Watergate, page 35
On December 28, 1972, he penned a private letter to Jack Caulfield warning that the White House should tread carefully if it was to blame the CIA and its director, Richard Helms. “If Helms goes and the Watergate operation is laid at CIA’s feet, where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall,” he warned. “It will be a scorched desert. The whole matter is at the precipice now. Just pass the message that if they want it to blow, they are on exactly the right course. I’m sorry that you will get hurt in the fallout.”
Around the same time, acting FBI director Patrick Gray stood before the trash incinerator in his Stonington, Connecticut, home, and fed into a roaring fire, one page after another, the documents from Howard Hunt’s safe that had been passed to him by Dean and Ehrlichman. He had flipped through some of them, and reassured himself that the files appeared to have to do with the Kennedy administration and the assassination of the South Vietnamese president. They were unconnected to Howard Hunt or the Watergate burglary, surely. “The clear implication of the substance and tone of [Dean and Ehrlichman’s] remarks was that these two files were to be destroyed and I interpreted this to be an order from the counsel to the President of the United States issued in the presence of one of the two top assistants to the President of the United States,” he testified later.
* * *
After months of the Post wondering why the paper of record continued to ignore their scoops, the reporting machine of the New York Times was finally focused on trying to get into the Watergate story itself; its editors and reporters in the Washington bureau were beginning to gather each day at 10 or 11 a.m. to discuss the day’s news and what angles the paper should try to chase.
One day that month, Times photographer Mike Lien poked his head into the morning meeting and said that he’d been out drinking the night before with some Secret Service agents. “They told me something interesting: They said the president has a whole taping apparatus in the Oval Office—it’s run by the Secret Service. They tape everything that goes on there,” Lien explained. His tip was met with only silence. “Thanks a lot,” someone finally said.
No one bothered to follow up the tip.
I. On election eve, he’d written in his diary on his first-term accomplishments—Peking, Moscow, and more: “The only sour note of the whole thing, of course, is Watergate and Segretti. This was really stupidity on the part of a number of people.”
II. In September, Ulasewicz had decided he wanted nothing more to do with the payments and returned the remaining money to Kalmbach, who in turn enlisted Fred LaRue to handle the payoffs. Later, in an ashtray in Dean’s White House office, LaRue, Dean, and Kalmbach burned the ledger Kalmbach had kept of his payments.
III. In the book, Bernstein says the Z conversation took place around 8 p.m.; if the date of the memo is to be believed, either it recounts a conversation from earlier that weekend, or Bernstein went out to track down yet another grand juror hours after the paper was chastised by a federal judge.
IV. It might be a believable excuse, but it wasn’t entirely accurate. Thirty pages after the Z mention in the book, Woodward goes to meet with Senator Sam Ervin as he begins work leading the Senate’s new Watergate Committee in January 1973, and turns over in his mind who would be most useful for the Senate probe: “Information from Deep Throat and Z and some other bits and pieces might help the investigation, conceivably could even send it on its way.” There are a handful of other references to her over the rest of the book, like “the riddles of Z” on page 243 and “Z’s statements” on page 251, that make clear her information and directional advice stuck with the reporters for weeks as the story unfolded, and that her involvement was not contained to just a two-page aside. As Himmelman concluded, “Maybe the moral of the story is that nobody gets to come out of the great mud bath of Watergate with his hands entirely clean.”
V. To Nixon, part of the paper’s affront stemmed from just how “dumb,” in his words, the underlying DNC burglary was. “Tying it to us is an insult to our intelligence,” he told Ehrlichman. His aide responded, “We don’t mind being called crooks, but not stupid crooks.” Interestingly, in that same November 1 conversation, Nixon still appears unsure if the burglary was a Mitchell operation. “If he did [it], he’s stupid,” Nixon said.
VI. Graham actually ran into Bob Dole on a flight to the West Coast a few weeks after the election, and he casually dismissed the caustic remarks he’d made about her and the paper. “Oh you know, during a campaign they put these things in your hands and you just read them,” he said. Graham was shocked; as she recalled in her memoir, “His reaction amazed me, dismissing so lightly something that had had such a powerful effect on all of us at the Post, especially me.”
PART III Brushfire
January–June 1973
Chapter 23 “Something Was Rotten”
History turns on the unexpected. In the opening months of 1973, as the 93rd Congress commenced in the Capitol, Thomas P. O’Neill was settling into his new role as House majority leader. O’Neill had been born in Boston’s “Old Dublin,” and just two generations removed from Ireland he looked every bit the part—the red face, bulbous nose, and Bahstan accent. “With the full blood of Cork City in his face,” Jimmy Breslin wrote, he had gained influence in the rough-and-tumble world of Boston Irish politics, first understanding the power of patronage and political machines when his father was the Cambridge superintendent of sewers.I
In 1971, O’Neill had become the House’s majority whip, the third-highest position in the body, and expected to spend the traditional decade or longer biding his time in the shadow of the new majority leader, Hale Boggs.
