All the President's Men (10 page)

Heading for the Beltway, Bernstein stopped at a phone booth and called Woodward at home. Between the coffee jag, the euphoria of the moment and the information he was trying to keep straight in his head, Bernstein sounded overexcited. He also didn’t want to say too much on the phone—the paranoia was catching. He said he’d be right over.

Woodward typed as Bernstein dictated his notes and filled in the gaps. The implications seemed clear. The money in Stans’ safe was related to the bugging operation; Liddy had received some of it; but,
most important, Mitchell’s assistants—including Magruder—had also gotten some of the money and were aware of the espionage operation.

Woodward had turned on the stereo full-volume, and typed at the top of the page: “Interview with X. Sept. 14.”

Then he passed Bernstein a slip of paper and asked him who the information was coming from. Bernstein wrote the Bookkeeper’s name on it.

Late the next day, September 15, the indictments were handed down by the grand jury. As expected, Hunt, Liddy and the five men arrested on June 17 were indicted. The seven men were charged with as many as eight separate counts each—all related to conspiracy, burglary and the federal wiretapping statute prohibiting electronic interception of oral communications. In its story, the
Post
noted that the indictments did “not touch on the central questions about the purpose or sponsorship of the alleged espionage.”

Attorney General Richard Kleindienst said the indictments represented the culmination of “one of the most intensive, objective and thorough investigations in many years, reaching out to cities all across the United States as well as into foreign countries.”

At the
Post,
Bernstein, Woodward and the editors had become increasingly skeptical of the federal investigation. Why weren’t the $89,000 in Mexican checks, the $25,000 Dahlberg check and the Stans slush fund mentioned in the indictment? How could the indictment be so limited if the government had the same information as the
Post?

Bernstein telephoned a Justice Department official who had been helpful occasionally and asked how the indictment squared with the Bookkeeper’s testimony. Hadn’t everything she said been confirmed by Sloan? Certainly the government had established through at least those two that the fund in Stans’ safe was tied to the bugging and that the money had been controlled by John Mitchell’s assistants.

The source was uncomfortable and evasive at first. Then, defensively, he confirmed that the information was there—including the assertions of Sloan and the Bookkeeper.

Bernstein asked indignantly why the
Post
shouldn’t run a story charging the government with ignoring evidence. There was proof that the fund in Stans’ safe was tied to the bugging and there were witnesses who knew which higher-ups at the committee were involved.

“You’re making some bad assumptions. I’ll believe you if you put your name on a story that says someone can testify to a fund going for the Watergate.”

Bernstein recalled that the Bookkeeper had said her evidence did not prove conclusively that the money went to the Watergate operation. He rephrased: Wasn’t there a considerable body of evidence indicating that others had knowledge of the bugging operation and that the fund was central to the involvement of others?

The source hesitated. “If what you say is true, it’s gonna come out in the wash. The only new things will come out in the trial.”

What about the people who had come back to offer new information to the FBI and the prosecutors?

“It happens in every investigation,” the official said, and added: “There is nothing you know that we don’t know. We’ve got all the facts. You’re not telling me anything.”

Then this would be the end of it?

“It can safely be said that the investigation for the present is at rest, in a state of repose. It seems highly unlikely that it will be reopened.”

Bernstein overstepped good judgment. Maybe the Feds should bring Dick Gerstein and his crackerjack investigator, Martin Dardis, up to Washington to help out, he suggested.

“It pisses me off that Gerstein is a member of the bar,” said the official. “We know the facts—not Gerstein, not you.”

4

W
OODWARD HAD
a source in the Executive Branch who had access to information at CRP as well as at the White House. His identity was unknown to anyone else. He could be contacted only on very important occasions. Woodward had promised he would never identify him or his position to anyone. Further, he had agreed never to quote the man, even as an anonymous source. Their discussions would be only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere and to add some perspective.

In newspaper terminology, this meant the discussions were on “deep background.” Woodward explained the arrangement to managing editor Howard Simons one day. He had taken to calling the source “my friend,” but Simons dubbed him “Deep Throat,” the title of a celebrated pornographic movie. The name stuck.

At first Woodward and Deep Throat had talked by telephone, but as the tensions of Watergate increased, Deep Throat’s nervousness grew. He didn’t want to talk on the telephone, but had said they could meet somewhere on occasion.

Deep Throat didn’t want to use the phone even to set up the meetings. He suggested that Woodward open the drapes in his apartment as a signal. Deep Throat could check each day; if the drapes were open, the two would meet that night. But Woodward liked to let the sun in at times, and suggested another signal.

Several years earlier, Woodward had found a red cloth flag lying in the street. Barely one foot square, it was attached to a stick, the
type of warning device used on the back of a truck carrying a projecting load. Woodward had taken the flag back to his apartment and one of his friends had stuck it into an old flower pot on the balcony. It had stayed there.

When Woodward had an urgent inquiry to make, he would move the flower pot with the red flag to the rear of the balcony. During the day, Deep Throat would check to see if the pot had been moved. If it had, he and Woodward would meet at about 2:00
A.M
. in a pre-designated underground parking garage. Woodward would leave his sixth-floor apartment and walk down the back stairs into an alley.

Walking and taking two or more taxis to the garage, he could be reasonably sure that no one had followed him. In the garage, the two could talk for an hour or more without being seen. If taxis were hard to find, as they often were late at night, it might take Woodward almost two hours to get there on foot. On two occasions, a meeting had been set and the man had not shown up—a depressing and frightening experience, as Woodward had waited for more than an hour, alone in an underground garage in the middle of the night. Once he had thought he was being followed—two well-dressed men had stayed behind him for five or six blocks, but he had ducked into an alley and had not seen them again.

