“I’m not going to characterize or give a definition for the reason I’m not commenting further,” Ziegler said. Most of the other questions Ziegler was asked that morning were of a similar cast.
In the coming days, Gray’s testimony would deeply implicate White House counsel John Dean, who according to Gray had personally requested and received FBI reports on the investigation and lied to federal investigators. Gray’s confirmation hearings became a referendum on Dean’s role, which in turn dragged Nixon in, insisting Dean wouldn’t testify because of executive privilege. The slow dance of administration officials turning on each other had begun, and nobody would do more eventual damage to Nixon than John Dean.
But even still, the lid might have stayed on were it not for James McCord and the letter that he wrote to Judge John Sirica on March 19, 1973, delivered to Sirica the next day and read in open court on Friday, March 23:
McCord, found guilty in the criminal trial, was awaiting sentencing in jail. In writing to the judge, he was breaking a silence he had maintained for nine months, ever since the break-in itself. He wrote that he couldn’t “feel confident” talking to the FBI or with prosecutors who “work for the Department of Justice.” Several members of his family had expressed fear for his life if he told the truth, but he didn’t want to receive the severest possible sentence and so he was willing to talk.
In his letter, McCord wrote:
1. There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.
2. Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to the very structure, orientation and impact of the government’s case, and to the motivation and intent of the defendants.
3. Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, when they could have been by those testifying.
“For the first time, really, I felt in my guts that we were going to win,” Ben wrote later of the moment that McCord’s letter became public. “And winning would mean all the truth. Every bit. I had no idea still how it would all come out, but I no longer believed Watergate would end in a tie.”
McCord’s letter marks the end of the Post’s singular contribution to the unraveling of the Watergate scandal. Since Sy Hersh’s January scoop about payments to the burglars, the Times had gotten into the game in a more major way, but with the revelations in Gray’s testimony and McCord’s letter, Watergate became an unabating national story for the following year and a half. Television crews staked out the houses of high presidential aides; there were reporters everywhere. Though things still happened in the shadows, and Woodstein were often quite good at penetrating those shadows to reveal bits and pieces here and there, the tectonics of governmental inquiry took over. At the end of March, McCord testified under oath to the Senate Watergate Committee that John Mitchell had personally approved plans to bug the Democrats’ headquarters. Woodstein were able to report that closed-door testimony the day after it happened, in a splashy front page story, but it was the testimony, not the reporting, that mattered now.
In mid-April of 1973, as the daily drumbeat of revelations suggested that the president’s men were going to take a woeful beating, the Pulitzer Prize board met in New York City to determine the winners of the prize for 1972. Prizewinners are determined by different juries for each category, but the board has the power to ratify, overrule, or suspend any of those decisions.
Ben had been on the Pulitzer board since 1969. When he arrived in New York, he was happy to discover that Post reporters had won three Pulitzers for 1972: David Broder, for his political column; Bob Kaiser and Dan Morgan, for foreign reporting; and Bill Claiborne, for “local spot news,” a single story written on deadline. But no Woodward, no Bernstein. And the Post itself had been shut out from the public service category, for which entire newspapers could be nominated.
When the jurors had voted, McCord’s letter still hadn’t come out, and the Post’s reporting hadn’t been fully vindicated yet. The public service jury had been headed by a man named Arthur Deck, whom Ben describes as “the great sort of newspaper establishment ASNE1 hack.” Deck was based in Salt Lake City, and Ben figured he didn’t understand Watergate and likely didn’t care about it. “Probably pro-Nixon, certainly pro-Mormon, just was out of it,” Ben says. But now, mid-April, the Post’s contribution couldn’t be denied. As Ben’s version of events goes, Scotty Reston of the Times and Newbold Noyes of The Washington Star told Ben, right when he arrived at the meeting, that the board should use its power to overrule the public service jury and give the award to the Post instead.
“I was thrilled,” he says, “and so naïve that I didn’t see that they would punish me for that.”
In the horse-trading that goes on in situations of that nature—horse-trading always denied by those who participate in it—the Post’s public service prize would come with a cost: as the day wore on, the board also overruled two of the prizes that the Post had already won. Broder remained, but Dan Morgan, Bob Kaiser, and Bill Claiborne all lost out.
“I was just furious. I mean I was so fucking mad I could hardly stand it,” Ben says. “And yet I couldn’t complain because there I had just won big casino, we had just won big casino.” The citation of the public service award was usually made to the newspaper itself, “for the work of” the reporters who worked on the story, instead of to the reporters directly. That’s how the board, with Ben’s approval, chose to do it in this instance, too. The board included an explanatory statement that singled out Bob, Carl, editorial writer Roger Wilkins, and the cartoonist Herblock, but also made reference to the “total effort” of the paper.
