Personal History (91 page)

At the next day’s press conference, Ron Ziegler apologized to
The Washington Post
generally and to Woodward and Bernstein particularly for his earlier criticisms of their reporting. Ziegler’s statement surprised us all, and also showed the extent to which he had been co-opted. Bob called him right away and thanked him, to which Ziegler responded, “We all have our jobs to do.” I made a statement to newspeople who called, saying we appreciated the apology and accepted it with pleasure. “It was handsomely made; it was handsomely done. I’m happy to accept it.”

Only a week after Fritz’s death, it was announced that
The Washington Post
had won the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious service for its Watergate reporting. Woodward and Bernstein were cited, and Herblock and Roger Wilkins were specially mentioned. As it turned out, the Pulitzer jurors, meeting weeks before the most dramatic developments in the case, had
not
voted a Pulitzer for the Watergate coverage or for Woodward and Bernstein. Three other
Post
staffers had been named, however: David Broder
for commentary; Bob Kaiser and Dan Morgan to share a prize for foreign reporting; and Bill Claiborne for local spot news for his reporting of a prison riot.

After the McCord letter became known, Scotty Reston and Newbold Noyes, who were serving on the awards board that year, pointed out that it would hardly make sense for the
Post
not to be recognized for its Watergate coverage. We had entered the competition in the category of public service, but had not won, or seemingly come close, largely because the regional editors on the prize committee were so incredulous about the whole affair. After Scotty and Newby voiced their opinions, the board asked Ben whether he wanted the paper entered for public service or investigative reporting. Ben chose public service, for which the paper won the award. However, the Pulitzer jury also rescinded two of the
Post’s
three prizes they had already voted on, with only David Broder retaining his for commentary.

But despite Nixon’s dramatic speech and the winning of the Pulitzer with its attendant confirmation of our reporting, the whole Watergate affair was far from over. Some of the rejoicing had been premature. Although we had gained credibility when Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned, we still had an implacable enemy in the White House, albeit a weakened one. Much of the world remained with Nixon and continued to think that the whole affair had been vastly exaggerated. Some of the world still does: many foreigners failed to grasp the significance of Watergate, particularly in Europe and in the Arab world, where people viewed the president as a foreign-policy genius, which in many ways he was.

There was a lot we—and the public—still didn’t know, but we were on the road to finding out, helped along in the spring of 1973 by a federal grand jury’s indictment of former Attorney General John Mitchell and former Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans on charges of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice for impeding an SEC investigation of international financier Robert Vesco, in exchange for a secret Vesco contribution of $200,000 cash to Nixon’s 1972 campaign. The televised Senate Watergate hearings and early calls for impeachment, coming from conservatives—including Barry Goldwater—as much as or more than from liberals, also helped.

The continuing efforts of the
Post
, and,
finally
, other newspapers and other media as well, and the Congress and the courts helped expose the size of the iceberg. There began a steady stream of revelations, with more and more evidence of scheming and political chicanery coming to light. Wiretaps of several journalists were revealed. We were told by many people that the
Post’s
building was bugged and even that I was being followed. Some of this was clearly an overreaction in an environment rife with paranoia. We did a sweep of our phones throughout the building and in my office
and the offices of key editors, but turned up nothing. I’m fairly sure that my phones were never tapped, nor do I believe I was ever followed, but the atmosphere was so infected that this kind of suspicion didn’t seem irrational at all.

In June 1973, Woodward and Bernstein wrote that the White House had maintained a list of “political enemies” in 1971 and 1972, and the disclosure surprised few of us. By that time, many people—several of my friends among them—regarded it as an honor to be on it. The list was yet another sign of the peculiar mentality of the small group of men running the country. I can’t remember whether my name actually appeared on it, but it was clear to me that I was on it whether my name was written down or not.

