All the President's Men (41 page)

“Do you mind if I take notes?” Warren asked, adjusting the glasses on his nose, and flipping to a clean page on his yellow legal-size pad.

Of course Woodward didn’t object. He explained that he and Bernstein had information indicating that Watergate was a much broader conspiracy than anyone had yet suggested publicly. The information was going to come out, Woodward said, and the
Post
was not going to be the only agent of disclosure. Perhaps the White House knew of things that might mitigate the effect. The
Post
wanted to explore those factors. The situation had reached a level of gravity where only direct responses by the President might lessen the damage.

Warren occasionally looked up from his note pad and asked for specific facts. Woodward said that he and Bernstein wanted to talk only to the President about the facts and hoped that Warren would consider this a formal request for an interview. Warren said he would, but that he assumed the request would be denied.

“I can tell you,” he said, “that it will be a decision I won’t make.
I’ll forward the request up the line.” Woodward imagined it would get about as far as Ziegler, whom he had purposely not called. He tried again.

Judging from their evaluation of the information, Woodward said, the President was going to have to jump ship on the Watergate at some point soon. The
Post
was anxious to discuss specifics before that happened. Woodward said they had information about additional wiretaps, break-ins and other secret operations, all of which was going to come out.

Warren winced a little, and cast a skeptical glance at him. “If you could be more specific, it would help,” he said.

Woodward said that he wouldn’t go into specific details at that moment, but if the President agreed to be interviewed, then questions would be provided in advance. There would be no attempt to spring something on him.

Woodward felt a hideous rush of nervousness. This wasn’t working, he realized. Also, his awe of the Presidency clutched at him. That was part of the reason he was there, sitting in that closet office, he realized. It was to give warning. Warren, too, realized that. But not a threat, Woodward wanted to make clear. It was, in an odd way, friendly, and meant to convey respect and the possibility of a way out. Woodward was seeking an adjustment. He wanted the paper to persuade by facts and good reporting, but he had no wish to build a hostile wall.

Warren smiled as if to say: It doesn’t work that way, you either have the goods and print them or you don’t. But he sounded sympathetic at times, as if he had wanted to sweep the papers off his desk and say: Right, we’ve got to talk about this. It could have been Woodward’s imagination, and Warren’s gentle ways.

When Woodward finished his presentation, Warren laid his pen gently on his pad, stood and extended his hand. “I’ll be back to you,” he said.

Woodward replied that there was no hurry and shrugged his shoulders to say he knew what the answers would be. As he walked out of the crackerbox office and into the sun, he felt buoyant. He had tried.

Bernstein and he were well aware that they would have far less to do with events than before. Much bigger forces were firmly in charge.
Government investigations were under way, and the instinct for survival could turn some of the President’s men into informers.

•   •   •

On Wednesday, March 28, McCord was scheduled to give his first sworn testimony behind closed doors to the seven Senators on the Watergate committee. Bernstein joined dozens of reporters waiting outside the hearing room. The reporters began discussing “leaks” which were bound to come out, and agreed on the dangers of trying to report what would go on inside. It was no longer a matter of “investigative” reporting—evaluating information, putting together pieces in a puzzle, disclosing what had been obscured. They would be merely trying to find out in advance the testimony of witnesses who would eventually take the stand in public. Judging which allegations were hearsay, which firsthand knowledge, and placing them in context would be difficult. Sensational charges and deliberate leaks by interested parties would be hard to evaluate. If some papers or networks searched out leaks, all the reporters would feel bound to compete.

The committee session with McCord lasted four and a half hours. Afterward, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, the Republican vice chairman of the committee, announced that McCord had provided “significant information  . . . covering a lot of territory.”

Bernstein and Woodward began the ritual phone calls, starting with the Senators. “Okay, I’m going to help you on this one,” one told Woodward. “McCord testified that Liddy told him the plans and budget for the Watergate operation were approved by Mitchell in February, when he was still Attorney General. And he said that Colson knew about Watergate in advance.”

