Watergate, page 32
One clue arrived days later, amid the final weeks of the campaign, through a rare random tip. The caller reached Bernstein and explained that his friend, an assistant attorney general in Tennessee named Alex Shipley, had been asked to help the Nixon campaign the year before. “Essentially the proposal was that there was to be a crew of people whose job it would be to disrupt the Democratic campaign during the primaries. This guy told Shipley there was virtually unlimited money available,” the caller told Bernstein.
When the reporter reached Shipley, the Tennessee lawyer confirmed the tip and began telling an almost outlandish story about being approached by someone named Donald Segretti in June 1971 and invited to join a political espionage team. Segretti seemed to have plenty of money—Shipley said he flew around the country all the time—but he was always suggesting lowbrow pranks, like having a fake group called the Massachusetts Safe Driving Committee award a medal to Ted Kennedy as a way to needle the senator over Chappaquiddick or calling a venue where a Democratic candidate was scheduled to hold a rally and telling the organizers the event had been postponed. It was all simply about wreaking “havoc,” Segretti told Shipley. As Woodward and Bernstein dug, a few other former colleagues of Shipley and Segretti—everyone involved seemed to have served together in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in Vietnam—verified Segretti had been involved in something strange. Bernstein also used a confidential source at a credit-card company to confirm that as the primaries unfolded Segretti had hopscotched across the country through 1971, stopping in key political states like New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois, and California.
The Post sent a West Coast freelancer named Robert Meyers to stake out Segretti’s apartment in Marina del Rey—the lawyer appeared to have gone off on a business trip, according to neighbors—and finally after a week Meyers noticed that a matchstick he’d lodged in Segretti’s front door had fallen out, indicating it had been opened. That afternoon—the same day the Los Angeles Times published the Baldwin scoop—Segretti answered the door, and Meyers began questioning him about his political espionage operation. “This is ridiculous,” Segretti replied midway through the questions. “I don’t know anything about this. This all sounds like James Bond fiction.”I
Yet it didn’t appear to be fiction as Bernstein and Woodward kept digging in D.C. The reporters uncovered hints that the Justice Department was aware of Segretti, and that his activities were part of the larger Watergate inquiries. He also appeared tied to the “USC mafia” in the White House, which included fellow graduates Ron Ziegler, Dwight Chapin, and Bart Porter, who had been one of the administrators of the campaign’s slush fund. That couldn’t just be a coincidence. “I can’t talk about [Segretti],” a Justice Department official told Bernstein when he called. “Political sabotage is associated with Segretti. I’ve heard a term for it, ‘ratfucking.’ There is some very powerful information, especially if it comes out before November 7.”
Intrigued, Bernstein called another Justice Department official, who immediately exploded when he raised the subject of “ratfucking.” The source sputtered, “I was shocked when I learned about it. I couldn’t believe it. These are public servants? God—it’s nauseating. You’re talking about fellows who come from the best schools in the country. Men who run the government. The press hasn’t brought that home. You’re dealing with people who act like this was Dodge City, not the capital of the United States.”
The source explained that Bernstein’s question tied back to a bizarre episode in February in which the Manchester Union-Leader had published an unverified letter alleging that Ed Muskie had referred to French-Canadians with the slur “Canucks.” The letter had exacerbated tensions between the conservative New Hampshire paper and Muskie, leading to salacious reporting about Muskie’s wife, and ultimately defined the doomed campaign when the candidate, standing in the snow, appeared to break down in tears as he defended his wife and attacked the paper’s publisher as a “gutless coward.”
Bernstein began to wonder out loud how high up these efforts went: Was Mitchell involved? “He can’t say he didn’t know about it, because it was strategy—basic strategy that goes all the way to the top. Higher than him, even,” the Justice Department official said. As Bernstein hung up, the phrase struck him: There were at a maximum two or three people who were “higher” than Mitchell—perhaps Ehrlichman, definitely Haldeman, and definitely the president. Was the president of the United States the head ratfucker?
* * *
Back in the newsroom, Sussman suggested to Bernstein that he try drafting a story to make sense of the various tidbits the reporters had assembled across the country. “Why don’t we put it on paper, see what it looks like, and talk about it then?” Sussman said. He also pulled Woodward aside with instructions to meet his special source.
The identity of Woodward’s source remained a mystery to the other editors and reporters on the Watergate chase; Woodward called him simply “my friend.” Finally, managing editor Howard Simons nicknamed him “Deep Throat,” a reference both to the source’s insistence on operating on “deep background” and to the then popular pornographic film of the same name that celebrated a character’s wide-open mouth.
Making sense of the Segretti story was precisely the type of lead where Deep Throat seemed useful, and so Sunday night, October 8, Woodward arranged to meet with Mark Felt in person. On the way, Woodward switched cabs twice and was dropped off several blocks away from their parking garage rendezvous location. When he arrived around 1:30 a.m., Felt was already standing there, smoking.
They talked straight through until morning, a conversation that finally allowed Woodward to grasp the full scope of the story he had been chasing. “Remember, you don’t do those 1,500 [FBI] interviews and not have something on your hands other than a single break-in,” Felt pointed out. “They are not brilliant guys, and it got out of hand.”
