Watergate, page 23
Magruder then went to Mitchell’s hotel suite, where he relayed the story to the campaign director. “That’s incredible!” Mitchell exclaimed. Magruder then spent the day successfully avoiding telephone calls from the two men he feared the most: Haldeman and Haldeman’s aide, Gordon Strachan. (Amazingly, the two men wouldn’t speak until Sunday.) Initially Magruder—like Hunt—seemed confident that the problem would be contained, but as hours passed, he grew less sure. From California, he called his aide Bob Reisner and asked him to remove the GEMSTONE file in Magruder’s CREEP office, as well as other sensitive documents. “This was a crime that could destroy us all,” Magruder recalled thinking.
Across Washington, officials learned more details. The FBI’s overnight watch supervisor had alerted Mark Felt, who hurried into the office at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday. “This thing has all kinds of political ramifications,” Felt said. “The utter stupidity of it baffled me. What could anyone find at the Democratic National Committee that would be worth the risks?”
For years, John Dean maintained that he didn’t learn of the burglary until Sunday; the White House counsel had been in the Philippines, part of a U.S. delegation to an international narcotics event, and he tells in his memoir how he experienced “two Mondays,” flying back from Manila on Monday the 19th, crossing the international date line, and landing back in San Francisco on Sunday the 18th. It was there that, by his account, he spoke to Fred Fielding for the first time, learned of the burglary, and flew immediately back to Washington. He also claimed not to have known of McCord’s involvement until Sunday night, when he arrived in D.C. and met with Fielding.II
Haldeman had been on the hotel terrace in Key Biscayne with Higby Saturday morning when Ziegler interrupted with the first wire service reports of the arrests. “Watergate historians have already supposed that the heavens fell when those in the President’s party in Florida learned the break-in had been discovered,” Haldeman later recounted. “Quite the reverse is true. My immediate reaction was to smile. Wiretap the Democratic National Committee? For what? The idea was ludicrous.” He says he assumed immediately it was a Chuck Colson operation, the president’s “impresario of ‘hard ball’ politics.” Higby had the same thought; he told Haldeman, “I’ll bet they’re Colson’s gunners.”
Nixon on the other hand was furious. Haldeman shared the news around 11 a.m., and the president promptly called Colson, telling the aide he threw an ashtray across the room. “The whole thing made so little sense,” he recounted thinking in his memoir. “Why? I wondered. Why then? Why in such a blundering way? And why, of all places, the Democratic National Committee?”
Yet even as word spread among the White House staff, there were doubts that the president’s inner circle were as innocent as they would profess. Alexander Butterfield heard about the burglary on the radio during his daily drive in to the White House, and when he arrived at the Oval Office, he said to Nell Yates, one of Nixon’s favorite secretaries, “You know, don’t you, that he had to have done this?”
“Of course,” she replied, not pausing for a moment.
They spoke for another moment before Butterfield concluded, “I can’t imagine anything happening in this administration that the president and/or Haldeman haven’t approved.”
* * *
Richard Kleindienst had not even been attorney general for a full week when word reached him via a call from the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Henry Petersen, that the Watergate had been burgled.III With little other information, the attorney general headed on with his day’s plans: the annual members golf tournament at Washington’s elite Burning Tree Golf Club.
During lunch in the club dining room, he looked up from the table to see Gordon Liddy and CREEP press secretary Powell Moore motioning to him from the passageway to the locker room. Kleindienst had only met Liddy once, during a meeting on narcotics policy. When Kleindienst walked over, he noticed the aide was agitated. “I’ve got to talk to you at once,” Liddy said. “Where can we talk in private?”
Inside the locker room, the story tumbled from Liddy’s mouth. “John Mitchell sent me from Los Angeles to inform you that some of the persons arrested last night at the Watergate Hotel might be employed by the White House or the Committee to Re-Elect the President—and he wants you to get them out of jail at once!”
Kleindienst was taken aback, but doubted that such a direct request had been made. “What in the hell are you talking about, Liddy?” he said. “John Mitchell knows how to reach me; I don’t believe he gave you any such instructions.”IV
According to Liddy’s memory of the conversation, he then told Kleindienst, “I know—there’s no way you can ever try to do it without it getting out. Then what happens to you?”
“Me?!” Kleindienst spat back, according to Liddy. “Fuck what happens to me! What happens to the President if I try a fool thing like that? It’s the Goddamnest thing I ever heard of.”
Dialing from the locker room phone, Kleindienst called Petersen. His instructions were clear: “Henry, I don’t know what this is all about, but those persons arrested last night are to be treated just like anyone else.”V
Frustrated, Liddy returned to the CREEP office to complete his shredding. That afternoon, he heard more bad news: Hunt’s name had apparently been inside the notebook of one of the burglars. The FBI had already attempted to interview Hunt at home, but he’d declined until he had the chance to speak to his lawyer.
