Watergate, page 34
The plan worked for now, but as he moved each chess piece around the board, Dean became increasingly aware of his own exposure. “I took a sweaty tour through the obstruction-of-justice laws. What I found obliterated any notions I might have entertained that I had been protecting myself,” he recalled in his memoir.
Howard Hunt was feeling equally jumpy as he and his lawyers reviewed the evidence supposedly seized from his White House safe; he realized that Dean must have hidden away Hunt’s operational notebooks—the only documents, in Hunt’s mind, that could have provided exculpatory evidence of how his actions were guided by direct orders from the White House leadership. As the trial neared, postelection, Hunt pressured the prosecutors for the whereabouts of the missing safe contents; Silbert, genuinely confused, asked the White House aides who had opened Hunt’s safe whether Hunt was telling the truth. When the prosecutor’s questions reached Dean, the lawyer—who continued to maintain that he’d turned over all necessary documents to the FBI—wiggled out of answering and flagged down a passing Henry Petersen. “Henry, I’ve got to talk to you,” Dean said, putting his arm around the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Some of the documents were politically very embarrassing and we sent them straight to Pat Gray. If there are missing documents, he’s got them.”
“Oh shit,” Petersen said, realizing the legal jeopardy prosecutors now faced. “You’re not serious?”
“I don’t have any idea how to handle that if I get called to testify,” Dean said, his implication clear: If this wasn’t resolved, it could lead to a witness-stand accusation from the White House that the FBI was obstructing justice. The ploy worked. As Dean recounted in his memoir, “I heard nothing more about being called as a witness.”
The missing evidence underscored to Hunt the sense that he again was being cut out of the picture. He and his wife had grown frustrated with the stop-and-start payments from “Mr. Rivers,” which never seemed to show up as needed—and when they did, the sum was always less than required.II
At one point in October, Dorothy had appealed directly to Colson’s office for funds to pay attorneys, and the next month it was Hunt’s turn to beg. At a prearranged time on November 14, he dialed Colson from a pay phone. “Commitments that were made to all of us at the onset have not been kept, and there’s a great deal of unease and concern on the part of the seven defendants,” he warned. “This is the long haul and the stakes are very, very high.” Money was expendable, men weren’t, he said. Colson tried to deny being involved at all. Hunt and his wife began to fear that with the election behind them, the promises from Nixon’s team might drift away.
“I left the telephone with a distinct feeling that the White House had washed its hands of us,” he recalled in his memoir. Ten days later, with no sign of progress, Dorothy told McCord the defendants appeared to be on their own.
* * *
On November 11, just a week after the election, Bernstein caught up with Segretti too. Out of a job, struggling to figure out how to make his car payments, scared, and rather pathetic, the five-foot-four USC grad hardly seemed a master covert operator. His family and friends were being hounded by reporters; investigators from Senator Ted Kennedy’s subcommittee, which had launched its own Watergate probe, were calling left and right. “Hi, Carl. I wondered when we’d meet up with each other,” Segretti said when they met, and he explained that everything had to be off the record. “I don’t understand how I got in over my head.”
As Segretti recounted his experience, Bernstein realized that the aide seemed more naive than anything. “What I did was mostly nickel-dime stuff,” he told Bernstein and Ronald Meyers, the Post’s West Coast freelancer, as they sat in his living room. “With fifteen cents or a quarter every once in a while.” Bernstein stayed for five days, but was unsuccessful convincing Segretti to go on the record.
The reluctance was hardly surprising. No one appeared eager to take on Richard Nixon postelection, at what seemed like the peak of his power, and especially not by name. “Everybody dried up,” Howard Simons recalled. “Who was about to talk with Nixon taking 49 states out of 50? So we were anxious.”
Later that month, still struggling to advance their reporting, Woodward and Bernstein tried a new avenue to uncover what prosecutors knew and searched for members of the grand jury willing to talk about what had occurred during the closed-door proceedings. After consulting with Bradlee and the Post’s lawyers, they had determined that the secrecy oath sworn by grand jurors placed the burden on the juror—reporters were not prevented from asking questions. “No beating anyone over the head, no pressure, none of that cajoling,” Bradlee warned as he gave the men the green light. “I’m serious about that—particularly you, Bernstein, be subtle for once in your life.”
The first step was identifying and locating the jurors, whose identities had thus far been kept secret. Woodward decided that a low-key approach might be the easiest, so he took a cab to the D.C. courthouse, went to the clerks’ office, and nonchalantly asked for a list of all jurors who had been called in recent months. He knew the Watergate’s grand jury had begun in early June and the foreman had an Eastern European–sounding name, and using those parameters he quickly identified the likely group. The clerk, unsure if anyone was even allowed to be seeing the orange cards each juror filled out with personal details—name, age, occupation, address, phone numbers—cautioned the reporter that he couldn’t take notes. Woodward carefully started memorizing four cards at a time, then making an excuse to run outside and jot down the information he could remember. It took more than an hour and several furtive escapes for Woodward to compile the twenty-five names and their contact details.
