Watergate, page 69
While the “mystery” of Deep Throat’s identity would persist until 2005—and it wouldn’t be clear for decades that Nixon himself had long suspected Felt of leaking—the FBI official made the short-list quickly too, only to be overlooked and discounted by many for forty years. Writing in the June issue of the Washingtonian, within days of the book’s publication, editor Jack Limpert asked, “Who did have motive and opportunity and method? Who hated what Nixon was doing to him? Who had access to all the material? Who had the resources to set up a system to leak it? The FBI, that’s who.”
In the next paragraph, Limpert continued, “Read the February 28 and March 13 Presidential transcripts and then try someone like Mark Felt on for size. A Hoover loyalist and number-two man to Pat Gray, he had every reason and resource for leaking the Watergate story and destroying Nixon. Why would someone like Felt pick Woodward and Bernstein? Why not? Why pick someone like Jeremiah O’Leary of the Star-News who has been getting FBI leaks for years? Why not pick the last two reporters who would ever be suspected of being FBI conduits?”
While the book became an instant entry in the canon of Watergate—and journalistic—writing, it also set off long-running questions about how accurate a retelling the book really was. One focus, for example, was how Woodward claimed to have used a small cloth flag in a flowerpot on his apartment balcony at 1718 P Street NW to request meetings with Deep Throat—moving it to the front of the balcony to indicate that the two should meet that evening at 2 a.m. on the bottom level of the parking garage underneath 1401 Wilson Boulevard. If Deep Throat needed to meet Woodward, the source would intercept the reporter’s home-delivered copy of the New York Times—it’s still a mystery how—circle page 20, and draw a clock on the page indicating the meeting time.
Critics noted that the flowerpot system seemed uniquely complex and challenging to execute; Woodward had an enclosed courtyard, meaning that someone would have had to go out of their way to inspect it every day, passing down through a back alley, despite what Woodward seems to identify as meetings that took place only every six to eight weeks.IV
Beyond questions about plot or character were comments about the writing process itself. The book draft had gone through many iterations and failed starts as the reporters tried to write it alongside their day jobs and all-consuming reporting and only really gained momentum when Robert Redford expressed interest in it as a movie; as a result, many scenes seem tinged with more than a little cinematic drama. In reviewing the account for his 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein, Adrian Havill cross-checked local weather reports and found that many didn’t line up with the dramatic tableaus the men wrote.V
There was also the odd tale of how Bernstein had tried to avoid a subpoena from the DNC’s civil suit against CREEP by hiding out in a movie theater for the afternoon of February 26, 1973, at Bradlee’s urging. “Get out of the building,” Bradlee is said to have told Bernstein, on page 260. “Go see a movie and call me at five o’clock.” As the authors write, “Bernstein went to see Deep Throat—the movie version.” It’s a playful aside, almost an inside joke to the reader—and it almost certainly didn’t happen. The hard-core porn movie had been playing in D.C. in the summer and fall of 1972—its pop culture notoriety at the time was what inspired Howard Simons’s moniker—but an FBI crackdown that fall saw agents raid D.C.’s dozen or so pornographic movie houses, confiscate films, and charge the proprietors with “interstate transportation of obscene materials for the purpose of distribution.” Accordingly, the hard-core movies were gone from theaters by February. “There were no ads in the Post or the newly named Star-News that day or week for anything resembling the film,” Havill’s book notes.
Years later, in an interview for his own memoir with a young journalist, Barbara Feinman, Ben Bradlee said, “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat. I know who they identify as—Bob identifies as Deep Throat. Did that potted palm incident ever happen? [Apparently Bradlee is referring to the flowerpot on the balcony.] That seems like a dumb [inaudible] to me. And meeting in some garage? One meeting in a garage? Fifty meetings in a garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage.” Continuing a few moments later, Bradlee added, “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”
The quote—and any underlying concerns Bradlee had about the full veracity of Deep Throat’s story arc—never made it into his memoir, A Good Life, and the quote lay buried until biographer Jeff Himmelman uncovered the interview transcript in Bradlee’s files in 2010.VI Himmelman, who had been a researcher for Woodward before he began the Bradlee project, confronted Woodward with the quote, and over days of conversation, he, Bradlee, and Woodward all chewed it over. Woodward, Himmelman wrote, seemed “frantic” and “shaken” over Bradlee’s doubts, even though it’s clear from the broader context that Bradlee was only concerned about the veracity of Woodward’s tradecraft, not the information or existence of Deep Throat.
