All the President's Men (31 page)

Bradlee, addressing them in a final briefing before bivouac, repeated the marching orders: “No strong-arm tactics, fellas. Right?”

Working separately over the first weekend of December, Woodward and Bernstein attempted the clumsy charade with about half a dozen members of the grand jury. They returned with no information and a clear impression that the prosecutors had warned the jurors to beware of jokers bearing press cards. Only one person volunteered that he was on the grand jury, and he explained to Woodward that he had taken two oaths of secrecy in his life, the Elks’ and the grand juror’s, and that both were sacred trusts. The others said they didn’t know anything about Watergate except what they had learned from the media. One told Bernstein: “Watergate? Oh yeah, that fancy apartment down
in Foggy Bottom. . . . I heard about it on the television, all that break-in business and stuff; there’s no place safe in this city.”

Until he heard about the Elk, Bernstein had feared that his partner with the fantastic memory had wasted it on the wrong list.

On Monday, Bradlee called the reporters into his office for an urgent meeting. He shut the door, a gesture often reserved for such delicate matters of state as firings. “The balloon is up,” he said. At least one of the grand jurors had told the prosecutors he’d been visited by a
Washington Post
reporter. One of the prosecutors had called Edward Bennett Williams, the
Post’s
principal attorney. The prosecutors had gone to Judge Sirica with the juror’s complaint and Williams had advised Bradlee to have his reporters sit tight.

They asked Bradlee how much trouble Williams thought they were in.

“You’re not going to get an award,” said Bradlee. “Williams said that it’s up to the Judge.” But he was worried. John Sirica, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, was known as “Maximum John” because of the stiff punishments he imposed.

Late in the afternoon, Bradlee told the reporters to be in Williams’ office at nine the next morning. “Things look a little better,” he said. “Williams talked to Sirica and to the prosecutors; he thinks he can keep you out of the slam.”

The next morning, Williams was pacing around his handsome office. “John Sirica is some kind of pissed at you fellas,” he said. “We had to do a lot of convincing to keep your asses out of jail.” Williams had pledged there would be no more
Post
contact with grand-jury members. The prosecutors, too, had interceded in the reporters’ behalf, recommending to Sirica that no action be taken because none of the grand jurors had imparted any information. But Sirica was still fuming, Williams said, and would probably lecture them, at a minimum. “Stay in touch and keep your noses clean,” he warned. The Judge could be very unpredictable.

•   •   •

The reporters returned to more conventional sources. A few nights later, Bernstein signed a
Post
car out of the office garage and drove to an apartment several miles away. It was about eight o’clock when he
knocked on the door. The woman he was looking for answered, but when he told her his name, she did not open the door. She slipped a piece of paper underneath it with her unlisted telephone number written on it. “Call me later this evening,” she said, adding, “Your articles have been excellent.”

The woman was in a position to have considerable knowledge of the secret activities of the White House and CRP. Bernstein had attempted to contact her before, but she had rejected every approach. He drove back to the office and dialed the number. Her voice was unsteady, nervous. “At this point, I don’t trust a soul,” she said. “But I respect your position.” She asked if Bernstein was calling from a safe phone. He was at the desk of a reporter on the Maryland staff; he thought so.

“I’m forced to agree 100 percent with Ben Bradlee; the truth hasn’t been told,” she said.

Bernstein printed the letter Z on the top sheet of a blue memo pad; X had been retired with the Bookkeeper. “My boss calls it a whitewash,” said Z. “Two years ago, I never would have believed any of this, but the facts are overwhelming.” She advised him to reread carefully the reporters’ own stories. “There is more truth in there than you must have realized—many clues. You’re doing very well, but you could do a lot better. It’s a question of putting on more pressure.”

She refused to be interrogated, and laid down the ground rules: She would point the reporters in the right direction to help them fill in some of the right names in the right places—certain hints, key avenues to pursue. She would answer questions only in the most general way, if at all. Much of what she called her “message” might seem vague, partly because even she didn’t understand things completely, and because the information would be difficult to sort out.

“Your perseverance has been admirable,” she said. “Apply it to what I say.”

Bernstein, who had no idea what to expect, thought she sounded like some kind of mystic.

