All the President's Men (30 page)

Bernstein called the office from his motel. Woodward, Sussman, Rosenfeld and Bradlee were all hanging on extensions. “Get it on the record, for Chrissakes,” Bradlee said. There was enough in the scant information Segretti had offered to seriously challenge White House claims of innocence.

Bernstein spent five more days in Marina del Rey, persuading his colleagues at the
Post,
and himself, that Segretti was going to “convert” and go on the record. But it was no go.

•   •   •

“Well, kid, we struck out on that one,” was Bradlee’s reply when Bernstein returned to the office. Bernstein had typed a 12-page, single-spaced memo detailing every aspect of his dealings with Segretti.

Bradlee had scanned the memo and made an open-fisted gesture, jerking his arm. “Quit beating yourself off, kid,” he told Bernstein, “and get some information.”

Bradlee’s frustration was understandable. The election had not stilled the White House guns. The self-confidence that flowed from the electoral triumph had emboldened the President’s men. The post-election offensive was led by Charles Wendell Colson, the 41-year-old former Marine Corps captain and a White House commandant on political warfare.

About a week after the election, Colson traveled to Kennebunkport, Maine—very near Edmund Muskie’s summer home—to address the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. He opened the speech by noting that his home state, Massachusetts, was the only one that had gone for George McGovern. The President, he joked, had decided to mend some fences and locate a new federal installation in Massachusetts—a nuclear-waste disposal center in Harvard Square.

Assuring his audience that “the First Amendment is alive and well in Washington,” he accused the
Post
of McCarthyism, and called Bradlee “the self-appointed leader of what Boston’s Teddy White
*
once described as ‘that tiny little fringe of arrogant elitists who affect the healthy mainstream of American journalism with their own peculiar view of the world.’  . . .

“If Bradlee ever left the Georgetown cocktail circuit, where he and his pals dine on third-hand information and gossip and rumor, he might discover out here the real America. And he might learn that all truth and all knowledge and all superior wisdom just doesn’t emanate
exclusively
from that small little clique in Georgetown and that the rest of the country isn’t just sitting out here waiting to be told what they’re supposed to think.”

Bradlee read Colson’s speech in his office and walked over to Woodward’s desk. “They’re really kicking it at me,” he said. “That’s some pretty personal shit.”

Woodward thought he was ruffled.

“I know it’s there,” Bradlee said.

Woodward recognized an admonition to dig harder.

“I know it’s there,” Bradlee repeated.

Later, Bradlee told an interviewer that he’d been “ready to hold both Woodward’s and Bernstein’s heads in a pail of water until they came up with another story. That dry spell was anguish. Anguish.”

In the four weeks following the election, the reporters went chasing around as if their heads
were
in a pail of water. They were learning things, but were unable to make any meaningful stories out of what information they got. . . . Magruder’s secretary told Bernstein she did not understand why she had not been interviewed by the FBI. . . . John Dean had sat in on all the FBI interviews with White House personnel, a Justice Department attorney said, and the prosecutors were upset about it. Dean had also received copies of the FBI reports for the Watergate investigation. . . . A secretary at the Mullen firm told Woodward that Dorothy Hunt, wife of Howard Hunt, was saying that “Howard is being made a scapegoat.”  . . . A middle-echelon White House aide said: “Dwight Chapin walks around as if he’s just packed his bags”  . . . and the big election victory seemed muted,
other White House aides were saying, and Watergate was number-one priority with the President, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Colson. . . . Some presidential aides who were normally insiders were saying they didn’t know what was going on. . . .