The star reporter pleaded with Himmelman not to publish the quote from his former editor. As Woodward said, “Don’t give fodder to the fuckers.”
* * *
While it may have been the most popular, All the President’s Men was hardly the only damaging report on the president’s activities that month. In late June, the Ervin Committee finished and released its 1,094-page report, which outlined all manner of White House scheming in exhaustive detail but stopped short of assigning responsibility directly to the president. As Ervin said, “You can draw the picture of a horse in two ways. You can draw a very good likeness of a horse, and say nothing, or you can draw a picture of a horse and write under it: ‘This is a horse.’ We just drew the picture.”
The literature of Watergate was piling up fast, thousands of pages of hearings, testimony, evidence, books, and transcripts. “It is no time for slow readers,” the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew noted. The consensus, however, remained largely the same; as the Washington Star’s Jack Germond wrote, “The smoking pistol has yet to be found in President Nixon’s hand.”
On June 21, Tip O’Neill plopped down in a seat on the House floor next to Pete Rodino. It was time to act, the majority leader told the judiciary chair.
“Get off my back,” Rodino shot back.
“Get off your back? I got 240 guys on my back. When are you going to move?” O’Neill snapped.
That night, dining at the D.C. institution Duke Ziebert’s, O’Neill retold the story and added how much respect he’d gained for Rodino: “When the rest of us are all forgotten, [Peter] is the one who will be in the history books.” The next day, Rodino came to the majority leader and handed over a timeline. The countdown clock had started.
On June 24, the committee wrapped its grueling hearings, spending its last hours fighting over whether to call witnesses of its own or whether St. Clair should be allowed to call defense witnesses like Colson, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean. Rodino, though, sensed now the committee would vote for impeachment and didn’t want to upset the delicate momentum for Nixon’s removal. The committee also voted to release its evidence publicly ahead of the final impeachment vote, giving the American people a complete understanding of what had been seen behind the locked door of Room 2141.
As St. Clair began two days of counterarguments on June 27, Rodino almost upset that delicate balance himself, when, speaking off the cuff to reporters in his House office during a lunch break, he speculated that all the committee Democrats would vote to impeach and that they would win five Republican votes. Jack Nelson ran the remarks the next day in the Los Angeles Times, causing an instant furor. Republican members of Congress decried Rodino’s “bias,” and the White House even said he should be “discharged” from overseeing the inquiry. Chagrined, Rodino quickly disavowed the story, but Nelson’s report was backed up by other reporters who had heard the same thing. Rodino instead offered to appease his Republican colleagues by subpoenaing the witnesses St. Clair wanted to present. That defense, though, wouldn’t amount to much: In a party-line vote, the committee decided to take the witness testimony behind closed doors. One anonymous Republican member of the committee told the New York Times’ James Naughton, “Things have gotten out of hand, but I’m afraid they’re going to get worse.”
* * *
All spring, the Nixon team had been digging for dirt on Rodino, hoping that it could smear the inquiry chair and show he’d engaged in improprieties similar to those charged against Nixon. In June, they seized a unique opportunity: At the Allenwood prison where Jeb Magruder was being held, the former campaign staffer sought out a onetime representative, Neil Gallagher, an old Rodino ally who himself had started a two-year prison sentence in June 1973 stemming from tax evasion charges. Allenwood was as close to a federal country club as prisons got—just four buildings in the Pennsylvania hills, with no walls or guard towers—and in June, Magruder cornered Gallagher while the two men played tennis, to ask if he had scandals to share. “If you could do anything to help, the President would be able to do something for you,” Magruder promised. “When we come up with something on Rodino, the public will be so revolted that the president could make it through. You’d be out of here clean—with a pardon.”
