All the President's Men (52 page)

The

New York Times
assigned Tad Szulc, the paper’s expert on Latin America and Spain, to the story. For almost a week, he reported about anti-Castro organizations whose members had ties to some of the suspects from Miami. However, on June 26, the
Times
ran a 3000-word wrap-up under the byline of Walter Rugaber. The story gave short shrift to the possibility of an anti-Castro plot, and reviewed some unanswered questions about the possibility of White House and Nixon campaign involvement in the break-in.
*
The $89,000 had first been mentioned by Silbert during a bond hearing for the Watergate suspects in early July. At the hearing, Barker’s attorney had explained that $89,000 had moved through the Miami bank account as a result of a real-estate transaction in which Barker had represented a group of Chilean investors. The investors could not be identified, Barker’s attorney said, for fear of political reprisals. The deal had fallen through, and Barker had returned the $89,000 to the investors, the lawyer had explained.
*
On April 20, $89,000 was deposited in Barker’s account in four checks issued to Ogarrio in Mexico City, endorsed by him there and deposited in Miami, the
Times
reported. The drafts were for $15,000, $18,000, $24,000 and $32,000. Barker later withdrew the money. Ogarrio’s 28-year-old son had told the
Times
that neither he nor his father had seen the four Banco Internacional drafts, and that none of the signatures on the checks resembled his father’s.
*
Mrs. Piper, a Minneapolis socialite, had just been found handcuffed to a tree in the wilderness after her husband had paid a $1 million ransom, thought to be the largest kidnap ransom in U.S. history.
*
Six days earlier, Eagleton had revealed that he had undergone electric shock treatment for mental fatigue in the 1960s. His announcement came after he had been asked about the matter by a reporter from the Knight newspapers.
*
William D. Ruckelshaus, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
*
John Osborne, the highly respected Nixon watcher for the
New Republic,
wrote, a week later: “The thing I’ll always remember about Mr. Nixon’s first ‘political press conference’ of 1972 was his handling of the funds and bugging matter and our failure to handle him as a vulnerable candidate should be handled. It was a lesson in the mesmerizing power of the presidency.”
*
Sloan was never identified as a source in the
Post
stories; he had been guaranteed anonymity. For this book, he agreed to allow the use of his name for the first time.
*
Edward Bennett Williams, principal attorney for the
Washington Post.
*
“Egos are tender in this business,” Bradlee said months later. “You massage them, don’t deflate them. . . . I can’t go out and take notes for someone. I’m removed, and sometimes it frustrates the hell out of me. . . . I can’t kick ass for getting scooped, but I do let it be known that I feel let down and that I hate it, just hate it. Don’t forget that I hate it.”
*
They had been dismayed at the lack of first-rate information reaching them via mail or telephone tips from strangers. Jack Anderson’s network of anonymous bureaucratic sources was legendary, and big ongoing stories—particularly scandals—often produced government informers who “leaked” information to newspapers on their own initiative. Watergate seemed to be the exception. No dissatisfied FBI agent or CRP employee had ever come to Bernstein or Woodward offering information. The closest they had come to observing one of these legendary fountains of information had been about a week after the indictments were handed down. The caller had said she worked for the Department of Justice and had seen files showing that Jeb Magruder and Bart Porter had lied to the grand jury, along with others. The persons in charge of the investigation had known they lied. And unusual political pressures had been brought to bear on the investigation throughout—particularly from the White House, she said. But the reporters could not keep her on the phone. She was too frightened, and they never heard from her again.
*
None of them came out. His camera had been incorrectly loaded.

*
The so-called Canuck Letter had been the beginning of the end of the Muskie campaign, as far as some of the Senator’s campaign aides were concerned. On February 24, two days before Muskie was scheduled to campaign in Manchester, New Hampshire, William Loeb’s right-wing newspaper, the
Manchester Union Leader,
had published an anti-Muskie editorial on its front page. Titled “Senator Muskie Insults Franco-Americans,” it accused Muskie of hypocrisy for supporting blacks while condoning the term “Canucks”—a derogatory name for Americans of French-Canadian ancestry, tens of thousands of whom were New Hampshire voters.

