All the President's Men (23 page)

As the
Washington Post
reporter has described it, the story is based entirely on hearsay and is fundamentally inaccurate. For example, I do not know, have never met, seen or talked to E. Howard Hunt. I have known Donald Segretti since college days, but I did not meet with him in Florida as the story suggests, and I certainly have never discussed with him any phase of the grand jury proceedings in the Watergate case. Beyond that, I don’t propose to have any further comment.

Chapin, busily answering charges that had not been leveled against him, ignored the main point: that he was Segretti’s contact. “Fundamentally inaccurate” was employed much as “collection of absurdities” had been to describe the initial Segretti-espionage-sabotage story. Along with the old “hearsay” red herring.

The “hearsay” charge rankled. The
Post
had a sworn statement from Larry Young.

At 9:00
P.M
., when Bernstein sat down to write, he had three versions of the Young interviews—his own, Woodward’s and Meyers’. The clutter on his desk was hopeless, so he moved to three vacant desks near his own and laid out five yards of notes. By 7:00
A.M
., he had 15 pages which quoted extensively from Young. Only the biographical details on Chapin remained to be written.

He flopped down on a couch in the sports department and got less than two hours of uncomfortable sleep before being awakened by a copy aide. Bernstein wanted the story to be completed early so it could be reviewed by Rosenfeld, Simons and Bradlee without any last-minute hassles. He had looked through the library at the
Post
for more background on Chapin. There was only one half-page handout, issued by the 1968 Nixon campaign organization. It said that Chapin had been graduated from USC, and had worked for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency under Bob Haldeman. Bernstein added details from Meyers’ notes.

At about 9:30
A.M
., he called the former administration official
he had talked to the week after the Watergate arrests. The man knew Chapin well. “If Dwight has anything to do with this, it means Haldeman,” he said. Chapin was no self-starter. “He does what two people tell him to do: Haldeman and Nixon.”

Woodward and Sussman arrived at the office that Saturday at about 10:00
A.M
. and began going over Bernstein’s draft. There was no problem with the lead; it was the same as read to the White House:

President Nixon’s appointments secretary and an ex-White House aide indicted in the Watergate bugging case both served as “contacts” in a spying and sabotage operation against the Democrats, a California attorney has said in a sworn statement.

Sussman was concerned that the top section of the draft did not adequately stress Chapin’s position in the White House, that it conveyed the impression that he was merely some flunkey calendar-keeper who worked out of a closet. He typed out a new second paragraph:

The appointments secretary, Dwight L. Chapin, 31, meets almost daily with the President. As the person in charge of Mr. Nixon’s schedule and appointments, including overall coordination of trips, Chapin is one of a handful of White House staff members with easy access to the President.

Bernstein was pleased with the addition. But he protested when the next paragraph, describing Chapin as a functionary who responded to orders from Haldeman, was struck from the draft.

Anger turned to anguish when the following paragraph was struck—an observation that Larry Young’s description of the Newport Beach lawyer who allegedly paid Segretti “appears to fit Herbert W. Kalmbach, the President’s personal attorney and former deputy finance chairman of the Nixon campaign.”

Woodward had tried to reach Kalmbach on Friday and been told by Kalmbach’s secretary that no member of the firm would comment to reporters on anything. Now Bernstein was prepared to argue strenuously, but Woodward joined the editors and said he preferred to kill the paragraph until Kalmbach was contacted, or until another source specifically identified Kalmbach as Segretti’s paymaster. Bernstein conceded that they should be able to confirm Kalmbach’s tie to
Segretti within a few days, as well as to identify the President’s lawyer as one of five persons with overall control of the secret funds that had financed the campaign of espionage and sabotage.

A new paragraph was added, quoting Young as saying that the money for Segretti’s activities, including a $20,000 annual salary, was paid from a “trust account in a lawyer’s name  . . . a highly-placed friend of the President, and [that Segretti] was instructed to guard that name zealously.”