Then, just three weeks before the November election, the Cessna carrying Boggs through Alaska with the state’s sole congressman, Nick Begich, had disappeared in the great expanse of the Last Frontier, crashing somewhere during a flight from Anchorage to Juneau. After nearly a hundred planes searched for forty days, nothing had been found. The unexpected vacancy in the House leadership propelled O’Neill—known as “Tip” to most of the country but as Tom to his closest friends—to the role just below the speaker himself.II
The transition marked a serious change for the House, elevating one of the great retail politicians of the twentieth century at just the moment when sensing the mood of the nation would prove critical. The House itself was also in flux, as a younger generation of congressmen—and a rising number of congresswomen—advocated for a more responsive and active legislature. It was a moment perfectly suited for O’Neill, who understood power innately—the illusion of it, how it ebbed and flowed, and what made men move.
He had witnessed plenty of hardball politics and thought he knew the world of dirty tricks inside and out, which is also how he knew that Nixon’s campaign had gone beyond the accepted bounds. In fact, he had suspected something was off about the president’s reelection effort for a year.
His suspicions had started with George Steinbrenner, a wealthy Ohio businessman who had revitalized a family shipping company on the Great Lakes. Steinbrenner had begun to dabble in sports and theater and chaired the Democrats’ major annual fundraising dinner in 1969 and ’70, so O’Neill noticed immediately when the shipping magnate didn’t make his annual party donation in 1972. Steinbrenner refused to discuss the issue over the phone and instead came to see O’Neill in person. “Tip, it’s terrible,” he lamented. “They’re holding the lumber over my head.” Over the course of the conversation, Steinbrenner revealed that his shipping company was under pressure from the federal government on various fronts—safety standards, working conditions, antitrust, and more—and that he’d been told the problems might disappear if he cooperated with the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
Steinbrenner told O’Neill how CREEP had maneuvered him into a corner: He had first visited Maurice Stans, then been sent on to Herb Kalmbach. “I’m a Democrat, but I’ll give you twenty-five thou,” Steinbrenner had offered, only to be met with a quick rejection. Kalmbach handed him instead a sheet of paper with the names of sixty loosely affiliated pro-Nixon organizations, the names of which all seemed innocuous and interchangeable, and wrote in the top-left corner an enigmatic code, “33@3, 1@1,” which Steinbrenner instantly grasped: He was expected to donate $100,000 to the campaign, split among the maximum $3,000 contributions to any thirty-three different Nixon committees. Kalmbach added that all donations had to be in before April 7, 1972, the deadline of that new campaign finance law after which donors’ names would be public.III “They had practically blackjacked them,” O’Neill recalled later.
Around the same time, O’Neill noticed that other prominent donors had fallen silent, only to appear in “Democrats for Nixon” ads, and one of O’Neill’s longtime Boston friends, Tom Pappas, a top GOP donor, even bragged to the House leader about how the campaign had set a $25,000 minimum for its donors. “Tom didn’t reveal any dirty secret, but he didn’t have to. A $25,000 minimum? That was unheard-of,” O’Neill recalled. “The conclusion was inescapable: what we had, plain and simple, was an old-fashioned shakedown.” Then, of course, had come the break-in and all the other strange reports circulating in the press.
Still, as 1973 began, O’Neill was hardly eager to dive into investigating the campaign; as partisan as he was, he was also institutionally disinclined toward investigations—viewing them as unnecessary noise and friction in what was supposed to be a still mostly collegial political environment. Nevertheless, he sensed that more would come and that the further revelations would lead to more trouble. “I was convinced that something was rotten in Washington,” he recalled later. O’Neill went to Speaker Albert and used the “i-word” for the first time in January: “The time is going to come when impeachment is going to hit this Congress,” O’Neill said. “We better be ready for it.”
The would-be congressional players all shared O’Neill’s initial reluctance to dig deeper. Neither Albert nor Pete Rodino, the also relatively new chair of the House Judiciary Committee, was eager to act. Impeachment was a nuclear option, used just eleven times ever—mostly against federal judges—and hardly any member of Congress remembered the most recent trial, in 1936. The Republican House minority leader, Michigan’s Gerald Ford, had tried to lead an impeachment crusade against liberal Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas in 1970, charging he had ties to underworld gambling interests, but a six-month investigation by the House Judiciary Committee had gone nowhere, as the move was mostly seen for what it was: politics.
Impeachment of a president seemed even more unthinkable; it had been more than a century since the last time Congress had impeached a president, and the only historical exposure most members on Capitol Hill had to that case, against Andrew Johnson, came in John F. Kennedy’s blockbuster book, Profiles in Courage, in which he had held up Kansas senator Edmund Ross as a hero for voting to acquit Johnson and save his presidency. “By 1973, the history books had come to agree that [Johnson’s impeachment] was a shameful, politically motivated, tasteless event in American history,” wrote UPI’s Howard Fields. It was hardly an encouraging scenario as the members weighed their own role in history, and Rodino discouraged any such talk.
“You’re not a lawyer,” Rodino cautioned O’Neill. “You’re only going on intuition, and you can’t prove a thing you’re saying.”
For now, O’Neill would watch and wait. But he knew what was coming.