The “evidence” was a semi-literate letter ostensibly mailed to Loeb from Deerfield Beach, Florida, and published in the
Union Leader
the same day as the editorial. The signer claimed that a Muskie campaign aide at a Fort Lauderdale meeting had said that “we don’t have blacks but we have Cannocks” (sic), and the Senator reportedly concurred laughingly, saying, “Come to New England and see.” The Muskie campaign had contended that the letter was a fake, and had undertaken an investigation but failed to find the author.

On February 25, Loeb had reprinted a two-month-old
Newsweek
item about the Senator’s wife. Titled “Big Daddy’s Jane,” it reported she sneak-smoked, drank and used off-color language on the press plane.

The next morning, standing in a near-blizzard on the back of a flatbed truck, Muskie had abandoned his prepared text and attacked Loeb as a “gutless coward.” Then, while defending his wife, he broke down and cried. There was no dispute among Muskie’s backers, his opponents and the press that the incident had a disastrous effect on his campaign. It shattered the calm, cool, reasoned image that was basic to Muskie’s voter appeal, and focused the last-minute attention of New Hampshire voters on the alleged slur against the French-Canadians who would be a formidable minority of voters in the Democratic primary.

*
There had been news stories reporting that the FBI had found a gun in Howard Hunt’s White House office.
*
The White House and the Justice Department had cited the number of interviews conducted by the FBI as evidence of the thoroughness of the Watergate investigation.
*
In one instance, according to Mankiewicz, someone had impersonated him in a call to CBS-TV anchorman Walter Cronkite and had referred to a deal in which Cronkite had allegedly agreed to give 80 percent of the news coverage on the CBS Evening News to McGovern and the remaining 20 percent to Nixon. The Mankiewicz impersonator told Cronkite (who later confirmed that he had received such a call): “But everybody’s getting suspicious—better give more to Nixon.” Mankiewicz said that Cronkite later told him that “the guy was definitely not just a crank. It was a very good imitation.”
*
Wilkins wrote the
Post
’s major editorials on Watergate.
*
A
Post
reporter spent two days investigating the charges. He found there was no evidence known to the local police or the FBI of any connection between these incidents and the McGovern campaign.
*
The
Post
receives a telephoto of the next day’s
New York Times
front page each night at about 11:00.

*
They included: “The greatest political scandal of this campaign is the brazen manner in which, without benefit of clergy, the
Washington Post
has set up housekeeping with the McGovern campaign. With his campaign collapsing around his ears, Mr. McGovern some weeks back became the beneficiary of the most extensive journalistic rescue-and-salvage operation in American politics.

“The
Post’s
reputation for objectivity and credibility have sunk so low they have almost disappeared from the Big Board altogether.

“There is a cultural and social affinity between the McGovernites and the
Post
executives and editors. They belong to the same elite; they can be found living cheek-by-jowl in the same exclusive chic neighborhoods, and hob-nobbing at the same Georgetown parties.

“There is the historic
Post
hostility to the person and political fortunes of the President of the United States—dating from the days of Alger Hiss when the President was proven right, and the
Post
and its friends exposed as gullible and naïve.

“It is only the
Washington Post
which deliberately mixes together illegal and unethical episodes, like the Watergate Caper, with shenanigans which have been the stock-in-trade of political pranksters from the day I came into politics.

“Now Mr. Bradlee, an old Kennedy coat-holder, is entitled to his views. But when he allows his paper to be used as a political instrument of the McGovernite campaign; when he himself travels the country as a small-bore McGovern surrogate—then he and his publication should expect appropriate treatment—which they will with regularity receive.”

