Personal History (87 page)

It was quite a temper tantrum on Mitchell’s part—and especially strange of him to call me Katie, which no one has ever called me. Bob later observed that the interesting thing for him was that Mitchell’s remark was an example of the misperception on the part of the Nixon people that I was calling all the shots and that I was the one who was printing everything on Watergate. In any case, the remark lived on in the annals of Watergate and was one of the principal public links of me with the affair. Later, though before Watergate had ended, I received a wonderful present from a California dentist who, using the kind of gold normally used to fill teeth, had crafted a little wringer complete with a tiny handle and gears that turned just like a regular old washing-machine wringer. And some time after that, Art Buchwald presented me with a tiny gold breast, which he had had made to go with the wringer. I occasionally wore the two of them together on a chain around my neck, and stopped only when a reporter threatened to tell Maxine Cheshire.

I
N
O
CTOBER
, the tempo of the whole story picked up, and the
Post
printed two articles that together brought the administration’s wrath
down on us. The first, which appeared October 10, described the original break-in as part of a massive, nationwide campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted in behalf of the president’s re-election efforts and directed by White House and re-election-committee officials. This idea was dismissed by the main spokesman for the CRP as “not only fiction but a collection of absurdities.”

Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, began his morning briefing at the White House charging that “stories are being run that are based on hearsay, innuendo, guilt by association.… [I]t goes without saying that this Administration does not condone sabotage or espionage or surveillance of individuals.” That same afternoon, Clark MacGregor, who had taken over from John Mitchell as Nixon’s campaign chairman, held a press conference in which he took no questions but read a prepared statement. He said that the
Post
’s

This and Ziegler’s turned out to be only two of the salvos in a broadside against us.

Naturally, I intensely disliked these attacks and, in fact, found them hard to understand. I kept remembering the moment in
War and Peace
, as I visualized it, when a soldier being pursued by an enemy with a bayonet thinks, “Can this man really want to kill me, me whom my mother loved so much?”

Senator Bob Dole got in on the attack, saying that he considered what he’d read about Watergate to be “a barrage of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations by George McGovern and his partner-in-mud-slinging,
The Washington Post.”
To ice the cake, Dole added: “Given the present straits in which the McGovern campaign finds itself, Mr. McGovern appears to have turned over the franchise for his media attack campaign to the editors of
The Washington Post
, who have shown themselves every bit as sure-footed along the low road of this campaign as their candidate.”

Ben, cool as usual, and convinced of the orchestration of the assault
on the paper, quickly responded to reporters who called by putting out his own statement:

Dole attacked again on October 24, in a speech in Baltimore that contained—as counted by Woodward and Bernstein—fifty-seven references to the
Post
, among them:

It didn’t help that the next day the
Post
’s second seminal article appeared, reporting, based on Woodward’s meeting with his main source, that the fifth person who was authorized to approve payments from the secret dirty-tricks cash fund was none other than H. R. Haldeman, the president’s chief of staff. When Dwight Chapin, the president’s appointments secretary, had been linked by the reporters to the secret fund, they had had to find ways to explain to the American people who Chapin was, and that he saw the president every day; it had been difficult to make the connection between this fund and those in power in the White House. But this second story—with its two-column, large-type headline, “Testimony Ties Top Nixon Aide to Secret Fund”—was altogether different. This was Haldeman, the most powerful man in Washington after the president, the president’s alter-ego and right-hand man. This article
would move the Watergate story line right through the front door of the White House.

The story noted that Haldeman’s participation was known to federal investigators and known from accounts of sworn testimony before the federal grand jury. In this story, with all its high visibility, the reporters unfortunately made one of their only errors throughout the long months of reporting. The substance of the story was true; the error was not of fact but of assumption. Woodward and Bernstein had assumed that Hugh Sloan, former CRP treasurer and former Haldeman aide, had told the grand jury about the secret fund. He had, in fact, told Woodward and Bernstein about it, and the only reason he hadn’t told the grand jury was that he hadn’t been asked. Sloan, through his attorney, denied the
Post’s
story the next morning, setting off repercussions everywhere, including more denunciations of the paper by Ron Ziegler at the White House, who unequivocally denied the story, accused the
Post
of being politically motivated, and attacked Ben Bradlee for being anti-Nixon.

Some of the strongest reverberations were felt at the
Post
. Harry Rosenfeld, who had worked on this particular story up until deadline, believed that the tie to Haldeman meant that Nixon was really at the bottom of it all. As Harry said, “If Haldeman is doing it, Nixon is doing it. There is no line between Haldeman and Nixon.” Harry was apoplectic at the idea that the reporters had gotten the story wrong. He and Howard Simons were discussing corrections and desperately looking for Woodward and Bernstein, who were nowhere to be found. (Ironically, those two turned out to be meeting with a publisher to discuss the book they intended to write about Watergate.) When they were finally located, the reporters, with Rosenfeld, who refused to retract the story until he knew more, went down to the courthouse. The next day we did retract the part of the story that said Sloan had told the grand jury of Haldeman’s connection to the fund, but the substance of the story remained.

