Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  The first thing I had to do was ask Ben about it. That was going to be tricky. By that time I was comfortable asking him tough questions, but he was quite good at identifying shaky branches and could rarely be lured into stepping out onto one of them. In that interview in 1990 he had been speaking to Barbara knowing that she was a trusted friend, that she wouldn’t (couldn’t) repeat a word of what he was telling her. I wasn’t bound by those ground rules, but I wanted to handle the subject with care.

  It took me a couple of months to find a good moment. One day in early October, just before his son Quinn’s wedding, I finally felt like he might be in the right mood. After twenty minutes of talk about Bob and Watergate, I edged my way there. “The only other question I have about it is a little bit of a trickier question,” I opened, and then I just laid it all out for him. I wanted to be sure that it was real, I said. Did he still have those doubts?

  “Well, I mean, if you would ask me, do I think that he embellished, I would say no,” Ben said. “But was he—he did nothing to … to play down the drama of all of this. I mean, whether, what was it, flowers in the …”

  “A flag in the flowerpot and all of that.”

  “You know, I’m sure they had a signal, and I’m sure it was that way, but whether it was roses or something else, I don’t … who knows.”

  He wasn’t going to go any deeper, but he hadn’t backed away from it, either.

  One of the things you learn as a reporter is that you always get your best information at the end. You put all the pieces together, and then you go back to your sources. The more information you have, the more power you have. And so I sat on Ben’s doubt about Deep Throat, because I didn’t know how Bob would react to it and I didn’t want to upset him before I needed to. There would be other questions that I would need his help with first.

  But then the grand jury discovery occurred, and suddenly I found myself chasing two strands of the Watergate story, strands that had unexpectedly led me toward bigger questions than I had ever thought I would ask. Of the two, the Deep Throat piece felt like significantly smaller beans. The grand jury episode involved decades of dissimulation and possible illegality. Ben’s doubts about a small piece of Deep Throat’s spycraft seemed to me to pale in comparison. I wrote Bob to set up what I described to him as a “final interview,” hoping this wouldn’t be the case but fearing that it might be. Two days later, I went over to Q Street for the interview.

  We spent the first forty-five minutes or so on Watergate. I had just undertaken my story-by-story analysis of it, and Bob’s memory is like a trap, so he was able to discuss the details of each story and give me bits of color about many of them. I could tell that he was mildly amused by the small-bore nature of my questions, but he humored me.

  When I was through with my prepared questions, I slid the three relevant pages of Ben’s interview with Barbara across the table toward Bob, with two pages from my follow-up interview with Ben stapled to the back. Bob asked for the date of Ben’s interview with Barbara, and then he read silently for a while.

  When he got to the second page he spoke for the first time. “Where he’s saying, ‘There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,’ what’s …” He trailed off. He knew the news peg as soon as he saw it.

  “That’s what I was curious about,” I said.

  “Yeah. And, you know, was there one meeting in the garage, were there fifty meetings in the garage …”

  “I ask him to clarify,” I said, pointing to my follow-up interview. “You’ll see where I …”

  Bob lapsed back into silence and continued reading. “He’s mixing up some things here, even,” Bob said. I could see, already, his mind trying to find the escape hatch. Ben was confused, Ben was just kidding around. Then he read silently for a while longer.

  Seven minutes after he’d started reading, he put the pages down and looked up at me. He was visibly shaken. It was not a look I was accustomed to seeing from him. “I’m not sure what …” he said, all vigor drained from his voice. Then, quietly: “What’s the question?”

  “There is no question,” I said, uncertainly. “When I read it, I was surprised. I thought it was a little strange, and I wondered whether you had ever had a conversation with him about it. Whether he’d ever conveyed any of this to you.”

