Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  In the back of my mind, alarm bells started to go off. This all sounded a lot like that memo I had put into Bernstein’s file, the one with the data points and the vague reference to a juror. I slid over to my Watergate box and pulled it out. Six grafs down, after some of the “major conclusions” from the interview at the top, lay Carl’s description of his contact with the source:

  CB arrived at her home about 7:45 p.m. identified myself through a closed door and she immediately responded, “Your articles have been excellent,” adding something about admiring our work, and then asking how we’d got her name. I said I’d like to talk and I’d explain how we got her name and [she] asked: “Are you contacting all the people?”

  She then said she’d give me her non-listed number and CB could call and said he couldn’t come in and slipped piece of paper w. number under door (this checked w. grand jury list number). I slipped my phone numbers under door, and told her I would call from office and she said that would be fine.

  Upon calling her she immediately began: “I’ve read your articles, the articles have been fantastic, incredible. Your persistence has been admirable.”

  It was late at night. I was sitting in a remote farmhouse in Rapidan, Virginia, and as it dawned on me I couldn’t help myself: like Woodward at the courthouse, only much, much louder, I screamed “Holy shit!” I scanned the rest of the memo to check the quotes from the book against the quotes in the memo, and every single one was a match. In a couple of places, Bernstein had changed some of the words in minor ways, but these seemed more like the inevitable journalistic errors of somebody writing against a deadline than anything else. All of the substance was there. There was no question that this was the same source.

  Z was no “mystic.” She was a grand juror in disguise. This, too, is obvious from the memo, and not just from the single detail of her number matching up with the grand jury list. Carl, in accordance with the instructions of their editors, was oblique about how he had come across her information: “told her it had come from a source along w. a few other names and this source had 100 per cent right. on previous tips. further I told her that source had said she had exhaustive infor [sic] on case but in no way involved. She said ‘of course, I was on the grand jury.’ ” Later: “I tried specific questions and she said she couldn’t answer because they ‘leading and I took an oath.’ ” Later still: “she said that her first time in court and she had no idea about what jury duty was like. ‘a liberal education.’ ‘I cared about the case more than most people on the jury.’ ” Toward the end she tells him, “If we’d learned all there was to learn, we’d have been there six more months.”

  The date on the memo was December 4, with no year specified. A quick date check revealed that December 4, 1972, was a Monday. In All the President’s Men, Carl and Bob specify that the visits to the grand jurors took place on the first weekend in December of 1972. Shortly thereafter, I located a list of the grand jurors from the Watergate grand jury, empaneled on June 5, 1972. One woman had initials that matched the initials at the top of Bernstein’s memo.5

  All these years, Carl and Bob and Ben have described the grand jury episode as a case of flying too close to the sun but escaping before any real damage was done. That is not the truth. The damage was done. Carl and Bob, with Ben’s explicit permission, lured a grand juror over the line of illegality and exposed her to serious risk. Z would certainly have been kicked off the grand jury had Sirica found out what she had done, and the judge could have imprisoned her without trial for as much as six months for contempt of court. He could also have upended the trial itself. (Z covered her tracks. She either lied directly to the prosecutors when they asked if any other grand jurors had been contacted, or she lied indirectly, by withholding that information and allowing Judge Sirica to act on the assumption that only one grand juror had been contacted and that nothing had leaked.)

  So what did Woodstein actually learn from the grand juror? Under the heading of “major conclusions” at the top of the memo, Bernstein lays out the key points from their conversation:

  Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson and Mardian all figure in the disclosure of wiretap information. A group by itself—apparently no others.

  David Packard very involved (“you missed a big one”) supervisory, not payments as are Kalmbach and apparently Morton B. Jackson.

  John Dean very involved and not just from point of view of doing investigation.

  Key names from grand jury pt. of view: Mitchell, Stans, the four above, Kalmbach, (Very important), Porter, (grouped w. Magruder), (sort of a separate entity), Magruder (“extremely interesting”), Odle, (“a dumb errand boy”).

  Also figuring: Baldwin, Diego, apparently Young, Nov. group (“Magruder is definitely the key”) ….

  Aside from the major conclusions, data throughout the seven-page memo would resurface later in the Watergate coverage: the slush fund, Haldeman’s role, the importance of Dean (which wouldn’t surface until April of the following year), the existence of a cover-up, the Plumbers, Colson’s involvement, the disclosure of wiretap information from the Watergate bug job to people as high up as Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

  How important was this information to Woodstein? If their own book is to be believed: crucial. In January of 1973, Senator Sam Ervin, who would run the Senate Watergate Committee, called and requested a meeting with Bob. Bob knew Ervin would seek information about his sources, and the senator didn’t waste much time. Here’s how Bob thought through his response, according to the book: “Information from Deep Throat and Z and some other bits and pieces might help the investigation, conceivably could even send it on its way,” he remembered thinking, but he wasn’t at liberty to divulge his sources and so he kept his counsel vague.

