All the President's Men (12 page)

Then why not tell what he knew? Now. Publicly. To keep others from getting hurt. In the long run, it would help Nixon, Bernstein argued, because the President was going to be hurt badly if the cover-up lasted much longer.

Sloan nodded. He would like to, he said. He really would. But his lawyers had advised against it; whatever he said publicly might be used against him in any civil suit arising from his role as treasurer of the Nixon campaign.

Bernstein resisted the temptation to advise Sloan to get a new lawyer; that’s what he would do if he were innocent and in Sloan’s place—get a new lawyer and sue CRP.

Sloan had also pledged to the prosecutors that he would not make any public statement before the Watergate trial. So he was twice bound to remain silent, he said.

How sure was Sloan that the prosecutors were on his side?

He thought they were, he said, but he didn’t have much faith in anybody any more.

Because only seven people had been indicted?

“Because of the whole situation.”

Bernstein remembered that the Bookkeeper had said that lawyers for the committee had been present during all FBI interviews with CRP employees.

That was true, said Sloan.

Had the lawyers told Sloan what to say, or to stay away from certain areas?

“We were never told in so many words, ‘Don’t talk,’” said Sloan. “But the message was clear. It was always ‘Hold ranks,’ or ‘Keep the ship together.’ ”

Did that mean to lie?

Bernstein could draw his own conclusions, Sloan said. But it was not an unreasonable assumption.

Who had conveyed the message? The lawyers? Mardian? LaRue?

Well, Mardian and LaRue had been chosen by John Mitchell to develop the committee’s response to the Watergate bugging. So they would certainly know about it, Sloan said; they had “engineered the response.”

Was that another way of saying “covering up”?

It definitely didn’t mean devising a plan for coming forward and telling the truth, Sloan said.

Did Mitchell know of the bugging before it took place? Did LaRue? Mardian?

Mitchell knew of the bugging and a lot of other things before they took place, Sloan said, but he had no absolute proof of this beyond the money, secondhand information and his knowledge of the personalities involved and how the committee worked. “Mitchell had to know of the funds. You just don’t give out that kind of money without the head of the campaign knowing what it’s going for, especially when his people are getting the cash.”

LaRue was Mitchell’s aide-de-camp, Sloan explained. He was probably involved in everything, too. He was less certain about Mardian, who had come to the committee from the Justice Department on May 1, after the money had been passed around. After June 17, however, there was no question that Mardian, who had been political coordinator at CRP, had learned all there was to know. Then he and LaRue had started running the show, in consultation with Mitchell.

Including the destruction of records?

That was part of it.

The Bookkeeper had seemed to imply that the records of the secret account in Stans’ safe had been destroyed immediately after the new campaign law took effect on April 7. But Sloan said they had been destroyed right after the arrests in the Watergate, along with a lot of other financial records. These included six or seven ledger books, each about half an inch thick, that listed all campaign contributions received before the new disclosure law took effect. There had been a house-cleaning after the bugging.

They were still standing in the hallway. Sloan kept glancing at the open door and Bernstein kept trying not to notice. Sloan was uncomfortable. He kept repeating that he was going further with Bernstein than he wanted to go without having some time to think about it.

Bernstein was impressed by Sloan’s thoughtfulness. Sloan seemed convinced that the President, whom he very much wanted to see reelected, had known nothing of what happened before June 17; but he was as sure that Nixon had been ill-served by his surrogates before the bugging and had been put in increasing jeopardy by them ever since. Sloan believed that the prosecutors were honest men, determined to learn the truth, but there were obstacles they had been unable to overcome. He couldn’t tell whether the FBI had been merely sloppy or under pressure to follow procedures that would impede an effective investigation. He believed the press was doing its job, but, in the absence of candor from the committee, it had reached unfair conclusions about some people. Sloan himself was a prime example. He was not bitter, just disillusioned. All he wanted now was to clean up his legal obligations—testimony in the trial and in the civil suit—and leave Washington forever. He was looking for a job in industry, a management position, but it was difficult. His name had been in the papers often. He would not work for the White House again even if asked to come back. He wished he were in Bernstein’s place, wished he could write. Maybe then he could express what had been going through his mind. Not the cold, hard facts of Watergate necessarily—that wasn’t really what was important. But what it was like for young men and women to come to Washington because they believed in something and then to be inside and see how things worked and watch their own ideals disintegrate.

