Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  I pick the paper up gently and hold it like a relic, certain I’m setting off some kind of silent alarm just by touching it. From its weight I can tell that it isn’t only the front section. A quick flip reveals that I have in my hands the entire final edition of the newspaper that day—Style, Metro, Sports, the works. Up to now I’ve read all the newspapers in microfilm or as PDFs online, which give a sense of what the papers looked like but can’t compare to holding the real thing in your hands:

  Without even reading a word, you can feel Ben on the uncluttered front page.1 This wasn’t a typical news day, of course, but still the decision to run only four stories on the front was a bold one. The news spoke for itself. That morning The New York Times ran the same headline but in much smaller type; above the fold in the Times there are headlines and text for some six different stories. The simplicity of the Post’s layout is striking.

  As I flip past the front page, I hear an ominous cracking sound. Stray bits of newsprint fall out of the paper and onto the table. Maybe this newspaper is too old to be read. I wait for the bell to go off, but after a few seconds I realize that if anybody cared this paper wouldn’t have been rotting away in a disorganized box in a disorganized room. I resolve to be as gentle as I can with it and keep moving.

  The first few inside pages hold the kind of national news that everybody that morning in 1974 no doubt skipped over as quickly as I do, run-of-the-mill stories about farm and factory price increases and six consecutive life sentences for a man who had hacked a bunch of people to pieces in Texas. The Watergate coverage picks up again on A6, with a long story by Lou Cannon, the presidential reporter, and then runs uninterrupted through to A23 before spilling over onto the editorial and opinion pages.

  Opposite Cannon’s piece is the jump from “A Solemn Change,” the analysis and reaction piece from Dick Harwood and Haynes Johnson on page one. Harwood and Johnson were the star news writers on the paper. As George Solomon, the former sports editor, once told me, “There were two guys he’d bring out and put on the white horse, Haynes Johnson and Harwood. And those two guys took it up a notch.” He likened having them write a piece about Nixon resigning to having your ace pitcher ready to throw Game Seven of the World Series.

  “Inside the White House, there were no last minute theatrics, no public relations gimmicks, no coyness about what was to happen and no rancorous remarks about enemies,” Harwood and Johnson wrote. “It was an orderly thing, this passing of power.” They appreciated the irony that Nixon’s resignation speech had preempted three previously scheduled programs on broadcast television with the titles The Taste of Ashes (NBC), The Nature of Evil (ABC), and The Last Man (CBS).

  Last Monday, Aug. 5, saw the final blow. He released three more transcripts. They contained the final seeds of his destruction. He conceded he had withheld critical evidence from his lawyer, his aides and staunchest supporters—and that he had personally approved plans for the Watergate cover-up only six days after the break-in on June 17, 1972. All his previous public statements about his role were demolished by his own words.

  Ben’s Post has every conceivable angle covered. There are reaction stories from Grand Rapids, where Vice President (and soon-to-be President) Gerald Ford was from, and from Whittier, California, where Nixon graduated from high school and college, and from outside the White House, and from the rest of America, and from area politicians, and from Congress, and from Ron Ziegler, and from conservatives already voicing support for Goldwater over “Rocky” (Nelson Rockefeller) for the now vacant vice president’s job. The Ziegler story shows how far even Ziegler had come since his apology to Woodstein in May of the previous year. The lede graf, a quotation from Ziegler himself: “I think I take away from this job a deep sense of respect for the country’s freedom of expression and the strength of a free press.”

  On the editorial page, Herblock sums it up better than all of the writers:

  Opposite the cartoon ran the lead editorial, “The Resignation of a President”:

  Maybe too much has already been written—and written too sentimentally—about the marvels of the system and how it “worked.” But it did. And it is important to be precise about how it worked.… It was the conscience and pride and responsibility of innumerable people and numerous institutions that combined to assert that 1) there was (and is) a norm of official behavior that is recognized and respected by all Americans and 2) the President’s departure from this norm was sufficiently gross and calculated to require an extraordinary and unprecedented remedy.

  The reference to the working of the system is as close as anybody in the entire A Section of the Post that morning came to mentioning the Post’s own part in the drama.

  Below Herblock’s cartoon, David Broder weighed in with “The Country He Leaves Behind”:

  Now that it is over, now that the long ordeal has ended for the man and the nation, now that the angry emotions have been vented into the vacuum created by his departure, what one can feel is compassion for Richard Nixon and renewed confidence in the country he left behind.

  He wanted so much to be President. The office tantalized and terrified him for 13 years before it came into his possession. And like any passion too long nurtured before it was fulfilled, it turned into something monstrous, something he could not control.

  The general theme of most of the paper’s coverage that morning—including a long supplemental section, “The Nixon Years”—was not that Nixon had been inordinately evil, only that he had succumbed to certain temptations that most men in power must face. There was an active effort not to demonize him, and much quotation of Shakespeare to set him in context. More than one person wondered at the standard that Americans had now established: if we got rid of Nixon for this, what do we do the next time? The shades of Clintonian perjuries hover just offstage.

