All the President's Men (47 page)

Who? Woodward asked.

Bernstein said that they had better go straight to Bradlee. Now, Bernstein said. It was after 2:00
A.M.

They got into Woodward’s car. They decided not to talk in the car, either. Several blocks from Bradlee’s house, they called him from a pay phone. He says come over, Bernstein said.

The reporters had never been to Bradlee’s house, and they had wondered how the boss lived. The streetlights created a half-dark atmosphere. As they approached the porch, a barking dog charged out. A man stepped out of the dim shadows. It was Bradlee, his hair combed, his voice and eyes sleepy.

“Come in,” he said and the three stepped into a comfortable living room filled with books and rustic antiques.

Woodward passed Bradlee a copy of the memo. Bradlee began reading and started to ask a question. The reporters both stopped him and asked that he finish reading first.

Bradlee finished and looked up.

Let’s walk outside, Bernstein suggested.

Bradlee gazed bemusedly about his living room, then he stood up and walked out the front door. The three moved into the center of
the small yard. The chill was biting. None of them wore a coat or sweater.

Bradlee said with a touch of mockery that it was unlikely that his front yard was bugged. “What the hell do we do now?” he asked.

Bernstein suggested mobilizing a group of reporters to check out each item on the memo. Woodward suggested that the
Post
hire private detectives to help. They spent half an hour on the front lawn, bouncing around to keep warm, reviewing Deep Throat’s statements. Bradlee said he had never seen anything like this before. Skeptical but shaken, he said that the problem was no longer just journalistic. He mentioned something about the state and the future of the country. He said he would call a meeting of key editors and reporters the next morning.

It was Bradlee who seemed to be prolonging the discussion, repeating himself and letting the reporters repeat themselves. None of his usual impatience showed.

“Okay,” he said finally, looking at Woodward. The reporters left at 4:00
A.M
. They had no idea whether Bradlee thought the early morning visit was called for.

The next morning at the office, Woodward and Bernstein passed copies of the memo to Simons, Rosenfeld and Sussman, gesturing that it should not be discussed in the office.

Just before noon, Bradlee called a meeting on the
Post’s
roof garden outside Mrs. Graham’s office. Bradlee, Simons, Rosenfeld, Sussman, national editor Richard Harwood, Bernstein and Woodward sat around a large wrought-iron table under an umbrella. Harwood found the entire story implausible. His questions indicated concern that the
Post’s
Watergate coverage was nearing the edge of fantasy.

Bradlee said that he wasn’t interested in the logic of it. “We’ve seen some pretty illogical things in the last year.” He just wanted to find out what might be true.

The meeting ended inconclusively. Bernstein and Woodward had a lunch appointment with one of Dean’s associates who they thought might know about some of the information they had received. They met him in a relatively remote restaurant, and over a long, leisurely lunch he confirmed most of the major points in the Deep Throat memo.

According to typed notes of the discussion, the source “didn’t think
RMN [Nixon] used the word ‘jail’ when he threatened Dean on national security, but confirms the conversation took place and the President made it clear ‘in the strongest terms’ that he wouldn’t stand for Dean revealing undercover activities. Dean was very shook after that meeting. . . .”

But he confirmed that Dean believed Senator Baker was in the bag and helping the White House, and that Hunt was blackmailing the White House.

“Beginning in February, RMN began dealing with Dean directly. By then blackmail scheme well into effect and stakes rising. RMN in one meeting asks Dean how much the total price will be for silence, asks for estimate. Dean says $1 million and the President says it can be accommodated, that there would be no problem getting the money  . . . doesn’t think as much as $1 million already doled out, that being the figure for whole package.”

Bradlee called another meeting in a large vacant office in the old, remodeled portion of the
Post
building. The same group gathered behind a glass panel which looked out on the desks of the Style section of the paper.

The editors and reporters paced back and forth as Bernstein and Woodward described what they had learned at lunch. It was the most concrete evidence so far that the President knew about the cover-up and was a willing participant.