There were discussions in the White House of releasing a report on Watergate, a “White Paper” to lay out the facts, but it had been discarded as too risky. . . . A prominent Washington lawyer who had high political connections told Woodward: “I understand that someone is taking care of Hunt and McCord either through CRP or the White House; someone from the White House got to Judge Richey through the back door and got him to help the administration; a Republican governor said he could get to Richey and word came back that there was no need, it had already been done.”
*
 . . . A close friend of John Mitchell’s described the former Attorney General as “essentially a very decent man who didn’t have any use for the kind of Mickey Mouse stuff that Haldeman and Colson and the others were dreaming up.”  . . . One of the President’s former top aides argued that Haldeman “would have been delinquent” if he had not set up a procedure to gather political intelligence for the President. . . . A ranking Justice Department official observed: “From what I hear, some of my best friends should be in jail.” . . . At least a dozen people said that Jeb Magruder was finished and would not get an administration job that required Senate confirmation. . . . An Assistant Attorney General was convinced that the Dean investigation was “a fraud, a pipeline to Haldeman.” . . . Mrs. Graham was told by a close friend who had ties to the administration that the phones of several
Post
reporters and news executives were tapped. A sweep which was conducted by electronics experts for a fee of $5000 turned up nothing. . . . The government had inexplicably failed to execute search warrants for the homes of the five arrested burglars. . . . A former Internal Revenue Service official related keen White House interest in some tax investigations of
the President’s friends: “Nothing I could put my finger on fully, but the message was coming over.”  . . . Disillusioned campaign workers at CRP referred to a “cover story” that had been told to the prosecutors. . . . Hunt and Liddy had been members of the “Plumbers,” a secret White House team investigating leaks to the news media. (The White House had no comment in the summer when
Time
magazine said there was such a group.)

•   •   •

One late November Saturday night, a
Post
editor asked for a word with Woodward in a deserted section of the newsroom. One of his neighbors had told him that his aunt was on a grand jury. His neighbor thought it was the jury on Watergate; she’d made some remark about knowing all about it. “She’s a Republican, but she says she really hates Nixon now. My neighbor thinks she wants to talk.”

A few days later, the editor handed Woodward a slip of paper with the woman’s name and address. Bernstein and Woodward went to Rosenfeld, who seemed to like the idea of a visit but suspended final judgment until he had checked with Bradlee for a policy decision. Bradlee asked the
Post’s
lawyers.

Bernstein and Woodward consulted the
Post’s
library copy of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Grand jurors took an oath to keep secret their deliberations and the testimony before them; but the burden of secrecy, it appeared, was on the juror. There seemed to be nothing in the law that forbade anyone to ask questions. The lawyers agreed, but urged extreme caution in making any approaches. They recommended that the reporters simply ask the woman if she wanted to talk.

Bradlee was nervous. “No beating anyone over the head, no pressure, none of that cajoling,” he instructed Woodward and Bernstein. He got up from behind his desk and pointed his finger. “I’m serious about that. Particularly you, Bernstein, be subtle for once in your life.”

He instructed them to get in touch with him the moment the visit was over. “Get to a phone booth and call me—no matter what happens.”

They drove to her house. She wasn’t there. Woodward called Sussman at the office and asked him to pass the word to Bradlee.

The next morning, the reporters drove across town, knocked at the
woman’s door and identified themselves. She invited them inside. They did not mention the grand jury, and said simply that they had heard she knew something about Watergate.

“It’s a mess, I know that,” the woman said. “But how would I know anything about it except for what I read in the papers?”

It took 10 minutes to figure out that the woman was indeed on a grand jury at the courthouse, but not the Watergate one. They thanked her and left.

The episode had whetted their interest. They knew the outlines of the information they needed. They lacked the details a cooperative grand juror could probably supply. That afternoon, Bernstein called the chief prosecutor, Earl Silbert, and asked for a list of the 23 grand jurors. Silbert refused flatly, rejecting Bernstein’s contention that the membership of the jury was a matter of public record.

Woodward asked a friend in the clerk’s office if it was possible to get a roster of the Watergate grand jury. “No way whatsoever,” he was told. “The records are secret.”

Next morning, Woodward took a cab to the courthouse.

The clerk’s office employed about 90 people. Woodward started at one end of the large complex of file rooms and after half an hour had found someone willing to direct him to a remote corner of the main file area where lists of trial and grand juries were kept. He identified himself to another clerk as a
Post
reporter and said he wanted to look through the file. The clerk looked at Woodward suspiciously. “Okay,” he said, “but you aren’t allowed to copy anything. You can’t take names. No notes. I’ll be watching.”

