The Boys on the Bus (40 page)

Wooten’s best story, however, was an impressionistic description of a day in Palm Springs, a story that did more to explain the Agnew appeal than any analysis or survey. Wooten had risen around five one morning, to drive out to the edge of town and watch a desert sunrise, which he had never seen before. Coming back, he stopped for breakfast in a diner with a name he found irresistible, the Cozy Cafe. After a half-hour of eavesdropping, Wooten finally tuned in on the conversation on which he based his piece. The article began: “At the Cozy Cafe, early this morning, some of the fellows were drinking their first coffee of the day from thick, chipped mugs and bemoaning the fact that they weren’t rich.”

Wooten quoted some conversation among three working men:

“ ‘All the man here wants is to live like Sinatra, right?’

“Howard nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘or maybe like Spiro.’

“Lou scoffed, semiseriously. ‘Come on, Howie,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to dream bigger than that. I mean, Agnew don’t have no money—no real money, if you know what I mean. Hell, he’s just staying out at Frank’s place. He’s just a guest.’

“Howard glanced at his watch, picked up his change and pushed his chair away from the table. ‘Maybe so, Lou,’ he said as he stood up. ‘But he’s there, ain’t he. Anytime he wants, he’s there.’ ”

Later in the article, Wooten described a golf game that included Agnew, Sinatra, Bob Hope, and Jack Benny. It was a perfect understated portrait of square decadence. Then he flashed back to the Cozy Cafe for his tag:

“ ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Jimmie. ‘Yeah, I’d settle for Agnew’s life, I guess.’

“ ‘Me too,’ said Lou, ‘As long as I could stay at Frank’s place.’ ”

Wooten had worked on the article for almost eight hours, rewriting it three or four times, and he took great pride in the fact that the article had “said something without actually saying
it.” Which was the trick of getting controversial pieces past the copy desk at the
Times
.

Although Wooten didn’t know it, he could have found similar attitudes much closer than the Cozy Cafe. Just up the aisle on the press plane was a member of the press corps, a good and sincere man, who later showed me his personal journal of the Agnew trip. Here, in part, is the entry for October 31:

In the end, Nixon’s 1972 non-campaign was a triumph of public relations. Agnew was calm and conciliatory. The President was Presidential. Peace was at hand. The press had become too weak, frightened, and demoralized to try to dent the Administration’s handsome veneer. There was only one problem. A small crack in the veneer had appeared in June and was rapidly growing into a fissure. Through this crack one could catch glimpses of the inside of the White House and see how the Administration really worked. The Watergate case brought in a small flock of new reporters, tough investigative types who were not about to be put off by Ronald Ziegler and his wonderful public relations machine. They studied the crack in the veneer like archeologists
poring over a hieroglyph, and they slowly began to piece together the real story of the Nixon campaign.

At first, the case made very little sense to anybody in the press. How could you explain the fact that five men in rubber gloves, all of them formerly involved in anti-Castro causes, had broken into the headquarters of the Democratic Party to install bugging devices? Who were they working for? Could it have been the bizarre, “third-rate burglary” the Administration claimed it was, and nothing more?

As late as October 5, Jack Nelson and Ron Ostrow of the Los Angeles
Times
, two of the best investigative reporters in the business, wrote resignedly that “Justice Department officials involved in the investigation have said that the real motivation for the bizarre incident may never emerge.” Five days later, it did. On October 10, two young Washington
Post
reporters named Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward revealed that the Watergate break-in “stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s reelection and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.” The campaign, they said, had been going on for many months and was aimed at destroying the candidacies of major Democratic contenders.

Had it not been for the
Post
’s determination to make sense of the Watergate, the courts and the Senate might not have been moved to explore the ugly ramifications of the break-in. And the
Post
might not have succeeded in cracking the case if the assignment had not gone to Bernstein and Woodward. They were both highly motivated, and it was said that their motivation sprang from desperation as much as from ambition. In June 1972, neither one of them seemed to be getting very far at the
Post
. Woodward, twenty-nine, was a handsome, soft-spoken, neatly dressed Midwesterner, a former Young Republican who had gone to Yale and spent five years in the Navy. During his nine months at the
Post
, he had done minor investigative stories and earned a reputation as a tireless worker, the office
grind. But many of his colleagues claimed that he couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag.

Carl Bernstein, twenty-eight, was a native Washingtonian with dark disheveled hair and an agressive, gregarious manner. A former copy boy for the Washington
Star
, he had dropped out of the University of Maryland at nineteen to become a full-time reporter. He had been on the
Post
for six years, covering courts, police headquarters, city hall, and doing some investigative stories. His rise on the paper had abruptly slowed down one afternoon when the city editor caught him napping on a couch in the District Building’s pressroom. Now he was the Virginia political correspondent, one of the least exciting positions on the paper. His career, like Woodward’s, needed a boost. But they were both on the metropolitan staff, and most of the best stories—the front-page articles about the government and politics—went to the national staff. Then came Watergate. As a local crime story, it was given to the metro staff. Since Bernstein and Woodward had some experience in investigative reporting, they received the assignment. They jumped on the Watergate story as if it were the last train to salvation.

“You know,” a veteran reporter at the
Post
said later, “if that story had been given to our national staff, we probably would have lost it. These were two city-side guys with nothing to lose and they just Worked their asses off.”

