Personal History (86 page)

President Nixon was in Key Biscayne, Florida, at the time. His press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dismissed the incident as “a third-rate burglary attempt,” adding, “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.” None of us, of course, had any idea how far the story would stretch; the beginning—once the laughter died down—all seemed so farcical.

It was Joe Califano, who was then not only our lawyer but also a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, who had called Howard in the first place. Howard swung into action. Once he’d spoken to me—and tried to reach Ben, who was at his cabin in West Virginia, with a phone that didn’t work—he phoned Harry Rosenfeld, then the metropolitan editor, who in turn called Barry Sussman, the one of his three deputies who focused on the District of Columbia.

Al Lewis, the
Post’s
police reporter since 1935, who knew everyone in the whole department, was dispatched to begin to cover the story. As usual, he headed first to the police station to get the names of those arrested—all fictitious, as it turned out. There he serendipitously bumped into the acting chief of police, Charlie Wright, with whom he was very friendly. The two of them went off together to the Watergate, where Al just walked right in with Wright. What he saw was a hive of activity, with people from the mobile crime lab trying to get fingerprints off the front door and others removing tiles from the ceiling to look for wiretaps. Lewis took off his jacket and stayed all day.

The story of the break-in appeared on the front page of Sunday’s paper, “5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here,” with Lewis’s byline. Contributing to the story were several staff writers, including Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who also did a separate report with background information on the suspects, four of whom, Carl discovered, were from Miami, where they had been involved in anti-Castro activities. Phil Geyelin’s editorial appearing the next day in the
Post
was titled “Mission Incredible,” and began with a quote from the CBS television show “Mission Impossible”: “As always, should you or any of your force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.…”

What we were seeing, of course, was the legendary tip of the iceberg. And we might never have known the size of the iceberg had it not been for the extraordinary investigative and reporting efforts of Woodward and Bernstein, famous names now but then two young men who had never worked together, one of whom (Woodward) had not even been long at the paper. In some ways it was a natural pairing, since their qualities and skills complemented each other. Both are bright, but Woodward was conscientious, hardworking, and driven, and Bernstein messy and undisciplined. He was, however, the better writer, more imaginative and creative. In other ways the relationship was oil and water, but the end product came out right, despite—or perhaps because of—the strange mix.

Barry Sussman, with only a few details about the botched burglary, knew that he wanted Bob Woodward on the story. Woodward had come to us fresh from the navy. Having been accepted by Harvard Law School, he had chosen instead to pursue journalism as a career. He so much wanted to work for the
Post
that Harry Rosenfeld had told his deputy, Andy Barnes, to put Woodward on for two weeks—without pay—and to look at his copy every night to see what he could do. Not one of the seventeen stories Bob wrote during those two weeks was printed, and at the end of the trial period, Barnes confidently declared that Woodward was a bright and good guy but lacked the skills needed for being a newspaperman—in short, was hopeless, and would be too much trouble to train. Harry told Woodward to get some experience and come back in a year. To Woodward, this was a kick in the stomach but also an inspiration, and he didn’t interpret Harry’s parting words as a total rejection. It may have been wishful thinking on Bob’s part, since for him the point was that, “in failing for two weeks at journalism, I knew I loved it.”

So Bob went off and got a job on the nearby
Montgomery County Sentinel
in Maryland, where it wasn’t long before he began scooping the
Post’s
metro reporters. After some months, he started phoning Harry again; one day he called him at home, interrupting his vacation and finding him on a ladder painting his basement. Having already been interrupted more times than he felt warranted for a man on vacation, Harry was in a foul
temper and complained to his wife, Anne, about this young upstart calling him up all the time and pestering him. Anne quietly asked, “Isn’t that what you always say is the kind of person you want, Harry?” She was, of course, exactly right, and Harry finally decided to hire Woodward, who started at the
Post
right after Labor Day in September 1971, the day, as Bob later told me, “unbeknownst to all of us, that Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy got on the airplane to go to Los Angeles to break into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s house.”

From the beginning, Bob distinguished himself, and there was no question in the editors’ minds whom they were going to send to court to cover the break-in. Carl Bernstein, on the other hand, had been at the
Post
since the fall of 1966 but had
not
distinguished himself. He was a good writer, but his poor work-habits were well known throughout the city room even then, as was his famous roving eye. In fact, one thing that stood in the way of Carl’s being put on the story was that Ben Bradlee was about to fire him. Carl was notorious for an irresponsible expense account and numerous other delinquencies—including having rented a car and abandoned it in a parking lot, presenting the company with an enormous bill. But Carl, looking over Bob’s shoulder while he reworked Al Lewis’s notes, immediately got hooked on this strange story and was off and running. It was Harry who saved him when both Ben and Howard wanted to fire him, saying that he was pursuing the Watergate story with verve, working hard, and contributing a great deal. And it was Carl who made the first connection of the crisp new $100 bills in the pockets of the burglars to money raised for the Nixon campaign.

Woodward and Bernstein clearly were the key reporters on the story—so much so that we began to refer to them collectively as Wood-stein—but the cast of characters at the
Post
who contributed to the story from its inception was considerable. As executive editor, Ben was the classic leader at whose desk the buck of responsibility stopped. He set the ground rules—pushing, pushing, pushing, not so subtly asking everyone to take one more step, relentlessly pursuing the story in the face of persistent accusations against us and a concerted campaign of intimidation.

Howard Simons, with his semi-independent pocket of authority on the paper, helped move the story along enormously, particularly with his attitude, as Woodward later described it, of “inquisitiveness and ‘Let’s find out what’s going on.’ ” Harry Rosenfeld said of Howard, “When the kids were running one way or the other, he would—if it was called for—stand up and screw the tide.” It was Howard who carried the story in its early days.

