All the President's Men Page 5

  Hughes, who had worked at the Bureau of the Budget during the Eisenhower administration when Stans was its director, added: “We’re going to conduct a full audit and find out what’s up.” The audit would be the first undertaken under the Federal Campaign Expenditures Act, which had gone into effect on April 7, establishing tighter control of campaign donations and requiring that all expenditures be reported.

  A GAO investigator called Woodward that afternoon for additional information on the $25,000 check. Woodward told him that he and Bernstein had written everything they knew about it.

  Before writing a follow-up on the GAO audit, Woodward tried to reach Hugh Sloan, the CRP treasurer. But he no longer worked for the re-election committee. A reporter on the city staff drove to Sloan’s home in suburban Virginia: Sloan was young, about 30, polite, and refused to discuss Watergate, except to say that he had cooperated with the FBI and the grand jury.

  Van Shumway told Woodward that Sloan had resigned “for personal reasons” unrelated to Watergate. “He was getting an ulcer and his wife is pregnant.”

  • • •

  Woodward called the GAO investigator every day to learn how the audit was progressing.

  “Hundreds of thousands of dollars in unaccounted cash,” the GAO man said one day. “A slush fund of cash,” he said the next. “A rat’s nest behind the surface efficiency of computerized financial reporting,” the third. With each day that Woodward did not write a story, the investigator felt freer to talk to him. Fitting these remarks together with another investigator’s, Woodward was becoming convinced that the cash “slush fund” was the same “convention security money” Bernstein had heard about early in July. The fund, which totaled at least $100,000, included the money from Barker’s bank account obtained from cashing Dahlberg’s check, according to the investigator.

  Bernstein made one of his regular calls to the former administration official and was told: “There was a large fund over which Gordon Liddy had supervision. . . . Yeah, it’s the same one. The present plan is for Liddy to take the fall for everyone. The story that the re-election committee will put out has nothing to do with the truth. They’ll say they were deeply concerned for the security of their convention and that they had a big fund to be sure they were secure from interference. That’s the word that will trickle out. Mitchell said to get the story out. Too many guys knew about the fund.”

  The reporters waited. Several days later, on August 16, Clark MacGregor met with a select group of White House reporters and made the first public attempt to shift the responsibility to Liddy. While serving as CRP’s finance counsel, MacGregor said, Liddy had spent campaign funds on his own initiative “for the purpose of determining what to do if the crazies made an attack on the President” at the Republican convention.

  Later that afternoon on the telephone, MacGregor was angered by Woodward’s attempt to get a fuller explanation. “I have no idea why the departed Gordon Liddy wanted cash,” MacGregor shouted. “It’s impossible for me to tell. . . . I never met Liddy. . . . I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Woodward suggested that MacGregor was implying that he was out of touch with the campaign he was supposed to be running.

  “If you print that, our relationship is terminated,” MacGregor said, and added: “I’m not threatening you. I’m just telling you what will happen.” MacGregor was one of the few Nixon administration officials who had a reputation for being friendly with the press.

  • • •

  On August 22, the second day of the Republican convention in Miami, the Post’s front page reported the preliminary findings of the GAO’s audit. Based primarily on Woodward’s conversations with the investigators, the story said the GAO had determined that CRP had mishandled more than $500,000 in campaign funds—including at least $100,000 maintained in an apparently illegal “security fund.”

  Paul E. Barrick, Hugh Sloan’s successor as treasurer, responded on behalf of CRP: “Washington Post stories of allegations to the effect that the . . . committee has incorrectly reported or failed to report contributions and expenditures in accordance with law are entirely wrong.”

  The rawest nerve touched by the GAO’s preliminary findings, however, was not that at least half a million dollars had been mishandled but the revelation of a “security fund” at the committee. For more than five weeks, Van Shumway, a former wire-service reporter who had come to the committee from the White House staff, had been insisting that no such fund existed. He had told Bernstein in July, “One thing I will never do is knowingly tell you something that is untrue.” Now Shumway said he had since learned that there was such a fund. “I’m afraid some people here aren’t telling me the truth,” he added.

  The GAO’s report was to be released publicly the same day. An hour before it was due to go out, the GAO sent a message to the news media that there would be a delay.

  Woodward called the GAO investigator. What had happened?

  “You won’t believe it,” the investigator said. “Stans called Hughes and asked him to come down to Miami at the convention to get more material . . . [He] of course had to go. They just didn’t want that report coming out today. I don’t blame them.”

  That evening in Miami, Richard Nixon was to be nominated by the Republican Party for a second term as President of the United States.

  Also the same day, August 22, United States District Court Judge Charles R. Richey, who was hearing the Democrats’ $1 million civil suit, reversed his earlier ruling and declared that all pre-trial testimony in the case would be kept sealed and withheld from the public until after completion of the proceedings in the case. This meant that sworn statements by Mitchell, Stans and others would not be made public before the election. What was extraordinary was that Richey had reversed his own decision in the absence of any motion by the CRP lawyers. He had, he said from the bench, acted out of concern for the constitutional rights of those under investigation.