  “Well, you know, what you need to—I mean, I don’t find this, I mean he’s saying at some point, he’s talking about flowerpots and garage meetings and so forth … and ‘there’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.’ ”

  He paused. “You know, I can understand,” he began. “He wasn’t there. I mean, the whole thing has a … you know, as we now know, the whole thing is kind of, a series of accidents and persistent pressure by me. You know, that’s one thing … I was the asshole that kept, you know, showing up and nudging [Deep Throat] and so forth. So, you know, I think that’s a strength that he would have a residual fear about what he doesn’t know about.”

  “But that the information was always good,” I countered. “To me, it’s a real indication of what a newspaper editor does, in a fundamental way. And I thought he clarified it in the interview with me by saying, ‘I don’t think he embellished, I think they did nothing to play down the drama of it.’ And my sense is, that’s his basic—”

  “Yeah, but this is 2010,” Bob interrupted, referring to my interview with Ben. Ben’s doubts as the editor of the Post in 1990 meant more than any doubts he might have now, as an eighty-nine-year-old man. I conceded the point.

  “Look, he’s got to be—you’ve got to understand his strength as a skeptic,” Bob said. “And that he would say, ‘There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,’ and then, you know, ‘You can’t argue with success.’ ” He laughed. “I mean, that’s Ben. That’s—it was right, it worked, but ‘There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.’ ” I could tell from the repetition of that one phrase that Bob wasn’t quite convincing himself.

  He acknowledged that a lot of what happened in Watergate was implausible at first. “That, you know, ‘H. Hunt, W. House,’ I mean … is that possible? You know, so, I mean I kind of like the line. ‘There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.’ … [I]t’s kind of Ben’s skepticism.” I thought this was a smart route to take, and also the truth. A few moments later he said, “You know, the residual fear in his soul that something isn’t quite straight, I would embrace that thought.”

  BW: You know, what don’t you have a residual fear about? You have a residual fear that you hear it wrong. You know, I’ve told the story about when Tenet said the WMD, “It’s a slam dunk,” that, you know, maybe he said “slim dick”.1

  [laughter]

  BW: Right? Maybe I didn’t hear it right. And so you have … a process—you know this—of vetting. Did we get this right, do we have the context right? … [Ben] was always kind of nudging me a little about it … but, you know, and this again is this, that there was a zone of interaction between a reporter and a source where there is, you know it’s kind of hallowed ground, and you don’t step in there.

  Q: Right.

  BW: Isn’t that right?

  Q: Absolutely.

  There is a zone between a reporter and a source that editors cannot tread in without breaking the terms of the compact. That really is what Ben had been talking about, in one sense. If you trust somebody, as Ben trusted Bob, you have to take some things on faith, even if you wouldn’t swear to them yourself.

  We talked a little bit more about Deep Throat, and how he had hidden in plain sight:

  Q: People have put so much pressure on it over the years. And the Deep Throat thing just magnifies the mystery of it in this way in people’s minds. And I think that pressure—I mean, I remember when I worked for you … I was here when you went and saw him. It was February of 2000. I remember coming into the office and you said to me, “So have you figured out who it is yet?”

 
BW: Yeah.

  Q: And I said, no. And I think you were just fucking with me.

  BW: Yeah.

  Q: I said something like, “I’m not sure I want to know, I’m not sure I would trust myself with that kind of secret.” And you said, “Well, I just saw him.” No—you said, “I just talked to him on the phone last week” or something. It was before you saw him. I maybe didn’t know you saw him. But you said, “I just talked to him on the phone last week, I may go see him,” or something like that. And I had forgotten about that until The Secret Man came out, and then I remembered, because I was here.

  BW: That was very indiscreet of me.

  Q: No, but it wasn’t … I think you were trying to say, “It’s a real person” …

  BW: But the, here’s the question … that “the residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,” what is the natural transaction between an editor and a reporter? Hmm? When he questioned, you know, “What’d they say?” “What were the words?” “What were, the exact language?” There’s doubt that we’re getting it right or that we’re, you know, the whole Haldeman thing.

