All the President's Men (28 page)

The reporters told him about Bernstein’s telephone conversation with the agent concerning Haldeman. Both had been on the line. Woodward showed him the typed notes.

The man read them hurriedly. They could see his anger building. “You realize that it’s against the law for one person to monitor a call that goes across a state line,” he told them.

The reporters said they would readily accept the consequences if they had violated the law. But the immediate issue was Haldeman and whether they had been wrong.

The superior marched off without saying another word.

In a few minutes, the agent came rushing down the hall toward the reporters. “I’m ordering you two to stay in this building,” he said, pointing and waving a finger in the air. “You’re not to leave.”

As he went racing off, Bernstein and Woodward agreed that the agent had no authority to order them to stay in the building unless he arrested them. They decided they had better call Sussman and get some advice. Woodward thought it might be a good idea to get a lawyer to join them.

They walked out of the building to a pay phone across the street and called Sussman. He suggested that they return to the
Post,
observing that it was absurd that the agent should order them around. “Did he arrest you?” Sussman asked. Bernstein said no. Rosenfeld was on the
line too, calling the agent various names and saying they would teach him not to dick around with the
Washington Post.

The reporters decided to ignore the advice and went back to the agent’s boss. Maybe there was a way to straighten it out. He was in his office. A secretary admitted them at once. The boss sat behind a large desk; the agent stood next to him. His superior ordered the agent to leave. “Now, exactly what is this all about?” he asked as the door closed.

Unless they could determine the accuracy or inaccuracy of the Haldeman story, they might have to use the name of any source who had knowingly misled them. They were obliged to defend themselves. They wanted to know if the agent had purposely given them false information.

More important, Bernstein said, they had to know
how
they had made such a mistake. They still did not understand. Was Haldeman one of the five, or wasn’t he? Had Sloan said he was, or hadn’t he? They thought that their problem was not the substance of the report, but the mention of Sloan’s grand-jury testimony.

“We’re not discussing the case,” the boss said.

The reporters tried again. If they were wrong, a correction and an apology were required. Whom should they apologize to? What should they say?

“You’re getting no answers from here,” the man said.

Half an hour later, the reporters were in Bradlee’s office again, with Sussman, Rosenfeld and Simons.

“What happened?” Bradlee asked, leaning over his desk and extending upturned hands toward Bernstein and Woodward. They explained that they still did not know.

Woodward observed that they had the option of naming their sources because any agreement with a source was broken if he had given bad information. Rosenfeld was unsure. Bernstein was against it.

Bradlee signaled for quiet. “You’re not even sure whether you’ve got it right or wrong.” He was agitated, but displayed no anger. “Suppose you name sources—they’ll just deny it and then where are you? Look, fellas, we don’t name our sources. We’re not going to start doing that.”

Bernstein felt relieved. Rosenfeld looked dispirited, but stayed
calm. He suggested going back to each one, talking with Deep Throat and Sloan and anyone else they could find. Then, in a day or two, they could see where they were.

The reporters said they were virtually certain that Sloan must not have given testimony about Haldeman before the grand jury. Woodward suggested writing that much, at least, and acknowledging their error.

Bradlee grimaced. “You don’t know where you are. You haven’t got the facts. Hold your water for a while. I don’t know whether we should believe Sloan’s attorney even now. We’re going to wait to see how this shakes out.”

Bradlee then turned to his typewriter to write a statement for all the news organizations that had been calling that afternoon for a comment. The two-ply paper flew through his typewriter and onto the floor like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie. After a number of false starts, he issued the following statement: “We stand by our story.”
*

•   •   •

Bernstein and Woodward sat tight and didn’t do a story for the next day. But others did. Many papers which had not carried the Haldeman story gave prominent notice to the White House’s denial. Ben Bagdikian later wrote in the
Columbia Journalism Review
that “the first information readers of the
Chicago Tribune
received of the
Post’s
Haldeman story was not the morning it broke  . . . but the next day on page 7, under the headline ‘Ziegler Denounces Post Spy Stories, Denies Link.’ ”

Peter Osnos, who had recently returned to Washington from a tour as the
Post’s
Vietnam correspondent, put together a front-page story on the statement by Sloan’s attorney and the White House denial.