  Several hours after his ruling, Judge Richey telephoned Bernstein at the Post. “I just wanted you to understand the basis for my decision.” He explained to Bernstein the dangers of releasing testimony in the civil suit before a criminal trial.

  Then Richey raised an issue that had not entered Bernstein’s head, the possibility that the Judge had been approached by someone who had urged a favorable ruling for CRP: “I want it to be very clear that I haven’t discussed this case outside the courtroom with anyone, and that political considerations played no part whatsoever.”

  Bernstein was dumbstruck. He had never met Judge Richey. The call came out of the blue.

  • • •

  Until the August 1 story about the Dahlberg check, the working relationship between Bernstein and Woodward was more competitive than anything else. Each had worried that the other might walk off with the remainder of the story by himself. If one had gone chasing after a lead at night or on a weekend, the other felt compelled to do the same. The August 1 story had carried their joint byline; the day afterward, Woodward asked Sussman if Bernstein’s name could appear with his on the follow-up story—though Bernstein was still in Miami and had not worked on it. From then on, any Watergate story would carry both names. Their colleagues melded the two into one and gleefully named their byline Woodstein.

  Gradually, Bernstein’s and Woodward’s mutual distrust and suspicions diminished. They realized the advantages of working together, particularly because their temperaments were so dissimilar. The breadth of the story, the inherent risks and the need for caution all argued for at least two reporters working on it. By dividing the work and pooling their information, they increased their contacts.

  Each kept a separate master list of telephone numbers. The numbers were called at least twice a week. (Just the fact that a certain source wouldn’t come to the phone or return calls often signaled something important.) Eventually, the combined total of names on their lists swelled to several hundred, yet fewer than 50 were duplicated. Inevitably, they crossed each other’s tracks. “
Don’t you guys work together?” a lawyer once asked Woodward. “I just this minute hung up on Carl.” On another occasion, a White House aide said, “We’ve been trying to figure out why some of us get calls from Bernstein and others seem to be on Woodward’s list.” There was no reason. The reporters wanted to avoid tripping over each other’s work as much as possible. In general, they preferred to keep their contacts divided because confidential sources would feel more comfortable that way: more time could be invested in developing a personal relationship.

  To those who sat nearby in the newsroom, it was obvious that Woodstein was not always a smoothly operating piece of journalistic machinery. The two fought, often openly. Sometimes they battled for fifteen minutes over a single word or sentence. Nuances were critically important; the emphasis had to be just right. The search for the journalistic mean was frequently conducted at full volume, and it was not uncommon to see one stalk away from the other’s desk. Sooner or later, however (usually later), the story was hammered out.

  Each developed his own filing system; oddly, it was Bernstein, by far the less organized of the two, who kept records neatly arranged in manila folders labeled with the names of virtually everyone they encountered. Subject files were kept as well. Woodward’s recordkeeping was more informal, but they both adhered to one inviolate rule: they threw nothing out and kept all their notes and the early drafts of stories. Soon they had filled four filing cabinets.

  Usually, Woodward, the faster writer, would do a first draft, then Bernstein would rewrite. Often, Bernstein would have time to rewrite only the first half of a story, leaving Woodward’s second half hanging like a shirttail. The process often consumed most of the night.

  As the number of leads and components in the Watergate story increased, the reporters became almost possessed by it. And, tentatively at first, they became friends. Neither had many demands on his time. Woodward was divorced; Bernstein separated. They often remained in the newsroom until late at night, making checks, reading clippings, outlining their next steps, trading theories. Sometimes they were joined by Barry Sussman, who ultimately was detached from his regular duties as city editor and given prime responsibility for directing the Post’s Watergate coverage.

  Sussman was 38, gentle in his manner, slightly overweight, curly-haired, scholarly in demeanor. He had been a desk man on a small-town newspaper near the Virginia-Tennessee line, a speed-reading instructor at New York University, a society editor, and then suburban editor for the Post—a vagabond journalist who had left Brooklyn odd-jobbing his way to Washington.

  Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instant recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman’s mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.

  At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell’s secretary? Why won’t anybody say when Liddy went to the White House or who worked with him there? Mitchell and Stans both ran the budget committee, right? What does that tell you? Then Sussman would puff on his pipe, a satisfied grin on his face.

  Sussman’s passions are history and polling. His hero is Jefferson, but the reporters always imagined that George Gallup ran a close second. Almost every time there had been a big demonstration in town during the height of the anti-war movement, Sussman had sent out teams of reporters to ask demonstrators their age, politics, home towns and how many previous demonstrations they had been in. Each time, he came up with the same conclusion almost every reporter on the street had already reached—the anti-war movement had become more broad-based and less radical. Since the break-in at Democratic headquarters, Sussman had been studying the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. He had a theory about Watergate that Bernstein and Woodward did not quite understand—it had to do with historic inevitability, post-war American ethics, merchandising and Richard Nixon.