Back at the office, the Post team went over the list and tried to establish which jurors seemed most likely to talk: Priscilla Woodruff, age 28, unemployed? Naomi Williams, 56, retired teacher and elevator operator? Julian White, 37, janitor at GW? They eliminated government workers and military personnel—too likely to follow the rules—and tried to imagine who among the generic names and occupations might be outraged enough at what they’d learned to speak to a reporter. Everyone involved with the exercise was nervous and wary of being caught; they might not be technically breaking the law, but it still didn’t feel right.
Over the weekend of December 2 and 3, Woodward and Bernstein approached a half-dozen grand jurors. Most played dumb, saying they knew vaguely about the case—“Watergate?” one supposed juror replied innocently. “I heard about it on the television, all that break-in business and stuff; there’s no place safe in this city”—while others were more direct. One juror told Woodward that he’d taken two sacred secrecy oaths in his life: one to the Elks and one as a grand juror. He didn’t intend to violate either.
Monday, with nothing to show for their efforts, the two reporters were summoned to Bradlee’s office. “The balloon is up,” the editor told them. One juror had reported Woodward and Bernstein’s cold call to prosecutors. “Sirica is some kind of pissed at you fellas,” explained the Post’s top lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, adding that he’d been working hard all day to keep the judge from sending the reporters to prison.
When the paper promised that there would be no further attempts to speak with the grand jurors, Silbert and the prosecutors backed off. “I settled on a stiff lecture in open court,” Sirica recalled; on December 19, with Woodward and Bernstein nervously sitting in the audience—both men dressed up in case they were arrested on the spot—the judge explained that a “news media representative” had approached the grand jurors, a matter he saw as “extremely serious” given their “sacred and secret” obligation. The other reporters present that day, unaware of the behind-the-scenes drama at the Post, were baffled by Sirica’s angry tirade: Who had done what? After the hearing, Woodward and Bernstein tried to sneak out before anyone could figure it out.
Though the men may have felt lousy, their behavior may have been worth it: They had actually gotten one grand juror to talk—a lot—but it would take nearly forty years before the reality of that weekend’s hunt became clear.
In 2010, Bradlee biographer Jeff Himmelman found a contemporaneous memo in the former editor’s personal files from Bernstein dated Monday, December 4—the very day that Sirica confronted the Post and demanded it cease contacting grand jurors—recounting a conversation the reporter had with a source who would appear in All the President’s Men by the mysterious moniker “Z.” The source, hidden in plain sight for all those years, had a long, fruitful, and meaty conversation with Bernstein that unfolded across pages 211 to 213 in the reporters’ memoir of the scandal and was described as a “woman [who] was in a position to have considerable knowledge of the secret activities of the White House and CRP.” According to the book’s telling, the conversation with Z occurred sometime after the grand jury episode, when the reporters “returned to more conventional sources,” but Himmelman discovered in the memo that Z was actually a grand juror—a source so helpful Woodward would later cite her as one of his most important sources, apart from Deep Throat.
“Your articles have been excellent,” the woman told Bernstein, according to their book, when he knocked on her door. She refused to speak with him but then slipped him her unlisted telephone number under the door and said, “I don’t trust a soul.”III
In a follow-up phone conversation that evening, Z explained that she felt the truth had not come out in the indictments and investigation. Like Deep Throat, she was hesitant to directly provide new information, but happy to point them toward previous clues and nuggets in their reporting that should be examined more closely. In the book, Bernstein portrays her wisdom as so smart that she “sounds like some kind of mystic,” but there’s little doubt in the Bradlee memo that Z is a grand juror. Bernstein noted in the memo that her unlisted telephone number “checked w. grand jury list number.” She also told Bernstein, “Of course I was on the grand jury,” and refused to answer other questions because “I took an oath.”
When Himmelman published his discovery of the memo in April 2012, Woodward and Bernstein pushed back hard. In a five-hundred-word statement released to their own Washington Post, they dismissed it as inconsequential: “If Jeff Himmelman thinks his discovery of a December 4, 1972, memo on Watergate is a significant revelation, he is wrong,” they wrote. “To the best of our recollection, someone contacted Carl and said there was a person, a neighbor, who had important information on Watergate. Carl went and interviewed the woman… [and] did not know she was a member of the Watergate grand jury when he arrived at her home.” They added, “The interview with her had been of little consequence because she was not telling us much more than we already believed,” which is why the episode garnered just two pages in All the President’s Men, and why they had forgotten it further until 2010.IV
Ultimately, as frustrated with their progress as Woodward and Bernstein were that November, they didn’t need to wait long. Even as Nixon plotted his triumphant second term, the forces set in motion by the summer’s break-in had acquired their own natural momentum. The scandal was set to break wide open just at the peak of Nixon’s power.
* * *
Nixon had promised that he would make the Post pay for its meddling, and after the election, he began the squeeze. “There ain’t going to be no forgetting, and there’ll be Goddamn little forgiving,” the president promised in one conversation with Ehrlichman that November.V Colson had plotted through the fall to attack Katharine Graham’s bottom line, writing a colleague to ask, “Please check for me when any of the Washington Post television station licenses are up for renewal,” and in short order, “citizen groups” backed by Nixon supporters challenged two of the Washington Post Company’s TV licenses with the FCC—targeting stations in Miami and Jacksonville—a dire threat that caused the paper’s stock to drop by half after the president’s reelection as his fury became evident.