At 8:45
P.M
., Bernstein finally reached Hugh Sloan by telephone. Bernstein explained their dilemma: they realized they were in error, but they weren’t sure where.

Sloan was sympathetic. “The problem is that I do not agree with your conclusions as you wrote them.”

* He was later to recall: “I issued two statements in that one year—both on Watergate. . . . Geez, what options did I really have? By this time I was up the river with these two reporters. I can remember sitting down at the typewriter and writing about thirty statements and then sort of saying, ‘Fuck it, let’s go stand by our boys.’ ”

Haldeman had indeed controlled the fund, but the matter had not come up in the grand jury, right?

“Bob Haldeman’s name has never come up in my interviews with the grand jury. Our denial is strictly limited to your story. It just isn’t factually true. I never said it before the grand jury. I was never asked. I’m not trying to influence your pursuit of the story. The denial was strictly low-key, purposely low-key.”

Sloan’s message seemed clear, though not explicit. Haldeman had controlled the fund; the matter had not come up during his grand-jury testimony. Either the reporters had misunderstood what Sloan had told them about the grand jury earlier that week or Sloan had misinterpreted their question.

The telephone conversation with Sloan was at least a hopeful sign; if the reporters could re-establish beyond any doubt that Haldeman controlled the fund, and could explain the error, their credibility might not be totally destroyed. Bernstein and Woodward were exhausted. They tried to analyze the steps that had led them to such a monumental blunder.

They had assumed too much. Persuaded by their sources, and by their own deductions, that Haldeman loomed behind “Watergate,” they had grasped a slim reed—the secret fund. The decision had some justification. The Nixon campaign’s cash had been the tangible key that had unlocked the secret activities. But they had taken shortcuts once they had themselves come to be convinced that Haldeman controlled the fund. They had heard what they wanted to hear. The night Sloan confirmed that Haldeman was one of the five, they had not even asked whether Haldeman had exercised his authority, whether he had actually approved any payments. They had not asked Sloan specifically what he had been asked before the grand jury, or what his response had been. Once Sloan mentioned the magic words, they had left and not called back. They had not asked him to say it again, to be sure they understood each other. In dealing with the FBI agent, they had compounded their mistakes. Bernstein’s questioning had been perfunctory. He should have attempted to get the agent to mention the name himself, in his own context. If the agent had failed to do so, then the confirmation route might have been acceptable. The Haldeman-Ehrlichman mix-up should have served as a warning that the agent might have been saying more than he knew. Bernstein’s ruse of accusing
the FBI of ineptitude in order to provoke the agent had been bad judgment. Bernstein had not dealt with the agent enough to know how reliable he was, or how he would react.

They had realized that confronting the agent’s boss was unethical as soon as they had done it. They had endangered the agent’s career, betrayed his trust and risked their credibility with other sources.

There were other miscalculations. Bernstein should not have used the silent confirm-or-hang-up method with the Justice Department lawyer. The instructions were too complicated. (Indeed, they learned, the attorney had gotten the instructions backward and had meant to warn them off the story.) With Deep Throat, Woodward had placed too much faith in a code for confirmation, instead of accepting only a clear statement.

•   •   •

The next afternoon, October 26, several hours after Henry Kissinger met with the press in the White House to declare that “peace is at hand” in Southeast Asia, Clark MacGregor entered the Washington studios of the National Public Affairs Center for Television to be interviewed. From the administration’s point of view, it was a perfect opportunity to adjust its public posture to hard realities and correct some of the misstatements that might haunt the White House later, particularly since anything MacGregor said would be overshadowed by Kissinger’s announcement.

MacGregor confirmed the existence of a CRP cash fund for clandestine activities, though he quarreled with the term “secret” and insisted that disbursements from the fund had not knowingly been spent for illegal activities. He maintained that the money in Stans’ safe had been used to determine if there were organized efforts to sabotage Nixon’s primary campaign. He named five persons who had authorized or received payments: Mitchell, Stans, Magruder, Porter and Liddy.