  Sussman and the other editors at the Post were by temperament informal. The reporters were never formally assigned to work on Watergate full time. They sensed that as long as the stories continued to come, there would be no problem. If they failed to produce, anything might happen in the competitive atmosphere of the Post newsroom. In the weeks after the story on the Dahlberg check, Rosenfeld became noticeably nervous as Simons and Bradlee showed an increasing interest in the Watergate affair. The invariable question, asked only half-mockingly of reporters by editors at the Post (and then up the hierarchal line of editors) was “What have you done for me today?” Yesterday was for the history books, not newspapers.

  That had been the working ethic of the Post since Ben Bradlee took command in 1965, first as managing editor and, in 1967, as executive editor. Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the New York Times need not exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism.

  That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. Though the Post was the second news organization to obtain a copy of the secret study of the Vietnam war, Bradlee noted that “there was blood on every word” of the Times’ initial stories. Bradlee could convey his opinions with a single disgusted glance at an indolent reporter or editor.

  • • •

  Since his return from Miami, Bernstein had become obsessed with the $89,000 in Mexican checks that had passed through Bernard Barker’s bank account. Why Mexico? According to the GAO investigator, Maurice Stans had said the money had come initially from Texas. But no one at the GAO had been able to understand why $89,000 in campaign contributions were routed through Mexico.

  In mid-August, Bernstein had begun calling all the employees of the Texas Committee for the Re-election of the President. A secretary at the committee’s offices in Houston said that the FBI had been there to interview Emmett Moore, the committee treasurer.

  “They questioned me about how money was transmitted to Mexico,” Moore said. “They said there had been allegations to that effect—that money was transferred to and from Mexico.”

  Moore immediately sought to make clear to Bernstein that the FBI agents were not interested in his own actions, but in those of the Texas committee’s chairman, Robert H. Allen, who was also president of the Gulf Resources and Chemical Co. of Houston. The agents had expressed particular interest in Allen’s relationship with a Mexico City lawyer, Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre, who represented Gulf Resources’ interests in Mexico.

  The Mexican connection. What did it mean?

  Moore, who said he had been as unnerved by the FBI’s visit as by Bernstein’s call, knew nothing of the reasons for moving the money across the border.

  Bernstein began leaving messages for Robert Allen at his home and office. They were not answered. Finally, on the morning that Maurice Stans summoned the GAO’s auditor to Miami, Bernstein got up at 6:00 A.M.—5:00 A.M. in Texas—and called Allen at his Houston home. Allen sleepily declined to discuss the matter, “because it’s before the grand jury.”

  Using his primitive high-school Spanish, Bernstein intensified his telephone search for Ogarrio and for any information on the elusive Mexican lawyer. Gradually, the enterprise became the object of good-natured office ridicule. Bernstein was unable to construct anything other than disjointed school-book phrases in the present tense. Ken Ringle, a reporter on the Virginia staff who sat next to Bernstein, would shout, “Bernstein’s talking Spanish again,” and reporters and editors would walk over to offer appropriate commentary. The calls went to bankers, relatives of Ogarrio, his former law partners, his clients, Mexican banking commis
sioners, the police, law schools. Nada. The standing office joke had it that Bernstein heard the whole Watergate story and didn’t understand it.

  Not surprisingly, the Nixon campaign’s Mexican connection was uncovered in English.

  On August 24, Bernstein called Martin Dardis in Miami. The chief investigator said he was coming up with pretty good information on the Mexican checks, really weird stuff that he didn’t want to talk about on the telephone. Dardis assured Bernstein that it would be worth his while to fly down to Miami again. Bernstein caught the first flight out of Washington Friday, August 25, and again spent most of the day with Ruby. Seething, he left to search again for the photo shop where the burglars from Miami supposedly had bought their film.

  On the freeway, a billboard caught his eye. It pictured a handsome, thirtyish, blond man who looked like a model in a cigarette ad. “Vote for Neal Sonnett, State’s Attorney, Dade County,” it said. Bernstein’s anger at the chief investigator turned to rage.

  A couple of weeks before, Dardis had called him for a favor. “It’s on a case we’re working, not related to Watergate,” he had told Bernstein. “You must have some friends at the Pentagon or somewhere in the military. If you could get somebody to look up the records for you . . .” Then he asked for any possible derogatory information—arrests, mental illness, history of homosexuality—in the file of a Neal Sonnett.

  A Pentagon colonel had agreed to try to get Sonnett’s military information for Bernstein, and just before the Republican convention Bernstein had called Dardis to tell him so. Fortunately, Dardis had said he didn’t need it any more.

  Bernstein called Dardis before six o’clock the next morning, August 26. Gerstein’s campaign schedule, he knew, began at 7:30. Dardis picked up the phone on the first ring. “God damn it, Carl, let’s get together later, I gotta run. It can wait a few hours.”