  I read the rest of the paper, too, just to feel the other contours of that 1974 world. In Sports, Muhammad Ali coined the phrase that has described his upcoming bout with George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, ever since: “We’re going to rumble in the jungle.” On the Business and Finance front page, a youngish and bespectacled Alan Greenspan looks out from a photograph next to a story about whether his nomination to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors would be held up. (It wouldn’t.) In Style, Faye Dunaway got married to Peter Wolf, the lead singer of the J. Geils Band. And in Metro you could find the usual lottery winners, shootings, and ex-policemen sentenced for their crimes. All of the business of the world still ongoing, even the funny pages, even on a day like that day.

  If the newspapers tell the story of who a newspaperman is, the Post’s Watergate coverage—and, specifically, the August 9, 1974, final edition of the paper—tells us who Ben is. From the front page on down, this was the capstone to a monumental undertaking, where Woodward and Bernstein and the editors and Kay Graham had put everything on the line in a way that makes the Pentagon Papers look quaint by comparison. All of the reporters who made the newspaper great, who defined its political coverage, are represented in this one newspaper—the older stars and a couple of newer ones, all weighing in on an event that they hadn’t created but in which they had played an undeniable and at times even central role.

  From this one newspaper, you can feel the sheer size of Ben’s job, the magnitude of the undertaking that is the production of a daily newspaper, measured alongside the odds they were up against with Watergate and the success they achieved. The simple fact of that accomplishment. Ben was in charge of all of those people, and responsible for them, too. He stood behind all of them. And his was the final word in the creation of the document itself, that incredibly complex and various document, meant to be read only for a day but now, in this one instance, for at least a little while longer.

  My favorite of all of the pieces in the newspaper was written by Sally, who was sitting in the press room that day. She wrote a kind of meta-piece, covering the media covering the story. By this point Ben and Sally were living together—in the Watergate, of
all places2—but her writing distinguishes her for its quality alone. She was already widely known for her insouciance and her ability to distill whole stories from the essence of one well-chosen quote. In this instance, she took everybody in the entire press room on. The lede:

  “The air was fraught with tension,” dictated several reporters from the White House press room. “An atmosphere of gloom pervades” … “One has the feeling of being in a cancer ward, waiting for a patient to die” … “one has the feeling of watching sharks closing in on a victim” … “one has the feeling … of waiting for the guillotine to fall … one has the feeling …”

  The air was fraught with clichés.

  She described the changing atmosphere in the press room as various developments occurred throughout the day, nailing Ziegler’s mood better than any of the news stories had: “He looked stricken. He was sweating when he stepped up to the podium, his hands were shaking and he moved them rapidly from his pocket to his papers to his chest, a muscle in his cheek was twitching and his voice cracked as he spoke.” She made it personal. To add to her roster of clichés, hers was the only story in the paper that morning that made me feel like I was there.

  She also noted the surreality of the whole situation, when the reporters realized that they weren’t going to be able to cover the president’s resignation speech and were going to have to watch it on television, like the rest of America. As the reporters gathered around the TV, Sally wrote, “[t]he photographers took pictures of the press watching the President.” In the picture of this moment that accompanies the article, Sally is sitting on the floor just left of the middle of the frame, wearing her distinctive oversize seventies glasses, notepad in her lap.

  The piece is playful, but the point hits home. The press had stepped out of the wings and onto the stage during Watergate. Bob and Carl and Ben and, increasingly, Sally—they had all become part of the story, actors in the drama itself. The book All the President’s Men had come out in June of 1974, making them all folk heroes, as Ben likes to say. The movie, which would do far more, was already in the works. Their heightened profiles would beget increased scrutiny and resentment, something that all of them were aware of but maybe weren’t quite ready for.

  After Nixon’s resignation speech, a pall fell over the press room:

  One hundred or so Americans became reporters again. “Well,” said someone cynically, “it probably played in Peoria.” And another remarked, “I wonder if my paper will send me to San Clemente tomorrow. I guess so. He’s probably a good story for at least 10 more days.”

  But another shook his head in a quiet kind of daze and said, “It’s a funny feeling. I’ve been covering this guy for so many years. And now I’ll probably never slug another story ‘Nixon’ again.”

  That was it, at its core. Nobody knew what to do next. Though somewhere, in the newsroom or in story conference at some point that very afternoon, I can just imagine Ben turning to some unsuspecting editor or reporter and saying, with zero irony, “So whaddaya got for tomorrow?”

  Harry Rosenfeld, September 26, 2011:

  We can talk about this endlessly, but the sun sets. Watergate was a piece of gold. It told the truth. If it wasn’t right in every last detail, it was right in more detail than any story I have ever dealt with, certainly with that kind of tenure. It was brass solid. And you can argue about this and you can argue about that, but the truth: the truth is, great wrongdoing was revealed, at great odds, that shook up the country and affects it to this day. The paradigm was set by our Watergate investigation. Everybody earned his stripes. Everybody. The fact that they weren’t perfect human beings, the fact that they didn’t make perfect judgments every time, I don’t think gainsays that.

