All the President's Men (29 page)

Woodward swallowed hard. He deserved the lecture.

•   •   •

That afternoon, Woodward told Bernstein what Deep Throat had said. They agreed they should write a story saying that Haldeman had
not been named by Sloan before the grand jury, but reasserting that reliable sources had again confirmed Haldeman’s authority over the secret fund.

Bradlee and the other editors didn’t want the story. The fires were cooling; they didn’t want to fan them.

Sunday, Senator McGovern appeared on NBC’s
Meet the Press
and welcomed the opportunity to drive home his Watergate message. It was all true, McGovern said, because two respected reporters from the
Washington Post
had said so.
*

The same afternoon, Spiro Agnew, on ABC’s
Issues and Answers,
offered a different opinion: “Journalistically reprehensible,” he said of the
Post’s
coverage in general, and described the Haldeman account as “a contrived story constructed out of two untruths attempting to tie this to the President.”

Minutes after the shows, Simons was on the phone to Rosenfeld. The paper now had no choice but to correct the Haldeman story. It was intolerable to have the Democratic presidential candidate running around the country quoting inaccurate information from the
Washington Post.

Bernstein and Woodward were told to write an account clarifying the controversy. They were sitting by Bernstein’s desk when a wire-room attendant brought them a press release from
Time
magazine.

The release stated that
Time
had obtained information from FBI files showing that Dwight Chapin had “admitted to FBI agents that he had hired” Donald Segretti to disrupt the Democratic campaign; that “Chapin had also told the FBI that Segretti’s payment was set by Nixon’s personal attorney, California lawyer Herbert Kalmbach.” And that the President’s personal lawyer had also admitted making the payments to Segretti.

But,
Time’s
account continued, “no hard evidence could be developed to support a charge by the
Washington Post
that H. R. Haldeman,
the White House chief of staff, was one of those with control over a fund that paid for spying and disruption.”

Woodward and Bernstein were aware that
Time’s
access to FBI files was unquestioned. They wrote a routine account that led with
Time’s
Chapin-Kalmbach information and the magazine’s conclusion on Haldeman. Then the story said that Sloan had been asked by the
Post
if Haldeman was one of those authorized to approve payments from the fund—even if Sloan had not imparted such information to the grand jury. The story quoted Sloan as saying, “Our denial was strictly limited,” and added:

The
Post
reporters then went back to their federal sources and were told that the
Post
story was incorrect in identifying Sloan’s grand jury testimony as a source of information on Haldeman’s link to the fund.

However, these same sources, who have provided detailed information on the Watergate investigation, confirmed once more that Haldeman was authorized to make payments from the fund.

One source went so far as to say “this is a Haldeman operation,” and that Haldeman had “insulated” himself, dealing with the fund through an intermediary.

10

F
OR SOME WEEKS
, Bernstein and Woodward had been looking forward to Election Day. The final stretch of the campaign was the most frustrating period they had encountered since June 17. In addition to the Haldeman debacle, they had begun to run into one stone wall after another. After the self-congratulations and enthusiasms generated by the initial accounts of Segretti’s operations and the Chapin-Kalmbach connections, the
Post
had mounted a huge investigation under Suss-man’s command. More than a dozen reporters were intermittently involved—investigating, analyzing the political fallout, writing profiles of the central figures, following the action in the courts, on Capitol Hill, at the White House. Little new information was developed: a few more Segretti contacts, isolated incidents of sabotage by the Nixon forces, additional examples of the narrowness of the course pursued by the FBI and federal prosecutors.

Bernstein and Woodward had resumed their evening visits. Nothing. The election was too near. Several people suggested they might be more talkative after Nixon’s victory.

The promise of easier access to information after November 7 was not the only reason the reporters wanted the election behind them. With Nixon’s re-election, the White House would be forced to abandon the line that the
Post
was working for the election of McGovern.