MacGregor’s remarks seemed to salvage some of the credibility the reporters had lost in the Haldeman debacle. The day before, Ziegler had denied the fund’s existence.

Bradlee ruled it off page one, which already had another Watergate story. “That would look like we’re grinding it in on their day of peace
at-hand,” Bradlee told Woodward, who had been lobbying for the front page.

The
New York Times
put the MacGregor story on page one, adding a significant fact. Sworn testimony by individuals connected with the Nixon committee, the
Times
reported, showed that cash disbursements of $900,000 had been made from the fund.

•   •   •

That morning, Woodward had moved the red-flagged flower pot on his balcony. He knew this would be the grimmest meeting ever with Deep Throat.

When he got home at about 9:00
P.M
., Woodward made himself an Ovaltine milk shake and fell asleep reading. He did not awaken until 1:30
A.M
. Angry at being late, he considered driving, then rejected the idea as too risky. He and Bernstein had already been incautious once too often.

Woodward put on warm clothes and dashed down the back stairs and into the alley. He walked 15 blocks, found a cab and made it to the parking garage shortly before 3:00
A.M
. Deep Throat was waiting in a dark corner, huddled against the wall.

The reporters needed help badly, Woodward told him, then spilled out all of his feelings of uncertainty, confusion, regret and anger. He talked for 15 or 20 minutes.

Deep Throat asked an occasional question, and appeared to be deeply concerned-—more sad than remorseful. Woodward wanted him to know how desperate their situation was. The mistake had jeopardized all of their earlier reporting, he believed. The stories had been building. Eventually the White House would have had to yield. Now the pressure was off the White House because the burden of proof had shifted back to the
Post.

“Well, Haldeman slipped away from you,” Deep Throat stated. He kicked his heel at the garage wall, making no attempt to hide his disappointment. The entire story would never become known now; the Haldeman error had sealed the lid.

Deep Throat moved closed to Woodward. “Let me explain something,” he said. “When you move on somebody like Haldeman, you’ve got to be sure you’re on the most solid ground. Shit, what a royal screw-up!”

He stepped even closer, speaking in a whisper. “I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t know, but your essential facts are right. From top to bottom, this whole business is a Haldeman operation. He ran the money. Insulated himself through those functionaries around him. Now, how do you get at it?”

Deep Throat described the Haldeman operation. “This guy is bright and can be smooth when necessary  . . . but most of the time he is not smooth. He is Assistant President and everyone has access to him if they want to take it. He sends out the orders; he can be very nasty about it.”

Haldeman had four principal assistants to whom he delegated orders but not responsibility: Lawrence Higby—“a young-punk nobody who does what he is told”; Chapin—“smarter and more urbane than Higby, also a dedicated yes-man”; Strachan—“soldierly and capable”; and Alexander Butterfield—“an ex-Air Force colonel who knows how to push paper and people.”

“Everybody goes chicken after you make a mistake like you guys made,” Deep Throat continued. “It contributes to the myth of Haldeman invincibility, adds to the fortress. It looks like he really stuck it in your eye, secretly pulling the strings to get even the
Washington Post
to fuck it up.”

The story had been “the worst possible setback. You’ve got people feeling sorry for Haldeman. I didn’t think that was possible.”

Deep Throat stamped his foot. “A conspiracy like this  . . . a conspiracy investigation  . . . the rope has to tighten slowly around everyone’s neck. You build convincingly from the outer edges in, you get ten times the evidence you need against the Hunts and Liddys. They feel hopelessly finished—they may not talk right away, but the grip is on them. Then you move up and do the same thing at the next level. If you shoot too high and miss, then everybody feels more secure. Lawyers work this way. I’m sure smart reporters must, too. You’ve put the investigation back months. It puts everyone on the defensive—editors, FBI agents, everybody has to go into a crouch after this.”