The ploy, like every other trick Nixon’s circle had tried, failed.
I. Staff got used to seeing Jenner in the evening in the lobby of their office building, nattily dressed with a gaudy handkerchief, carrying his loafers in his hand. He had a habit of taking off his shoes at his desk, then working such a long day that his swollen feet at the end wouldn’t fit back into his shoes. Owen, for his part, was smoking so much—first three packs, then four—that some days his teeth hurt.
II. Nixon was hardly the only one suffering as the pressures of Watergate seemed to manifest in physical stress too: While the president was at Egypt’s Qubba Palace in Cairo, back in Washington Fred Buzhardt suffered a serious heart attack and was rushed to the hospital.
III. The movie version would prove even more popular when it was released in 1976, becoming the second-biggest movie of the year after Rocky. Warner Bros. touted it as how two young reporters “solved the greatest detective story in American history.”
IV. One theory is that Felt relied on others to scout the apartment—perhaps an FBI agent elsewhere in the building or one attached to a surveillance post nearby—but even repeated in-person scouting seems likely to have raised suspicions among Woodward’s neighbors. “Those mundane tasks were probably entrusted to reliable agents, possibly one or more of Felt’s aides,” concluded Watergate historian Max Holland. Gray, for his part, always suspected that Deep Throat was a compilation of sources, rather than a single person, which was long believed too by some of Woodward and Bernstein’s competitors on the beat: As the Los Angeles Times’ Ronald Ostrow said, “When we got some of the same stories, we know they did not all come from the same person.” Years later, after Felt’s identity became public, a former senior FBI agent named Paul Daly explained that Felt had indeed headed “a clandestine group of high-ranking agents who agreed to leak information about the Watergate break-in” for a “noble purpose” and protect the bureau’s public integrity. The group included not just Felt but its assistant director of the criminal division, Charles Bates, and the head of the Washington Field Office, Robert Kunkel.
V. For example, a scene where Woodward and Bernstein, after their humiliating lunch with their literary agent and editor on October 25, 1972, following their messed-up scoop about Hugh Sloan and Haldeman’s control of Nixon’s secret fund, raced back in the rain to the newsroom, holding copies of the newspaper above their head and arrived “soaked and shivering.” A great dramatic scene for a movie, except that according to the National Weather Service records that I double-checked as well, it didn’t rain at all that day in D.C., and the temperature at the end of lunch was nearly 60 degrees. Could their meeting with an agent have happened another day when it did rain? Maybe—it appears to have rained, gently, after lunch on October 19, but then their meeting with their book editor wouldn’t have occurred in the shadow of their biggest screwup.Similarly, when Bernstein journeyed on September 18, 1972, to try to speak with Hugh Sloan, his trip to Northern Virginia took far longer than expected “in the rain,” he got “soaked” searching for Sloan’s house, and when he finally returned “a few hours later” to speak with Sloan after he arrived home, the campaign treasurer “let Bernstein step out of the rain and into the hallway.” Except, again, it was hardly pouring rain that day. The total precipitation recorded that evening by the National Weather Service was 2/100ths of an inch in the 4 p.m. hour and 4/100ths of an inch in the 5 p.m. hour. Unless there was a Linus-like rainstorm hovering over Sloan’s house alone, those totals would have been barely a few passing drops of rain, hardly the punishing, multi-hour downpour Bernstein relates. Other examples of dramatic detail fail to line up to recorded weather reports too.
VI. In an appropriately mysterious Watergatian twist, the original tape of Bradlee’s 1990 interview with Feinman is the only one of a dozen such lengthy interviews for his memoir that Himmelman found was missing.