Woodward started going through the file drawers and finally found the master list of 1972 grand juries. Two grand juries had been sworn in on June 5. He remembered that the foreman of the Watergate grand jury had an Eastern European name and worked for the government as an economist or something like that. He found the right name on Grand Jury Number One, sworn in on June 5, 1972.

Each of the grand jurors had filled out a small orange card listing name, age, occupation, address, home and work telephones. Woodward began sifting through the cards, then glanced over his shoulder. The clerk was sitting at his desk, about 15 feet away, staring at him. Woodward took the first four cards, set them face up in the bottom of the file drawer and began studying the names, ages, addresses, phone
numbers and occupations. It took about 10 minutes to memorize the information. He asked the clerk where the men’s room was.

Inside the washroom, Woodward went into a stall, took a notebook from his jacket pocket and wrote out what he had memorized.
Priscilla L. Woodruff, age 28, unemployed.
Trying to visualize what each of the grand jurors looked like helped him keep track of the information.
Naomi R. Williams, 56, retired teacher and elevator operator. Julian L. White, 37, janitor at George Washington University.

Woodward drew a mental picture of a coat of arms and the name of Haldeman etched beneath a pair of crossed daggers guarding a throne:
George W. Stockton,
he wrote in his notebook,
Institute of Heraldry, Department of the Army, technician, age 53.
He hitched up his trousers. Four down, 19 to go.

Woodward memorized the next five cards. Straining not to look guilty, he asked the clerk where the chief judge’s chambers were.

The man frowned. “You’re sure spending a lot of time with those files. I’m not so sure that you’re allowed to even look in there.”

Woodward said he would be back—as soon as he had checked something with the chief judge. Upstairs, in a third-floor washroom, he wrote down the five names and the other information. That left 14. At the rate he was going, the job would take all morning.

On the third try, he was able to memorize six cards. Returning from the lavatory to the file room, he asked the clerk when he went to lunch. “I don’t go out for lunch,” the man said curtly. The perfect clerk, Woodward thought ruefully: even eats at his desk. He needed to get the rest this time because the clerk was getting impatient. It took nearly 45 minutes to memorize the last eight names and accompanying details.

At the office, he typed a list of the jury members and the accompanying data. In Bradlee’s office, the editors and Bernstein and Woodward eliminated nearly half the members of the grand jury as too risky. Low-grade civil servants—especially older ones, for instance—were accustomed to doing things by the bureaucratic book, checking with their superiors, rarely relying on their own judgment. Military officers the same. They were looking for the few least likely to inform the prosecutors of a visit. The candidate would have to be bright enough to suspect that the grand-jury system had broken down in the Watergate case and be in command of the nuances of the evidence.
Ideally, the juror would be capable of outrage at the White House or the prosecutors or both; a person who was accustomed to bending rules, the type of person who valued practicality more than procedure. The exercise continued with Bernstein, Woodward and their bosses trying to psych out strangers on the basis of name, address, age, occupation, ethnic background, religion, income level. The final choices were left to the reporters.

Everyone in the room had private doubts about such a seedy venture. Bradlee, desperate for a story, and reassured by the lawyers, overcame his own. Simons doubted out loud the rightness of the exercise and worried about the paper. Rosenfeld was concerned most about the mechanics of the reporters not getting caught. Sussman was afraid that one of them, probably Bernstein, would push too hard and find a way to violate the law. Woodward wondered whether there was ever justification for a reporter to entice someone across the line of legality while standing safely on the right side himself. Bernstein, who vaguely approved of selective civil disobedience, was not concerned about breaking the law in the abstract. It was a question of
which
law, and he believed that grand-jury proceedings should be inviolate. The misgivings, however, went unstated, for the most part. The reporters’ procedure would be to identify themselves, tell the juror that they had learned from an anonymous mutual acquaintance that he or she knew something about Watergate and ask if he or she was willing to discuss the matter. They would leave unless the juror, without prodding, volunteered something. Nothing would be said about the grand jury unless the juror mentioned it.