Watergate: A New History

by Garrett M. Graff

Bernstein called back to the Post newsroom as soon as he landed and asked Sussman whether he should head to Mexico City. In what Bradlee’s biographer Jeff Himmelman would call “arguably the most important decision made by any Post editor during the initial phase of Watergate,” Sussman told Bernstein to stay in Miami and dig into what he could find there.II The reporter spent the rest of the day trying to coax information out of the state’s attorney; he ultimately not only confirmed that the four checks were exactly as described in the Times, but also learned of a fifth check, from someone named Kenneth H. Dalhberg, for $25,000, that Barker had also deposited.

some guesswork and archival research by Woodward, Bernstein, and the Post’s librarians managed to identify him. Dahlberg, they determined, lived in Minneapolis and had headed the ’68 Nixon campaign’s efforts in the Midwest. Dahlberg seemed baffled how his check had ended up in the Miami bank account of a Watergate burglar. “I don’t have the vaguest idea about it,” he told Woodward over the phone.

Until then, Woodward and Bernstein had been all but competing with each other, each keeping his own hunches, scoops, and sources under wraps, not trusting that the other wouldn’t run with the story and steal credit. As they pursued Dahlberg, though, Woodward requested that Bernstein’s byline also be featured, despite him being in Miami, and all future Watergate stories would be co-bylined. Colleagues soon came to see a pattern in the duo’s style: Woodward would tear speedily through a first draft of a story to establish the basic facts and outline, then Bernstein, the better writer, would work it through to a more polished version.

They would argue—loudly—in the newsroom over individual word choices and phrasing, arguments that regularly grew so heated that one or the other would throw up his hands and walk away. Their finished drafts always seemed to arrive at the last minute before deadline.

But in the Oval Office and the Executive Office Building, Nixon’s team spent that month concocting an elaborate series of lies, suborning perjury, and constructing half-truths

In mid-August, Magruder was called before the grand jury. Heading into the testimony, it seemed highly likely that the deputy campaign director would be indicted (and he would have been had he told the truth), but on August 15, he and Dean met in the White House counsel’s office to prepare his answers. There had been more and more stories spreading about Liddy and his antics, and the White House was trying to make clear Liddy acted alone without prompting the former aide to reconsider his silence.

At every turn, bad news seemed buried by good news. In late August the Washington Post reported that the GAO audit had identified a campaign slush fund at CREEP; the same night at the Republican convention in Miami, Nixon was formally nominated as the party’s presidential candidate.

On August 29, Nixon held a press conference out in San Clemente, quickly brushing aside a leadoff question related to the campaign fund. Maurice Stans, he said, was “an honest man and one who is very meticulous” and would easily and quickly remedy any “technical violations [that] have occurred.” He also dismissed the need for a special prosecutor, noting the aggressive investigations already underway by the FBI, the Justice Department, the Senate Banking Committee, and the Government Accounting Office, all of which had “total cooperation” from the White House.

“We are doing everything we can to take this incident and to investigate it and not to cover it up,” Nixon continued. “What really hurts in matters of this sort is not the fact that they occur—because overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong—what really hurts is if you try to cover it up.” Nixon’s words surely ranked as among the most brazen—or least self-aware—statements ever by someone actively involved in the very behavior he condemned.

“Whatever you said about Bernstein,” Ben Bradlee said decades later, after Bernstein would spend decades living in the shadow of the prolific scoop-machine Woodward, “Bernstein made the first key connection of the money.”

Someone was leaking prodigiously to TIME’s Justice Department reporter Sandy Smith, as Smith first reported the existence of the “plumbers,” and TIME warned readers the “Watergate Caper” was morphing into something larger and more sinister. “The case had begun to resemble a dinner party at which the silverware starts disappearing.

One weekend in late summer, Bob Woodward drove to Felt’s house in Fairfax, Virginia, about thirty minutes outside D.C.; Felt wasn’t exactly happy to see the reporter, but they ended up having a long talk, during which the FBI executive outlined the circumstances under which he’d be willing to cooperate more deeply with Woodward’s reporting. The stakes, Felt said, “were much higher than anyone outside perceived,” and necessitated serious caution. They worked out a system where Woodward would contact Felt when needed, but only for background information, not for quoting or reference.IV He’d only confirm what Woodward had already gathered, guide reporting, or help provide analysis—not volunteer any new details, leaving the power in his hands. This approach also allowed Felt to go to other outlets and scatter the information around to reporters like TIME’s Smith.

Felt had been upset earlier that spring when Woodward had seemed to too clearly point to a high-level FBI source in his reporting on George Wallace’s attempted assassination.

Two days after Patman’s initial report, on Friday, September 15, 1972, the government’s long-anticipated indictments landed, a near-total strategic victory for the White House, CREEP, and the cover-up. The prosecutors zeroed in solely on the five burglars, plus Liddy and Hunt—the narrowest case possible, though the Justice Department stated officially, “We have absolutely no evidence to indicate that any others should be charged.”