* * *
Richard Nixon turned sixty on January 9, and in a birthday-themed interview, he explained that his formula for living was simple: Never slow down. True to form, he started 1973 fighting hard on all manner of fronts—including a Christmas bombing campaign against Vietnam that had provoked protests at home and a battle in Congress over the president’s right to “impound” assigned appropriations, that is, ignore Congress’s priorities and refuse to spend money it had allocated for specific purposes. The postelection effort to remake the executive branch, as devastating as it had been to staff morale, had centralized power at the White House to an almost unprecedented degree, purging the cabinet of personalities, stumbling blocks, and dissenting voices, and installing in their place what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., labeled that spring “the most anonymous Cabinet within memory, a Cabinet of clerks, of compliant and faceless men who stand for nothing, have no independent national position and are guaranteed not to defy Presidential whim.” Schlesinger hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but Nixon would have seen it as such.
There had also been a massive sea change in American politics; less than a month apart, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Party’s two lions, both died, bringing a close to the postwar liberal consensus of the New Deal and the Great Society. Nixon—the first time this had happened in decades—was the sole president alive, and he seemed ascendent. Gallup showed him with a national favorable rating of 68 percent, the highest in four years.
There was still, however, the small issue of the Watergate break-in.
* * *
The morning after Nixon’s birthday, the burglary trial finally began, more than six months after the break-in—delayed, in part, because Judge Sirica had pinched a nerve in his back. Public and media interest in the trial was huge, but it still seemed a sideshow, hardly something that could affect Nixon or his presidency. “My instincts told me that if the truth came out, things could be difficult for some of the president’s friends and assistants,” Sirica recalled, but never did he imagine that damage would reach the Oval Office.
Even before opening arguments, it was clear the proceedings would be unsatisfying to nearly everyone involved; Silbert and the prosecutorial team made clear that they wouldn’t offer a satisfying motive for the crime, nor spend much time examining who ordered the break-in or why. “The indictment they had prepared was very narrowly drawn,” Sirica recalled later. “Technically, they didn’t have to prove a motive, only that the seven men were guilty of the charges against them. But the public was growing more and more suspicious. There had to be some reason these men had gone into the Watergate. Why not develop it?”
The seeming reticence of the prosecutors to dive deeper into a mystery they clearly hadn’t cracked belied their generally strong reputations. “Earl the Pearl” Silbert was known for his particularly polished presentations; his mother joked that her Harvard Law School grad son was so meticulous that he even perfectly lined up the heels of his shoes in his closet. The forty-six-year-old Seymour Glanzer, the oldest of the assistant U.S. attorneys on the case, was equally scrupulous. In addition to Watergate, he had been working on a federal government case aimed at forcing the soda industry to drop sugar from diet ginger ale—a move to protect diabetics—and so spent much of the investigation sitting in an office stacked with cartons of various ginger ales. Donald Campbell, whose bald head and freckled face was dominated by his red mustache, had come to the case as one of the government’s top wiretap experts, even sitting on the Justice Department panel that oversaw such investigative requests. He kept the team’s detailed Watergate calendar, marking down with his silver ballpoint pen every date that witnesses mentioned, trying to make sense of what happened when.
Investigators had continued to run down leads from the burglary straight through December, tracking down every telephone call they could and crisscrossing the country to interview potential witnesses. In December, in Utah, they had located Thomas Gregory, the college student who had been a spy for CREEP in the McGovern campaign and had knowledge of the earlier May burglary at the Watergate. “That really strengthened our case because he could also identify Liddy,” said Silbert. “It was one of those cases from a prosecutor’s point of view—you have good evidence, you simply have to win it.”
The day the trial began, away from the courtroom, Katharine Graham lunched with Woodward and Bernstein. The two reporters had desperately wanted to cover the trial themselves, but the paper’s editors felt they were too close to the story; the trial was instead assigned to the Post’s normal court reporter, though Woodward and Bernstein would alternate sitting in the audience to keep an eye out for stray details that could help their reporting. That day at lunch, Graham asked the reporters, “I mean, are we ever going to know about all of this?”
I. On snowy days, men would line up outside the O’Neill door to get a token that would allow them to shovel out the city for pay.
II. The hope-against-hope for Boggs’s miraculous return meant that for months O’Neill presided from an office that still featured Boggs’s home-state Great Seal of Louisiana on its ceiling.
III. What only came out later was that in addition to Steinbrenner’s own $75,000 in donations, he structured an additional $25,000 in donations by laundering the money as bonuses to his firm’s executives, who then turned around and donated the money to Nixon. The checks—including eight from other employees, all dated April 6 or April 7—had been rushed out from American Shipbuilding’s offices and carried by hand by a company employee who flew to Washington to deliver them in time to the campaign.
Chapter 24 Guilty Pleas
Every seat in D.C.’s largest ceremonial courtroom was full as the trial officially opened on January 10, 1973. Jury selection had lasted just two days, during which a pool of 250 was whittled down to 12 jurors and 6 alternates, ranging from a taxicab telephone operator to an ink maker at the government’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Each had been sent home with deputy U.S. marshals to pack a suitcase before returning to the courthouse for sequestering on its upper floors.I