Chapter 51 Impeachment
Richard Nixon arrived back in the United States from his Soviet Union summit at the beginning of July, timing his return to the minute, just as he had for his China trip, so his triumphant landing in Maine would make the evening newscasts. He told the crowd, “It’s always good to come home to America,” but the sentiment seemed empty. The House committee had finished its draft articles of impeachment just as Nixon returned from the summit. As the month began, though, a bipartisan impeachment looked unlikely. Republican members had begun to talk of perhaps just censuring Nixon and moving along, though the approach was publicly dismissed by the House minority leader. “What we are trying to do is to strengthen the Presidency one way or another, not weaken it,” Representative John Rhodes said. “To censure the President and leave him in office would be doing the country a grave disservice. It would completely cripple the man and would be giving him the worst of two worlds.”
On Tuesday, July 2, the House committee heard its first witness in its impeachment hearings. For ten hours, presidential aide Alexander Butterfield answered questions from John Doar, Albert Jenner, and James St. Clair, as well as assorted committee members, his testimony reinforcing the notion that Nixon was too much of a control freak to not know what was swirling around the Watergate actions.
Doar had always promised that at the right moment after he’d presented the cold, hard evidence objectively, he would adopt a more advocacy-oriented approach and put his own thumb—and opinions—on the scales. That moment finally arrived following Congress’s traditional Fourth of July recess, when he and the inquiry’s senior staff—Richard Cates, Bernard Nussbaum, Evan Davis, and Richard Gill—began presenting to the committee what they called “seminars,” detailed sessions connecting the evidence and what it collectively might mean. By day, the committee heard from witnesses, and after, the staff ran such evening “night schools” that proved equally critical to developing the case.
Cates had believed since late November that the case for impeachment was there, and the subsequent months of new evidence and facts had only strengthened his resolve. He spent every breakfast, dinner, and evening of that first week in July sequestered with groups from two to a dozen members, walking through the robust and clear case for presidential misconduct. He excelled at connecting puzzle pieces, explaining the logic of evidence, and helping members fill in the motives and thoughts of the conspiracy participants based on known reactions and evidence. He laid out what was known—and, perhaps most helpfully, what didn’t need to be known to understand events. He dissected the cover-up in detail, walking members through what would have been exposed at each stage of the burglary investigation had it been allowed to proceed unimpeded.
Had Nixon’s team not stonewalled that first week, Cates explained, it all might have unraveled much quicker. “There would be an immediate realization that there was a relationship between CREEP and the burglaries that would no longer be hidden,” he said.
* * *
The Supreme Court oral argument over the special prosecutor’s subpoena for the sixty-four tapes had been set for 10 a.m. on Monday, July 8. The public had been allocated 136 seats in the court’s grand chamber, as well as 27 seats that would rotate in and out every five minutes, and the crowd began forming on Saturday, stretching out onto the Capitol lawn across the street.
In readying for their big day, Lacovara had suggested to Jaworski that they wear the traditional morning coat with tails worn by the solicitor general before the court, to emphasize their role as the government’s advocates, but Jaworski resisted. It was his fourth time before the court, and he felt that the formal outfit relegated him to a penguin. “If you keep it up, I’ll show up in cowboy boots and jeans,” Jaworski chided. He and Lacovara ultimately arrived at the court in conservative navy suits. It was a brutally hot D.C. summer day, humid and sticky already as the day’s participants arrived, and the most popular man outside the court building ran the Popsicle cart.
As he arrived, Jaworski seemed confident in the case ahead. “Our brief is one of the strongest I’ve ever seen,” he said. Over the past weeks, St. Clair had seemingly gathered up all manner of relevant and irrelevant arguments on behalf of the president and even floated the possibility that Nixon wouldn’t abide by the court’s ruling if it went against him. It was a shocking statement, but surely one that the court would weigh as it considered the case. Some of the arguments put forth by the president’s attorney—including one that the request for twenty of the sixty-four tapes was irrelevant because Nixon had already released transcripts—seemed downright shabby. St. Clair had also included the argument that as an employee in the executive branch, Jaworski couldn’t sue the president—an argument the special prosecutor saw as betraying the explicit agreement he’d made with Al Haig before taking the job.