A month later, a seismic Watergate event occurred—the turning point, the pivotal moment. In the course of his testimony before the Senate investigating committee, Alexander Butterfield, another Haldeman aide, revealed that there was a voice-activated recording system in the White House. Consequently, the vast majority of conversations the president had had in the Oval Office were on tape, a fact the president himself had clearly lost sight of; or perhaps he assumed that no one knew and that therefore the existence of the system would never become public knowledge. However, someone had to have installed this thing as well as run it, and that someone was Alexander Butterfield. As Woodward later said, it was yet another “incredible sequence of events, and luck for us and bad luck for Nixon. Wrong decisions, wrong turns. But full disclosure of it hung by that fragile thread that could have been cut hundreds of times.”

Without the tapes, the true story would never have emerged. In fact, I believe that we at the
Post
were really saved in the end by the tapes and the lucky chance that they weren’t destroyed. After the discovery of the tapes, people actually began waiting in the alley outside our building for the first edition of the paper, giving additional meaning to the phrase “hot off the presses.” Everyone was now following the story.

Who knows why Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes? He seemed to think that they were valuable and that he could defend their privacy, which for a long time he tried to do. On July 25, the president announced he would not release the tapes to Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed by Attorney General Elliot Richardson, because it would jeopardize the “independence of the three branches of government.”

Unaccountably, during this time I was still attempting to maintain relations even with Vice-President Spiro Agnew, which in retrospect seems to me undignified, considering the awful slamming we were taking from him. I think my behavior was a combination of a rational idea—that it was better to be talking to people who hated us or disapproved of us than not—and that good old-fashioned encumbrance of mine, the desire to
please. Someone had sent me a funny photograph of an old shed somewhere in New York on which had been painted “Ted Agnew likes Kay Graham. Pass it on.” I thought it was hilarious, and did just that, passed it on to the vice-president, saying, “I thought this sign … might amuse you as it did me. The man who sent me the snapshot of the ‘graffiti’ told me that the shed later burned—thus destroying the evidence! I guess things in life—or in graffiti—often come full circle. I promise to keep it a secret.”

Even more peculiarly, Agnew wrote back: “I can find no fault with the sentiment of the graffiti. It is difficult to admire a newspaper that characterizes one as Caligula’s horse, but I think you are charming.” How embarrassing!

A separate drama began unfolding around Agnew. Only ten days after I had written him the sniveling little note, Agnew announced that he had been informed he was under investigation for possible violations of criminal law, and two days later, on August 8, he held a press conference to trot out the usual denials of wrongdoings.

As the investigation continued, the
Post
, on September 22, wrote that, despite his statements that he would never quit, the vice-president was plea-bargaining. Agnew’s lawyers tried to learn the source of certain damaging leaks by issuing subpoenas to
Post
reporter Richard Cohen and others who had been running stories about him. I later used quite plain language to describe what Agnew was trying to do: “Freed of legalese, he wanted to know who in government was fingering him, so he could deal with them personally or have the President fire them.”

The strategy our lawyers worked out to protect Cohen and the paper was to put all of his notes relating to Agnew in my possession, and in my affidavit to the court I asserted that I had ultimate responsibility for the custody of the notes. In fact, I was prepared to go to jail if need be to defend the notes and the source. This time the possibility of jail seemed more realistic. I was traveling, and called between planes to hear, with relief, that Agnew had pleaded no contest to one count of income-tax evasion while governor of Maryland, which meant that I was off the hook. On October 10, Spiro T. Agnew resigned as vice-president.

Meanwhile, President Nixon’s troubles continued to mount, not helped at all by the Agnew crisis. On August 15, he had made another televised speech, delivering his fifth major statement on Watergate, calling it a “backward-looking obsession” and trying to deflect interest away from it by suggesting that the nation let the courts deal with it and turn its attention instead to “matters of far greater importance.”