  Asked by Senator Sam Ervin for his best and most important leads, Bob put Z’s information on the same level as Deep Throat’s. That’s a pretty high level. Either Z’s information was formative to their thinking about Watergate in an ongoing way, or from a narrative perspective Woodstein were hyping the import of what Z had told them in order to heighten the mystery and power of their anonymous sources. This comports with Carl’s characterization of Z as a “mystic,” and is of a piece with the deeply mysterious Throat. Either reason is revealing in and of itself. References to “the riddles of Z” and “Z’s statements” continue for much of the rest of the book.

  “This was no Batman and Robin trip,” Carl confessed to Pakula a few years later, “and this is not some simple thing about simple truths and the good guys and the bad guys. [We faced] tremendous ethical problems … some of which we dealt with successfully and some of which we didn’t.” Watergate was never a fair fight. On one hand, Woodstein’s successful penetration of the grand jury is a stunning reporting coup. They didn’t coerce Z; she clearly wanted to cooperate. She chose civil disobedience in the face of an unprecedented cover-up and a grand jury investigation that had stopped well short of the truth, and there is honor in that.

  On the other hand, Woodstein’s repeated proclamations that they “never got anything out of the grand jurors,” and the faux hand-wringing in the book, do raise basic questions about ethics and truthfulness. It’s one thing to get information from a grand juror and then be coy about where it came from. It’s quite another thing to make a public point of honor about never having gotten it in the first place. You can argue about good lies and bad lies, about ends justifying means, but maybe the moral of the story is that nobody gets to come out of the great mud bath of Watergate with his hands entirely clean.

  A couple of weeks after I rediscovered the grand juror memo, I laid out the evidence for Ben in his office during one of our regular interviews. I showed him a couple of the quotes, and the descriptions of Z in All the President’s Men, and how they matched. And then I asked him if he knew.

  “It doesn’t ring a huge bell,” he said. It was hard to tell if he really didn’t remember or if he was just telling me that.

  “I think it’s very likely that you didn’t
know,” I told him. “But I found the memo in your files.” He understood what that meant. Who knew if he’d read it, but he had it, and that meant he might well have known.6

  “You can say that Bradlee can’t remember, right?”

  “Easily. That’s all I need to say.”

  “I mean, knowing that that’s the truth,” he said. “I’m not ducking it.”

  “I don’t ever feel like you’re ducking anything. But because of how strongly Bob reacted to all of this other stuff, I’m going to wait on this one. I don’t want to launch World War II again.” We laughed.

  “I don’t ever remember probing whether they had talked to a grand juror,” he said. “Maybe because I was scared that they had. I mean, I don’t remember holding back, I don’t remember being scared about it. But if you told me that they had, it doesn’t shock me.”

  That was as good an answer as I was going to get, as far as Z and Ben go. As for what “World War II” was, I have to start from the beginning.

  * * *

  1 Throat’s dialogue is quoted from The Secret Man (2005), Bob’s book about his relationship with Mark Felt.

  2 Williams didn’t like any suggestion of a backroom deal with Sirica and objected to its publication in All the President’s Men; just before the book came out he appealed to Simon and Schuster to have it eliminated from the manuscript. When it made it into the final draft, Williams refused to talk to Woodward for two years.

  3 Later that same day, December 19, Sirica held the Los Angeles Times D.C. bureau chief, John Lawrence, in contempt of court for failing to turn over audiotapes of the paper’s interview with Alfred Baldwin, the lookout on the night of the break-in. Lawrence was jailed, without a chance even to say goodbye to his wife, while Woodstein walked free.

  4 The veracity of O’Keefe’s videotape recording has since been challenged, but hadn’t yet been at this time.

  5 I know her name but won’t reveal anything else about her.

  6 Before my interview with Ben I had spent a day in Pakula’s archives in Los Angeles. Barry Sussman, to Pakula: “Some of their writing is not true … that they never got something from a Grand Jury member. Barry thinks that’s wrong. They did get information from one person and Carl planned to meet with that person again.” This doesn’t mean that Ben knew for sure, but it means that they didn’t keep it completely to themselves, either. And it meant that I had found what I knew I had found.

  DOUBT

  (PART ONE)

  In April of 2010, Carol, Ben’s secretary, called to tell me that somebody had yet again located a couple of stray Bradlee boxes at the Post’s storage facility. In one of the boxes were two of the interviews that Ben had done with Barbara Feinman for his memoir in 1990. Like me, Barbara had worked for Bob before working for Ben, and she had been roughly my age when she and Ben sat down for their interviews. Unlike me, she caught Ben while he was still the editor of the paper, and much of the material that surfaced during those interviews—and nearly all of the good stuff—went wholesale into Ben’s memoir.

  The first of the two interviews was dated May 16, 1990, slugged “Watergate for memoirs.” From the first question on, it sizzles:

  BF: Did you read the transcript?

