowing what winning might turn out to be. But all along, we knew we could not afford any mistakes. And now we had made one.”
FROM SUSSMAN
Following is a recap of the charges made against us Tuesday night and Wednesday by Ziegler, MacGregor and Dole. I am not dealing with the ad hominem attacks but rather only with the specific instances in which they say we are wrong in fact. My conclusions are that we appear to have made one definite error and perhaps a second: a) Sloan did not name Haldeman to the FBI, b) Haldeman was not interviewed by the FBI. Beyond that I feel there is no indication from what Ziegler, MacGregor and Dole said that we have made any other mistakes. That is, I feel at this point that we are right on Haldeman.
By the evening of the 25th, all involved had come to the conclusion that Sussman describes. Haldeman had in fact been the fifth person in charge of the fund, but Sloan hadn’t named him to the grand jury, and the FBI hadn’t interviewed Haldeman. Sloan’s lawyer, who had no idea that his own client was the source of the story, told Bob that the Post had been wrong about the grand jury but that they didn’t owe Haldeman any apologies. As Sloan would later put it, his denial was strictly limited to the way that the story had been written. So they were in the uncomfortable position of being essentially right on Haldeman but unable to prove it or to counter the denials coming from the White House and other Republican surrogates.
Kay Graham was clearly getting an earful, too. She sent the following down to Ben’s office, written by hand, with a copy of the Haldeman story attached to it:
Ben—
I have now heard from a mutual acquaintance that the lead paragraphs in this story is what is bothering the White House most—I must say—I have a problem with them—one—that it says Haldeman had access to the fund 2—the fund financed a spying & bugging campaign—a basic element of the Nixon re-election strategy was conceived by high presidential aides—
Haldeman is a high presidential aide (unspoken assumption that Haldeman conceived spying & bugging)—we say—“all we said was Haldeman had access to the fund.” But if that is all we said—we certainly implied much more—This really troubles me—not you?
Kay
The squeeze was on. She didn’t normally reach down like that. During Watergate Ben would often reach up, to reassure her that there was a team of editors overseeing every story; he often asked Edward Bennett Williams to talk to her, too. “We must keep her strong,” Ben would say to his pal, and because Williams was instrumental in the civil case Kay trusted him when he confirmed the direction of Woodstein’s reporting.6 Largely this strategy worked. But, as Ben would say later of the Haldeman mistake, “That’s the one where Katharine’s sphincter tightened just a little bit.”
Oddly enough, this was the day that Bob and Carl had scheduled a lunch meeting with Dick Snyder, the head of Simon and Schuster, to discuss a possible book deal based on their reporting. They sat through lunch thinking instead that they might have to resign from the Post.
After lunch, the reporters went looking for Angelo Lano, the FBI agent they felt had led them astray. When they found him, he told them that he would deny having spoken to them. When they saw one of Lano’s colleagues in the hallway—FBI memos declassified in 1980 suggest that this was assistant U.S. prosecutor Earl Silbert—they decided to gamble. Woodstein confronted Silbert and told him that Lano had been their source. In so doing, they were betraying Lano’s confidence and violating their own ethical standards, but they were desperate to know where they had gone wrong. Silbert gave them nothing.7
When they got back to the office, they were beside themselves. Ben, less so:
BW: I remember that Bradlee was very calm … there was a certain serenity in him … a certain power of saying, “Goddamn it, don’t panic, don’t fly off the handle.”
CB: In both meetings we had, he was very much like that.
BW: And he was willing to take the epistemological step of, “God damn it, I don’t know anything here. Maybe Sloan’s not telling the truth.”
At a meeting in his office, Ben made the executive decision that the paper was not going to name its sources. If they named Lano in the newspaper, all Lano would do was deny it, and then they’d be in an unwinnable pissing match. His basic message to the reporters was to sit tight, to go back to their sources again, to give it some time. The refusal to rush into some kind of correction or admission of fault was also an expression of support. By that time Ben knew enough about their reporting and about the Nixon administration to know that the reporters weren’t going to be far off. Until there was countervailing evidence and something more than just a denial, you didn’t fold your hand. You held tight and hung tough and protected the institution.
And so Ben sat down at his typewriter and typed out a one-sentence statement: “We stand by our story.” There are a lot of other things he could have written. There were parts of the story that really were wrong. But if the Nixon people could outright lie all over the place, surely Ben could stick to his guns and give his reporters some cover. He had come too far with Woodstein to abandon them now. He remembers trying out any number of different statements before finally deciding to say, “Fuck it, let’s go stand by our boys.”
If you want Ben as the editor of Watergate in a single sentence, that sentence is it.
Ben took a similarly defiant approach with angry readers. On the day that the statement ran, a reader wrote Ben, “I observe from today’s issue of your yellow sheet that you ‘stand by’ your story concerning Haldem
an which means that you stand by a lot of damn lies. I suspect that your father was a bachelor.”
Dear [Angry Reader]:
Thank you for your moderate letter and your suspicions about my father.
I suspect that your mother was sorry.
Sincerely,
* * *
1 In June they had reported that Howard Hunt’s name had appeared in the burglars’ address books, along with the notation “W. House,” but Hunt was only a consultant and had already been cut loose. This was the first link to a high-ranking member of the permanent staff.
2 That day, October 16, the Post dedicated its new building at 1150 15th Street, the same building that it occupies today. And so, perhaps coincidentally, the modern physical Washington Post came into being on the very same day that its modern reputation was made, standing by its Watergate reporting under a coordinated and withering attack from the White House.
3 Sloan did not intentionally mislead them. In his briefing with the prosecutors before his testimony, Sloan did apparently name all five in control of the fund, including Haldeman, but he didn’t then repeat those names in response to questioning before the grand jury. He would have named Haldeman there, too, but the prosecutors never asked.
4 Ben found faults in other stories, too. “Once Bradlee and Simons were involved routinely,” Rosenfeld told me, “Sussman would bring me the story, I would go over it, bust his chops, and then when I was satisfied I would take it to Bradlee and Simons. Frequently, to my chagrin, they would find things I had not found. This was a process that helped make the stories as solid as they were.”
5 Apparently Bernstein screwed up the instructions. “Carl got his signals screwed up,” the source told Barry Sussman later. “I didn’t give him the ‘confirm’ signal, I gave him the ‘deny.’ ” “It’s amazing,” Pakula would later tell Woodward and Bernstein. “In trying to protect yourself from your disaster, each one … fucked yourself up more and more.”
Yours in Truth Page 19