A week after that, on August 22, the same day Nixon made Kissinger secretary of state following the resignation of Bill Rogers, he also accepted the blame for the White House “climate” that led to the break-in and the cover-up. Events were proceeding apace. On August 29, Judge Sirica ordered
the president to turn over to him for his private examination the tapes involving Watergate. Nixon and his lawyers appealed the order. The battle was joined in earnest when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld Sirica. Nixon then came up with the peculiar idea of providing tapes to the federal courts and Senate investigators with a personally prepared summary to be verified by Senator John Stennis. Special Prosecutor Cox, rightly, rejected the idea. The next day, October 20, Cox defended his decision not to compromise with the president about the tapes.

That night the Buchwalds had arranged a tennis party for Art’s birthday. Several of us were either already at or on our way to an indoor tennis court when we heard the stunning news of what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Attorney General Richardson had been told by the president to fire Cox; when he refused, he himself was fired. Richardson’s deputy, Bill Ruckelshaus, also refused to fire Cox, and he, too, was fired. Finally, the third-ranking officer at the Justice Department, Robert Bork, consented to and
did
fire Cox. By that point, every journalist had left Art’s party to head back to work.

So dramatic and unexpected were the events that night that we were all really shaken. It’s hard to realize now how fast everything was unfolding. With Leon Jaworski succeeding Cox as special prosecutor, the House Judiciary Committee met to consider impeachment proceedings against Nixon. Eventually, the many impeachment resolutions that were introduced in the House of Representatives seemed to induce the president to release the tapes Cox had insisted on.

Yet the
Post
remained under attack—and the attack was becoming much more public. By this time I had warmed up to a degree of toughness of which I probably wouldn’t have been capable the year before. I am not a good combatant. Generally I hate fights and would like to run from them, but when there is no choice, I feel able to take action. I was much more willing to go on the offensive than to be defensively polite, particularly in my letters to readers and others who wrote complaining about our coverage. For example, whereas earlier I may have been somewhat sympathetic with readers who wrote about the sharpness of Herblock’s pen, in the later stages of Watergate I had no patience with those who complained that he was being unfair to the president. To one scathing letter, I responded, “We have been heavily attacked for biased reporting by many individuals, who, when confronted with the facts, have since resigned from the government.” I wrote to a man in Florida in October 1973, facetiously thanking him for sending me a copy of an ad from the Miami paper suggesting that we belonged in jail and asking him, “If we are exaggerating minor peccadillos, why has the majority of the White House staff had to be unloaded?”

At some point, I even engaged in a behind-the-scenes back-and-forth with Clare Booth Luce. Personally I admired her, but I was not in accord with her extremely conservative views. She sometimes overdramatized things in speeches. In a major address to the Newspaper Publishers Association convention, she said she had written a speech but was troubled about it and thinking about it as she went to bed. That night, she said, the spirit of her late husband, Henry Luce, came to her and told her to tell the truth about Watergate. She then attacked the
Post
for our reporting and for hiring “enemies” of the president. After the speech, I told a friend that Phil Graham had appeared to me in the night and told me to tell her to “shove it.”

O
N
D
ECEMBER
28, I was lunching outside the building—a rare occurrence—with Meg and Phil Geyelin at an Italian restaurant when I got called to the telephone by Alexander Haig, who was then White House chief of staff. He was calling from Nixon’s California home—or the “Western White House,” as it was called, since the president spent a great deal of time there. I vividly recall sitting on the stairs in a dark, narrow passageway where the phone was located, furiously scribbling notes on a scrap of paper I’d hastily grabbed from my purse.

Haig heatedly complained about two page-one stories by Woodward and Bernstein. The first had said that “Operation Candor,” the name that had been given to the president’s attempt to defend himself, had been shut down, and that two of the president’s closest advisers, who had stuck by him, no longer believed in him. The second story said that the president’s counselors had been supplying lawyers for Haldeman and Ehrlichman with documents and evidence that the White House was submitting to the special prosecutor’s office. Haig was outraged, calling the articles “scurrilous and untrue” and referring to the second piece as “a patchwork of thievery.”