In the next paragraph, Limpert continued, “Read the February 28 and March 13 Presidential transcripts and then try someone like Mark Felt on for size. A Hoover loyalist and number-two man to Pat Gray, he had every reason and resource for leaking the Watergate story and destroying Nixon. Why would someone like Felt pick Woodward and Bernstein? Why not? Why pick someone like Jeremiah O’Leary of the Star-News who has been getting FBI leaks for years? Why not pick the last two reporters who would ever be suspected of being FBI conduits?”
While the book became an instant entry in the canon of Watergate—and journalistic—writing, it also set off long-running questions about how accurate a retelling the book really was. One focus, for example, was how Woodward claimed to have used a small cloth flag in a flowerpot on his apartment balcony at 1718 P Street NW to request meetings with Deep Throat—moving it to the front of the balcony to indicate that the two should meet that evening at 2 a.m. on the bottom level of the parking garage underneath 1401 Wilson Boulevard. If Deep Throat needed to meet Woodward, the source would intercept the reporter’s home-delivered copy of the New York Times—it’s still a mystery how—circle page 20, and draw a clock on the page indicating the meeting time.
Critics noted that the flowerpot system seemed uniquely complex and challenging to execute; Woodward had an enclosed courtyard, meaning that someone would have had to go out of their way to inspect it every day, passing down through a back alley, despite what Woodward seems to identify as meetings that took place only every six to eight weeks.IV
Beyond questions about plot or character were comments about the writing process itself. The book draft had gone through many iterations and failed starts as the reporters tried to write it alongside their day jobs and all-consuming reporting and only really gained momentum when Robert Redford expressed interest in it as a movie; as a result, many scenes seem tinged with more than a little cinematic drama. In reviewing the account for his 1993 biography of Woodward and Bernstein, Adrian Havill cross-checked local weather reports and found that many didn’t line up with the dramatic tableaus the men wrote.V
There was also the odd tale of how Bernstein had tried to avoid a subpoena from the DNC’s civil suit against CREEP by hiding out in a movie theater for the afternoon of February 26, 1973, at Bradlee’s urging. “Get out of the building,” Bradlee is said to have told Bernstein, on page 260. “Go see a movie and call me at five o’clock.” As the authors write, “Bernstein went to see Deep Throat—the movie version.” It’s a playful aside, almost an inside joke to the reader—and it almost certainly didn’t happen. The hard-core porn movie had been playing in D.C. in the summer and fall of 1972—its pop culture notoriety at the time was what inspired Howard Simons’s moniker—but an FBI crackdown that fall saw agents raid D.C.’s dozen or so pornographic movie houses, confiscate films, and charge the proprietors with “interstate transportation of obscene materials for the purpose of distribution.” Accordingly, the hard-core movies were gone from theaters by February. “There were no ads in the Post or the newly named Star-News that day or week for anything resembling the film,” Havill’s book notes.
Years later, in an interview for his own memoir with a young journalist, Barbara Feinman, Ben Bradlee said, “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat. I know who they identify as—Bob identifies as Deep Throat. Did that potted palm incident ever happen? [Apparently Bradlee is referring to the flowerpot on the balcony.] That seems like a dumb [inaudible] to me. And meeting in some garage? One meeting in a garage? Fifty meetings in a garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage.” Continuing a few moments later, Bradlee added, “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”
The quote—and any underlying concerns Bradlee had about the full veracity of Deep Throat’s story arc—never made it into his memoir, A Good Life, and the quote lay buried until biographer Jeff Himmelman uncovered the interview transcript in Bradlee’s files in 2010.VI Himmelman, who had been a researcher for Woodward before he began the Bradlee project, confronted Woodward with the quote, and over days of conversation, he, Bradlee, and Woodward all chewed it over. Woodward, Himmelman wrote, seemed “frantic” and “shaken” over Bradlee’s doubts, even though it’s clear from the broader context that Bradlee was only concerned about the veracity of Woodward’s tradecraft, not the information or existence of Deep Throat.
