Watergate, page 33
The day the Haldeman story was published, Woodward and Bernstein were meeting with their literary agent and editor to talk about turning their Watergate reporting into a book—the project that would ultimately grow, through many twists and turns, into All the President’s Men—but the excitement of the meeting was deflated by the reporters’ fears of a potentially massive screwup. At the White House, Ron Ziegler blasted the Post and its reporting, calling it “shabby journalism,” “absurd,” and a “blatant effort at character assassination.”
After lunch, Woodward reached Sloan’s attorney. “Your story is wrong,” he said. “Wrong on the grand jury.” The conversation grew heated. Woodward, desperate, tried to figure out how and where they had erred. He asked Sloan’s lawyer if they owed Haldeman an apology. The attorney said he didn’t think so. Woodward breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps the gist of their story was right, but the sourcing had been misattributed.
In a rash move, Woodward and Bernstein rushed to federal court to find and confront Lano. The agent smiled when he saw them. Bernstein was incensed. “This is no fucking joke,” he snapped. The reporters threatened to talk to Lano’s boss if he didn’t explain where they screwed up. Woodward waved the notes from Lano’s Monday-night conversation with Bernstein at the FBI agent. “I’ll deny everything,” Lano said angrily. “I can’t even be seen talking to you two bastards.” He added a final “Fuck you” before walking away.
Down the hall, the reporters spotted prosecutor Don Campbell and confronted him.VII Campbell angrily read over the notes of Lano’s conversation and stalked off, reminding the reporters that it was against the law to monitor a conversation across state lines (Woodward had been listening in on Bernstein’s conversation on another extension without telling Lano). The situation escalated quickly; Lano found them again in the hallway and ordered them to remain in the building. They panicked and left, calling their editor from the street, before returning to confront investigators one more time.
They found Lano and Campbell in Silbert’s office and threatened to name Lano as their source unless the prosecutor and the FBI agent cleared up the mistake. “You’re getting no answers from here,” Silbert said with finality. The showdown was, in Woodward and Bernstein’s own words, one of the most “unprofessional” moments of the entire multiyear escapade, one that could have resulted in serious legal trouble for almost everyone involved, not to mention major ethical problems for the reporters—outing an anonymous source to the source’s boss was just about the worst sin in journalism.
Back at the newsroom, they chewed over with editors what had gone wrong. “You don’t know where you are,” Bradlee told them. “You haven’t got the facts. Hold your water for a while.” He then sat down at his typewriter and tried, repeatedly, to craft a statement to release to the other news organizations now clamoring for clarity from the Post. Fuck it, he thought, as he finally typed a simple statement: “We stand by our story.”
Around 9 p.m., Bernstein finally reached Sloan by phone. He explained that, yes, his issue was just with the sourcing. “I never said it before the grand jury,” he said. “I was never asked.”
The next night, Woodward signaled for a parking garage meeting with Deep Throat. “Well, Haldeman slipped away from you,” the FBI leader said, kicking the wall. “When you move on somebody like Haldeman, you’ve got to be sure you’re on the most solid ground. Shit, what a royal screw-up!”VIII
Newspapers across the country covered the subsequent White House denunciations. The following Sunday, McGovern cited the reporting on a morning talk show and Agnew criticized the Post on another channel, while TIME (presumably with the impeccable sourcing of Sandy Smith) reported in its new issue the Haldeman news was false. In response, Bradlee assigned Woodward and Bernstein to write a story clarifying the error. The duo explained they were “incorrect” in saying Sloan identified Haldeman before the grand jury, but that their “federal sources” had indeed confirmed “once more that Haldeman was authorized to make payments from the fund.”
Disaster had been averted, but the short-term damage was real. Across town at the New York Times, the Post’s missteps on the Haldeman “scoop” reaffirmed its decision to stay out of Watergate. As D.C. Bureau Chief Max Frankel said later, “They were writing stuff that we couldn’t have gotten into the Times. Judged by what they printed we couldn’t feel they had a solid hold on the story, particularly when they broke the Haldeman story.”