*
He was later to recall: “I issued two statements in that one year—both on Watergate. . . . Geez, what options did I really have? By this time I was up the river with these two reporters. I can remember sitting down at the typewriter and writing about thirty statements and then sort of saying, ‘Fuck it, let’s go stand by our boys.’”
*
McGovern said: “We have the written reports of respected reporters citing sworn testimony before the grand jury by the treasurer of the Committee to Re-elect the President, that a $700,000 fund was set up that was controlled, first, by Mr. Mitchell and, later, by Mr. Ehrlichman—Mr. Haldeman, the President’s Chief of Staff, and that that money was set aside for the purposes of political espionage, political sabotage, and all these dirty tricks that have been played to disrupt the democratic process.”
*
Nixon won the election with 61 percent of the vote.
*
Two days after the
Post’s
October 10 story, Senator Kennedy directed his Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure to open an investigation into the allegations of White House-sponsored sabotage and spying.
†
Arthur Bremer was the man who had attempted to assassinate Governor George Wallace of Alabama.
*
Theodore H. White, author of
The Making of the President
series.
*
Dean, Mitchell and Haldeman all later testified that a Washington lawyer, Roemer McPhee, had engaged in private discussions about the civil case with Judge Richey. Dean testified that McPhee initiated private discussions with the judge to seek favorable treatment for the administration in the civil suit. Mitchell acknowledged that he had had at least nine meetings during the summer of 1972 with McPhee, who has been a personal friend of Richey’s for many years. However, Mitchell said it was “inconceivable” that McPhee had approached the judge improperly. Judge Richey flatly denied any improper conduct and said that he and McPhee had never discussed any substantive aspects of the case.
*
That afternoon, Bernstein and Woodward wrote the story of Ziegler’s remarks from notes taken at the briefing by Carroll Kilpatrick, the
Post’s
veteran White House correspondent. The reporters had a special fondness for Kilpatrick, who had been a Washington reporter for more than half of his 60 years and had covered the White House since the Kennedy administration. If anyone at the
Post
had suffered as a result of the paper’s Watergate coverage, it was Kilpatrick. Many of his old sources on the Nixon staff refused to talk to him after November 7, when it no longer served their purposes. Of those few who were still talking to him after the election, Kilpatrick did not know which, if any, to trust—a disillusioning experience for any reporter who had dealt in good faith with those he covered. Kilpatrick, like most of his colleagues in the White House press corps, was skeptical of much of what Bernstein and Woodward had written. But he had never imposed his own judgment on their stories. The story on Kathleen Chenow and the Plumbers seemed to dull Kilpatrick’s previous skepticism. “There has to be a lot more meaning in that story than meets the eye,” he said.
*
Lawrence spent several hours in a basement cell before the U.S. Court of Appeals released him pending appeal. Three days later, attorneys for Alfred Baldwin announced that he was voluntarily releasing the
Los Angeles Times
from its agreement to keep the tapes confidential. The tapes were handed over to the court.
*
Months later, Howard Simons summarized his private feelings about the
Post’s
position during the trial. “I had this nagging feeling that the Watergate might turn out like the Reichstag fire. You know, forty years from now will people still be asking did the guy set it and was he a German or was he just a crazy Dutchman?  . . . I’ll tell you, it’s like being in a bathtub, where scientifically, you know, you turn the water a little bit hotter at a time and burn yourself to death without realizing it because the increments are so small that the body doesn’t understand or feel. . . . That’s the difference between Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. In the Pentagon Papers, damn, you had the lawyers involved the first day  . . . getting advice, and Katharine actually making the decision to publish. Nothing like that happened with Watergate. We never called the lawyers and said, Are we okay, what’s the legal view of this? I do think we did slip into it. It was incremental.”
*
Several weeks later, in a post-trial hearing, Sirica would say flatly that he didn’t believe Sloan had been truthful. But he had picked on the wrong person. Sloan was the one CRP witness who had cooperated fully with the investigation. Sirica didn’t ask a single question of Magruder or Bart Porter, the CRP scheduling director. Both would later acknowledge committing perjury at the trial.
*
The
Los Angeles Times
had reported earlier that Liddy had suggested to White House colleagues that the