Woodward spent Election Day idly at the office, sometimes watching Sussman indulge his fascination with polling. Puffing his pipe, Suss-man was trying to see if there were any way the polls could be wrong—calculating
that if George McGovern were to win, it would entail a shift of so many million votes. The latest surveys were strewn around—scrap-paper remnants of long division, multiplication, additions and symbols understandable only to Sussman. He concluded that it was mathematically impossible for Richard Nixon to lose.

Woodward, a registered Republican, did not vote. He couldn’t decide whether he was more uneasy with the disorganization and naïve idealism of McGovern’s campaign or with Richard Nixon’s conduct. And he believed that not voting enabled him to be more objective in reporting on Watergate—a view Bernstein regarded as silly. Bernstein voted for McGovern, unenthusiastically and unhesitatingly, then bet in the office pool that Nixon would win with 54 percent.
*

•   •   •

The day after the election, Bradlee and Simons asked Sussman for a memo advising how Bernstein and Woodward intended to pursue their investigation and listing areas on which they intended to concentrate. Sussman told the reporters he detected a lot of pressure for a story—any story, as long as it was good; something that would take the heat off the
Post
and put away the notion that the paper had been promoting George McGovern’s campaign.

Woodward was demonstrably angered at the request. Not without a touch of arrogance, Bernstein and he advised Sussman to write a memo for the editors saying any damn thing that came into his head.

Sussman wrote a one-page memo which concluded: “Woodward and Bernstein are going back to virtually every old source and some new ones who have shown an interest in talking now that the election is over. Some of our best stories to date were pretty much unexpected and did not come from particular lines of inquiry, and quite possibly the same will be true now.”

•   •   •

At five on the morning of November 11, a
Post
switchboard operator tracked down Bernstein at the home of a friend. She said she had been calling all over town for him since midnight.

Great, said Bernstein, and wondered loudly how the operator had found him and whom else she had called to do so.

“We don’t disclose our sources of information, dear,” she replied.

He was to call Sussman at home immediately. Bernstein had received middle-of-the-night calls from the office before. Usually, they signaled calamity or tragedy—Robert Kennedy’s assassination, bombings at the Pentagon, the Capitol.

Sussman answered the phone, “Segretti’s back home. Bob Meyers spoke with him very briefly.”

Sussman wanted Bernstein to get the next plane to Los Angeles and talk to Segretti—if he would talk. Segretti had disappeared immediately after the October 10 story.

Bernstein reached Dulles Airport five minutes before the flight, with less than $20 in his wallet.

Meyers met Bernstein at the Los Angeles airport and they drove immediately to Segretti’s apartment in Marina del Rey, about 20 minutes away. He was not at home, so Meyers stuck one more matchstick in the door.

Bernstein reached Segretti by phone late that afternoon. “Hi, Carl,” he answered. “I wondered when we’d meet up with each other.” His tone was cheerful and chipper, but not flip. He agreed to let Bernstein and Meyers come over. “I won’t discuss any specifics, and everything has to be off the record.”

Segretti was dressed in corduroy jeans and Scandinavian sweater and had a grin on his face when they arrived. He shook hands with Bernstein warmly. “How’ve you been?” he asked. Bernstein was struck by the fact that he was only about five foot four. This was the master spy? Secret agent with a White House badge? Segretti had a baby face, a slightly toothy smile and traces of a cowlick.

Segretti invited Bernstein and Meyers to sit down on the living-room couch and chatted about his hi-fi equipment.

“The fact is that I’m about broke,” he said after a while, “out of a job and I still have payments on the car—and there will be legal fees.”

Segretti was, by his own account, confused, scared, angry, and without friends. Bernstein found him likable, and his situation pathetic.

“I really want to tell the whole story and get this thing over with,” Segretti said. “I don’t understand how I got in over my head. I didn’t know what it was all about. They never told me anything except my own role. I had to read the papers to find out.”

They?

“The White House.”