But, in answer to Woodward’s questions, he added that McCord had only secondhand information for his allegations, as well as for his earlier accusations that Dean and Magruder had had prior knowledge.

“However,” the Senator said, “he was very convincing.”

Bradlee was able to get a second Senator to corroborate the story, and Bernstein received the same version from a staff member.

The next day’s story, though calling attention to the hearsay nature of McCord’s testimony, quoted the unnamed Senator’s evaluation.

The flood of “McCord says” stories continued. McCord appeared again on Thursday, and the reporters went through the same exercise.
McCord stated that Liddy had told him that charts outlining the Watergate operation had been shown to Mitchell in February. Three sources gave identical versions of the testimony.

At this point, press secretary Ronald Ziegler announced that the President, seeking to “dispel the myth  . . . that we seek to cover up,” had ordered members of his staff to appear before the grand jury and testify, if called. The
Star-News
interpreted this as a change of policy and reported that it “appears to be a significant relaxation of Nixon’s firm policy of sheltering the staff under the doctrine of executive privilege.”

Concerned that the
Post
would make the same error, Bernstein and Woodward went to Dick Harwood, the national editor. Ziegler himself had said that there was nothing new in the policy. Several White House aides had already either testified before or given sworn depositions to the grand jury. The President had never asserted a claim to executive privilege on their behalf to protect them from testifying in
criminal
investigations, but only in congressional hearings.

The reporters suggested strongly to Lou Cannon, a
Post
national-staff reporter who was writing the story, that the newest Ziegler announcement did not represent a change of policy. Cannon’s Republican sources were considerable, and he had written some of the
Post’s
finest pieces about the effects of Watergate on the White House and the GOP. Now he was furious. He had discussed the matter with the most experienced members of the White House press corps, and they had agreed that the President had relaxed his position on sweeping executive privilege.

Watergate had been, for some months, a strain on the never very cozy relations between the city and national desks at the
Post.
Bernstein and Woodward were outraged by the tenor of Cannon’s story, and also by its position as the lead in the next day’s paper.

The next day, their White House sources confirmed that Ziegler’s statement was nothing more than a public-relations gesture. But the Senate committee and staff now charged, more importantly, that it was intended to divert attention from the President’s claim of executive privilege in the Senate investigation. Senate sources suggested an additional reason for the President’s willingness to cooperate with one inquiry and not another—the grand jury’s proceedings would be secret, and under the supervision of the administration’s Justice Department.
The Senate hearings would be public, and independent of the Executive.

Nine months after Watergate, the White House demonstrated once again that it knew more about the news business than the news business knew about the White House.

•   •   •

If there was one Washington reporter unlikely to be taken in by White House manipulations, Bernstein and Woodward thought it was Seymour Hersh of the
New York Times.
A mutual friend had arranged for Bernstein and Woodward to have dinner with Hersh on April 8.

Hersh, 36, horn-rimmed and somewhat pudgy, showed up for dinner in old tennis shoes, a frayed pinstriped shirt that might have been his best in his college freshman year, and rumpled bleached khakis. He was unlike any reporter they had ever met. He did not hesitate to call Henry Kissinger a war criminal in public and was openly attracted and repelled by the power of the
New York Times.
Hersh had broken the story of the cover-up of My Lai and had spent years reporting on military and national-security bureaucracies. He was uniquely qualified to understand the ramifications of Watergate. “I know these people,” Hersh said. “The abiding characteristic of this administration is that it lies.”

He could be just as tough on the
New York Times:
“Lies, lies, lies,” he remarked of a story written by one of his colleagues.

During dinner, Bernstein and Woodward brought up one of the President’s men who was under suspicion in Watergate.

“I’d really love to get that son of a bitch, too, I know him from way before Watergate,” Hersh said. “But he’ll get no cheap shots from me; either I get him hard, with facts, solid information, evidence, the truth, or I don’t touch him.”

