All the President's Men (39 page)

“It was my idea,” Gorton said, not too convincingly. He had reported to Kenneth Rietz, director of CRP’s Youth Vote Division. “Rietz knew that I could supply him with information on what radicals were thinking. I supplied the information, but Rietz didn’t ask where I got it.” Then he changed the story, claiming that Brill had been his lone operative.

Ken Rietz, 32, was Haldeman’s choice as the next Republican national chairman. He had left CRP for the National Committee to head the 1974 Republican congressional campaigns.

Brill’s $150 weekly salary had not been reported under the new campaign disclosure law. After the Brill story appeared, the General Accounting Office audited the CRP books again. The audit helped establish that Rietz had headed a “Kiddie Corps” of young spies for the President.

•   •   •

Around this time, Woodward went to visit a well-placed CRP official. The man seemed disaffected, disgusted with the White House and the tactics that had been used to re-elect the President. “If there was an honest and a dishonest way to do something,” he said, “and if both ways would get the same results, we picked the dishonest way. . . . Now, tell me why anyone would do that.”

For instance?

“It’s hard to think of specifics,” the CRP man said. He thought for another moment. “Remember the decision to mine Haiphong about five months before the election? Some of us felt that that decision could make or break the President. We spent $8400 on false telegrams and ads to stir up phony support for the President’s decision. Money was used to pay for telegrams to the White House, to tell the President what a great move it was, so that Ziegler could announce that the telegram support was running some large percentage in support of the President. Money also went to pay for a phony ad in the
New York Times.”

He took a copy of the ad out of his desk and handed it to Woodward. Headlined “The People vs. the
New York Times,”
the advertisement criticized a
Times
editorial that had opposed the mining.

“Notice,” the man from CRP said, “it is signed by about ten supposedly independent people, leaving the impression that citizens are up in arms about the editorial, and are willing to fork over several thousand dollars of their own money to express their opinion. Not so. The ad was paid for by CRP with forty of those $100 bills from the pile in Stans’ safe.”

A line in the advertisement ran: “Who can you believe—the
New York Times
or the American people?”

Back at the office, Woodward called another CRP official. He said the attempt to drum up support for the Haiphong decision “put the entire staff in overdrive for two weeks. . . . The work included petition drives, organizing rallies, bringing the people in buses to Washington, organizing calls to the White House, getting voters to call their Congressmen.”

Bernstein remembered something that tied in. In May 1972, Barker and Sturgis had appeared uninvited at a meeting of Cuban exiles in Miami and attempted to take over plans for organizing a demonstration in support of the mining. Sturgis had driven the lead truck in a parade of support that followed.

Sussman told the reporters to write a story on the campaign of deception surrounding the Haiphong issue. “This hits home,” he said. “People understand attempts to tamper with public opinion.”

The day the story ran, James Dooley, a 19-year-old former head of the CRP mailroom, came to the
Post
newsroom and said he wanted to talk to someone about the Haiphong mining. Woodward took him into Sussman’s office.

“You don’t know everything that was done about Haiphong,” said Dooley. “We rigged WTTG’s poll on whether the people supported the President’s decision.”

The local Metromedia television station had asked its viewers to send in a card indicating whether they agreed or disagreed with the President on the mining. Sample ballots were placed in advertisements in the
Post
and the
Star.

“The press office ran the project,” Dooley said, “and work ground to a halt. Everyone had to fill out fifteen postcards. Ten people worked
for days buying different kinds of stamps and cards and getting different handwriting to fake the responses. . . . Thousands of newspapers were bought from the newsstands and the ballots were clipped out and mailed in.”

At a minimum, Dooley said, 4000 ballots supporting Nixon’s decision were sent from CRP. WTTG reported that 5157 agreed with the President and 1158 disagreed. Had the CRP ballots not been sent in, the President would, at best, have lost by one vote—1158 to 1157.

“When all the ballots were clipped,” Dooley continued, “people became afraid that the newspapers might be discovered, so someone said, ‘Shred them.’ McCord was in charge of the shredder and he was upset about a ton of newspapers all over the shredder room. . . . But all the newspapers were destroyed as directed.”