Another plot, uncovered later in Ehrlichman’s notes at the Nixon archives, had suggested that conservative titan Richard Mellon Scaife buy the newspaper away from the Graham family; since it was publicly traded, if he offered enough, they’d be all but forced to sell. Nixon, though, didn’t want to stop at the Post itself. One night, in a classic example of his “Alice-in-Wonderland off-with-their-heads” orders, he called Colson and told his aide to figure out how to force Edward Bennett Williams, to give up his role as president of the Washington Redskins football team.
Both Bradlee and Graham felt the enormous pressure of tackling a president at the peak of his power. Williams encouraged Bradlee through the darkest moments as the paper pursued the case, telling him, “Ben, the kids have got to be right because otherwise why are the Nixon people lying to you so goddamn much? If they’re clean why don’t they show it?”
As measured as she tried to be in public, publisher Katharine Graham recalled, “I was feeling beleaguered. The constant attacks on us by CRP and people throughout the administration were effective and taking a toll.” At the many social events she hosted and attended, friends like columnist Joe Alsop and even Henry Kissinger tried to warn her to tread carefully. She was personally incensed when Bob Dole alleged in his attacks on the paper that the aggressive reporting was encouraged because Graham “hate[d]” the president. She wrote Ehrlichman directly. “What appears in the Post is not a reflection of my personal feelings,” she said. “I would add that my continuing and genuine pride in the paper’s performance over the past few months—the period that seems to be at issue… proceeds from my belief that the editors and reporters have fulfilled the highest standards of professional duty and responsibility.”VI
That December, Graham crossed paths with Woodward at a luncheon reception. It was the first time she really knew who he was. As Bradlee’s biographer would write, “She had bet the paper on two reporters that she couldn’t distinguish from each other until after their most important reporting had already been done.”
* * *
At the end of November, Liddy and Hunt, with their lawyers, met to discuss the lack of financial support from the White House. Hunt said he was increasingly embarrassed that the Cubans appeared forgotten; he had recruited these men—a recruitment based on their long, shared history—and vouched to them the import of their collective mission. As Liddy recalls the meeting, Hunt said they should start upping their demand for more money. Liddy stalked out, saying, “I just want everyone in this room to understand one thing: I am not for sale.”
On December 8, 1972, Dorothy Hunt flew to Chicago to see her family, the same cousins Howard had hid out with that summer. Hunt was in his study, working on finishing his latest novel, The Berlin Ending, when his son arrived home from school and burst into the study, panicked. “Papa, in the car radio coming home I heard Mama’s plane crashed and she’s dead!” he shouted.
United Airlines Flight 553 had crashed while attempting to land at Chicago’s Midway Airport; forty-three of its sixty-one passengers died, including Hunt’s wife. News headlines quickly began to trumpet how investigators had found $10,000 cash in her purse.
By Hunt’s account, the death of his wife of nearly a quarter century crushed him emotionally, sending him into a deep depression. He realized he wouldn’t be able to withstand the mental stress of a trial, especially without her or the White House’s support. “The government was still concealing the only documentary evidence that might establish I had been acting in good faith,” he wrote later, referring to his operational notebooks and files that had been hidden by John Dean and Patrick Gray. Hunt began to consider pleading guilty.
Meanwhile, appearances to the contrary, the warnings about the money from Hunt rattled the White House, which started to put pressure on John Mitchell to sort out the cover-up, even as the co-conspirators remained unsure of everyone’s role in their joint conspiracy. “We all know who should have handled this. Goddamn it, it was Mitchell and he wasn’t handling it,” Nixon fumed on December 11 to Ehrlichman and Haldeman. “John Mitchell has a serious problem with his wife. He was unable to watch the campaign and as a result, underlings did things without his knowledge.”
“The minute you dump on Mitchell indirectly by saying he didn’t have a chance to watch the underlings, the underlings are going to produce their diaries and show Mitchell was in 18 meetings where this was discussed, ratified, approved, authorized, financed,” Ehrlichman cautioned.
“Was he?” Nixon said, still curious and confused about who had done what when in the conspiracy.
“I gather so,” Ehrlichman replied, himself still unsure months later about who had known what and done what when.
* * *
As the year ended, McCord also stewed. He didn’t like where he saw the burglary trial was heading; first, it seemed that the whole caper was going to be laid at his doorstep, the break-in some kind of rogue effort. When he protested through his defense counsel that he wouldn’t keep quiet if that thesis was borne out, fresh leaks appeared to instead posit that the burglary was a CIA operation. That angered him even more. He had spent his entire life in service to his country and was a fanatical patriot, loyal to the agency above almost all else. He had imagined that he was continuing his service to his nation—and his attorney general and president—with his work at the Watergate and couldn’t stomach the idea his bosses in the caper were trying to slander his former employer.