The three exchanged their sense of some of the witnesses and principals in Watergate, being careful not to tip their hands. Later that evening, Bernstein joshingly asked Hersh what Watergate story he was going to unload when the
Times
front page arrived at the
Post
that night.

“Just a little something,” Hersh replied.

Bernstein and Woodward couldn’t tell if he was kidding. Woodward called the office. Hersh wasn’t kidding. His “little something” was the
first report that McCord had testified that the cash payoffs to the Watergate conspirators had come directly from CRP. The connection was one of the keys they had all been waiting for. Since January, everyone had assumed that CRP had bought the conspirators’ silence, but now someone was finally saying so from the inside.

Months earlier, Hugh Sloan had told the reporters that the celebrated secret fund had never ceased to exist—even after the Watergate arrests. Bernstein and Woodward had been astonished. Sloan had told them that the money had been transferred from Stans’ safe to Fred LaRue. They had not written about it because they couldn’t confirm it and didn’t know how the money had been spent. Sloan had refused to say how much money was involved. Now it seemed possible that the money had bought the defendants’ silence. LaRue had been John Mitchell’s deputy and co-director of Watergate housecleaning. He and Mardian were the two CRP officials who had supervised Kenneth Parkinson and the other committee lawyers. McCord’s testimony had identified Parkinson and the late Dorothy Hunt, Howard Hunt’s wife, as conduits for the payments to the conspirators.

Woodward called a CRP official who had been friendly but unwilling to talk specifics. The man exploded on the phone about the awful state of affairs in the wake of the McCord disclosures:

“John Mitchell still sits there smoking on his pipe, not saying much. . . . I used to take that for wisdom—you know, keeping your mouth shut. Now I realize that it’s ignorance. . . . God, I never thought I’d be telling you guys that I didn’t hate what you did. It’s the way the White House has handled this mess that’s undermined the Presidency. . . . I’ve got friends who look at me now and say, ‘How can you have any self-respect and still work for CRP?’ I’m sick.”

Seeing an unusual opportunity, Woodward said he and Bernstein
knew
that LaRue was involved in the payoffs to the conspirators. Woodward had only seen pictures of LaRue. He was a balding little man with round spectacles, a former Las Vegas casino owner and oil millionaire—the perfect bagman, Woodward had thought.

“I can’t answer any questions, but I’ll tell you one thing you might have trouble believing,” the man from CRP said. “Fred LaRue won’t lie under oath. If they ask him, he’s going to say he helped pay the men off.”

Woodward called Hugh Sloan. LaRue paid off the boys, Woodward
announced, then realized how silly he sounded. Sloan was not surprised to hear it. He had always suspected the worst, whatever it was.

How much money was transferred from the fund? Woodward was looking for a ballpark figure.

Sloan wouldn’t say.

They played their old game, like two sparring partners who hadn’t been in the ring for a while. More than $100,000? More than $50,000? Between $50,000 and $100,000? Which side of $75,000?

“Within $5,000 of that,” Sloan said.

That was good enough; it was probably $80,000, but they would use $70,000.

How could CRP continue the secret fund after the Watergate arrests and get away with it?

“It [the transfer] was done in July,” Sloan said. “Nothing had come out about the money yet and Secretary Stans approved [it]. It was a way of doing business, having cash around.” Sloan presumed that somebody had told Stans to do it, but he didn’t know who. He was assuming the worst on that, too.

Do the prosecutors know about this? Woodward asked.

“I don’t think so,” Sloan said. “I was never asked.”
*

Woodward called a Justice Department official. Were the prosecutors trying to determine if the conspirators were paid off with the $70,000 LaRue got out of Stans’ safe after Watergate?

“The prosecutors are looking at every penny of committee money to see if it went for payoffs, every penny they can find.”

Including the money that was in Stans’ safe?

“Right.”

That tied the knot. The secret fund had brought the reporters full circle—first the bugging, and now the cover-up.