Woodward called CRP spokesman Devan Shumway and asked if the poll had been rigged. “When you’re involved in an election, you do what you can,” Shumway replied. “We assumed the other side would do it also. On that assumption, we proceeded. I don’t know if the other side did.”

Woodward asked if the other side Shumway was referring to was the North Vietnamese.

No, Shumway said, he meant the McGovern forces.

Following it down to the end, Woodward called Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s former campaign aide. “We didn’t do it,” he said, somewhat incredulously. “It didn’t occur to us, believe me. These guys are something. They assume we have the same sleazy ethics as theirs.”

•   •   •

No presidential decision affecting Watergate seemed so ill-advised or left the reporters more perplexed than the White House announcement in February that L. Patrick Gray’s name would be submitted to the Senate for confirmation as J. Edgar Hoover’s permanent successor. Gray was already the acting FBI director; his confirmation hearings would almost certainly become a congressional inquiry into the FBI’s conduct of the Watergate investigation; why risk the possible consequences of a senatorial fishing expedition to make his tenure permanent? The administration officials to whom the reporters posed the riddle seemed no less baffled. Several insiders professed to know only that there had been a mammoth struggle in the innermost Nixon circle.
John Ehrlichman, it was said, had vehemently opposed the nomination, but the President had ultimately rejected his counsel. No one suggested that Gray had been nominated because of ability, or because the White House regarded the hearings as an opportunity to set the Watergate record straight.

Shortly before the hearings were to begin, the reporters decided it was time for Woodward to move the flower pot on his balcony. That night he traveled by foot and cab to the garage. Deep Throat was not there. Deep Throat had said he would leave a message on a certain ledge when he couldn’t make an appointment. Woodward, five foot ten, couldn’t reach it. He found a section of an old conduit pipe and fished around for it.

There was a small piece of paper on which Deep Throat had typed instructions to meet the next night at a bar Woodward had never heard of. A bar. Had Deep Throat gone crazy? Woodward wondered. Something must be wrong. When he got home, he looked the bar up in the phone book. There was no such listing. From a pay phone in his apartment building, he dialed information. An operator gave him the listing—an address on the outskirts of the city.

At nine the next night, Woodward walked a few blocks before taking a cab to a section of the city in the opposite direction from the bar. He walked another 15 minutes and took a cab to within a few blocks of the bar. It was really a tavern, an old wooden house which had been converted into a saloon for truckers and construction workers. Woodward, who was dressed casually, walked in. No one seemed to pay any attention to him. He spotted Deep Throat sitting alone at a side table and nervously sat down across from him.

Why here? he asked.

“A change,” Deep Throat said. “None of my friends, none of your friends would come here. Just a sleepy, dark bar.” A waiter came over; they both ordered Scotch.

There has to be more to this new meeting place, Woodward said.

“A little bit classier surroundings,” Deep Throat answered. “No chance you were followed? Two cabs and all?”

Woodward nodded.

“How’d the
Post
like its subpoenas?”

Just great, said Woodward.

“That’s only the first step. Our President has gone on a rampage
about news leaks on Watergate. He’s told the appropriate people, ‘Go to any length’ to stop them. When he says that, he really means business. Internal investigations, plus he wants to use the courts. There was a discussion about whether to go the criminal route or the civil-suit route first. At a meeting, Nixon said that the money left over from the campaign, about $5 million or so, might as well be used to take the
Washington Post
down a notch. Thus your subpoenas, and the others. Part of the discussion was about starting a grand-jury investigation, but that’s for later.

“Nixon was wild, shouting and hollering that ‘we can’t have it and we’re going to stop it, I don’t care how much it costs.’ His theory is that the news media have gone way too far and the trend has to be stopped—almost like he was talking about federal spending. He’s fixed on the subject and doesn’t care how much time it takes; he wants it done. To him, the question is no less than the very integrity of government and basic loyalty. He thinks the press is out to get him and therefore is disloyal; people who talk to the press are even worse—the enemies within, or something like that.”

