All the President's Men (7 page)

Several hours after his ruling, Judge Richey telephoned Bernstein at the
Post.
“I just wanted you to understand the basis for my decision.” He explained to Bernstein the dangers of releasing testimony in the civil suit before a criminal trial.

Then Richey raised an issue that had not entered Bernstein’s head, the possibility that the Judge had been approached by someone who had urged a favorable ruling for CRP: “I want it to be very clear that I haven’t discussed this case outside the courtroom with anyone, and that political considerations played no part whatsoever.”

Bernstein was dumbstruck. He had never met Judge Richey. The call came out of the blue.

•   •   •

Until the August 1 story about the Dahlberg check, the working relationship between Bernstein and Woodward was more competitive than anything else. Each had worried that the other might walk off with the remainder of the story by himself. If one had gone chasing after a lead at night or on a weekend, the other felt compelled to do the same. The August 1 story had carried their joint byline; the day afterward, Woodward asked Sussman if Bernstein’s name could appear with his on the follow-up story—though Bernstein was still in Miami and had not worked on it. From then on, any Watergate story would carry both names. Their colleagues melded the two into one and gleefully named their byline Woodstein.

Gradually, Bernstein’s and Woodward’s mutual distrust and suspicions diminished. They realized the advantages of working together, particularly because their temperaments were so dissimilar. The
breadth of the story, the inherent risks and the need for caution all argued for at least two reporters working on it. By dividing the work and pooling their information, they increased their contacts.

Each kept a separate master list of telephone numbers. The numbers were called at least twice a week. (Just the fact that a certain source wouldn’t come to the phone or return calls often signaled something important.) Eventually, the combined total of names on their lists swelled to several hundred, yet fewer than 50 were duplicated. Inevitably, they crossed each other’s tracks. “Don’t you guys work together?” a lawyer once asked Woodward. “I just this minute hung up on Carl.” On another occasion, a White House aide said, “We’ve been trying to figure out why some of us get calls from Bernstein and others seem to be on Woodward’s list.” There was no reason. The reporters wanted to avoid tripping over each other’s work as much as possible. In general, they preferred to keep their contacts divided because confidential sources would feel more comfortable that way: more time could be invested in developing a personal relationship.

To those who sat nearby in the newsroom, it was obvious that Woodstein was not always a smoothly operating piece of journalistic machinery. The two fought, often openly. Sometimes they battled for fifteen minutes over a single word or sentence. Nuances were critically important; the emphasis had to be just right. The search for the journalistic mean was frequently conducted at full volume, and it was not uncommon to see one stalk away from the other’s desk. Sooner or later, however (usually later), the story was hammered out.

Each developed his own filing system; oddly, it was Bernstein, by far the less organized of the two, who kept records neatly arranged in manila folders labeled with the names of virtually everyone they encountered. Subject files were kept as well. Woodward’s recordkeeping was more informal, but they both adhered to one inviolate rule: they threw nothing out and kept all their notes and the early drafts of stories. Soon they had filled four filing cabinets.

Usually, Woodward, the faster writer, would do a first draft, then Bernstein would rewrite. Often, Bernstein would have time to rewrite only the first half of a story, leaving Woodward’s second half hanging like a shirttail. The process often consumed most of the night.

As the number of leads and components in the Watergate story increased, the reporters became almost possessed by it. And, tentatively
at first, they became friends. Neither had many demands on his time. Woodward was divorced; Bernstein separated. They often remained in the newsroom until late at night, making checks, reading clippings, outlining their next steps, trading theories. Sometimes they were joined by Barry Sussman, who ultimately was detached from his regular duties as city editor and given prime responsibility for directing the
Post’s
Watergate coverage.

Sussman was 38, gentle in his manner, slightly overweight, curly-haired, scholarly in demeanor. He had been a desk man on a small-town newspaper near the Virginia-Tennessee line, a speed-reading instructor at New York University, a society editor, and then suburban editor for the
Post
—a vagabond journalist who had left Brooklyn odd-jobbing his way to Washington.

Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instant recall. More than any other editor at the
Post,
or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman’s mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.

At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell’s secretary? Why won’t anybody say when Liddy went to the White House or who worked with him there? Mitchell and Stans both ran the budget committee, right? What does that tell you? Then Sussman would puff on his pipe, a satisfied grin on his face.

Sussman’s passions are history and polling. His hero is Jefferson, but the reporters always imagined that George Gallup ran a close second. Almost every time there had been a big demonstration in town during the height of the anti-war movement, Sussman had sent out teams of reporters to ask demonstrators their age, politics, home towns and how many previous demonstrations they had been in. Each time, he came up with the same conclusion almost every reporter on the street had already reached—the anti-war movement had become
more broad-based and less radical. Since the break-in at Democratic headquarters, Sussman had been studying the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. He had a theory about Watergate that Bernstein and Woodward did not quite understand—it had to do with historic inevitability, post-war American ethics, merchandising and Richard Nixon.

Sussman and the other editors at the
Post
were by temperament informal. The reporters were never formally assigned to work on Watergate full time. They sensed that as long as the stories continued to come, there would be no problem. If they failed to produce, anything might happen in the competitive atmosphere of the
Post
newsroom. In the weeks after the story on the Dahlberg check, Rosenfeld became noticeably nervous as Simons and Bradlee showed an increasing interest in the Watergate affair. The invariable question, asked only half-mockingly of reporters by editors at the
Post
(and then up the hierarchal line of editors) was “What have you done for me today?” Yesterday was for the history books, not newspapers.

That had been the working ethic of the
Post
since Ben Bradlee took command in 1965, first as managing editor and, in 1967, as executive editor. Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the
New York Times
need not exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism.

That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the
Times
published the Pentagon Papers. Though the
Post
was the second news organization to obtain a copy of the secret study of the Vietnam war, Bradlee noted that “there was blood on every word” of the
Times’
initial stories. Bradlee could convey his opinions with a single disgusted glance at an indolent reporter or editor.

•   •   •

Since his return from Miami, Bernstein had become obsessed with the $89,000 in Mexican checks that had passed through Bernard Barker’s bank account. Why Mexico? According to the GAO investigator, Maurice Stans had said the money had come initially from Texas. But no one at the GAO had been able to understand why $89,000 in campaign contributions were routed through Mexico.

In mid-August, Bernstein had begun calling all the employees of the Texas Committee for the Re-election of the President. A secretary
at the committee’s offices in Houston said that the FBI had been there to interview Emmett Moore, the committee treasurer.

“They questioned me about how money was transmitted to Mexico,” Moore said. “They said there had been allegations to that effect—that money was transferred to and from Mexico.”

Moore immediately sought to make clear to Bernstein that the FBI agents were not interested in his own actions, but in those of the Texas committee’s chairman, Robert H. Allen, who was also president of the Gulf Resources and Chemical Co. of Houston. The agents had expressed particular interest in Allen’s relationship with a Mexico City lawyer, Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre, who represented Gulf Resources’ interests in Mexico.

The Mexican connection. What did it mean?

Moore, who said he had been as unnerved by the FBI’s visit as by Bernstein’s call, knew nothing of the reasons for moving the money across the border.

Bernstein began leaving messages for Robert Allen at his home and office. They were not answered. Finally, on the morning that Maurice Stans summoned the GAO’s auditor to Miami, Bernstein got up at 6:00
A.M.—
5:00
A.M
. in Texas—and called Allen at his Houston home. Allen sleepily declined to discuss the matter, “because it’s before the grand jury.”