Harry himself was an old-style, tough, picturesque editor, and another real hero of Watergate for us. From the outset, he thought of the story as a very big local one, seeing it as something on which the
Post
’s local
staff could distinguish itself. He controlled the story before it regularly made page one of the paper, keeping it going on the front page of the metro section.

Barry Sussman eventually was released from his duties as District of Columbia editor to devote full time to directing the day-to-day Watergate coverage. He was just the person for the job. As described by Woodward and Bernstein in
All the President’s Men
, “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, … Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed.… Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.”

On the editorial side, Phil Geyelin and Meg Greenfield were invaluable. Through their editorials, along with those by Roger Wilkins, they plugged away at the import of what was unfolding on our news pages. The
Post
’s editorials consistently argued the seriousness of the known facts in the first several months, well before the White House had even acknowledged special concern, and at a time when the whole matter was thought to be dead. These editorials played a great part in keeping the issues before the public and had a demonstrable impact on the way people came to think about Watergate.

An even more immediate impact was achieved by Herblock. From the cartoon that appeared a few days after the “third-rate burglary”—depicting a guard throwing one of the burglars out of the Democratic National Headquarters with Richard Nixon, Richard Kleindienst, and John Mitchell looking on, over the caption “Who Would Think of Doing Such a Thing?”—to his justly famous one of Nixon trying to hang on to the ends of two reels of tape on which the words “I am … a crook” appear, with a clipped piece of tape with the word “not” on it in his mouth, Herblock kept up his relentless assault. He was well ahead of me and of the news side of the paper. Six days after the burglary, I was in the newsroom when he shared with me a cartoon he’d drawn showing two men investigating footsteps representing the bugging case and the Nixon fund scandals—footsteps that led right to the front door of the White House. The caption read: “Strange—They All Seem to Have Some Connection with This Place.” I laughed and said, “You’re not going to print that, are you?” It appeared the next day, June 23, 1972. All this was taking place just as the political campaign of 1972 was getting into full swing: George McGovern was nominated by the Democratic Party as its candidate just two weeks after the burglary at the Democratic headquarters.

From the start, Woodward and Bernstein followed the trail of the Watergate burglars with alacrity and skill, and a lot of elbow grease. From the time Bob went to court and heard James McCord say “CIA,” he was
hooked on the story. When Carl came up with Howard Hunt’s address book, and the two found in it the name “Colson” and the phrase “W. House,” they, like Herblock, decided there was a connection to the White House. When it was discovered that numerous calls had been made from the phone of Bernard Barker, one of the burglars, to an office shared by Gordon Liddy and another lawyer at the Committee to Re-elect the President, whose acronym, CRP, quickly turned into the unfortunate CREEP, Woodward and Bernstein were off and running.

On August 1, over a month after the break-in, the first big story appeared under the joint byline of Bernstein and Woodward, reporting on the connection of the burglars to CRP. Three weeks later, on August 22, President Nixon was renominated with great fanfare at the Republican National Convention in Miami. The next week, apparently trying to declare the Watergate affair finished, Nixon announced that John Dean, counsel to the president, had thoroughly investigated the break-in and said, “I can state categorically that his investigation indicates that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident. What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.” Again, we learned only later, from John Dean’s testimony, that he had never heard of “his” investigation until the president made that statement. Strange, indeed.

On September 15, a federal grand jury indicted the original five burglars as well as two former White House aides, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. It was on that same day—but this came to light only two years later—that Nixon spoke to two of his aides, the White House chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, and John Dean, making threats of economic retaliation against the
Post:
“[I]t’s going to have its problems.… The main thing is the Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one. They have a television station … and they’re going to have to get it renewed.… And it’s going to be God damn active here.… [T]he game has to be played awfully rough.” Of our lawyer, Nixon said, “I wouldn’t want to be in Edward Bennett Williams’s position after this election. We are going to fix the son of a bitch, believe me. We are going to. We’ve got to, because he is a bad man.”

Two weeks later, a seminal Bernstein and Woodward article appeared on page one of the
Post
. They had dug up information that there was a secret fund in the safe of Maurice Stans—former secretary of commerce, but finance chairman for CRP at the time—which was controlled by five people, one of whom was John Mitchell, and which was to be used to gather intelligence on the Democrats. Thus the story reached a new level, involving Mitchell himself, not only in his new role in the campaign, but when he was still attorney general, since Woodward and Bernstein had
unearthed Mitchell-authorized expenditures from the fund from the previous year.

CRP denied the story artfully—and graphically. In an effort to check it out, Bernstein, having been told by a press aide at CRP that there was “absolutely no truth to the charges,” called Mitchell directly, reaching him at a hotel in New York, where Mitchell answered the phone himself. When Carl told him about the story, Mitchell exploded with exclamations of “JEEEEEEESUS,” so violent that Carl felt it was “some sort of primal scream” and thought Mitchell might die on the telephone. After he’d read him the first two paragraphs, Mitchell interrupted, still screaming, “All that crap, you’re putting it in the paper? It’s all been denied. Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ! That’s the most sickening thing I ever heard.”

Bernstein was stunned and called Ben at home to read him Mitchell’s quotes and discuss adding them to the already prepared article. Ben told Carl to use it all except the specific reference to my “tit.” The quote was changed to read that I was “gonna get caught in a big fat wringer.” Ben decided he didn’t have to forewarn me. (Later he told me, “That was too good to check with you, Katharine.” I would have agreed with Ben’s decision.) As it was, I was shocked to read what I did in the paper, but even more so to hear what Mitchell had actually said, so personal and offensive were the threat and the message. I ran into Carl by accident the next day and asked him if he had any other messages for me.