Despite the deletions, the story—headlined “Key Nixon Aide Named as ‘Sabotage’ Contact”—broke new ground. Almost four months after the break-in at Democratic headquarters, the spreading stain of Watergate had finally seeped into the White House.

8

B
ERNSTEIN HAD LEFT
Washington Saturday night to spend the rest of the weekend in the Virginia countryside, horseback riding. When Woodward awoke Sunday, the radio news was quoting the
Post
story, as well as a press release from
Time
magazine dealing with the Segretti-Chapin connection:
Time’s
story was better than the
Post’s
in some respects. Though it was based on anonymous government sources and lacked any personal account such as Young’s, it had several additional details: Chapin had hired Segretti—not merely served as his “contact.” Another USC alumnus, Gordon Strachan, the political aide to Haldeman, also had a hand in hiring his old classmate. Segretti had been paid more than $35,000 by Herbert W. Kalmbach, the President’s lawyer.

Woodward, his Sunday shot to hell by
Time
magazine—not for the first nor the last time, he was sure—went to the office and started working the telephone.

Late in the afternoon, he reached a Justice Department attorney whose overriding interest seemed to be getting back to the television set to watch a football game. He hurriedly confirmed that Kalmbach was indeed the paymaster for Segretti’s secret activities. Woodward didn’t even have time to ask him about Gordon Strachan.

Woodward called Hugh Sloan. Working around the edges, the two talked for a few minutes about Kalmbach’s role in the campaign. Kalmbach had resigned as deputy finance chairman on April 7, the date the new campaign finance disclosure law took effect. Until
Maurice Stans resigned as Secretary of Commerce, Kalmbach had been in charge of fund-raising for the President’s re-election, although Stans was doing political work while still at Commerce. There was very little about the financial side of the Nixon campaign that Kalmbach did not know, Sloan said, even after he resigned his position.

Then Kalmbach had to be one of the five persons with authority to approve disbursements from the secret stash in Stans’ safe, Woodward suggested.

“Well, yes,” Sloan said. “But he had some of the money in California.”

The money from Stans’ safe?

It was all really one cash fund, whether it was in California or Washington, Sloan said; it had all showed up on the same burned books. It was a Special Projects fund.

For espionage and political sabotage?

“That’s what it was, but I didn’t know it at the time,” said Sloan. He responded with resignation, off-handedly, like a patient recounting a bad dream to a psychiatrist for the fourth time.

Kalmbach had distributed other money from the fund, far in excess of the amount received by Segretti, Sloan said. But he would not disclose how much or to whom. “The cash fund seems to be at the center of this,” he understated.

Woodward called Bernstein in the country and filled him in. Bernstein agreed that Kalmbach’s control over the fund was more important than the payments to Segretti and should lead the story Woodward would write. It would also include the
Time
material on Strachan, which Woodward had been unable to confirm.

This time, the White House did not trouble to comment, and the next day’s front page of the
Washington Post
carried a two-column head above Herbert Kalmbach’s picture: “Lawyer for Nixon Said to Have Used GOP’s Spy Fund.”

Woodward had taken time out to watch John D. Ehrlichman’s appearance on ABC-TV’s
Issues and Answers.
On TV, Ehrlichman resembled a snarling prune, he thought, one eyebrow cocked high, the other low. He was saying that everything in the papers about the Nixon campaign’s program of political espionage and sabotage involved “a lot of charges, not much proof, not any proof. . . .” He suggested that the McGovern campaign was somehow responsible for
the allegations which people were reading in their newspapers and hearing on television.

Reminding the audience that the election was only three weeks away, Ehrlichman said this was the “mud month,” when political charges would be thrown around. He was not personally aware of any campaign of political espionage mounted by Republicans in or out of the administration, he said; certainly nobody in the White House had known anything about Watergate in advance. He couldn’t “affirm or deny” the charge that Chapin was involved with Segretti. But, he added, it was important to distinguish between the Watergate bugging, which “involves a crime,” and such activities as “finding out what the other fellow’s schedule is.” Political pranks, said Ehrlichman, that kind of thing, “has been in American politics as long as I can remember.”