That fall, as the election neared, Walter Cronkite joined his CBS colleague Daniel Schorr in the belief that Watergate deserved to be a national news story and made a final on-screen effort to attract attention—an extended, two-part segment that tried to explain the swirling, complicated scandal. Cronkite’s interest in the story meant a great deal. He was the embodiment of journalistic gravitas and integrity—in fact the term “anchorman” had been invented in 1952 to describe precisely his role—and one of the evening broadcast’s best producers, Stanhope Gould, carefully constructed a lengthy segment that explored the break-in, the political espionage, and Segretti’s dirty tricks.
Cronkite loved the first segment—which ran to a full fourteen minutes, an eternity in a TV newscast that lasted just twenty-two minutes each night—even though by TV standards it was boring, repetitive, and complicated. (Gould reasoned the repetition was necessary in such a complex saga.) CBS executives balked at devoting so much time to a single piece, but Cronkite pushed ahead and aired it on Friday, October 27, just days after the Haldeman blowup.
“At first it was called the Watergate caper,” Cronkite began. “Five men apparently caught in the act of burglarizing and bugging Democratic headquarters in Washington. But the episode grew steadily more sinister: No longer a caper but the Watergate affair, escalating finally into charges of a high-level campaign of political sabotage and espionage, apparently unparalleled in American history.” The segment was highly produced, with photos of the main players and carefully labeled sourcing, painting the first national picture of what Schorr called “a kind of extra-legal shadow government, existing side by side with the constitutional government.”
Chuck Colson complained immediately, calling the head of CBS, and over the weekend the network battled for hours over whether to air the planned second segment. It decided to move forward, but as a compromise ultimately aired just nine minutes of the second segment on Tuesday night the 31st, cut down from the originally planned fourteen. Even in truncated form, Cronkite’s involvement shifted the national attitude, and validated the Post’s work. When she saw CBS executive Bill Paley at a party soon after, Katharine Graham ran to his side and kissed him. “You saved us,” she exclaimed; Paley, who had borne the brunt of Colson’s diatribe and all but ordered the second segment truncated or shelved, froze in dismay at Graham’s embrace.
As the final days of the campaign ticked away and Patman’s investigation seemed to fade from view, Walter Rugaber penned a pre-election analysis of what the New York Times called “the Watergate mystery” and the mix of “generally accepted fact, reasonable guesswork, and simple assertion” that united the three threads thus far seen publicly: the burglary and wiretapping allegations, the campaign’s financial shenanigans, and Segretti’s political mischief. From many thousands of words written over many months, Rugaber made the most important point in just two sentences: “There are still no definitive, conclusive answers to either of the key questions posed by the Watergate affair from the beginning: What are the limits in assessing blame? What were the intentions and actions of those involved?”
The questions would linger, unanswered, right through Election Day.
I. The conversation is rendered slightly differently in Barry Sussman’s account: He says Segretti dismissed it as “This is material for a good novel.”
II. The Segretti headlines and their intense focus reporting-wise through the fall of 1972 in some ways also represented an all but unrelated branch from the main Watergate story; not only was Segretti’s work almost entirely preceding and unrelated to the hard-core efforts of Liddy’s GEMSTONE team, but he was even operating independently from Magruder’s other trickster-ing efforts. Segretti, in fact, likely intersected the “dirty tricks” operation run by the operative Magruder had nicknamed “SEDAN CHAIR.” As it came out later, they both—unaware of the other—had targeted a Muskie speech at Nixon’s alma mater, Whittier College. A dozen chanting Nixon picketers had confronted Muskie at the speech, organized by Roger Greaves—the SEDAN CHAIR operative—even while Segretti passed among the audience handing out literature about Muskie’s conservative position on abortion, which he assumed would (and did) rile up the student audience.
III. It’s not clear from the conversation whether Haldeman had any sense of the scale, depth, or breadth of Felt’s leaks; in fact, the Post’s reporting is never mentioned in the conversations about the topic, although they do specifically discuss Felt’s leaks at that moment to Sandy Smith at TIME magazine. Woodward, in his own 2005 book, The Secret Man, assumes Nixon’s conversations were about him and the Post, but there’s evidence that the source Haldeman cited actually was a lawyer related to Time Inc., Roswell Gilpatric, a former Kennedy Pentagon official, who told Mitchell.