The star reporter pleaded with Himmelman not to publish the quote from his former editor. As Woodward said, “Don’t give fodder to the fuckers.”
* * *
While it may have been the most popular, All the President’s Men was hardly the only damaging report on the president’s activities that month. In late June, the Ervin Committee finished and released its 1,094-page report, which outlined all manner of White House scheming in exhaustive detail but stopped short of assigning responsibility directly to the president. As Ervin said, “You can draw the picture of a horse in two ways. You can draw a very good likeness of a horse, and say nothing, or you can draw a picture of a horse and write under it: ‘This is a horse.’ We just drew the picture.”
The literature of Watergate was piling up fast, thousands of pages of hearings, testimony, evidence, books, and transcripts. “It is no time for slow readers,” the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew noted. The consensus, however, remained largely the same; as the Washington Star’s Jack Germond wrote, “The smoking pistol has yet to be found in President Nixon’s hand.”
On June 21, Tip O’Neill plopped down in a seat on the House floor next to Pete Rodino. It was time to act, the majority leader told the judiciary chair.
“Get off my back,” Rodino shot back.
“Get off your back? I got 240 guys on my back. When are you going to move?” O’Neill snapped.
That night, dining at the D.C. institution Duke Ziebert’s, O’Neill retold the story and added how much respect he’d gained for Rodino: “When the rest of us are all forgotten, [Peter] is the one who will be in the history books.” The next day, Rodino came to the majority leader and handed over a timeline. The countdown clock had started.
On June 24, the committee wrapped its grueling hearings, spending its last hours fighting over whether to call witnesses of its own or whether St. Clair should be allowed to call defense witnesses like Colson, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean. Rodino, though, sensed now the committee would vote for impeachment and didn’t want to upset the delicate momentum for Nixon’s removal. The committee also voted to release its evidence publicly ahead of the final impeachment vote, giving the American people a complete understanding of what had been seen behind the locked door of Room 2141.
As St. Clair began two days of counterarguments on June 27, Rodino almost upset that delicate balance himself, when, speaking off the cuff to reporters in his House office during a lunch break, he speculated that all the committee Democrats would vote to impeach and that they would win five Republican votes. Jack Nelson ran the remarks the next day in the Los Angeles Times, causing an instant furor. Republican members of Congress decried Rodino’s “bias,” and the White House even said he should be “discharged” from overseeing the inquiry. Chagrined, Rodino quickly disavowed the story, but Nelson’s report was backed up by other reporters who had heard the same thing. Rodino instead offered to appease his Republican colleagues by subpoenaing the witnesses St. Clair wanted to present. That defense, though, wouldn’t amount to much: In a party-line vote, the committee decided to take the witness testimony behind closed doors. One anonymous Republican member of the committee told the New York Times’ James Naughton, “Things have gotten out of hand, but I’m afraid they’re going to get worse.”
* * *
All spring, the Nixon team had been digging for dirt on Rodino, hoping that it could smear the inquiry chair and show he’d engaged in improprieties similar to those charged against Nixon. In June, they seized a unique opportunity: At the Allenwood prison where Jeb Magruder was being held, the former campaign staffer sought out a onetime representative, Neil Gallagher, an old Rodino ally who himself had started a two-year prison sentence in June 1973 stemming from tax evasion charges. Allenwood was as close to a federal country club as prisons got—just four buildings in the Pennsylvania hills, with no walls or guard towers—and in June, Magruder cornered Gallagher while the two men played tennis, to ask if he had scandals to share. “If you could do anything to help, the President would be able to do something for you,” Magruder promised. “When we come up with something on Rodino, the public will be so revolted that the president could make it through. You’d be out of here clean—with a pardon.”