* * *
As the day progressed, the D.C. federal prosecutors assigned to the break-in, Chuck Work and Earl Silbert, set about obtaining search warrants for the burglars’ hotel rooms.VI When the arresting police officers, Sergeant Leeper and Officer Shoffler, were finally granted access, they and other D.C. police found mysteries aplenty: spy equipment, sequentially numbered $100 bills, and, among some other papers, various letters and mail mentioning someone named “E. Howard Hunt,” as well as the burglars’ address books, which also included entries for Hunt, one noting “WH” and another outright saying “W. House.”
Investigators initially thought one of the burglary motives might be jewelry theft and assigned the case to the FBI’s C-2 squad, the Washington Field Office’s “street sweepers” who handled “miscellaneous crimes,” ranging from migratory bird violations to crimes on the capital region’s many military posts. FBI Special Agent Angelo Lano was the first on the scene, which made him the “case agent,” a post he would hold through the scandal’s conclusion. He’d handled several of the Watergate complex’s domestic burglaries already, including the jewelry theft from Rose Mary Woods. “I never solved any of them,” he recalled years later. “The Watergate had simply become my beat.”
Soon investigators hit their first big clue when they realized that the burglar who called himself Edward Martin was actually someone named James McCord—and, confoundingly, he appeared to work for the president’s campaign. The bureau, meanwhile, searched its files for Howard Hunt and found it had recently run a background investigation for someone of the same name who was up for a job at the White House.
As questions compounded, Lano brought in his colleague Daniel Mahan, a twenty-nine-year-old agent known for being a skilled interviewer, and dispatched him to the D.C. jail to speak to the burglars. “They clearly didn’t look like ordinary knuckleheads,” Lano recalled. They gave up nothing—when Martinez was asked about the purpose of the burglary, he replied, “That’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?”
Interviewed by another Spanish-speaking agent, Paul Magallanes, Martinez remained enigmatic. “We’re working for the same man,” Martinez said. “You work for the government. We work for the government. And we’re going to be taken care of.”
Who did Martinez mean? the FBI agent asked. “By the man—the president,” the burglar said. “We work for the president, just like you do.”
* * *
News of the burglary began to circulate in the media after the Democratic Party’s deputy chair, Stan Griegg, called Lawrence O’Brien to inform him his office had apparently been the target. O’Brien was in Miami, preparing for the summer presidential convention, and Griegg explained that he had been to the jail to look at the suspects, but didn’t recognize them. “Neither Stan nor I knew what to make of the break-in,” O’Brien recalled. The DNC’s lawyer, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., however, knew someone who might. He also happened to be the lawyer for the Washington Post and called his other client to pass along a tip.
Around 8:30 a.m. Saturday morning, the paper’s city editor, Barry Sussman, enlisted the Post’s legendary police reporter, Alfred Lewis, and a relatively new reporter named Bob Woodward to dig deeper. Lewis’s job was to hang around police headquarters and local precincts and call in tips and stories to the paper’s rewrite desk; despite having worked for the paper since before World War II, his colleagues weren’t sure he’d ever written a story himself. After thirty-five years on the beat, he was almost more cop than journalist—he even often wore a regulation blue police sweater—and that day, he marched right into the Watergate alongside a police official he knew, swirling past the media and cameras waiting outside. Soon, he was inside the DNC office suite and used one of the party’s phones to call Sussman with some details. It was clear this was more than just a weird crime story. “One of the men had $814, one $800, one $215, one $234, one $230,” Lewis dictated. “They seemed to know their way around; at least one of them must have been familiar with the layout.”
As Lewis gathered details at the scene, Woodward began working the story from the newsroom. He’d been at the paper just about nine months. Having just left the navy and suddenly dreading the prospect of starting law school, he had in August 1970 approached the Washington Post’s metro editor, Harry Rosenfeld, about becoming a reporter, showing up at the paper’s headquarters at 15th and L Streets NW and prowling the building until he found Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld firmly rebuffed Woodward’s interest, pointing out he’d never even worked on his college newspaper, and quizzing him on the basics of journalism. Woodward flunked. Still, something about the young man’s audacity piqued Rosenfeld’s interest, and he offered Woodward a two-week tryout, a test Woodward also flunked; he tried to research and write a dozen or so stories over the two weeks and succeeded at none. Rosenfeld told him to go learn the ropes at a small newspaper, suggesting a suburban Maryland weekly run by a former Post editor. “Though I had failed the tryout completely—it was a spectacular crash—I realized I had found something I loved,” Woodward recalled later. “The sense of immediacy in a newsroom and the newspaper was overwhelming to me.” He joined the Montgomery County Sentinel, learned the basics of reporting, and a year later, Rosenfeld hired him onto the Post staff.VII He started as the Post’s lowest-paid reporter, making $165 a week, working the night cops beat, from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m., running from crime scene to fire across the city. By June, he felt he was ready for bigger things and had just finished his first major investigative series, looking at the assassination attempt on George Wallace.
As Saturday unfolded, Sussman enlisted another reporter, Carl Bernstein, to gather biographical information on the burglars.VIII The team soon figured out that four of the burglars were from Miami’s Cuban-American community, and Sussman—a heavyset, thirty-eight-year-old newspaper veteran from Tennessee who had been at the paper for nearly a decade—dispatched a reporter accompanying Nixon to Key Biscayne to talk to the exile community in Florida.