To anyone who had closely followed the story, however, the indictments were baffling, mentioning none of the campaign finance violations and none of the accusations about the $89,000 from Texas or the $25,000 from Minnesota that had found their way into Barker’s bank account. There was also no reference to the $350,000 slush fund that Stans had apparently used to fund Liddy’s operations. It was as if the money intended for the Nixon campaign had just coincidentally ended up in the burglars’ bank account—and then their pockets—as they broke into rival campaign offices.

Inside the White House, Nixon’s team celebrated their good fortune. Their cover-up might just work. That Friday evening, the 15th, around 5:30 p.m., Dean was invited into the Oval Office to discuss the day’s events with Nixon and Haldeman. It was a rare opportunity for Dean, and he entered to find Haldeman and the president slumped down, reclined in their chairs.

The casual reception thrilled him; it was another sign that he was now part of the inner circle.

The president looked at Dean through the “V” of his feet crossed upon his desk. “Well, you had quite a day today, didn’t you? You got Watergate on the way, huh?” Nixon said in greeting. “Quite a three months,” Dean replied. As the conversation progressed, they praised the good initial press, wondered if the case had been stopped in its tracks, and gossiped about the FBI investigation and political ramifications. “Three months ago I would have had trouble predicting where we’d b...

Although Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman would later make their work look glamorous, the team’s investigative reporting process was usually “lonely, frustrating, tedious, and emotionally draining work,”

Bernstein, who had long seemed to live a nocturnal existence in the newsroom and was never great on life’s administrative details—he famously once forgot a company rental car for weeks in a parking garage—found he was falling behind on paying bills because he was rarely home enough to get them.

For sources who were too sensitive to call by phone—or those they had no existing relationship with—the reporters often tried home visits. They would leave after the newspaper’s early edition deadline at 7:45 p.m.—Bernstein by bicycle and Woodward in his small 1970 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia coupe—and knock on doors across Washington and its suburbs. At the time, it was a novel reporting technique. “Reporters didn’t do that then,” CBS newsman Bob Schieffer recalled. “Washington was a place where everybody played by the rules. You dealt with people in the office.… Watergate was when the stakeouts first started.” The door-knocking was often fruitless, but it paid

off often enough—and big enough—that it became a regular part of their reporting. “It was like selling magazine subscriptions—one out of every thirty people will feel sorry for you and buy one,” Bernstein would say later.

Woodward’s social life at the time was equally Watergate-focused too: That summer, he’d started dating a young CBS reporter named Lesley Stahl, who had been assigned by the network to cover the scandal. She was one of the only other reporters in the courtroom on June 17 for the burglars’ arraignment.

Bernstein began to wonder out loud how high up these efforts went: Was Mitchell involved? “He can’t say he didn’t know about it, because it was strategy—basic strategy that goes all the way to the top. Higher than him, even,” the Justice Department official said. As Bernstein hung up, the phrase struck him: There were at a maximum two or three people who were “higher” than Mitchell—perhaps Ehrlichman, definitely Haldeman, and definitely the president. Was the president of the United States the head ratfucker?

The identity of Woodward’s source remained a mystery to the other editors and reporters on the Watergate chase; Woodward called him simply “my friend.” Finally, managing editor Howard Simons nicknamed him “Deep Throat,” a reference both to the source’s insistence on operating on “deep background” and to the then popular pornographic film of the same name that celebrated a character’s wide-open mouth. Making sense of the Segretti story was precisely the type of lead where Deep Throat seemed useful, and so Sunday night, October 8, Woodward arranged to meet with Mark Felt in person. On the way, Woodward switched cabs twice and was dropped off several blocks away from their parking garage rendezvous location. When he arrived around 1:30 a.m., Felt was already standing there, smoking. They talked straight through until morning, a conversation that finally allowed Woodward to grasp the full scope of the story he had been chasing. “Remember, you don’t do those 1,500 [FBI] interviews and not have something on your hands other than a single break-in,” Felt pointed out. “They are not brilliant guys, and it got out of hand.”

payments from a secret Nixon campaign cash fund, according to federal investigators and accounts of sworn testimony before the Watergate grand

waved the notes from Lano’s Monday-night conversation with Bernstein at the FBI agent. “I’ll deny everything,” Lano said angrily. “I can’t even be seen talking to you two bastards.” He added a final “Fuck you” before walking away. Down the hall, the reporters spotted prosecutor Don Campbell and confronted him.VII Campbell angrily read over the notes of Lano’s conversation and stalked off, reminding the reporters that it was against the law to monitor a conversation across state lines (Woodward had been listening in on Bernstein’s conversation on another extension without

Post’s missteps on the Haldeman “scoop” reaffirmed its decision to stay out of Watergate. As D.C. Bureau Chief Max Frankel said later, “They were

“At first it was called the Watergate caper,” Cronkite began. “Five men apparently caught in the act of burglarizing and bugging Democratic headquarters in Washington. But the episode grew steadily more sinister: No longer a caper but the Watergate affair, escalating finally into charges of a high-level campaign of political sabotage and espionage, apparently unparalleled in American history.”

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.