  Q: Or Bernstein on the phone with his source, you have to hang up in ten seconds and all of that.

  BW: Yeah, all of that nonsense. And so I think that’s a state of … I think that applies, doesn’t that, to any …

  Q: To any interaction you have.

  BW: You know, look, when you worked, when we worked together, I trusted you.

  Q: Right.

  BW: No question about it.

  Q: But I could screw something up.

  BW: You could …

  I reminded Bob of our interview three and a half years earlier, when he had said that with Ben, as with one’s father, “you never close the deal.” In The Secret Man, Bob makes the same point about Deep Throat. By the time Bob wanted to air everything out with Mark Felt, to understand why Felt had cooperated in the way that he had, Felt had lost his memory of the events in question. Bob never got any solid answers about Felt’s motivation, or even how he executed some of the spy tradecraft—checking Bob’s balcony for the flag in the flowerpot, or accessing Bob’s copy of The New York Times in order to draw a clock face inside of it—that people over the years had called into question.

  Bob said that many reviewers of that book had felt that it was “incomplete,” that it didn’t resolve anything. “You don’t get a window into somebody’s motives,” he said. “You know, what was Nixon’s motive?”

  Toward the end, Bob pulled the transcripts I’d brought toward him and said, “Let me keep this. I’ll put it in my Bradlee file.” I told him that was no problem.

  “Whatever you make of this …” he said, portentously.

  “I’m interested to hear your reaction, because that’s essentially my reaction,” I said, wanting to reassure.

  “How could he …”

  “How do you operate in a realm of doubt and lack of 100 percent certainty? That’s the newspaper business. His philosophy is always you don’t get the full story any day. You take a piece and you take a piece and you take a piece. So you’re not going to be 100 percent certain that it’s an authoritative account in any story, really.”

  “On anything,” Bob said.

  A minute later we turned the tape recorder off, and Bob asked if I wanted to stay for lunch. Rosa Criollo, Bob’s cook, brought out a perfect tomato soup and sandwiches while the two of us shot the shit for a while. It was a fun, pleasant lunch. Bob didn’t seem agitated at all, and I figured that the evolution he’d gone through in the interview—from being stunned by Ben’s doubt to absorbing it and even appreciating it—was the perfect trajectory. It would make for an interesting byway in the book, nothing more.

  When I got home later that day and listened to the recording of the interview, my heart sank. I hadn’t fully realized that Bob had repeated that one phrase—“There is a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight”—fifteen times in twenty minutes. I had a bad feeling. When my wife got home and asked me about it, I said it had gone well but that I suspected I hadn’t heard the last of it.

  * * *

  1 In Bob’s book Plan of Attack, which described the run-up to the Iraq war, he quoted CIA director George Tenet as having told President George W. Bush that it was a “slam dunk” case that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.

  DOUBT

  (PART TWO)

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  Two days later, at 11:26 on Saturday morning, an email from Bob arrived. It was pleasant but direct: what was the date of Barbara’s interview with Ben, where was the tape of that interview, and what did Barbara have to say about it?

  I knew Bob well enough to know that this was the beginning of a process, not the end of one. I thought back to something I’d said in passing at the end of our interview the previous Thursday and instantly regretted it. We were talking about “slam dunk” vs. “slim dick,” and how one can never be sure that you hear things right, or that somebody else heard things right. I mentioned that I was relying on transcripts for interviews that I hadn’t conducted, and that one could always doubt work that somebody else had done. I shouldn’t have said it.

  I know Barbara Feinman, and I never for one second doubted that her transcription of her interview with Ben was anything less than 100 percent accurate. But now Bob was on the hunt, which caused me to question things I hadn’t questioned before. I called Barbara, and she told me that she didn’t remember that interview in particular but that it sounded like Ben. She said she had given all of the interview tapes back to Ben when she left his employ. I knew some tapes were at Ben’s house and some were in his archives down at the Post, which were in the process of being readied for sale.