Word about the Pulitzers arrived at the Post on or about April 12, 1973.2 Shortly thereafter, Bob and Carl made their way into Ben’s office to have a little chat. They had heard a version slightly different from Ben’s. What they had heard was that Ben hadn’t nominated them for the prize in National Reporting, but had instead “maneuvered it” so that the prize went to the paper instead of to Woodward and Bernstein as individuals. Bob was apparently angrier about it than Carl. As Halberstam noted later in a private memo, Carl “says it was really the only time he’d seen Woodward angry at Bradlee.” Bob acknowledged this in his interview with Halberstam as well:
[Ben] was wearing that black navy turtleneck sweater, and he looked like Kirk Douglas as a submarine commander. He was very much the naval commander, and he says, “It’s a good thing you’ve come in, we’ve been stalling each other on this.” And we told him we thought we were getting screwed by it. And we said there was a way to put it in for both of us, you know, that we would get it and the paper would get it as well. It was, says Woodward, self promotion. We wanted our candy too and we wanted our names on it.
We talked about loyalty to us, then Bradlee talked about loyalty and he said it, “The paper had its cock on the chopping block,” and he talked about the economic pressures on the paper. “You don’t even know what was going on, you don’t know what the stakes were,” and he talked about loyalty and the paper had been good to us and what a great thing this was, and he was just … Bradlee at his best, absolutely seductive, convincing you away from what you want to what he wants. You had a sense that he could really move you and change you.
And you also knew that this meant a lot to him to get it for the paper, that this was getting even with the Times. The Pentagon Papers to him had had blood on every word, that had been his phrase and that’s what he meant. And then he said to us, you know, no one will ever forget who wrote those stories, your names are engraved and … I mean, he made us feel a little shabby about what we were doing. He made us feel like we were being a little bit gross, and at the same time we knew he was screwing with us.
Ben’s version of that meeting: “I said to them, in the last analysis, if it had not been for the guts of the Grahams you guys would be pumping gas somewhere.”
On April 17, the Los Angeles Times broke a front page story reporting that “The White House will make a dramatic
admission within several days that one or more high level officials bear some responsibility for Watergate-type political espionage.” That same day, Jim Fallows, then a twenty-three-year-old staff editor at Washington Monthly, wrote to Ben to inquire about why he hadn’t chosen to run that same story on the front page of the Post:
Dear Mr. Bradlee:
I don’t know whether to be astonished or amused by your decision to run the LA Times story on page 16 of today’s paper. If your own correspondents had produced it, you presumably would have considered it as important as any of the other Watergate stories you have consistently run on page 1. Why the boondocks for this one? Does rivalry among papers (in this case, one whose readership does not overlap yours) overcome news judgment?
Ben’s response, three days later:
Dear Mr. Fallows:
I would hope there is room for reaction somewhere between amusement and astonishment.
We considered that story very carefully. It had no details of what major development, or how it would happen. No names. We had already printed that things were coming to one hell of a head, fast. We simply felt it took us very little further.
Other newspapers apparently disagreed, because they had not printed anything like this. We had. The page 16 is accidental. That was the jump page for all Watergate stories. It could just as well have been page 4.
In the Watergate case, I’m just plain damned if The Washington Post is the paper to be asked whether rivalry among newspapers overcomes news judgment.
I showed this exchange to Bob, and he chuckled. He summarized Ben’s letter thus: “Fuck you, Jim.”
But the Los Angeles Times had it right: the story really was about to change dramatically. That same day, the 17th, President Nixon announced that there had been “major developments” in the Watergate case. In a reversal of his earlier position, he was going to allow his aides to testify under oath before the Ervin committee. He had previously said publicly that no members of the White House staff had been involved in Watergate, but on the 17th he changed his mind, as Woodward and Bernstein reported in a front page story on the 18th:
“If any person in the executive branch or in the government is indicted by the grand jury, my policy will be to immediately suspend him. If he is convicted, he will of course, be automatically discharged.”
The President’s statement was in sharp contrast to 10 months of White House denials of involvement of presidential aides in the Watergate bugging and other political espionage and sabotage activities.
Following Mr. Nixon’s brief talk, presidential press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler met with reporters and said that all previous White House statements about the bugging were “inoperative.” Ziegler emphasized: “The President’s statement today is the operative statement.”
That about summed it up.
The next day the story blew wide open, leading into two of the most remarkable weeks in the history of American journalism:
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And then the biggest of them all:
Though there was certainly a degree of satisfaction in the Post newsroom when word of the resignations of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean reached Carl and Bob and Ben and the other people who had devoted so much of their lives to the Watergate story, the sweetest vindication would come the next morning, in the White House press room. Adam Clymer, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun,3 asked whether Nixon was prepared to apologize to the Post for the administration’s attacks on the paper and its credibility.
“We would all have to say that mistakes were made in terms of comments,” Ziegler said. “I was overly enthusiastic in my comments about the Post, particularly if you look at them in the context of developments that have taken place.… I would apologize to the Post and to Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein.” They had pursued the story and deserved credit for their work. “When we are wrong, we are wrong,” Ziegler said, “as we were in that case.” As he finished, he tried to interject a qualifying “But …,” but the word was barely out of his mouth before he was cut off by another reporter who said, “Now, don’t take it back, Ron.”
