Personal History (88 page)

In the middle of a tennis game, Pete was called to the phone by a White House operator, who had placed the call for Haldeman. Having to locate Pete at my house undoubtedly was a factor in the administration’s later getting rid of him. It was not a winning card to be weekending at Glen Welby, although Henry Kissinger didn’t seem to suffer within the
administration even though he went on coming to my house—but not to the
Post
—during Watergate.

Pete remained a friend of mine throughout our reporting of Watergate. In fact, he told me that after the
Post
’s late-October stories my name came up in White House staff meetings even more often than before. Having heard plenty of comments that they were going to “get” me, Pete came to my office by himself one day to say, “Kay, I don’t know what the truth is, but there is a group of very angry people who feel you are out to get them. I hope you are using rigorous journalistic standards. If you are wrong, it’s serious; they will get you.” I appreciated the spirit in which Pete courageously came to see me and assured him that I heard what he was saying—and that we were being careful.

Indeed, we were. We always did our best to be careful and responsible, especially when we were carrying the burden of the Watergate reporting. From the outset, the editors had resolved to handle the story with more than the usual scrupulous attention to fairness and detail. They laid down certain rules, which were followed by everyone. First, every bit of information attributed to an unnamed source had to be supported by at least one other, independent source. Particularly at the start of Watergate, we had to rely heavily on confidential sources, but at every step we double-checked every bit of material before printing it; where possible, we had three or even more sources for each story. Second, we ran nothing that was reported by any other newspaper, television, radio station, or other media outlet unless it was independently verified and confirmed by our own reporters. Third, every word of every story was read by at least one of the senior editors before it went into print, with a top editor vetting each story before it ran. As any journalist knows, these are rigorous tests.

Yet, despite the care I knew everyone was taking, I was still worried. No matter how careful we were, there was always the nagging possibility that we were wrong, being set up, being misled. Ben would repeatedly reassure me—possibly to a greater extent than he may have actually felt—by saying that some of our sources were Republicans, Sloan especially, and that having the story almost exclusively gave us the luxury of not having to rush into print, so that we could be obsessive about checking everything. There were many times when we delayed publishing something until the “tests” had been met. There were times when something just didn’t seem to hold up and, accordingly, was not published, and there were a number of instances where we withheld something not sufficiently confirmable that turned out later to be true.

At the time, I took comfort in our “two-sources” policy. Ben further assured me that Woodward had a secret source he would go to when he wasn’t sure about something—a source that had never misled us. That was the first I heard of Deep Throat, even before he was so named by Howard
Simons, after the pornographic movie that was popular in certain circles at the time. It’s why I remain convinced that there was such a person and that he—and it had to be a he—was neither made up nor an amalgam or a composite of a number of people, as has often been hypothesized. The identity of Deep Throat is the only secret I’m aware of that Ben has kept, and, of course, Bob and Carl have, too. I never asked to be let in on the secret, except once, facetiously, and I still don’t know who he is.

This attention to detail and playing by our own strict rules allowed us to produce, as Harry Rosenfeld later said, “the longest-running newspaper stories with the least amount of errors that I have ever experienced or will ever experience.”

T
HE IMPACT OF
our October stories and the CBS broadcast continued to reverberate—on Nixon and his administration,
and
on us. There was a good deal of evidence that the campaign to undermine public confidence in the
Post
and in any other news medium thought to be hostile to the administration was intensifying. The investigation of such a tangled web of crime, money, and mischief would have been hard enough under the best of circumstances, but it was made harder given the unveiled threats and major and minor harassments by a president and his administration. Chuck Colson was quoted by a
Star
reporter as saying: “As soon as the election is behind us we’re going to really shove it to the Post.… Start coming around with a breadbasket because we’re going to fill it up with news.… And that’s only the beginning. After that, we’re really going to get rough. They’re going to wish on L Street that they’d never heard of Watergate.”

I particularly loathed reports that personalized the whole dispute, implying that some sort of personal vendetta had poisoned the relationship between the
Post
and the administration. I had already begun to hear a chorus of rumors concerning my own feelings about Nixon, a chorus that warmed up with some help from Senator Dole, who made a charge, picked up and carried all over the airwaves, saying that I had told a friend that I hated Nixon. Dole made the leap to saying that that was the reason the
Post
was writing all the negative Watergate stories.

I detested the assumption and impression that we were out to get Nixon, that we somehow had it in for him and for the Republicans. Many people misunderstood the role of the
Post
, believing that we got some sort of enjoyment “out of kicking the president and the Republicans,” or “extracting every last drop of blood,” as I heard more than once. Far from its being our aim or purpose, we got no pleasure from it. As I wrote someone, “It’s the only government we have and it would be a lot bigger pleasure not to have to report the kind of things we do.”

Incredibly, I was still in touch with John Ehrlichman from time to time, so I wrote him on the day before the election:

I genuinely meant what I wrote Ehrlichman. I have a faint memory of talking to Stew Alsop once about how, as the months progressed, I was certainly feeling more and more negative about Nixon, but I had no such personal feelings about Nixon as a politician and couldn’t imagine that I had said anything like Dole’s quote in his speech, much less that my feelings toward the president would inspire the
Post
’s editors and reporters.