He sketched out an operation that was unprecedented and sinister but also, at a basic level, routine and naive. As Bernstein’s source had indicated, Mitchell was certainly involved. “Check every lead,” the FBI official told Woodward. “It goes all over the map, and that is important. You could write stories from now until Christmas or well beyond that.… Not one of the games was freelance. This is important. Everyone was tied in.”
Woodward was incensed by his source’s vague allusions, and at one point, he grabbed Felt’s arm in frustration. Felt relented. “You can safely say that fifty people worked for the White House and CRP to play games and spy and sabotage and gather intelligence. Some of it is beyond belief, kicking at the opposition in every imaginable way,” he continued. “It’s all in the files. Justice and the Bureau know about it, even though it wasn’t followed up.”
As the reporting team convened later in the day at the Post, Woodward recounted Deep Throat’s revelations to his stunned colleagues. “Our understanding of Watergate had taken a quantum leap,” Sussman recalled later. Then they got to work. The story, sourced to “information in FBI and Department of Justice files,” ran on the front page of the Post Tuesday, titled, “FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats.”
“FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President,” Woodward and Bernstein wrote. It was a uniquely carefully worded piece—the verb “established” covered a lot of ground and made clear that the FBI hadn’t exactly “concluded” that there was a massive campaign, but that its interviews had suggested as much. (Gray, reading the piece that morning, scribbled in the margins next to the lead sentence: “Have we?”)
The operation, the reporters explained, ran the gamut from “following members of Democratic candidates’ families and assembling dossiers on their personal lives; forging letters and distributing them under the candidates’ letterheads; leaking false and manufactured items to the press; throwing campaign schedules into disarray; seizing confidential campaign files; and investigating the lives of dozens of Democratic campaign workers.” The Nixon campaign delivered its typical response: “The Post story is not only fiction but a collection of absurdities”—but when pressed on the specifics, they refused further comment, saying “the entire matter is in the hands of the authorities.”
Woodward, even in the heat of Watergate, would call the Segretti reporting their “largest and most significant story,” but while the core of it was accurate, its most shocking detail—that Segretti’s dirty tricks team consisted of more than fifty operatives—was inaccurate. No evidence would ever emerge that Segretti’s efforts encompassed nearly that many people. It was possible that he had contact with fifty people over the course of the campaign, but he’d never had anything like fifty people involved in his trickster-ing and pranking. An FBI follow-up memo labeled the allegation “absolutely false,” and for months, Simons would bug the reporters to find the “other 49.”II
After the article ran, Dean called Gray to complain—again—about the leaks. Then, that evening, Dean’s colleague Fred Fielding visited the FBI director to pick up yet another batch of raw FBI investigative reports for Dean to peruse on his own.
* * *
Even though the identity of Deep Throat would not become public for another forty years, Nixon already knew his name. On the afternoon of October 19, after a haircut in the White House barbershop, the president retreated to his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building to spend nearly three hours “chewing the cud” with Haldeman and, later, Colson, including his ongoing frustration with Watergate leaks: “You know, materials are leaked out of the FBI. Why the hell can’t Gray tell us what the hell has left?”
“We know what’s left and we know what’s leaked and we know who leaked it,” Haldeman said, surprising the president.
“Is it somebody in the FBI?”
“Yes, sir,” the chief of staff said. “The FBI doesn’t know who it is. Gray doesn’t know who it is. And it’s very high up.”
“Somebody next to Gray?”
“Mark Felt,” Haldeman said.
“Now why the hell would he do that?”
“It’s hard to figure,” Haldeman replied. “Then again, you can’t say anything about this,” he cautioned, “because we’ll screw up our source, and the real concern is Mitchell is the only one that knows this. And he feels very strongly that we should—we’d better not do anything.”
“Do anything? Never!” the president agreed.
“If we move on him, then he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI,” Haldeman continued. “He has access to absolutely everything.”
They talked for some time longer, discussing the challenges and delicacies of confronting Felt, and whether they should warn Gray. Haldeman explained that he’d already brought up the matter with Dean, but the lawyer didn’t believe Felt had committed any crimes by leaking.III They also speculated about Felt’s motive. “Maybe he’s tied to the [Ted] Kennedy set? Maybe he’s playing this game, building himself up?” Haldeman suggested at one point.
Then Nixon’s darkest side emerged. “Is he a Catholic?” the president asked. “Find out. Find out.”
“I think he’s Jewish,” Haldeman wondered out loud.
“Christ! I’m not going to put another Jew in there. Mark Felt is certainly a Jewish name. Well, that could explain it, too,” the president said.
As the conversation continued, they considered a transfer to a new field office to get Felt out of Washington, but Nixon ultimately agreed that the reward was not worth the risk. “I don’t want him to go out and say the White House tried to squelch him and all the rest,” the president said. “It’s hard to think what would make him do that, but there may be bitterness over there that we didn’t put Felt in the top spot.” With almost a sense of Machiavellian admiration, Nixon added, “That’s a hell of a way for him to get in the top spot.”