He and his wife believed in the same things they had before they came to Washington. Many of their friends at the White House did, too, but those people had made a decision that you could still believe in the same things and yet adapt yourself. After all, the goals were unchanged, you were still working for what you believed in, right? People in the White House believed they were entitled to do things differently, to suspend the rules, because they were fulfilling a mission; that was the only important thing, the mission. It was easy to lose perspective, Sloan said. He had seen it happen. He and his wife wanted to get out of Washington before they lost theirs.

Bernstein didn’t think Sloan would be saying these things unless he was convinced the White House was involved in the bugging and the cover-up of the true story.

“I don’t know anything hard about what went on across the street
[meaning the White House],” Sloan said. “But judging from who’s involved in the committee, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

In any case, Sloan said, the question was largely semantic: Since the bugging, the White House and the President himself had talked as if CRP were a private company set up by supporters of Richard Nixon who were intent on drafting him for re-election and contracting his campaign to a consulting firm. But the Committee for the Re-election of the President
was
the White House, wholly its creation, staffed by the White House, reporting only
to
the White House.

Bernstein asked if the names of any persons still working for the White House had been on that single sheet of paper used to account for withdrawals from the fund in Stans’ safe. Sloan wouldn’t say. But Liddy and Porter were a “logical grouping,” and there had been no withdrawals of amounts comparable to theirs.

Bernstein thought, from what the Bookkeeper had indicated, that Liddy and Porter had received considerably more than $50,000 apiece: $50,000 was merely where she had cut off the guessing game.

Sloan confirmed his suspicions. The total was closer to $300,000. The fund had been in existence for more than 18 months, and had represented
cash
contributions to the Nixon campaign. Whatever cash had come into committee headquarters was simply shoveled into Stans’ safe. At any given moment, there would probably have been about $700,000 in the safe.

Before June 17, Sloan added, nobody had told him of any specific purpose for the funds.

What about “convention security” or the term “security fund”?

Sloan had heard of neither until after the Watergate break-in. Then the story began making the rounds at CRP that the money withdrawn by Liddy, Porter and Magruder had been for convention security, and that Liddy had misappropriated his share, using it to pay for the bugging. But it didn’t make sense to Sloan. Legitimate security expenditures were all carefully budgeted, he said, paid for by check and accounted for in reports filed with the GAO. If that had been the purpose of the expenditures, Sloan would have been told when they were made. He was the treasurer, after all.

Bernstein asked the obvious question. But Sloan would not say who had ordered him to make the secret payments. He wanted more time to think about Bernstein’s suggestion that he go on the record. Bernstein
said the
Post
would let him establish the ground rules; how about a taped interview? If Sloan wanted his lawyer present, that was fine, and Sloan could review the transcript and delete anything his lawyer said might give him legal problems, as long as his omissions did not distort the facts.

Bernstein wanted to come back with Woodward. If they could get Sloan to relax and to trust them, there was a good chance he might talk unguardedly. Much of what Sloan had said was ambiguous and unclear, but it suggested a broader conspiracy than he was willing to talk about at this point.

Sloan asked Bernstein to call him the next day—he would give him an answer about the interview. And if that were not possible, maybe the three of them could get together on some other basis.

They chatted easily for a few more minutes, about the baby—any day now, Sloan said—the campaign, the newspaper business. Sloan wondered if newspapers weren’t a little hypocritical, demanding one standard for others and another for themselves; he doubted that reporters had any idea of the anguish they could inflict with only one sentence. He wasn’t thinking of himself so much, he said. But his wife, his parents—it had been very rough on them.

Driving back to the office, Bernstein kept thinking about what Sloan had said in those last minutes.
*
Woodward and he had talked about the problem. Suppose that Magruder and Porter were only fall guys, that someone at the committee or the White House had wanted that day’s story so they could pounce on the
Post?
Or suppose that Magruder and Porter were being fingered to protect somebody else?