Harwood shifted gears; he thought the story was important and should run. Bradlee and Simons were nervous. “This was new to us,” Simons said later. “We had been told that our offices might be bugged, that lives could be in danger. Anyone who could do that might consciously set us up on a story. There was no reason to rush.”

It would be two weeks before Bernstein and Woodward wrote about Dean’s allegation concerning the President’s involvement in the $1 million estimate of the cover-up cost, and two weeks more before they had confirmed and written the story that Howard Hunt had blackmailed the White House. But, in the following months, almost all the items on the Deep Throat memo appeared in the public record as a result of the work of news organizations, the Senate committee and statements from the White House.

For several days after Woodward’s meeting with Deep Throat,
Bernstein and Woodward behaved cautiously. They conferred on street corners, passed notes in the office, avoided telephone communications. But it all seemed rather foolish and melodramatic, so they soon went back to their normal routines. They never found any evidence that their telephones had been tapped or that anyone’s life had been in danger.

•   •   •

At the trial in January, the Justice Department had contended that low-level officials like Gordon Liddy were the moving forces behind the Watergate conspiracy. The first hint that Justice was considering the President’s involvement came during a lunch with a high department official in May.

In the week before the President’s April 17 announcement, the official told Bernstein, the prosecutors had informed Assistant Attorney General Petersen that they were on the verge of indicting several of the President’s closest aides—present and former. The prosecutors had insisted that the President be told personally of the impending indictments. Petersen did so. The prosecutors had expected the President to announce the resignations of Ehrlichman and Haldeman immediately. Instead, he had resisted for almost two weeks. They had asked that he order the cooperation of members of his staff. It never came. The prosecutors had been confused and disturbed about the President’s actions ever since.

In late May, Bernstein talked about this on the phone with another Justice Department attorney. He had decided that the best way to get at it was to suggest that the department was going easy in its investigation. Why wasn’t it dealing with allegations against the President?

“What makes you think we aren’t?” the lawyer replied, angrily.

We know that your theory of the case is a closed conspiracy that ends with Haldeman, Bernstein said.

“You just showed me you don’t know it,” the attorney said. He paused. “If you’re taking notes, that is not saying one way or the other.”

Then you’re investigating the President?

“Come on, you’re not going to get me to answer that.”

Bernstein listed some of the evidence against the President.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the lawyer said impatiently. “Evidence has nothing to do with it. Talk to some lawyers. What does the Constitution say about the President? Think about it. Can he be indicted? Even assuming one had a case that showed he was guilty of obstruction?”

Bernstein asked why the prosecutors were unwilling to call the President before the grand jury.

“Who said they wouldn’t?”

You
haven’t,
Bernstein said.

“Talk to some lawyers,” the attorney said disgustedly.

Bernstein did that, and when he finished he understood what had happened. The question of the President’s involvement had been discussed at some length in Justice. Attorneys researching the problem had come to believe that the Constitution precluded the indictment of an incumbent President. If the President could not be indicted, the lawyers reasoned, he could not be called before a grand jury.

Bernstein went to a well-placed source who said, “There is no bombshell tucked away. There is an evidentiary pattern  . . . raising questions about the President’s role.”

Bernstein suggested to another Justice Department attorney that if it had been anyone other than the President, such a pattern of evidence would have meant that person would have been called before the grand jury. The attorney agreed.

Working with a Justice Department phone directory, Woodward found a lawyer in the Criminal Division who said, “The Watergate investigation has run smack into the Constitution. We now must deal with the question of how the President can be investigated.”

Bernstein went back to the angry attorney who had first suggested the constitutional problem. “Of course the President can’t be called,” he stated, “and of course it would be justified.” That was the prosecutors’ view, too, he added.