The ploy, like every other trick Nixon’s circle had tried, failed.
I. Staff got used to seeing Jenner in the evening in the lobby of their office building, nattily dressed with a gaudy handkerchief, carrying his loafers in his hand. He had a habit of taking off his shoes at his desk, then working such a long day that his swollen feet at the end wouldn’t fit back into his shoes. Owen, for his part, was smoking so much—first three packs, then four—that some days his teeth hurt.
II. Nixon was hardly the only one suffering as the pressures of Watergate seemed to manifest in physical stress too: While the president was at Egypt’s Qubba Palace in Cairo, back in Washington Fred Buzhardt suffered a serious heart attack and was rushed to the hospital.
III. The movie version would prove even more popular when it was released in 1976, becoming the second-biggest movie of the year after Rocky. Warner Bros. touted it as how two young reporters “solved the greatest detective story in American history.”
IV. One theory is that Felt relied on others to scout the apartment—perhaps an FBI agent elsewhere in the building or one attached to a surveillance post nearby—but even repeated in-person scouting seems likely to have raised suspicions among Woodward’s neighbors. “Those mundane tasks were probably entrusted to reliable agents, possibly one or more of Felt’s aides,” concluded Watergate historian Max Holland. Gray, for his part, always suspected that Deep Throat was a compilation of sources, rather than a single person, which was long believed too by some of Woodward and Bernstein’s competitors on the beat: As the Los Angeles Times’ Ronald Ostrow said, “When we got some of the same stories, we know they did not all come from the same person.” Years later, after Felt’s identity became public, a former senior FBI agent named Paul Daly explained that Felt had indeed headed “a clandestine group of high-ranking agents who agreed to leak information about the Watergate break-in” for a “noble purpose” and protect the bureau’s public integrity. The group included not just Felt but its assistant director of the criminal division, Charles Bates, and the head of the Washington Field Office, Robert Kunkel.
V. For example, a scene where Woodward and Bernstein, after their humiliating lunch with their literary agent and editor on October 25, 1972, following their messed-up scoop about Hugh Sloan and Haldeman’s control of Nixon’s secret fund, raced back in the rain to the newsroom, holding copies of the newspaper above their head and arrived “soaked and shivering.” A great dramatic scene for a movie, except that according to the National Weather Service records that I double-checked as well, it didn’t rain at all that day in D.C., and the temperature at the end of lunch was nearly 60 degrees. Could their meeting with an agent have happened another day when it did rain? Maybe—it appears to have rained, gently, after lunch on October 19, but then their meeting with their book editor wouldn’t have occurred in the shadow of their biggest screwup.Similarly, when Bernstein journeyed on September 18, 1972, to try to speak with Hugh Sloan, his trip to Northern Virginia took far longer than expected “in the rain,” he got “soaked” searching for Sloan’s house, and when he finally returned “a few hours later” to speak with Sloan after he arrived home, the campaign treasurer “let Bernstein step out of the rain and into the hallway.” Except, again, it was hardly pouring rain that day. The total precipitation recorded that evening by the National Weather Service was 2/100ths of an inch in the 4 p.m. hour and 4/100ths of an inch in the 5 p.m. hour. Unless there was a Linus-like rainstorm hovering over Sloan’s house alone, those totals would have been barely a few passing drops of rain, hardly the punishing, multi-hour downpour Bernstein relates. Other examples of dramatic detail fail to line up to recorded weather reports too.
VI. In an appropriately mysterious Watergatian twist, the original tape of Bradlee’s 1990 interview with Feinman is the only one of a dozen such lengthy interviews for his memoir that Himmelman found was missing.