If they found out more information about the Watergate case than anyone else, it was because they worked harder. Woodward had recently been divorced and Bernstein was separated from his wife, waiting for a divorce to come through. So, unlike many reporters, they were not settled into a cozy suburban existence with family obligations and a keen desire to leave the office by six o’clock. They worked twelve to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Often, they did not leave the office until three in the morning. In four months they contacted over a thousand people.

Two months after the election, I had supper with Bernstein and Woodward in the darkwood, Tudor dining room of the
Hay-Adams hotel. Earlier in the year, Ben Bradlee, the
Post
’s executive editor, had forbidden them to talk about their work, but now they could talk about it in general terms. For investigative journalists, they looked surprisingly dapper in their suits and ties. Having become friends over the course of the investigation, they often finished each other’s sentences.

How did they get their stories?

“People seem to have a conception of our sources as the classic Jack Anderson leaker-who-mails-documents-in-the-night,” Woodward said with a smile. “But our sources weren’t like that.”

They used sources in the FBI, the Justice Department, and even the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), but none of these sources was a leak. Bernstein and Woodward got their information through the tedious, time-honored methods of investigative reporting: get a piece of information and then use it to pry loose more information.

“Some of the sources,” said Bernstein, “are responsible people who have no ax to grind but know that we have a piece of the story and want to help make the story accurate. We’d say to somebody, ‘Well, we know this fund existed—but suppose it all went for legitimate use?’

“And he’d say, ‘Well, if it all went for legitimate use, why did so-and-so get X thousand dollars to go for such-and-such a thing?’

“You knock on a lot of doors and you make a lot of phone calls, and people put you on to other people,” Bernstein went on.

“We started a policy of going to visit people in the evening without phoning them first,” said Woodward.

“Nine times out of ten, people wouldn’t let us in the door,” said Bernstein. “But sometimes it worked. The theory was that there were a lot of people who worked in places where the last thing in the world they would want was a visit from somebody named Woodward or Bernstein. And if you call them on the phone, they’re gonna say no.”

“But instead you show up at their homes and show that you’re
well-dressed and civilized …” said Woodward.

“And you convince them that you’re interested in the truth and not in any preconceptions,” added Bernstein. “You tell them that if you’ve been in error, they’re in a position to show you where you went wrong. We didn’t think we were in error very often, but it’s an effective introduction.”

“Some people let us in for an hour and told us absolutely nothing,” said Woodward.

“Sometimes,” said Bernstein, “you wouldn’t learn anything substantial from the source, but you’d learn something about how a certain office worked. It all added up.”

They pieced the mosaic together bit by bit. At the beginning, they did not even know what they were looking for, and they arrived at the picture of a massive sabotage campaign only after compiling countless scraps of seemingly meaningless information. Although
Newsday
,
The New York Times
, the Los Angeles
Times
and
Time
magazine all contributed valuable information to the Watergate story, the bulk of the story emerged in seven watershed articles by Bernstein and Woodward. In barest outline, here is what the articles said:

—August 1. A story researched mainly by Bernstein reported that a check for $25,000, given to Maurice Stans, the finance chairman of the Nixon campaign, by Kenneth Dahlberg, the campaign finance chairman for the Midwest, had later ended up in the Florida bank account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the Watergate burglars. This was the first article to show a definite financial link between the Committee to Re-elect the President and the Watergate bugging.

—September 16. Bernstein and Woodward revealed that the money that paid for the Watergate bugging had come from a “secret fund” of more than $300,000. The fund had been kept in the safe of Nixon’s chief fund raiser, Maurice Stans, and was controlled by principal aides of former campaign manager John Mitchell.

—September 17. Bernstein and Woodward reported that two officials of the Committee to Re-elect the President, Jeb Magruder
and Herbert Porter, had each withdrawn $50,000 from the secret fund.

—September 29. John Mitchell had personally controlled the secret fund, Bernstein and Woodward reported.

(In the course of writing this story, Bernstein phoned a CREEP campaign official for comment and received one of the non-denials which the Nixon people were so adept at constructing. So he decided to phone Mitchell himself. Sitting at his metal desk, which was decorated with photographs of Tricia’s wedding and Martha Mitchell dressed as Catherine the Great, Bernstein reached Mitchell in New York at 11:25
P
.
M
. After apologizing for calling at so late an hour, Bernstein told Mitchell the gist of the story the
Post
was about to run.

“All that crap, you’re putting it all in the paper?” said Mitchell. “It’s all been denied. Jesus. Katie Graham [Katharine Graham, the publisher of the
Post
] is going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ, that’s the most sickening thing I’ve ever heard.”

Then Bernstein told Mitchell that the Committee to Re-elect the President had issued a statement on the matter.

“Did the Committee say that you could go ahead and publish that story?” Mitchell asked, as if CREEP had some sort of veto power over newspapers. “You fellows got a great ball game going. As soon as you’re through paying Ed Williams [Edward Bennet Williams, attorney for both the
Post
and the Democratic party], we’re going to do a story on all of you!” Like many people around Washington, Mitchell mistakenly believed that Bernstein and Woodward were getting all of their information from Williams, who was handling the Democrats’ Watergate lawsuit.