IV. In another instance that winter, Felt made a stink about a leak he knew he wasn’t responsible for and fingered prosecutor Campbell as the likely source, and used the opportunity to rail about the shoddiness of the reporters covering the scandal. “[Woodward and Bernstein’s] stories have contained much fiction and half-truths,” Felt wrote to his deputy, Robert Gebhardt.
V. Sloan was testifying as part of a Common Cause lawsuit trying to compel the disclosure of the “anonymous” pre–April 7 Nixon campaign donors, using the mechanism of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
VI. In a later, lengthy statement to the FBI, Lano gives a different account of the conversation than the version of the conversation in All the President’s Men recalls, outlining it as far more hostile than Bernstein does and in which he provided far more ambiguous and less useful answers.
VII. In their book, they don’t identify Lano by name and identify Campbell as “one of the agent’s superiors” but FBI records released later make clear it was Lano and Campbell. The FBI records also show that prosecutors Campbell and Silbert were both present for the ensuing conversations, but the presence of both is not mentioned by Woodward and Bernstein.
VIII. Unbeknownst to Woodward, Felt had had a front-row seat to the previous day’s drama at Silbert’s office; some combination of Lano and Silbert had immediately reported the incident to their higher-ups, and by the end of the day, a four-page memo and eight-page statement from Lano was on Felt’s desk, to be dispatched to Kleindienst, Gray, and other Justice officials outlining the incident. Woodward and Bernstein’s insistence that Lano was their source was “an outrageous lie,” which Lano would swear in an affidavit. “Bernstein and Woodward have obviously gotten themselves into an extreme bind because of their false story and they are seeking to make SA Lano their scapegoat,” the memo explained. Across the top, Felt scrawled, with his trademark elongated initial, “original delivered to AG at home evening of 10.26.72.”
Chapter 22 Landslide
When Nixon’s greatest life triumph arrived, he marked it alone, in serious pain. The campaign trail push to Election Day had been exhausting—Chicago, Tulsa, Providence, Greensboro, and Albuquerque—before finally finishing with a rally in Ontario, California, just a few miles from his boyhood home, on Saturday, November 4.
Speaking without notes in a speech that went on for too long, he tried to sum up all that he had learned and seen as president, from America’s streets to the four overseas capitals he had been the sole commander in chief to visit: Peking, Moscow, Bucharest, and Warsaw. The rally inspired him. Thirty thousand people or more spilled out before the stage, stretching off as far as he could see, and the din of their enthusiastic cowbells and honking horns extended even farther. “I believe that we have the chance—and this is our goal—to make the next four years the best four years in America’s history,” he told them all. “This, of course, not only is the last rally of this campaign that I will speak to, it is the last time I will speak to a rally as a candidate in my whole life, and I want to say to all of you here who worked on this, to all of you who took the time to come, thank you very much for making it probably the best rally that we have ever had.”I
Early Tuesday morning, he arrived to vote for himself one final time, at Concordia Elementary School. Then it was back to Washington; there was no real doubt about the victory ahead, and the mood aboard Air Force One, the Spirit of ’76, was, one observer remarked, “like coming from an easy win at a football game.” Everyone ate Mexican food and drank champagne. Ziegler joked that the next day the Washington Post would carry the headline “McGovern Sweeps D.C.” in its largest font, with a subhead that read “Nixon carries nation.”
At home in the White House, Nixon ate dinner with his wife, daughters, and their husbands. Then mid-meal, he grimaced. He had broken a crown. He was examined for a half hour by the White House dentist, then went, alone, to the Lincoln Sitting Room to await telephoned updates from the campaign’s election-reporting teams stationed in the White House lobby and at the Shoreham Hotel. His family, aides, and friends gathered in the Residence’s reception room to watch the results. Nixon turned down an offer for a portable television set.
By night’s end, he had swept every state but Massachusetts and D.C.; McGovern conceded, and Nixon addressed the nation from the Oval Office for two minutes at 11:54 p.m. before setting off for a victory party at the Shoreham. Colson remembered looking around the ballroom that night with an ominous feeling: “There was no air of triumph here,” he wrote later. “The faces before us were unsmiling.” Back at the White House, later, Nixon rejected draft after draft of a telegram to McGovern. “He could show no charity in his hour of his greatest triumph,” Colson recalled.