Woodward and Bernstein concluded that Ehrlichman was perhaps the only high White House aide clean enough on Watergate to be safely trotted out before the TV cameras. Haldeman sure as hell couldn’t be sent out—not after the Chapin story. Both felt certain that Ehrlichman’s appearance signaled that he was clear. Maybe Deep Throat had been wrong when he said Ehrlichman had ordered Howard Hunt out of town.

•   •   •

Ehrlichman’s remarks on television were a mild prelude. The Chapin connection had brought Watergate to the doors of the Oval Office. Now the White House was ready to fight back. Although
Time
had developed information as damaging as the
Washington Post’s,
the paper had been selected as the target.

It began with Ron Ziegler’s White House briefing the next morning, October 16.

“Mr. Chapin has made a comment on that, and I don’t have anything to add to it,” Ziegler responded to the first question concerning the Segretti connection.

Q
UESTION
: “Is the President concerned about the report?”

Z
IEGLER
: “The President is concerned about the technique being applied by the opposition in the stories themselves. I would say his concern goes to the fact that stories are being run that are based on hearsay, innuendo, guilt by association.”

Q
UESTION
: “Who is the opposition?”

Z
IEGLER
: “Well, I think the opposition is clear. You know, since the Watergate case broke, people have been trying to link the case with the White House  . . . and no link has been established  . . . because no link exists. Since that time the opposition has been making charges which are not substantiated, stories have been written which are not substantiated, stories have been written that are based upon hearsay and on sources that will not reveal themselves, and all of this is being intermingled into an allegation that this administration, as the opposition points out, is corrupt. . . . That is what I am referring to and I am not going to comment on that type of story.”

Q
UESTION
: “Why don’t you deny the charges?”

Z
IEGLER
: “I am not going to dignify these types of stories with a comment  . . . it goes without saying that this administration does not condone sabotage or espionage or surveillance of individuals, but it also does not condone innuendo or source stories that make broad sweeping charges about the character of individuals.”

The White House had decided that the conduct of the press, not the conduct of the President’s men, was the issue.

“The President has confidence in Mr. Chapin,” Ziegler concluded.

Speaking to an assembly of black Republicans at a downtown Washington hotel that afternoon, Senator Bob Dole, the Republican national chairman, delivered three pages of prepared remarks designed to link the
Post’s
investigative reporting with the failing fortunes of Senator McGovern’s campaign. Less restrained than Ziegler, Dole got right to the point:

For the last week, the Republican Party has been the victim of a barrage of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations by George McGovern and his partner-in-mud-slinging, the
Washington Post.
Given the present straits in which the McGovern campaign finds itself, Mr. McGovern appears to have turned over the franchise for his media attack campaign to the editors of the
Washington Post,
who have shown themselves every bit as sure-footed along the low road of this campaign as their candidate.

While wire service stories on Dole’s and Ziegler’s statements piled up, the reporters were told that Clark MacGregor, Mitchell’s successor as director of the Nixon campaign, had scheduled a 5:00
P.M
. press
conference to discuss the latest charges of political espionage and sabotage. Both reporters hated press conferences and rarely attended them, but Bernstein decided to go to this one. He had never seen MacGregor and wanted to find out if his reputation of being open with reporters was deserved. When Bernstein arrived in the large conference room at CRP headquarters shortly before five, an unusually large crowd of about 100 reporters was waiting.

MacGregor entered the room from the rear and walked up the middle aisle. He is a big man, six foot three inches, about 210 pounds. Arriving at the lectern, he grabbed both sides of it and gave a halfhearted smile. Because of the “unusual developments of the past few days,” MacGregor said, he would be unable to answer any questions.

Clark Mollenhoff, six foot four inches and 230 pounds, Washington bureau chief of the Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate, rose, his face contorted in anger. Mollenhoff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, had briefly served at the White House as resident ombudsman charged with keeping things honest. MacGregor and Mollenhoff looked like two giants getting ready to lay clubs on each other.