Using his primitive high-school Spanish, Bernstein intensified his telephone search for Ogarrio and for any information on the elusive Mexican lawyer. Gradually, the enterprise became the object of good-natured office ridicule. Bernstein was unable to construct anything other than disjointed school-book phrases in the present tense. Ken Ringle, a reporter on the Virginia staff who sat next to Bernstein, would shout, “Bernstein’s talking Spanish again,” and reporters and editors would walk over to offer appropriate commentary. The calls went to bankers, relatives of Ogarrio, his former law partners, his clients, Mexican banking commissioners, the police, law schools.
Nada.
The standing office joke had it that Bernstein heard the whole Watergate story and didn’t understand it.

Not surprisingly, the Nixon campaign’s Mexican connection was uncovered in English.

On August 24, Bernstein called Martin Dardis in Miami. The chief
investigator said he was coming up with pretty good information on the Mexican checks, really weird stuff that he didn’t want to talk about on the telephone. Dardis assured Bernstein that it would be worth his while to fly down to Miami again. Bernstein caught the first flight out of Washington Friday, August 25, and again spent most of the day with Ruby. Seething, he left to search again for the photo shop where the burglars from Miami supposedly had bought their film.

On the freeway, a billboard caught his eye. It pictured a handsome, thirtyish, blond man who looked like a model in a cigarette ad. “Vote for Neal Sonnett, State’s Attorney, Dade County,” it said. Bernstein’s anger at the chief investigator turned to rage.

A couple of weeks before, Dardis had called him for a favor. “It’s on a case we’re working, not related to Watergate,” he had told Bernstein. “You must have some friends at the Pentagon or somewhere in the military. If you could get somebody to look up the records for you  . . .” Then he asked for any possible derogatory information—arrests, mental illness, history of homosexuality—in the file of a Neal Sonnett.

A Pentagon colonel had agreed to try to get Sonnett’s military information for Bernstein, and just before the Republican convention Bernstein had called Dardis to tell him so. Fortunately, Dardis had said he didn’t need it any more.

Bernstein called Dardis before six o’clock the next morning, August 26. Gerstein’s campaign schedule, he knew, began at 7:30. Dardis picked up the phone on the first ring. “God damn it, Carl, let’s get together later, I gotta run. It can wait a few hours.”

Bernstein mentioned what nice posters Neal Sonnett had all over town.

“I guess I shouldn’t have asked you to do that,” Dardis said sheepishly.

Bernstein asked him what he had learned about the Mexican checks.

“It’s called ‘laundering,’” Dardis began. “You set up a money chain that makes it impossible to trace the source. The Mafia does it all the time. So does Nixon, or at least that’s what this guy who’s the lawyer for Robert Allen says. This guy says Stans set up the whole thing. It was Stans’ idea. He says they were doing it elsewhere too, that Stans didn’t want any way they could trace where the money was coming from.”

Dardis said he had learned the whole story from Richard Haynes, a Texas lawyer who represented Allen. Haynes had outlined the Mexican laundry operation to Dardis this way:

Shortly before April 7, the effective date of the new campaign finance law, and the last day anonymous contributions could be legally accepted, Stans had gone on a final fund-raising swing across the Southwest. If Democrats were reluctant to contribute to the campaign of a Republican presidential candidate, Stans assured them that their anonymity could be absolutely ensured, if necessary by moving their contributions through a Mexican middleman whose bank records were not subject to subpoena by U.S. investigators. The protection would also allow CRP to receive donations from corporations, which were forbidden by campaign laws to contribute to political candidates; from business executives and labor leaders having difficulties with government regulatory agencies; and from special-interest groups and such underground sources of income as the big Las Vegas gambling casinos and mob-dominated unions. To guarantee anonymity, the “gifts,” whether checks, security notes or stock certificates, would be taken across the border to Mexico, converted to cash in Mexico City through deposit in a bank account established by a Mexican national with no known ties to the Nixon campaign, and only then sent on to Washington. The only record would be jealously guarded in Washington by Stans, kept simply to make sure the contributor would not be forgotten in his time of need.