  Kay to Ben, Christmas 1974:

  The first thing you and I have to do is separate myth from reality because after this year the myth will start to grow and reality will start to diminish even in our minds.

  The reality is so much less pretentious but so apparently impossible to describe. And it really is much nicer because it’s human—You are now supposed to be a hero and I a heroine by many and the opposite by many—I think heroes and heroines are both vulgar and boring and usually lead that kind of lives. But when you tell people you were just doing your own thing in an admittedly escalated situation, they say, Ah, yes, etc.

  So what are the realities?

  They are so complicated of course because we have known each other and our lives have impinged on each other with almost Proustian coincidence, both closer and more distant than they’d think. Closer because I am thinking of the shared Walter and Helen Lippmann type memories—the first tour at the Post, Phil and me seeing you and Jean in Paris, leading up obviously to the drama of Newsweek, followed by the horror years viewed so differently at the time and then Phil’s death. You have to remember at that time we hardly knew each other and certainly not in reality or very favorably either—

  How could the rest have happened? It couldn’t ever again. We were still small enough as a company, still private, and so the impossible happened.… I with nothing more than a family feeling, a passion for newspapers and for this newspaper in particular, (not the slightest clue about business, broadcasting or Newsweek—only negative vibes about the latter which was associated only with madness in my mind) took over this peculiar & charismatic entity.

  Two years later [meaning 1965] you knocked—typically, brashly, intuitively, humorously, rudely, perceptively, farsightedly, ballsily, and pushy as Hell—And because this was a not unfamiliar syndrome to me—and one whose merits—& drawbacks I knew—I nodded a feeble assent (I guess that’s slightly exaggerated I say hastily for all those future fucking Columbia Journalism Review stories.) But there’s a kind of core truth to the scene.

  Then came another—the years of learning, of stumbling, of fun, of some achievement, progress, mixed with big smelly eggs on the floor—laid and cleaned up or just shoved under the rug until the stain soaked through. The fascinating thing—and the thing to remember is that if you have enough going for you in the way of momentum and luck, everyone looks at the developing pattern on the rug whether it’s an Oriental design or the stain from the egg, and says, “What a beautiful rug.” And pretty soon we’re telling ourselves—“It’s a hell of a rug we’ve made”—and even funnier, it is. But let’s always remember the stains, the unfinished work, with the total effect & the fun—my God, the fun. It’s unfair, who else has fun? And that’s my Christmas thanks to you, kid—more than even the Watergates, although that, too—

  The things that people don’t know—that I know—are style, generosity, class & decency, as well as understanding of other people’s weaknesses. If I had to name the toughest time for you in retrospect & the worst time for me in retrospect were the post-Style years during which you coined a famous phrase—“Take your finger out of my eye”—

  It was out of all these many things that Watergate evolved for you & for me & for the way it works.

  If there was one thing I thought of at the time it was a high wire over a canyon in which I almost couldn’t pull at your coat tails & say “are we alright because if we’re not look below”—It was sort of like trying to talk to the pilot during a hairy landing. Not that I didn’t.…

  And maybe one of the things it’s easy to forget in 1974, is that the answer was, we were not all right—we were righteous but mercifully stupid. We were only saved from extinction by someone mad enough not only to tape himself but to tape himself talking about how to conceal it. Well, who could have counted on that? Not you and not me.

  Thank God for the reality, it will never be in any book or any cruddy movie. It’s much too good for that.

  BCB, April 19, 1985:

  Dear Mr. Yanoff and Mather High students:

  First, I want you to know I think your interest in writing the principals who had something to do with Watergate is terrific. I suspect you’re lucky to have a teacher who gives that much of a damn.

  The thing abou
t Watergate that made it a major event in our nation’s history was the resignation of Richard Nixon, the first President to be forced out of office in the history of our great country. If he had not resigned, it probably would not have been fair to call it a major event. But he did resign, and the only reason he resigned was that he was going to be impeached if he didn’t. The way I see it, I have to call that a major event.

  Will its importance diminish with time? Sure. Everything diminishes with time. The Civil War, the Depression, World War II, Vietnam. Even the Hagler-Hearns fight seems slightly less important to me this morning than it did on Monday night.

  Did we as a country learn anything from Watergate? I wish I were sure that we had. I wish our government officials had learned more than that it is simply better not to be caught. I wish people saw clearly that the real lesson of Watergate is that a bunch of arrogant people cannot pervert the laws of this land to their own benefit without running the risk of shame and scorn.

  I know it’s popular now to say that Watergate was exaggerated by the press, especially by The Washington Post. But remember this: Dozens of people went to jail, including the Attorney General of the United States. And they were sent to jail by their peers, by jurors, not by journalists.

  Good luck to all of you.

  * * *

  1 Notice that the final edition front page is different from the first edition front page, which Ben reviews in the famous picture; between 7:30 P.M. and sometime much later that night, the editorial team decided to replace the picture of a haggard-looking Nixon with a more tender picture of him hugging his daughter.

  2 “Bob Dole was living there, too,” Sally told me. “Blasting the Post every day on TV, then being really friendly to Ben and me in the elevator.”