The debate recommenced the following day, and Nixon brought Ehrlichman in. A plan was formed to keep Felt in check: They would issue their own leak about Nixon considering Felt as the permanent director postelection—a dangle that presumably would shut him up until any decision was made. As Haldeman wrote in his diary, “We found the FBI leak, and that it’s at the next to highest level.… [Nixon’s] concerned that we not do anything that blows it up at this time, but that we try to turn off any further activities so that it doesn’t get any worse.”
Back at the Justice Department, Kleindienst was hearing the same rumors about Felt from Mitchell. “He’s leaking, Pat, and we know it,” the attorney general told the FBI’s Gray. Kleindienst had suggested to Gray five times already that he fire Felt, and Colson apparently offered similar warnings: “There are leaks in the FBI from the old guard.” When confronted, Felt denied involvement and offered his own scapegoat. “[TIME reporter] Sandy Smith talked to Charlie Bates,” Felt told Gray, naming the head of the FBI’s criminal division. “He says his source is someone in the Department of Justice and it’s the same as Bernstein and Woodward’s.”
A few days later, Smith was back in the pages of TIME, with some of the most explosive and damaging allegations yet against Gray and the Nixon team: “While the White House has tried to ignore some unpleasant FBI findings in the Watergate case, it has used the agency in an unprecedented way to aid the Nixon campaign.” The article outlined an effort by Ehrlichman and Gray to boost the president’s campaign message on criminal justice, and published a teletype to twenty-one FBI offices asking for help, because Gray had wanted to be sure that Ehrlichman could “give the president maximum support” on the campaign trail.
Playing both arsonist and firefighter, Felt told his boss, “The president was on the ceiling about this leak, and Kleindienst thinks it’s someone who’s after you.”
Felt was, of course, talking about himself.IV
* * *
As the election neared, the Washington Post team had, in Barry Sussman’s words, “run out of gas,” with no new developments post-Segretti and no stories to chase. “What scared me was that the normal herd instincts of Washington journalism didn’t seem to be operating,” Howard Simons said. An October Gallup poll still showed that 48 percent of Americans did not even recognize the word “Watergate,” let alone have any sense of what it encapsulated, and even though the Washington Post team had written fifty-one stories on the scandal, the TV networks all but ignored it, struggling to find compelling “pictures” that conveyed its magnitude.
CBS’s Daniel Schorr was one of the few TV reporters who seemed invested. Schorr had interviewed Al Baldwin after the lookout had spoken to the Los Angeles Times, and found his oceanfront interview in Connecticut chilling, listening as the onetime FBI agent banally recounted an executive burglary plot as if it were a routine case debriefing. “It was from Baldwin that I first got a sense of one of the great evils of Watergate—the way the aura of law and order was given to a conspiracy against law and order,” the correspondent recalled. Schorr, trying to explain the drama for TV audiences, had done more walk-throughs of the Watergate building than he cared to count, so to get new video, he’d finally settled on filming stakeouts as the various civil lawsuits around the case proceeded—trying to grab a few seconds of witnesses passing him on the street while he asked questions. Witnesses hated the TV gauntlet. As he arrived one morning that fall, John Mitchell grumbled, “How is Larry O’Brien’s press corps?”
On Wednesday, October 25, Schorr was waiting outside a D.C. law firm on 19th Street NW when Hugh Sloan and his lawyer arrived for a deposition. He asked the men about that morning’s big Woodward-Bernstein story, “Testimony Ties Top Nixon Aide to Secret Fund,” which had alleged none other than H. R. Haldeman himself as the fifth person “authorized to approve payments from a secret Nixon campaign cash fund, according to federal investigators and accounts of sworn testimony before the Watergate grand jury.” The article said all five people who controlled the fund had been named in Sloan’s testimony, but when Schorr asked, Sloan’s lawyer was clear: “We categorically deny that such a statement was made by the grand jury.”V
Hearing the denial later that morning, Woodward felt sick. Had they made a huge error? The reporters gathered their editors, each seemingly more stricken than the next at the news of the potential mistake. It was, Bradlee said later, “my lowest moment in Watergate.”
The story indeed had been garbled; throughout their reporting, Woodward and Bernstein had relied on strict multiple-source rules, ensuring information was checked and cross-checked to extrapolate what they came to call the “best obtainable version of the truth.” With the Haldeman story, however, they’d relied on a series of odd, opt-in and opt-out confirmations that confused their own sources and misinterpreted vague responses from Felt, Sloan, FBI special agent Angelo Lano, and a fourth Justice Department official.VI
The Haldeman revelation, the reporters knew, would be huge—a link to the top level of the White House, from someone giving information to the grand jury. Looking over the story before it headed to press, Bradlee had insisted on going over the verbatim conversations with each source. “The numbers [are] getting terribly terribly heavy,” he intoned, feeling the significance of their reporting. When reached for comment, Haldeman’s denial, “Your inquiry is based on misinformation because the reference to Bob Haldeman is untrue,” seemed pro forma and didn’t raise any alarms. They knew the stakes were high, especially as news came that RNC chair Bob Dole had blasted the paper that same evening during a speech in Maryland, attacking the press generally and the Post specifically—fifty-seven times.