Mid-afternoon Saturday, Woodward headed to the courthouse for the burglars’ preliminary hearing, where he had several confounding exchanges with Douglas Caddy and Joseph Rafferty, the lawyers who seemed to be representing the burglars. Caddy said he’d met one of the defendants, Bernard Barker, during a gathering at the city’s posh Army-Navy Club—not exactly a normal hangout for a burglary suspect—and had been called by Barker’s wife around 3 a.m. when she hadn’t heard from her husband.
When court came to order around 3:30 p.m., Judge James Belsen asked the burglars their professions. “Anti-communists,” Barker said, speaking for the group as the others nodded.
McCord, when asked the same question, replied he was a security consultant.
“Where?” the judge asked.
“I’ve recently retired from government service,” he said, his voice soft.
“Where in government?”
“CIA,” he all but whispered.
Woodward, sitting toward the rear of the room, muttered out loud: “Holy shit.”
He raced back to the newsroom to add his reporting to the paper’s main story, which would run on the front page of the Sunday edition under Alfred Lewis’s byline. A second story profiled Wills, the security guard, and a third by Bernstein and the reporter in Key Biscayne provided what details they could gather about the suspects. Altogether, ten Washington Post reporters contributed to those first reports. “As we read it over, no one could fail to be impressed by the extraordinary mystery at hand,” Sussman recalled.
Not every news organization, though, saw a major story. At the New York Times, the assignment desk decided the burglary wasn’t even worth calling the D.C. bureau’s designated weekend writer.IX Instead, one of the paper’s young minority interns, Nat Sheppard, wrote up the story; it ran on page 30.
* * *
Unaware of the burglary, Martha Mitchell woke for the day in California around eleven and headed to the beauty parlor. As she went about her day, she noticed a certain franticness and moodiness to the staff—at one point, returning to the Mitchells’ suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel from a photo shoot, she saw John sitting, glumly, with the LaRues and the Mardians, all drinking—but the evening’s campaign party, headlined by Pat Nixon with stars that included Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jimmy Stewart, Clint Eastwood, and John Wayne, proved a triumph. At the end of the night, she found John still too consumed by meetings to absorb her complaints that the first lady had snubbed her at the party.
On Sunday, the Magruders left abruptly for D.C., but the Mitchells and others headed south to Newport Beach and the Newporter Inn, one of the Nixon staff’s favorite resorts during trips to the Western White House.X That afternoon, John and Martha sat together, pleasantly talking in the sitting room of their resort villa; John explained that he needed to return to Washington, but that she should spend a few days relaxing with their daughter. He would leave Steve King, their bodyguard of the moment, to stay with them. (“Those were the last decent words we ever had together,” she later said.) That evening, everyone tromped to another Nixon fundraiser, but Martha still heard no mention of a burglary. As she said later, “They had me at a brunch, they had me at a cocktail party, they had me at a reception and a dinner all day Sunday. They kept me going all that day.”
That Sunday morning, the AP reported for the first time that one of the burglars, James McCord, was the security coordinator for the president’s reelection campaign, and John Mitchell issued a swift and stern statement from California: “The person involved is the proprietor of a private security agency who was employed by our committee months ago to assist with the installation of our security system. He has, as we understand it, a number of business clients and interests, and we have no knowledge of these relationships. We want to emphasize that this man and the other people involved were not operating on either our behalf or with our consent. There is no place in our campaign or in the electoral process for this type of activity, and we will not permit or condone it.”
Martha was still none the wiser.
On the other side of the country, the official word was that Nixon was “ignoring” the incident and “taking no interest.” After the ashtray-throwing phone call to Colson, he’d continued on with his weekend, ensconced on Bob Abplanalp’s private island, far from his top aides, and he didn’t return to Key Biscayne until noon on Sunday and didn’t head back to D.C. until late Monday. In between, he talked repeatedly with Colson, Haldeman, Haig, Kissinger, and others weighing the evolving situation and dealing with other presidential business.
There’s reason to believe the White House’s interest was deeper and more troubled than it let on. According to Pat Gray’s 2008 memoir, Ehrlichman phoned Henry Petersen at the Justice Department Sunday afternoon to urge the head of the criminal division to wrap up the case pronto. “That’s it,” the White House aide told Petersen. “You have the burglars—close it out in the next 24- to 48-hours.”
“Screw you,” Petersen replied, according to Gray. “We’re not going to.”
Ehrlichman certainly understood how important it was to keep Watergate bottled up. As he recalled later, “We had one hundred and some days until the ’72 election. If we could keep it out of the White House for that length of time, he’d be home free.”
* * *
Back at the Post, Woodward and Bernstein focused Sunday on learning more about the burglars. It was the first time the two had ever worked together on a story, and they didn’t exactly have a warm relationship. Although just a year apart in age, they came from radically different backgrounds. While Woodward had come to journalism late, Bernstein had started early—he’d been at the Post for six years, most recently covering Virginia, and had begun as a $44-a-week copyboy at the crosstown-rival Washington Star at sixteen and, after dropping out of college, became a reporter full-time at nineteen.