Woodward took a breath. Deep Throat sipped his Scotch gingerly, then wiped his mouth inelegantly with the back of his hand.

How worried was he?

“Worried?” Deep Throat leaned back and threw his arm over his chair. “It can’t work. They’ll never get anyone. They never have. They’re hiding things that will come out and even discredit their war against leaks. The flood is coming, I’m telling you. So the White House wants to eat the
Washington Post,
so what? It will be wearing on you, but the end is in sight. It’s building and they see it and they know that they can’t stop the real story from coming out. That’s why they’re so desperate. Just be careful, yourselves and the paper, and wait them out, don’t jump too fast. Be careful and don’t be too anxious.”

Woodward was anything but reassured by his friend’s assessment. He said he needed more details if he was going to tell the others at the
Post
that they were on the menu but weren’t going to be eaten. Deep Throat shook his head, indicating that he could not say much more.

What about Gray’s nomination? asked Woodward. That didn’t make any sense.

Deep Throat said it made all the sense in the world, though it was
a big risk. “In early February, Gray went to the White House and said, in effect, ‘I’m taking the rap on Watergate.’ He got very angry and said he had done his job and contained the investigation judiciously, that it wasn’t fair that he was being singled out to take the heat. He implied that all hell could break loose if he wasn’t able to stay in the job permanently and keep the lid on. Nixon could have thought this was a threat, though Gray is not that sort of guy. Whatever the reason, the President agreed in a hurry and sent Gray’s name up to the Senate right away. Some of the top people in the White House were dead set against it, but they couldn’t talk him out of it.”

So good Pat Gray had blackmailed the President.

“I never said that,” Deep Throat laughed. He lifted his eyes, the picture of innocence.
*

What about the
Time
magazine story? Had Gray been aware of taps on reporters and White House aides?

“Affirmative,” said Deep Throat, and cautioned that even he did not know all there was to know about the subject. “There was an out-of-channels vigilante squad of wiretappers that did it. Including taps on Hedrick Smith and Neil Sheehan of the
New York Times,
after the Pentagon Papers publication. But it started before that. All the records have supposedly been destroyed.” He explained that the wiretapping had been done by ex-FBI and ex-CIA agents who were hired outside of normal channels. Mardian had run the Justice Department end of the operation for the White House. Watergate was nothing new to the administration, Deep Throat continued.

There had been an election strategy session at which Haldeman pushed Mitchell to set up a wiretapping operation for the campaign. Mitchell had been reluctant, but Haldeman was insistent. Mitchell was instructed by the White House chief of staff to move part of the vigilante operation from the White House to the campaign. That meant Hunt and Liddy.

“In 1969, the first targets of aggressive wiretapping were the reporters and those in the administration who were suspected of disloyalty,” Deep Throat said. “Then the emphasis was shifted to the radical political opposition during the anti-war protests. When it got near election time, it was only natural to tap the Democrats. The arrests in the Watergate sent everybody off the edge because the break-in could uncover the whole program.”

Deep Throat and Woodward each had another Scotch, luxuriating in the unfamiliar comfort of their meeting place. Woodward wondered if his friend was intentionally flirting with the danger of being discovered. Did Deep Throat want to get caught so he would be free to speak publicly? Was there a love-hate dialectic about his government service? Woodward started to ask, then faltered. It was enough to know that Deep Throat would never deal with him falsely. Someday it would be explained.

The drinks were cheap. Woodward put a $5 bill on the table and left first.

•   •   •

The next morning, the reporters studied Woodward’s notes. They were now thinking in terms of a report which, like the October 10 story on the massive campaign of spying and espionage, would attempt to put Watergate in perspective. Just as the break-in had been but a small part of a massive election-year campaign of espionage and sabotage, the whole undercover effort to re-elect the President was, in its turn, part of a broader program directed by the President’s men, almost from the beginning, against those who they thought threatened the administration.