The Boys on the Bus (41 page)

The
Post
published Mitchell’s response, omitting his reference to Katharine Graham’s anatomy.)

—October 10. Bernstein and Woodward reported that the Watergate bugging incident was only one part of a massive Republican spying and sabotage campaign that had been going on since 1971. The article detailed the activities of one of the saboteurs, Donald H. Segretti, and charged that Ken Clawson,
a White House aide, had forged a letter accusing Edmund Muskie of condoning a racial slur on Franco-Americans. The celebrated “Canuck letter” had been published in February by the Manchester
Union Leader
and had hurt Muskie in the New Hampshire primary.

—October 15. Bernstein and Woodward reported that Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary and one of his closest aides, had been Donald H. Segretti’s contact in the White House. The story was based on a signed statement from a lawyer who knew Segretti.

—October 25. The team reported that H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, Nixon’s closest aide, was one of five “high-ranking presidential associates” authorized to make payments from the secret fund.

Each of these articles contained revelations that should have been devastating. Bernstein and Woodward had, after all, traced a plot to sabotage the Democratic party right into the inner sanctums of the White House. Yet somehow the Watergate affair failed to “sink in;” its sinister implications never registered on the public’s imagination. A Gallup poll taken around the time of the election found that 48 percent of the American public had never heard of the Watergate affair, and most of the rest didn’t care about it.

During the fall campaign, George McGovern’s staffers kept hoping that the
Post
’s progressively more spectacular disclosures on the Watergate affair would destroy Nixon at the polls. But Bernstein and Woodward never had any illusions that their articles would turn the election around.

“We knew where we were getting the information, where it was locked up, where and if it might come out,” Woodward said at the Hay-Adams in January. “And we were quite convinced that maybe it never would come out, that this was something that would go unproven and hang like a black cloud. Like the ITT affair. If you asked the average American about the ITT, he would say, yes, it seemed to smell bad, but he didn’t know exactly what was illegal or what was wrong. It was the same way with Watergate.”

“Also, it was a very complicated thing for the reader to
grasp,” Bernstein added. In the weeks after the election, Bernstein and Woodward lamented the fact that they had never found time to write one comprehensive story on the Watergate, pulling together all their findings to produce a clear narrative. They were sorry, too, that they had not had a better understanding of the inner structure of the White House.

“If we had known then what we know now about the White House,” Bernstein said in January, “a lot of what we were writing would have made much more sense to us and our readers, and it would have taken us a good deal farther. For instance, we found out very early that Haldeman was one of those who had authority to disburse funds from the secret fund—and that turned out to be the link that we made between Haldeman and whatever dirty tricks were going on. But in fact, there were much more substantive links. And eventually, when we began to see how the White House operated, we began to perceive that this whole thing was a Haldeman operation.”

“And then,” said Woodward, “we got somebody at the Justice Department to say, ‘Yeah, this whole damn thing is a Haldeman operation.’ ”
^*

“You simply had to find out how the White House worked,” said Bernstein. “And you had to find out that the Committee for the Re-election of the President had nothing to do with the Republican National Committee, but was wholly a creation of the White House; and that the people in the key positions at the Committee for the Re-election of the President were former members of Haldeman’s staff and Justice Department people who had worked with Mitchell. That was the key.

“If we’d understood the White House set-up, we could have found people to talk to, perhaps. Like anywhere else, there are factions in the White House. If we had understood something about the allegiances that had developed in the White House, I think we would have had access to more information.”

The two reporters learned these things painfully and slowly because nobody they consulted in the White House press corps knew anything about the inner workings of the White House. For instance, when
Time
reported in its October 23 issue that a White House aide named Gordon Strachan had helped to hire Donald H. Segretti, Bernstein and Woodward tried to find out more about Strachan’s role.

“We could find out about Strachan from the time he was born through the time when he knew Segretti, right up to the time he went to the White House,” said Bernstein. “After that, we couldn’t find out a damn thing about the guy. Nobody we asked in the White House press corps had even
heard
of him. This guy Strachan was Haldeman’s
chief political aide
, he was the liaison for Haldeman to the Committee to Re-elect the President, and they didn’t even know the guy’s name. The problem was that this Administration had never been reported from the inside by anyone in any really coherent fashion—with the possible exception of John Osborne. It wasn’t entirely the reporters’ fault because that place is impregnable—you can’t even get a White House phone directory without going through some extraordinary measures. But what I’m saying is that if we had known more about the White House hierarchy, we could have put our findings into perspective; we could have made the articles mean more.”