She began with Haldeman: “Someone had to pull the strings. You have a lot of company in thinking it’s Haldeman. . . . John Dean is very interesting. It would be really interesting to know what Dean’s investigation really was. His involvement went way beyond that. . . .
Magruder and Mitchell are very definitely involved. . . . Mitchell requires more perseverance.”

Bernstein had already interrupted her several times, but she would not be more specific. Involved in what? Dirty tricks? Wiretapping?

She advised him to consider Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson and Mardian as a group. “Disclosure is the common thread,” she said. “ . . . Yes, of wiretap information.”

Meaning they had received information from the Watergate tap?

“Disclosure,” she repeated, “is the common thread. When people have jobs to lose in high places, they will go to any extent to protect them. The general theme is ‘Don’t blow the lid,’ even now. They are better organized now than before June 17. They are good organizers but, to a certain extent, very sloppy. Financing is the most important way to learn who is involved. Pursue other Segrettis. Kalmbach was the paymaster. A lot of activities grew out of Plumbing. It goes back a lot farther than the Pentagon Papers. The Plumbers are quite relevant; two of them were indicted. I’d like to know how many more Plumbers there were.”

Bernstein tried to learn more.

Z said there would be no further messages; he was forbidden to call her.

•   •   •

The next night, Woodward and Bernstein drove the familiar route to Hugh Sloan’s house. Perhaps he could help decipher Z’s message. Knowing that Sloan was always less than anxious to see them, they did not telephone ahead. As usual, he was too polite to close the door in their faces. He looked pale and defeated. He had lost weight. He invited them into the front hallway. The job-hunting was going badly, he said—the taint of Watergate. Equally awful, there was no end in sight to the trials and civil suits and depositions that were making him a professional witness at about $20 a day. They did not know how to respond. Visiting Sloan always made them feel like vultures.

The reporters outlined what they had learned from Z, but Sloan said he could make no more sense of it than they. Then he was apologetic about the Haldeman debacle, and finally it became painfully clear what had happened that night in the rain. Sloan had
misunderstood Woodward’s question, thinking that Woodward had inquired if Sloan
would have
named Haldeman before the grand jury had he been asked.

Now he was more enlightening than before on Haldeman’s relationship to the fund and to CRP:

“Bob ran the committee through Magruder until Mitchell and Secretary Stans came over in the first part of ‘72. Jeb authorized the first payments to Liddy. I think Liddy was still working at the White House at the time, in the summer of ‘71. Actually, Haldeman stood behind all four who got bulk payments from the fund: Kalmbach, Liddy, Magruder and Porter.”

Haldeman was insulated from the fund. Magruder, Kalmbach, Stans and even Mitchell had effectively acted on his behalf, Sloan explained. Haldeman had never personally ordered Sloan to hand out any payments. But spending money was the province of the White House chief. “Maury [Stans] frequently complained that too much money was being given out [from the fund],” he said.

Woodward asked more about the structure of Haldeman’s office. Chapin was the presidential appointments secretary; Strachan, the political lieutenant; Larry Higby, the office manager and majordomo; and Alexander Butterfield supervised “internal security and the paper flow to the President.” Typing his notes that night, Woodward underlined the words “internal security.” That was the name of the Justice Department division in charge of government wiretapping, formerly headed by Robert Mardian.

•   •   •

While Woodward typed his notes, Bernstein pulled out a three-inch-thick file folder marked “To Be Checked.” Several days earlier, Lawrence Meyer, a city-staff reporter whose beat was the federal courthouse, had obtained a confidential copy of a routine legal agreement between the prosecutors and attorneys for the seven Watergate defendants—whose trial was to begin on January 8. Bernstein read the 12-page “stipulation.” It described telephone, travel and bank records that the prosecution and defense had agreed were accurate. Most of the information was already known to the reporters. Two matters intrigued them, however. There was evidence that Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt had traveled to Los Angeles together under
false names on September 4, 1971, and also on January 7, 1972, and February 17, 1972. That included the period when both were working at the White House, months before the Watergate break-in. They also found a note that a telephone had been installed “on August 16, 1971, in room 16 of the Executive Office Building located at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C., and  . . . disconnected on March 15, 1972.” It had been listed in the name and home address of Kathleen Chenow, of Alexandria, Virginia.