Chapter 51 Impeachment
Richard Nixon arrived back in the United States from his Soviet Union summit at the beginning of July, timing his return to the minute, just as he had for his China trip, so his triumphant landing in Maine would make the evening newscasts. He told the crowd, “It’s always good to come home to America,” but the sentiment seemed empty. The House committee had finished its draft articles of impeachment just as Nixon returned from the summit. As the month began, though, a bipartisan impeachment looked unlikely. Republican members had begun to talk of perhaps just censuring Nixon and moving along, though the approach was publicly dismissed by the House minority leader. “What we are trying to do is to strengthen the Presidency one way or another, not weaken it,” Representative John Rhodes said. “To censure the President and leave him in office would be doing the country a grave disservice. It would completely cripple the man and would be giving him the worst of two worlds.”
On Tuesday, July 2, the House committee heard its first witness in its impeachment hearings. For ten hours, presidential aide Alexander Butterfield answered questions from John Doar, Albert Jenner, and James St. Clair, as well as assorted committee members, his testimony reinforcing the notion that Nixon was too much of a control freak to not know what was swirling around the Watergate actions.
Doar had always promised that at the right moment after he’d presented the cold, hard evidence objectively, he would adopt a more advocacy-oriented approach and put his own thumb—and opinions—on the scales. That moment finally arrived following Congress’s traditional Fourth of July recess, when he and the inquiry’s senior staff—Richard Cates, Bernard Nussbaum, Evan Davis, and Richard Gill—began presenting to the committee what they called “seminars,” detailed sessions connecting the evidence and what it collectively might mean. By day, the committee heard from witnesses, and after, the staff ran such evening “night schools” that proved equally critical to developing the case.
Cates had believed since late November that the case for impeachment was there, and the subsequent months of new evidence and facts had only strengthened his resolve. He spent every breakfast, dinner, and evening of that first week in July sequestered with groups from two to a dozen members, walking through the robust and clear case for presidential misconduct. He excelled at connecting puzzle pieces, explaining the logic of evidence, and helping members fill in the motives and thoughts of the conspiracy participants based on known reactions and evidence. He laid out what was known—and, perhaps most helpfully, what didn’t need to be known to understand events. He dissected the cover-up in detail, walking members through what would have been exposed at each stage of the burglary investigation had it been allowed to proceed unimpeded.
Had Nixon’s team not stonewalled that first week, Cates explained, it all might have unraveled much quicker. “There would be an immediate realization that there was a relationship between CREEP and the burglaries that would no longer be hidden,” he said.
* * *
The Supreme Court oral argument over the special prosecutor’s subpoena for the sixty-four tapes had been set for 10 a.m. on Monday, July 8. The public had been allocated 136 seats in the court’s grand chamber, as well as 27 seats that would rotate in and out every five minutes, and the crowd began forming on Saturday, stretching out onto the Capitol lawn across the street.
In readying for their big day, Lacovara had suggested to Jaworski that they wear the traditional morning coat with tails worn by the solicitor general before the court, to emphasize their role as the government’s advocates, but Jaworski resisted. It was his fourth time before the court, and he felt that the formal outfit relegated him to a penguin. “If you keep it up, I’ll show up in cowboy boots and jeans,” Jaworski chided. He and Lacovara ultimately arrived at the court in conservative navy suits. It was a brutally hot D.C. summer day, humid and sticky already as the day’s participants arrived, and the most popular man outside the court building ran the Popsicle cart.
As he arrived, Jaworski seemed confident in the case ahead. “Our brief is one of the strongest I’ve ever seen,” he said. Over the past weeks, St. Clair had seemingly gathered up all manner of relevant and irrelevant arguments on behalf of the president and even floated the possibility that Nixon wouldn’t abide by the court’s ruling if it went against him. It was a shocking statement, but surely one that the court would weigh as it considered the case. Some of the arguments put forth by the president’s attorney—including one that the request for twenty of the sixty-four tapes was irrelevant because Nixon had already released transcripts—seemed downright shabby. St. Clair had also included the argument that as an employee in the executive branch, Jaworski couldn’t sue the president—an argument the special prosecutor saw as betraying the explicit agreement he’d made with Al Haig before taking the job.