  [of his interview with Woodward and Bernstein in 1973 for All the President’s Men]

  B: I read it but I haven’t read it as thoroughly as I should. But I mean it’s almost better to talk about it from my own point of view rather than from Woodward’s and Bernstein’s. Well, you know, Watergate in retrospect, it’s hard to believe that people were that dumb, were that insane to do that. And it’s achieved a prominence in history and in my life that it doesn’t really deserve.…

  I mean the crime itself was really not a great deal. Had it not been for the Nixon resignation it would be really a blip in history. The Iran-Contra hearing was a much more significant violation of the democratic ethic than anything in Watergate. Watergate really was dirty tricks and arrogance and people thinking that they were all-powerful and could ride roughshod over civil liberties, but it wasn’t dealing in smuggled arms and buying foreign nations and shit like that.

  I wish I had gotten the chance to interview that Ben.

  Later I came across a longer section that told me more about what it felt like to be Ben during Watergate than anything else I’d seen:

  B: None of the recreations that I’ve seen do justice to the absolute passion this city had for that story. I mean, every night before you went home, before Williams and Califano for instance, or before Clark Clifford, or before Katharine or before Oz Elliott in New York went home from work they would call up and say, “What have you got?” They had to have a fix, they could not go out to dinner. Kay would drop down on the way home and say something, “Jesus, what have we got tomorrow?” “Jesus, you sure you’re right?” The interest in the community and in the newspaper community around the country was extraordinary, just extraordinary.

  BF: Was that what was always on your mind during that time?

  B: … [A]fter the Pentagon Papers was out of the way, until I met Sally, I don’t consider I did anything but Watergate. And after that, after meeting Sally, I mean that was another year or so before Watergate was over. Anyway, dealing with Woodward and Bernstein became—as they became more skilled in subterfuge, as they became more skilled in double meanings and triple meanings and quadruple, it became quite hard to deal with. They probably put us all a little bit on the defensive. Their great habit was to come around about seven thirty at night to say they had a helluva story.

  BF: Did they do that on purpose?

  B: Of course they did it on purpose. Because they thought the guard would be down and they could slip it into the paper without the usual sort of grilling.

  BF: That’s pretty ballsy.

  B: Yeah. And it ruined a lot of dinners and nights because the first few times we said okay, stopped, unpacked and went back to work and would stay there until we got it that we could print it or we didn’t print it or waited a day, but at least we—and it was we—Simons and myself and Harry Rosenfeld, Sussman, looked at it, worked it over, made decisions. And then finally we just said, “To hell with it, don’t [come] around here at quarter of eight or seven thirty, if you can’t explain what you’re doing, if you can’t do it—terrific that you’re doing it, but let’s do it in an orderly fashion.”

  BF: Were they scared of you at all?

  B: They say they were but I’m not sure.

  The interview continued along that track, branching off in a few different directions but then returning to the movie. At a recent panel discussion, facing questioning about Deep Throat, Ben had said that he didn’t want to be held to a Hollywood portrayal of Woodward’s secret garage meetings with his source.

  “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” Ben told Barbara.

  B: I know who they identify as—Bob identifies as Deep Throat. Did that potted palm incident ever happen? That seems like a dumb (inaudible) to me. And meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage.

  BF: And you haven’t pressed him because it’s irrelevant?

  B: There came a time when I pressed him for his name. But I had a long conversation with Bob in the middle of it as to the source and I said at that time that I didn’t have to know the name of the person but if I didn’t know the name I had to know everything about him—age, sex, place of work, high, low, what kind of access, who he knew. I suppose after that conversation if I had—

  BF: When did you find out?

  B: I don’t know exactly, some years later.

  BF: Do you get sick of it, the Deep Throat part of it, people always asking you who it is?

  B: I mean they always sort of, “Who’s Deep Throat,” that’s sort of a standard. No, I can say this to you, there’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.

  BF: And do you think that’s partially because of the Janet Cooke
thing? I mean I know that you trust them but do you think that that fear—

  B: You can’t argue with success. I mean, one way or another they were right. Whether they’ve embellished that or not.

  I read it over a few times, just to see if it meant what I thought it did. Later, unprompted, Ben amplified it:

  B: I mean, the movie Deep Throat was out and it was just too perfect to have some sort of porn movie figure to describe some role in the Nixon thing was just wonderful.

  But whether—I just find the flower in the window difficult to believe and the garage scenes … I mean, I can see that would be a terrific place to meet—once—but you know, I just don’t know. But I have a feeling that that’s a fight still to be fought. If they could prove that Deep Throat never existed—they—the fuckers out there, if they could prove that, that would be a devastating blow to Woodward and to the Post, never mind that Nixon resigned but it’s the Post’s version would be called into account. It would be devastating, devastating.

  In any case, you know, I’m a great believer in playing the cards that you’re dealt, and I’d been dealt that hand and I gotta play. Time and time and time again the reports that they brought back were proved right. Over the long haul you can’t argue with that. Most of them from Woodward.

  The interview took place in 1990, long after history had vindicated the facts of Woodstein’s reporting. Ben has always stood so firmly behind Woodward that the doubts—the residual fear—surprised me. He makes no mention of them in his memoir, or anyplace else.