Wednesday’s Washington Post put it simply: “Nixon Wins Landslide Victory.” The byline belonged to famed political correspondent David Broder, who wrote in his lede, “Richard Milhous Nixon yesterday won re-election as President of the United States in a landslide victory rivaling the greatest of American political history.”
The word “Watergate” never once appeared in the 2,800-word story.
* * *
With the next four years and a national mandate secure, Nixon proceeded to move ahead with the second half of his victory plan: building a new administration from the ground up. “Nixon believed that second terms were worse than first terms, because the same people do the same work, and they are tired and lose their creativity and energy,” then secretary of the treasury George Shultz explained. He was intent on avoiding the mistakes presidents usually made after winning reelection, and so in his moment of triumph, Nixon moved with alacrity to dismiss everyone.
In a series of postelection meetings where most aides expected to be covered in a geyser of gratitude for their hard work, he instead demanded resignations. The suddenness and discourteousness of the move struck even his senior staff, like Kissinger, as “appalling” and “degrading.” Shultz too was crisp in his reaction: “It was cruel.” There was, however, one administration appointee the White House moved quickly to reassure he was safe from the ax: Henry Petersen. As Dean said on the phone to Haldeman, “There’s one guy we can’t afford to piss off—one guy we need, who’s been helpful, concerned, and who’s been watching out after our interests.” Dean reached Petersen just after Kleindienst had told the Justice Department’s leadership they were all to resign, and he recalled hearing an audible sigh of relief as Petersen learned he was excluded.
Nixon ordered the rest of the White House staff to prepare what they called a “spent volcano” analysis, a job-by-job examination of who had fire left. “This is the time to face up to our mistakes in personnel and to get some new committed, hard-charging, capable people in key jobs,” Nixon aide Fred Malek explained. Analysis in hand, Nixon retreated to Camp David with his inner circle to sit in judgment. The president had fought the bureaucracy throughout his first term; his second, he would control it—or as he said, “every goddamn Cabinet officer… and every damned agency head.” For days and then weeks, military helicopters shuttled applicants and supplicants back and forth from Washington. Many were offered second chances; others were pushed aside.
As Nixon had promised that crowd in California, the next four years were going to be his—and America’s—best years yet. As one Nixon aide bragged, “During the first term, we stopped their revolution, now we can move forward with our own.”
Amid Nixon’s larger administration shake-up, the White House cover-up machine continued to churn along, quietly reshuffling aides and trying to keep the hush money flowing to the burglars. Dean stayed busy, carving time out of his postelection honeymoon to debrief Segretti in Palm Springs, an hours-long conversation he recorded for Haldeman. At the White House, he also hosted a series of discussions with what he’d later call the “middle-level cover-up group,” aides like LaRue and CREEP’s lawyers Kenneth Parkinson and Paul O’Brien (no relation to the DNC’s O’Brien), as well as with Colson, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman, about how to lock down remaining loose ends. Looking over the amounts of the hush money payments, O’Brien was shocked. “I think I’m going to switch sides,” he joked. “Any of you guys have any break-ins you want me to do?”
Among the moves they settled on was rewarding Jeb Magruder with a job at the Commerce Department at the highest rank that didn’t require Senate confirmation. Egil “Bud” Krogh, whose ouster from the Plumbers in 1971 had saved him from public exposure to the scandal, was promoted to undersecretary of transportation—a job that did require Senate confirmation, but he simply denied any knowledge of Watergate in his testimony, which was technically, if not wholly, accurate. Dwight Chapin, who had been Segretti’s contact, headed for the private sector, as did Chuck Colson, who had long hoped to build his own law practice as the Republican equivalent of the Democratic power broker Clark Clifford. (“Colson can be more valuable out than in,” Nixon said. “Basically in, he has reached the point that he is too visible.”) Gordon Strachan, whose knowledge of the Liddy operation was seen as the administration’s biggest threat, was transferred away from the White House and given a top job at the U.S. Information Agency. (“[Dean] said the important thing is to keep him in the government, keep him where he doesn’t feel that he’s been cut off at all, and just let him roll,” Haldeman reported to the president during a conversation at Camp David.)