Nixon got Nixon, Bob and Carl and Ben always insist, not The Washington Post. He was his own worst enemy. And it was the series of governmental inquiries, more than any newspaper coverage, that would eventually force Nixon from office. But as Ziegler’s apology demonstrates, nobody could deny that Woodstein and the Post had played a singular role in keeping the spotlight on, particularly when the story seemed like it might fizzle. As Bob likes to say, the two most important readers of The Washington Post were John Sirica and Sam Ervin, and it is fair to say that neither man would have done what he did had the Post not kept the pressure on.
“My feeling generally … after being interviewed a hundred times by journalists trying to make us glamorous, [is that] there was no magic moment,” Ben would say later. “There was no fail-safe, there was no point of no return, there was no moment in which everybody on the paper quaked like hell and called a board of directors meeting and said, ‘Fellas, we’ve got this and should we go or shouldn’t we go.’ ” If there had been any moment like that it had been the Haldeman story of October 25, 1972, the moment when they’d made their only serious mistake. More than anything in Watergate they had done the daily and uncertain work of newspapering, getting the story in the paper day after day, using the methodology of journalism as a way to try to understand and explain something that still defies understanding or explanation.
The magic moment for me occurred during my interview with Carl, when he told me a story he would later repeat at Ben’s eighty-ninth birthday dinner in Sag Harbor. In September of 1972, when he and Bob discovered that John Mitchell had been among the people who controlled the slush fund at CRP, they had retreated to a vending machine area just off the newsroom to take a break and talk things over.
“I put the dime in the coffee machine, and I literally felt a chill go down my back,” Carl told me. “And I turned to Woodward and I said, ‘Oh my God.’ And he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘This president’s going to be impeached.’ And he said, ‘Oh my God, you’re right. And we can never use that word in this newsroom anywhere.’
“And we never did,” Carl went on. “Lest they think that we had an agenda in the newsroom. We didn’t want Ben to think that we had an agenda.”
But from that moment on Carl knew where it was headed, just the same. “I have no idea to this day where that came from, but I just knew,” he told me. He laughed, and then he looked away and thought for a moment. As much to himself as to me, he said, with a shake of his head, “Two twenty-eight-year-old kids standing in front of a vending machine.”
* * *
1 The American Society of Newspaper Editors—and all the “alphabets,” as Ben calls them—was not Ben’s kind of crowd. He thought they were mostly small-time and resentful of people like him. Eugene Patterson remembered going to one ASNE convention with Ben and having Ben turn to him and say, “There’s probably not a guy in this room I’d hire.” “There’s probably not an editor here who’d hire you, Ben,” Patterson replied.
2 The prizes wouldn’t be announced publicly until May 7.
3 In September of 2000, while standing on a podium in Naperville, Illinois, presidential candidate George W. Bush would famously refer to Clymer, then a reporter for The New York Times, as a “major-league asshole.”
CODA
The first buzz lets us into the photo archives, which my guide Eddy Palanzo duly calls “the morgue.” A second buzz deposits us in a musty and poorly lit room farther back, where the Post keeps old copies of itself. A decrepit microfilm machine idles off to one side, abutting a couple of rows of freestanding bookshelves. One row holds all the books that used to sit on the shelves in Kay Graham’s office, arrayed just as they were before she died, as if preserved in amber. Lining the
back wall is a set of cabinets that hold the microfilm, and atop those cabinets rest piles of long rectangular boxes filled with yellowing newspapers.
I’m here because of a sentence that Ben probably never thought much about, buried as it was in the middle of a short letter to his old boss, Russ Wiggins, in 1996. Ben had written to tell Wiggins that he would happily submit to an interview with a woman who was writing a biography of the old Post editor, and he promised Wiggins that he would give her the goods. It’s an unremarkable letter, except for the kernel that arrives in the middle without any fanfare and departs without any further explication: “I have found,” Ben wrote, “that daily journals and diaries aren’t as important in recreating the life of a newspaperman as the newspapers themselves.”
Eddy shows me how everything works, and then we pull out a couple of the boxes that I’ve come for. Scrawled on the sides are designations of what’s inside: “JFK Assassination,” “Pentagon Papers,” “Nixon 1” and “Nixon 2.” None of them is as complete as the labeling would have you believe, but it’s a start. Most of the big Pentagon Papers stories are missing, and a number of the papers in the Nixon/Watergate boxes don’t seem like they belong there.
Then I open the box labeled “Nixon 2,” and find myself suddenly knocked back. Sitting on the very top of the pile is the final edition of The Washington Post from August 9, 1974, with its banner headline in type so large that they had to take a picture of the largest typeface they had, blow it up, space it out, and then reset it: “NIXON RESIGNS.” The biggest two-word headline ever to run in the Post, in every sense. On the wall in his office Ben keeps a copy of the famous picture, where he’s leaning over the page form for this historic front page, with the headline in reverse below him.
Yours in Truth Page 24