Segretti was agitated about the inquiries made to his family, friends and acquaintances by the press, and by the investigators from Senator Edward Kennedy’s subcommittee.
*

“Kennedy is out for blood and I’m the one treading water and bleeding,” Segretti said. “Kennedy will tear me to shreds. Some people even asked my friends if I knew Arthur Bremer.”
†
Segretti’s eyes filled with tears. “How could anybody even ask something like that? It’s terrible. It’s horrible. I didn’t do anything to deserve that. What do people think I am? If that’s the kind of thing Kennedy gets into, that might just be the point where I say ‘Fuck the whole thing’ and get up and walk out and let them put me in jail. . . . I’ve been dragged through the mud, maligned—you’d think I was making bombs or something. I haven’t done anything illegal, or even that bad. My friends have been harassed, my parents, my girlfriends; my privacy has been invaded; my phone is tapped, it clicks all the time; people have been following me; everybody I ever telephoned has been bothered.”

Segretti’s naïveté was compelling. He traced most of his difficulties to the press. He was particularly angry with the
New York Times
and
Newsweek
for getting his phone records and badgering his family. So Meyers and Bernstein calculatedly dumped on the opposition.

The process was excruciatingly slow. Segretti wouldn’t volunteer any information without prodding and refused to discuss his activities except in general terms.

“What I did was mostly nickel-dime stuff,” he said. “Maybe fifteen cents or a quarter every once in a while.”

Finally, Segretti admitted he had been hired by Chapin. Strachan also had discussed the job with him. Kalmbach had paid him. The first approach had been from Dwight Chapin to Segretti, not vice versa.

“I didn’t go looking for the job,” Segretti said bitterly. “What would you do if you were just getting out of the Army, if you had been away from the real world for four years, you didn’t know what kind of law you wanted to practice, and you got a call to go to work for the President
of the United States? If the really sinister things actually happened, I don’t think Dwight knew about them,” Segretti said. “Dwight just did what he was told.”

Told by whom?

“Well, I’d sure like to meet Haldeman,” he suggested.

Did Segretti have any hard evidence that it was Haldeman? Had Chapin ever said so?

“No, but I understand that Dwight generally takes his orders on everything from Haldeman.”

Segretti confirmed meeting Howard Hunt and a man he thought was Gordon Liddy in Miami; Hunt had asked him to organize an anti-Nixon demonstration to embarrass McGovern. He would not say what the plan was, “but it sounded illegal to me, and I didn’t want anything to do with being violent or breaking the law.”

After each visit from the FBI, Segretti acknowledged, he had called Chapin for advice, but he would not say who had counseled him just before his grand-jury appearance. He denied that his testimony had been prompted or rehearsed, or that he had been shown FBI reports. “That’s an example of some of the lies and bullshit that have been written,” he said. “That would be as bad as the Watergate bugging.” He had “discussed” his upcoming testimony with someone from the White House; they had agreed that every question asked by the grand jury would be answered truthfully. Bernstein got the impression that the discussion had been with John Dean. Segretti said he had been interviewed for what he presumed was the “Dean investigation.” But he wouldn’t say whether the interview had been conducted by Dean himself or a member of his staff, or whether it had occurred immediately prior to the grand-jury appearance. “I won’t discuss John Dean,” he said, and he would not say whether he had ever met him.

Segretti said he was through being a pawn of the White House. “They’re going to have to break down my door and drag me to get me out of here again. All I want is to get my life back in order. I think the lowest point was when the mother of an old girlfriend told me she didn’t want her daughter to see me any more. People can really be cruel.”

Again Segretti’s eyes glazed over and filled with tears. “Everyone is out to rip me apart and crucify me—Kennedy, the White House, the
press. I just want to stay here and enjoy myself for a while—sail, swim, sit in the sun, see some girls.”

During the visit, which lasted several hours, Segretti seemed as interested in finding out what Bernstein knew as Bernstein was interested in what he knew. There would be more to come, Bernstein said. None too subtly, he warned Segretti that he could expect to get swallowed up if he didn’t get his story on the record soon. Unlike his superiors, he had no cloak of high office for protection. Segretti agreed, but he wanted more time. They would talk again the next day.