•   •   •

Bernstein telephoned an FBI agent who was assigned to the Watergate case. He knew the man only slightly, and the agent was not happy to hear from him. The weekend stories on the secret fund, and on Bart Porter and Jeb Magruder, had caused trouble in the Bureau, he said. L. Patrick Gray III, acting director of the FBI, had personally called the head of the Washington field office and ordered him to make sure the
Post
was not getting its information from agents there.

“I don’t know how you guys are doing it, but you’ve got access to
the 302s,” the agent said, “and some people think you’re getting them from us.” FBI forms 302 were the interview reports filed by agents immediately after talking to witnesses.

“Now you come in through the switchboard, give your name to the girl and ask for me. Thanks a lot,” he said.

Bernstein suggested that the agent announce loudly that he couldn’t talk to any reporters and call him back. He did.

Bernstein read to him from his notes: Robert Odle had removed documents during the weekend of the Watergate arrests and perhaps destroyed some. Somebody, not necessarily Odle, had destroyed memos describing the wiretapped conversations of Democratic Party officials. Robert Mardian and Fred LaRue, beginning on June 19, had directed the response to the bugging and were aware of the destruction of some records: it was part of the response. LaRue and Mardian had told CRP employees to avoid certain areas when questioned by investigators—particularly as they related to any records that might have been destroyed. Mitchell had selected Mardian and LaRue to take charge of CRP’s response.

The agent was furious. There was only one place the information could have come from and that was the 302s, he said. It was against the law for Bernstein to have these files, or copies of them, and if the
Post
published a story so clearly based on the 302s, the agent would attempt to have Bernstein and Woodward subpoenaed and ordered to turn over all documents belonging to the government.

It was an odd confirmation, but that’s what it was.

How substantial were the allegations?

The agent would not say.

That was the trouble with the 302s, Bernstein knew. They were raw reports, unevaluated, unsubstantiated. Anybody could say any damn thing to the FBI and it went straight into the 302—facts, fourth-hand information, personal suspicions, gripes. Using a 302 as the sole basis for a story was unthinkable.

The agent’s indirect confirmation on Odle, Mardian and LaRue, and on the destruction of records in general, meant only that the FBI had received the same raw information the reporters had. It wasn’t enough.

Bernstein called Sloan, but he was too busy to see them, or even to talk on the phone. Bernstein could call him back later in the day.

While Woodward made the day’s telephone checks, which often took hours, Bernstein began a draft of a story. Bernstein had become convinced that a tangible accounting could be assembled which would prove that an organized attempt had been made to conceal the facts of Watergate. Woodward was skeptical.

He was not alone. Rosenfeld had called Woodward into his office a few days earlier to tell him that Bernstein’s thinking frequently moved one step ahead of the facts. Bernstein’s theories were often right, Rosenfeld said, and he did not wish to discourage him. “But you’ve got to make sure none of that gets into the paper unless it’s fully supported,” Rosenfeld implored.

Bernstein’s draft reported that John Mitchell’s principal associates at CRP, Mardian and LaRue, had directed a “massive housecleaning” in which records were destroyed and staff members were instructed to “close ranks” in response to the Watergate arrests. And that the “housecleaning” had immediately followed Mitchell’s personal selection of LaRue and Mardian to direct the committee’s response.

The draft described some of what had gone on at CRP during those days after the break-in at the Watergate. The wholesale destruction of documents—wiretap memos, the single-sheet accounting of the secret fund (including the withdrawals by Porter, Magruder and Liddy) and as many as seven ledger books listing campaign contributors and the amounts they gave before April 7—was accomplished. Mardian and LaRue had begun a search for incriminating evidence on June 19, and the relevant records no longer existed by the time the FBI began its examination of CRP’s files. Robert Odle had spent the weekend after the Watergate break-in taking an inventory of the committee’s files and removing records. After the destruction of the records he had been assigned by CRP to provide the FBI with the documents it requested.