I
WAS FEELING
beleaguered. The constant attacks on us by CRP and people throughout the administration were effective and taking their toll. During these months, the pressures on the
Post
to cease and desist were intense and uncomfortable, to say the least. But, unbelievable as the revelations were, the strong evidence of their accuracy is part of what kept us going.

Many of my friends were puzzled about our reporting. Joe Alsop was pressing me all the time. And I had a distressing chance meeting with Henry Kissinger just before the election, at a big reception of some kind. “What’s the matter? Don’t you think we’re going to be re-elected?” Henry asked me, seeming quite upset. I assured him that I could read the
overwhelming polls as well as anybody and hadn’t the slightest doubt that Nixon would be re-elected. Henry later told me that, although he was never part of any actual discussions that related to threats, he knew Nixon wanted to get even with a lot of people after the election. Maybe this had been his way of warning me. In any case, the implications in Henry’s exclamation added to my tension.

Readers, too, were writing me, accusing the
Post
of ulterior motives, bad journalism, lack of patriotism, and all kinds of breaches of faith in our effort to get the news to the people. It was a particularly lonely moment for us at the paper. Other organizations were beginning to report the story, but we were so far ahead that they couldn’t catch up; Woodward and Bernstein had most of the sources to themselves. The wire service and AP sent out our stories, but most papers didn’t even run them, or buried them somewhere toward the back pages. Howard used to get on the phone to his editor friends around the country to tell them they were missing a big story. Because an exclusive story usually remained so for only about twenty-four hours before everyone jumped on it, I sometimes privately thought: If this is such a hell of a story, then where is everybody else?

Bearing the full brunt of presidential wrath is always disturbing. Sometimes I wondered if we could survive four more years of this kind of strain, of the pressures of living with an administration so completely at odds with us and determined to harm us. As I later wrote to Isaiah Berlin, “The idea of living with that gang in the White House whacking at you for four more years was depressing beyond words.” I couldn’t help speculating about what condition we’d all be in—including the paper—at the end of it. The best we could do while under such siege, I felt, was to keep investigating, to look everywhere for hard evidence, to get the details right, and to report accurately what we found.

Just as the stresses of loneliness were at their most extreme, immediately before the election, we got a break. CBS, in the persons of Walter Cronkite and Gordon Manning, then a producer and an ex–
Newsweek
editor, decided to run two long pieces on Watergate on the evening news. Basically, the story had not appeared on television. To begin with, it wasn’t easy for television to report Watergate in sound bites—there were few if any picture opportunities, and it was an extremely complicated, hard-to-follow story, full of names of people unknown to the public. There were many different threads to the story, and it was difficult to see how it all came together. And then, as I was soon to learn firsthand, television and radio were vulnerable, relying as they do on a government agency for their licenses to operate. The three television networks all owned local radio or television stations from which a large part of their profitability derived, so it took even more than normal courage for them to take on the government. But Cronkite, who was the supreme authority on his show, decided
to go ahead. Manning, who knew Ben from
Newsweek
, tried to get his help for CBS’s program, and was startled and dubious when Ben told him we had no documents, no paper trail of evidence, and couldn’t help.

The first piece aired on the evening of Friday, October 27, and took fourteen of the twenty-two minutes of that night’s network news—more time than had ever been given to any single story—filled largely by quoting the
Post
and the government’s various replies to the paper’s charges. I will never forget my joy and relief to have CBS News behind us, piecing the story together and carefully explaining to a national audience what had happened, what had been proved, and what had not. Cronkite gave us great credit, and the still photos of the
Post
and its headlines in the background helped enormously. The show ran eleven days before the election.

Also watching the CBS Evening News was the White House tough guy, Chuck Colson, who was assigned to oversee the networks. Colson became known for saying that he would walk over his grandmother if it was necessary to do a job. He had gotten wind of the show, called Frank Stanton, and then gone straight to Bill Paley. Stanton had worked hard at CBS to protect press freedoms and the news division, but Paley had not experienced calls from angry presidents or their flunkies, so he flinched at Colson’s call and in turn summoned the head of news, Richard Salant, and leaned on him very hard about the evils of the piece that had already been aired and the necessity of killing the proposed second part, to be run the next night. After a fight within CBS News, Salant compromised, and on the grounds of repetition of what had already appeared on the network, the second piece was cut from fourteen minutes to eight.

In the end, the length of the report didn’t really matter: CBS had taken the
Post
national—even against Bill Paley’s frightened will.

I spent the day after the first CBS story aired at Glen Welby with a large group of guests, including my friend Pam Berry (by then Lady Hartwell), Clay Felker, Dick Holbrooke, and, most interestingly, Peter Peterson, Nixon’s secretary of commerce at the time, and his then wife, Sally, a liberal Democrat. Sally was quite vocal in her views, and there were several awkward moments during the weekend, particularly when she announced emphatically that she would be voting for McGovern—which actually was known to the White House—and made remarks openly critical of the administration, at one point saying, “Nixon has no balls.” We all squirmed, but it was also noticeable that Pete didn’t come to his boss’s defense.