The story was headlined: “Prosecutors Say Quiz of Nixon Can be Justified.” The White House was outraged. Ziegler said the President would not testify before the grand jury or the Senate committee because “it would be constitutionally inappropriate” and “would do violence to the separation of powers.” The
Post
story, Ziegler said, recounted “a shocking and irresponsible abuse of authority on the part of
federal prosecutors. Grand jury proceedings are by law secret.” The White House asked Attorney General Richardson and Harvard law professor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed special prosecutor in May, to find the sources for the story. If an investigation was ever opened, the sources were never found.

•   •   •

The first week of June, Bernstein was talking to a source he hadn’t called for several weeks. He asked if there had been any other burglaries.

“There was one
proposed
 . . . but I don’t think it ever came off. The Brookings Institution. John Dean turned it off.”

Bernstein called Dean’s associate. “I’m not sure you have the right word, friend,” he said. “Somebody must have misspoken himself. Chuck Colson wanted to rub two sticks together.”

Maybe Bernstein’s mind was jumping too fast. Colson wanted to start a
fire?

“You might say that.”

It couldn’t have been serious, Bernstein said.

“Serious enough for John Caulfield to run out of Colson’s office in a panic. He came straight to John Dean, saying he didn’t ever want to talk to that man Colson again because he was crazy. And that John better do something to stop him before it was too late. John caught the first courier flight out to San Clemente to see Ehrlichman. That’s how serious it was.”

Why Ehrlichman?

“Because he was the only one with enough influence to stop it at that point. And he was not happy to see John Dean. Dean wasn’t supposed to know about it. But once he flew out there to make a big deal about it, E didn’t have any choice but to shut it down. John stayed in the room and listened while E called Colson. The whole time he was on the phone, E just glared at him like he was a traitor.”

Dean’s associate explained the purpose of the operation to Bernstein: Morton Halperin, Daniel Ellsberg’s friend whose telephone was among the “Kissinger taps,” was believed to have kept some classified documents when he left Kissinger’s staff to become a fellow at the Brookings Institution (a center for the study of public policy questions). The
White House wanted those documents back, and since security at the institution was too tight to risk a simple burglary, it was conjectured that a fire could cover a break-in at Halperin’s office.

Bernstein located someone who had heard the whole story from Caulfield. “Not just a fire, a
firebombing,”
the man said. “That was what Colson thought would do the trick. Caulfield said ‘This has gone too far’ and [that] he didn’t ever want anything to do with Colson again in his life.” Both Dean and Caulfield had told the story to investigators, he said.

Woodward was afraid it might be a set-up.

Bernstein checked his sources again and the investigators. Absolutely solid, he told Woodward. A firebombing.

Woodward then called Colson.

“There’s no question about that,” Colson told him. “There is one mistake. . . . It was not the Brookings but the
Washington Post.
I told them to hire a wrecking crane and go over and knock down the building and
Newsweek
also.”

Woodward said that he was serious, the allegation was deadly serious and not a joke.

“It was the
Washington Post,
I’m telling you. He had an explicit assignment to destroy the
Washington Post,”
responded Colson, his tone perfectly straight. “I wanted the
Washington Post
destroyed.”

Woodward didn’t doubt it, but he said the allegation about the Brookings Institution was going into the paper.

“Explicitly,” Colson replied, “it is bullshit. I absolutely made no such statement or suggestion. It is ludicrous. The story you have told me is a flight of fantasy, the outer limits—this one has gone too far.”

He called Woodward back several hours later. “Are you serious about this story?”

Woodward said that he was.

Colson’s tone was altered. “I was asked about this by the federal prosecutors. I was aware that there was a discussion about how to get highly classified documents back. . . . There is always a possibility that I might have said it. . . . It is characteristic of me  . . . but I never made it and certainly never meant it.”

The story ran on June 9.

About a week before John Dean testified before the Senate committee in June 1973, Woodward was talking about Howard Hunt with a
Senate attorney. The attorney felt that Hunt held a key to still more undercover work. Hunt had been brought to Capitol Hill from jail for long interviews. And he had disclosed an instruction he claimed to have received from Colson about an hour after Alabama Governor Wallace was shot.