——

T
HOUGH THE
editorial-page editor and his deputy and writers were certainly not in agreement with George McGovern’s views and policies, the
Post
’s editorial page, which didn’t endorse, had vaguely seemed to favor McGovern—partly because it was so unsympathetic to Nixon. Candidate McGovern had used the Watergate story only somewhat tentatively. Ironically, he, too, felt that the coverage he received in the
Post
had not been ample enough or accurate or fair—a feeling shared by almost every candidate about almost every paper anywhere and at any time.

To no one’s surprise, President Nixon was re-elected by a landslide, with 61 percent of the vote and forty-nine out of fifty states—evidence of how little impact Watergate had had and how very powerful were these angry and vindictive men in the White House and connected with the president elsewhere. However, instead of becoming more secure with his victory in hand and working to unite the country, Nixon immediately turned to vengeance and to strengthening his hold on power. In a speech at his victory dinner with members of the administration, he mentioned
The Washington Post
several times. He asked everyone in the upper echelons of his administration to resign and set out to replace anyone—even “good Republicans”—who might not agree with him implicitly. One of the first victims was Pete Peterson, who was politely fired soon after the election.
The Wall Street Journal
ran an article at the time speculating openly on what had been on all our minds, that Peterson might have been knifed by the White House inner circle. The article quoted someone from the White House as saying, “How can you trust a guy who has dinner with Kay Graham?” Tom and Joan Braden had a goodbye party for Pete, which was reported in the
Post
by Sally Quinn. At the party, Pete, by this time fed up with the treatment he’d received from the administration, gave a highly irreverent response to the toasts. He described being sent for to go to “Mount David” and being quizzed about his dubious friends in a loyalty test. “Finally, Peterson told the guests,” according to Quinn, “he failed the physical test. His calves were too fat and he could not click his heels.”

Right after the election, with the atmosphere between the
Post
and the president at its most poisonous, the Watergate story dried up. Our having nothing new to report fed the idea that the whole story had been political to begin with—a baseless, biased attack on the president by the
Post
for the sake of influencing the election.

According to Phil Geyelin, that was the only time that Ben actually asked him to think about writing editorials on the subject: “He told me, ‘It wouldn’t hurt if you just wrote an occasional editorial saying what the hell’s happened to this investigation and why isn’t it going forward.’ ”

Editorials did appear. And on the news side, Harry Rosenfeld was
nagging Woodward and Bernstein, hounding them to dig even deeper, to keep at the story, which, of course, they did. Later on, I added a note to the file about something Ben said that applied to this period when the story seemed to be going nowhere. His comment reflected his attitude then and always: “Low profiles are a lot of shit.”

That fall, after the election, partly in response to the escalating campaign we felt was being waged against the reputation of the
Post
, I began to make more speeches defending the press in general and the
Post
in particular. One of the first big ones was to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club, quite a conservative group. Meg led the team that worked on the speech, which was a strong defense of freedom of the press. I was in something of a panic about the question period to follow the speech, worrying that I would be quizzed on the minutiae of the Watergate story and not know all the players or the various events relating to it. Meg gave me a chronology of the complicated events that had been put together by the Democratic National Committee, and I took it with me to study on the plane on the way out. I settled into my seat for the cross-country flight and began to look over this document, but promptly fell asleep. I woke up as we landed, at which time the man across the aisle from me leaned over to say, “Hello, Mrs. Graham, can I help you with your bag?” I looked up into the eyes of Senator Dole and was immediately frozen with fear that he had seen me studying the Democratic Party–prepared document, since this was not long after his accusations that we were reporting Watergate because I hated Nixon. However, either he hadn’t observed it or else he was being polite, but he was very friendly, helped me off the plane, and did indeed carry the bag for me. We talked pleasantly, and I finally worked up my nerve to say, “By the way, Senator, I didn’t say I hated Nixon.” “Oh, you know,” he casually replied, “during a campaign they put these things in your hands, and you just read them.” His reaction amazed me, dismissing so lightly something that had had such a powerful effect on all of us at the
Post
, especially me.

At the same time that the administration granted an exclusive interview to the
Washington Star
, it started a boycott of sorts on us—specifically, as an anonymous White House aide told
Time
magazine, “to screw the Washington Post.” The thinking was,
Time
reported, “How can we hurt the Post the most?” We were not to have our calls answered, not to be dealt with professionally in any way; administration people were not to come to editorial lunches, and certainly not to my house for dinner. A uniquely ludicrous, petty, and rather weird form of vengeance took place when the administration excluded our charming, much-respected, and even loved senior society reporter, Dorothy McCardle, then sixty-eight years old, from covering parties and made her sit alone cooling her heels in the pressroom, barring her from one social event after another. The
strategy backfired, for Dorothy soon became something of a heroine to her colleagues in the Washington press corps. In fact, the
Star
gallantly ran an editorial supporting us and opposing the ban, stating that, if the
Post
couldn’t cover the parties, the
Star
didn’t want any favors: their social reporter, Isabelle Shelton, would join Dorothy in the pressroom, declining to attend the events as long as Dorothy couldn’t. I wrote Newbold Noyes, thanking him “for the nicest, most generous minded statement I can imagine in behalf of the competition.…” Moreover, I wrote that I considered it “vitally important … in the light of all that’s going on, for the powers that be to know that we care about the ethics of our profession, and will stick together. Their divide and conquer attitude … seems very determined.”