  Ben and Sally were down at Porto Bello, so I called Sally there to tell her that I’d had an interview with Bob and he was concerned about a certain tape. I asked if I could come by the house on Monday morning to see if it was among the tapes in Ben’s home office. We made plans to meet at N Street around ten on Monday morning. I did not discuss those plans with Bob.

  On Sunday night, at 10:45, another email came in, this one from Sally. Bob had come over to N Street that night to discuss the situation, and he was agitated. She said Bob would be there the next morning when I came to look for the tape, and that Ben had warned her to “stay out of it.”

  This was unnerving. I barely slept that night as various scenarios unfolded in my mind. Would Bob try to bring Ben down on me? Would he attack the verity of the transcript, or go after the tape before I could get there? Had he already? In my email back to him, I hadn’t told him the precise date of the interview for just that reason.

  In the morning I called my dad, who doubles as my lawyer. I laid it all out for him, and he listened. When I finished I asked him, in all seriousness, if he thought I should wear a wire to the meeting. He laughed, but I could hear his mind spinning on the other end of the line. No, he said. Nor should I bring my tape recorder, because the legal merits of taping anything surreptitiously weren’t something I wanted to have to parse down the road. He suggested I speak as though I were being tape-recorded, to watch my mouth and to make no commitments. If there were any other lawyers there when I arrived, I should turn around and leave. (I realize this might all sound preposterous, maybe even paranoid, but Bob is a powerful man.)

  Around 8:30 I called over to N Street. Sally picked up and told me what had happened. When she and Ben had gotten home from dinner the night before, there had been an urgent message from Bob on their machine. She called him back, and he ended up coming over around nine and staying for nearly two hours. As soon as he arrived, it was clear that he was deeply worried about what was in the documents I had given to him at our interview. He gave them to Ben to read, and apparently after Ben read them he told Bob that he didn’t see what the big deal was.

  She said that at that point Ben got “defensive,” angry with her and angry at Bob. I kept asking why Ben had
been angry, but I couldn’t get a clear answer. Sally hinted that Ben had been irritated with her because she was interjecting too much, which wasn’t hard to imagine, but the Bob part was more mysterious. Bob’s baseline contention had been that the publication of some of the quotations from Ben’s interview with Barbara would undermine his own legacy, Ben’s legacy, and the legacy of the Post on Watergate. That it would be on the front page of The New York Times: “Bradlee Doubted Deep Throat.” That the tape of the interview, in the wrong hands, could end up on 60 Minutes. Sally said Bob had really gotten Ben “worked up” about it, and that he had told Ben flat out that I shouldn’t use the material, and that Ben shouldn’t allow me to use it. I asked her what I should expect when I got over there, and she said that I should expect for Bob to make a loyalty argument—to him, to Ben, to the paper.

  I asked her if I could come by a little early to look for the tape, and she said sure. “You’ve got a tough decision to make,” she said. “I just want you to know that whatever decision you make, I’ll respect it.”

  She asked if I wanted her to be there for the meeting, and because I still didn’t know Ben’s state of mind I told her that I’d be more comfortable if she were in the house somewhere. The only situation I wasn’t sure I could handle, I told her, was if both Bob and Ben were to turn on me together.

  One of the maids let me in a little after 9:30. Ben was in the dining room. “Woodward, is that you?” he called out when he heard the front door close.

  Here we go, I thought to myself. I walked into the dining room and put on my bravest smile and said, “No, it’s just me.” He was finishing his breakfast, and I saw that he had a marked-up copy of the documents I had given to Bob in his right hand. I took a seat to his left.

  “So I guess I’ve really stirred the hornet’s nest here with Bob,” I said.

  “It sure seems that way,” he said. He flipped through the documents quickly, then put them down on the table. He asked me what I thought of them. I told him that I didn’t think they were all that bad in their entirety, but that I wanted to hear Bob out about it. Then he asked me what about them I thought had upset Bob the most.