If Deep Throat wanted a meeting—which was rare—there was a different procedure. Each morning. Woodward would check page 20 of his
New York Times,
delivered to his apartment house before 7:00
A.M
. If a meeting was requested, the page number would be circled and the hands of a clock indicating the time of the rendezvous would appear in a lower corner of the page. Woodward did not know how Deep Throat got to his paper.

The man’s position in the Executive Branch was extremely sensitive. He had never told Woodward anything that was incorrect. It was he who had advised Woodward on June 19 that Howard Hunt was definitely involved in Watergate. During the summer, he had told Woodward that the FBI badly wanted to know where the
Post
was getting its information. He thought Bernstein and Woodward might be followed, and cautioned them to take care when using their telephones. The White House, he had said at the last meeting, regarded the stakes in Watergate as much higher than anyone outside perceived. Even the
FBI did not understand what was happening. The source had been deliberately vague about this, however, making veiled references to the CIA and national security which Woodward did not understand.

The day after the indictments were handed down, Woodward broke the rule about telephone contact. Deep Throat sounded nervous, but listened as the draft of a story was read to him. It said that federal investigators had received information from Nixon campaign workers that high officials of the Committee for the Re-election of the President had been involved in the funding of the Watergate operation.

“Too soft,” Deep Throat said. “You can go much stronger.”

The Bookkeeper had been right about the money in Stans’ safe. It had financed the Watergate bugging and
“other intelligence-gathering activities,”
he said. John Mitchell’s top assistants were only
“among those”
who had controlled the fund. He would not say if the former Attorney General had had prior knowledge of the bugging attempt.

The wiretap logs had reached some of the same Mitchell aides who had disbursed the spying funds, he said.

Following the conversation, Woodward read his scrawled notes to Bernstein, who typed a new lead:

Funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by several principal assistants of John N. Mitchell, the former manager of President Nixon’s campaign, and were kept in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President, the
Washington Post
has learned.

The story also reported: the fund contained more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects; Gordon Liddy was among those who received money from the fund; records relating to the account had been destroyed; Hugh Sloan’s resignation had been the result of his suspicions about Watergate. Perhaps more important than the specific details of the story was its larger meaning: The Watergate indictments had not broken the conspiracy. And some of CRP’s campaign workers had the answers to many of the remaining questions.

As the 6:30 deadline for the Sunday paper approached, Woodward called Van Shumway for CRP’s response. Half an hour later, Shumway called back with a statement.

There have been and are cash funds in this committee used for various legitimate purposes such as reimbursement of expenditures for advances on travel. However, no one employed by this committee at this time has used any funds [for purposes] that were illegal or improper.

The statement, taken literally, did not flatly deny what had been reported.

That afternoon George McGovern held a press conference and called the Watergate investigation a “whitewash. . . . What is involved here is not only the political life of this nation, but the very morality of our leaders at a time when the United States desperately needs to revitalize its moral standards,” he said. “And that is why I shall pursue this case the length and breadth of this land.”

The next day, September 17, both the reporters went to the Bookkeeper’s house. It was a Sunday afternoon, and she was not inclined to talk to reporters, especially when a page-one story in the
Post
contained facts that only she and a few others at the Nixon committee knew.

But she would rather have the reporters out of view than on the doorstep, where they were imploring her to listen to some information they had. She let them inside. They wanted her to tell them exactly who “L” and “M” and “P” were. Liddy or LaRue? McCord? Mitchell? Magruder? Porter? How much money was paid out? What about the others on the list?

The Bookkeeper was scared and was having second thoughts. But she was calling Bernstein by his first name.

Woodward was silent at first. Bernstein was throwing out figures. He stopped at $700,000.

“At least that, $350,000 is what’s left in the fund.”

The ice seemed broken. Had she meant Liddy for the “L,” or had LaRue or someone else with that initial also gotten cash?

She would not say.

They said they
knew
Liddy was the only L to be paid from the fund.

She confirmed it.

An unstated agreement was in the making. She seemed willing to confirm or deny statements if the reporters remained casual and gave the impression that they simply needed confirmation, not primary information. If people were to be convinced that Sloan and Stans were
innocent, they told her, it was critical that the
Post’s
reporting be precise. That was where she could help.

“Morale is terrible in finance,” she said. “Those of us who know are tired of being suspected. There are little jokes all the time, like ‘What’d you do with the twenty-five grand, lady?’ ”

Was that how much Liddy got?

She shook her head no.

More than $50,000? Woodward asked.

She nodded.

Magruder got at least that too, didn’t he?

Again she nodded.

Magruder was the only M to get money, right?

Another nod. But, she indicated, there was more to know about Magruder. “Let’s just say I don’t trust him at all, especially where his own skin is concerned,” she said. “He’ll stop at nothing. The last three weeks he’s turned on the charm to me something fierce.”

And LaRue? The reporters said they knew he was involved, too, even though he had received no money.

“He’s very elusive, he covers his tracks,” she said. “He and Mitchell are like this”—she intertwined her fingers. But she would not say what LaRue knew.

“P” was Bart Porter; they were sure of that, they said.

“He got a lot of money. It was in $100 bills; everybody got $100 bills.”

Bernstein reminded her of a joke she had made—“We’re Republicans, you know. We deal in big figures.”

Porter, too, had gotten more than $50,000, she said.

The Bookkeeper was disturbed by the narrowness of the indictments. “I went down in good faith to the grand jury and testified and obviously the results are not there. My feeling is that the FBI turns the information in and it goes upstairs. . . . I just want out now. Hugh Sloan made the wisest decision of all. He quit. Mr. Stans said, ‘I begged him to stay, but he wouldn’t.’ ”