But nothing Bernstein and Woodward could have done would have made the Watergate case sink in. The problem lay elsewhere. The main trouble was that very few news organizations joined the
Post
in tracking the Watergate case. Failing to dig up the information themselves, they refused to print the
Post
stories. Some snubbed the
Post
articles out of petty rivalry; others feared the Administration or favored Nixon in the Presidential race. The Washington
Star-News
^†
acted according to a time-honored wire-service practice: if your competitor beats you on a good story, try to tear
his
story apart. The
Star-News
had four full-time reporters on the case and they struck out. So the
Star-News
reacted by ignoring some of the
Post
stories and trying to discredit others.

Since the Los Angeles
Times
and the Washington
Post
are rivalrous partners in the same news service, the
Times
often underplayed the
Post
stories; in late October, the Los Angeles
Times’
newly appointed Washington Bureau chief, John F. Lawrence, wrote a “reassessment” of the Watergate story which managed to suggest that some of the
Post
stories were based on shaky information.
^‡
The New York Times
buried the first story of the Watergate break-in on page 50 and wasted a lot of time chasing leads on Cubans in Miami. Finally, when the
Post
dropped its bombshells in October, the
Times
panicked and began turning up some valuable information. But it, too, often gave slight attention to the
Post
stories.

Many papers completely ignored the
Post
stories, but gave good play to White House denials of the stories.
§
For instance, the Chicago
Tribune
, the San Diego
Union
, the Minneapolis
Tribune
, and the Philadelphia
Inquirer
all neglected to print the
Post
’s October 25 story on Haldeman, but printed Ziegler’s denial of the story the next day.
^‖

The hostility and pettiness of other newspapers not only
helped to suppress the Watergate story, but also had the effect of isolating the
Post
—which was precisely what the Administration wanted. For the White House strategy was to make the issue out to be the Washington
Post
rather than the Watergate affair, and they succeeded. All of Agnew’s attacks on the
Post
during 1970 and 1971 suddenly paid off in spades—the public had half-accepted the idea that the
Post
was an Eastern elitist paper with a liberal ax to grind. Now the Administration simply let loose a barrage of attacks on the
Post
as the woolly, unprincipled organ of the McGovern campaign.

Of all the files Bernstein and Woodward compiled in the course of their investigation, the fattest folder was the one labeled “White House-CREEP Responses.” It was as thick as a phone book. For instance, on October 16, the day after the Chapin story appeared, both Ron Ziegler and Clark McGregor, the manager of the Nixon campaign, attacked the Washington
Post
at a widely publicized news conference. Neither man said a word about
Time
or
The New York Times
, although both publications had come up with original stories on the spying campaign at the same time as the Post. The Administration spokesmen concentrated all their fire on the
Post
, the main source of the Watergate stories.
^a

Later, other Republican officials joined in the attacks. The
attackers seldom denied the substance of the stories,
^b
but they claimed that the stories were based on “hearsay and innuendo.” Of course, any newspaper story that is not an eyewitness account is technically “hearsay.” Every time the White House correspondents reported what Ronald Ziegler claimed the President said or did, it was a hearsay story. But the term also had connotations of “rumor” and “gossip,” and these were the meanings that Ziegler and Co. managed to pin on the
Post
stories.

“Did you feel any sense of disappointment that you failed to affect the election?” I asked Woodward and Bernstein as they finished their coffee at the Hay-Adams.

“No,” Bernstein laughed, “that wasn’t our purpose. We wish there hadn’t been any goddam election. Our stories would have had much more impact in a non-election year, when the White House wouldn’t have had the election issue to work with. They just painted us into McGovern’s corner.

“But we never expected to have much impact anyway,” he added matter-of-factly. “Why? Well, we watched the McGovern campaign fall apart, we knew how the press had been undercut, and we realized one crucial fact about the White House:
they know our business and we don’t know their business
.”

Journalism is probably the slowest-moving, most tradition-bound profession in America. It refuses to budge until it is shoved into the future by some irresistible external force. The few innovations which appeared in the coverage of the 1972 election year had all come about in response to pressures from outside the profession. It was mainly the inescapable influence of Teddy White’s books, for instance, that forced the news organizations to attempt more stories on the inner workings of the campaign organizations. The success of Joe McGinniss’
Selling of the President
embarrassed them into examining the candidates’ use of media. The repercussions of the Chicago Convention persuaded them to give more space to the mood of the country.