There was no Kathleen Chenow in the phone book, but, using a crisscross directory, Bernstein found a former roommate who said Miss Chenow had moved to Milwaukee. He reached her there. It took only a few minutes to establish that Kathleen Chenow had been the “Plumbers’ ”secretary. She did not seem hesitant about talking. Bernstein, who could hardly remember the last time he had encountered a willing source, did not know quite where to start. He finally asked her just who and what the Plumbers were. Her answer was straightforward: The Plumbers were Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy, David Young and Egil (Bud) Krogh. They investigated “leaks” to the news media and reported to John Ehrlichman. Their office was in the Executive Office Building basement, across from the White House. Technically, she had been David Young’s secretary; he was on loan to Ehrlichman’s staff from Dr. Henry Kissinger’s office. Young had made regular reports to Ehrlichman on the progress of the Plumbers’ investigations. Krogh was one of Ehrlichman’s principal deputies.

“Originally the administration had wanted a study of how close the
New York Times
version of the Pentagon Papers was to the actual documents,” she explained. “Then they tried to determine how the Pentagon Papers got out. That started it all, the business of looking for leaks. For a while, they were studying State Department leaks. They checked embassy cables and tried to put two and two together about whose desks the cables went across. Most of Mr. Hunt’s work that I saw was State Department cables he had reviewed dealing with the substance of the Pentagon Papers.”

Bernstein asked if she could remember what specific leaks had been investigated.

“The Pentagon Papers, of course. Then there was a time when Jack Anderson was running columns on the administration, in December. They were checking those for leaks, too. Mr. Mardian from
the Justice Department came down to the basement two or three times during that period.

“There was another occasion when Mr. Mardian was at a big meeting in Mr. Krogh’s office with Liddy, Hunt and three or four people I didn’t recognize,” Chenow said. “And David [Young] used to talk to John Mitchell  . . . I don’t know what about; I don’t know how often.”

•   •   •

He asked about the telephone listed in the “stipulation.”

“That was Mr. Hunt’s phone. It was put in for me to answer and take messages for him. Mr. Barker always called on that phone; he was about the only one who ever called. It rang an average of once a week, sometimes two or three times a week.” Hunt and Bernard Barker “were always chummy on the phone: Mr. Hunt would usually say ‘How are you? What you been up to?’ . . . Sometimes when he talked to Mr. Barker he spoke Spanish; he apparently liked to speak Spanish for some reason. . . . No, I don’t speak Spanish. . . . I remember Mr. Hunt calling Mr. Barker and his [Barker’s] wife—nobody else. Sometimes Mr. Liddy might have used the phone to talk to somebody Mr. Hunt had placed a call to. I guess it was Mr. Barker. Most of the phone calls were from August to November. The phone was taken out March 15; by then it hadn’t been used in ages.”

Bernstein asked the obvious. Why would a telephone in the White House complex, which had the benefit of the most sophisticated communications system in the world, be listed in the name and address of an individual in Alexandria?

“That’s a good question,” she replied. “They apparently wanted it in my name because they didn’t want any ties with the White House—for what reason I don’t know.”

Bills for the phone service had been mailed to her home and she had sent them to another Ehrlichman deputy, John Campbell—“so the White House would pay them. Apparently it had been arranged—by Mr. Hunt, Mr. Young and Mr. Liddy. They had talked to Mr. Campbell and he would take care of it.”

Chenow had left the White House staff on March 30, 1972 and was traveling in Europe at the time of the Watergate arrests. About two
weeks later, she was located in Birmingham, England, by John Dean’s assistant, Fred Fielding.

“He had flown to Europe to pick me up,” she said. “He said the White House was talking to the FBI and that they—the White House and the FBI—were going to have an investigation. Apparently, the FBI had asked Mr. Dean to find me. Mr. Fielding requested that I come back and said that I should just recall my work and that they would ask me questions about the telephone and to try and recall. . . . On the flight back, Mr. Fielding gave me a
Time
magazine and tried to bring me up to date. He asked, ‘Do you know anybody in the articles [on the break-in]?’ and I said, ‘Of course—Mr. Hunt.’ ”