All the President's Men (26 page)

Woodward, listening on the extension, took notes.

A
GENT
: “We did not miss much.”

B
ERNSTEIN
: “Then you got Haldeman’s name in connection with his control over the secret fund?”

A
GENT
: “Yeah.”

B
ERNSTEIN
: “But it also came out in the grand jury?”

A
GENT
: “Of course.”

B
ERNSTEIN
: “So it came out then in both the FBI interview with Sloan and when he was before the grand jury?”

A
GENT
: “Yes.”

B
ERNSTEIN
: “We just wanted to be sure of that because we’ve been told that it came out only in grand jury, that you guys fucked it up.”

A
GENT
: “We got it, too. We went to everybody involved in the money  . . . we know that 90 percent of your information comes from Bureau files. You either see them or someone reads them to you over the phone.”

Bernstein said he would not talk about their sources. He returned to the question of Haldeman and asked again if Haldeman was named as the fifth person to control the secret fund.

“Yeah, Haldeman, John Haldeman,” he said.

Bernstein ended the conversation and gave a thumbs-up signal to Woodward. Then it came to him that the agent had said
John,
not
Bob,
Haldeman. At times, it seemed that everyone in Washington mixed up Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—“the German shepherds,” “the Prussians,” “the Berlin Wall,” as they were called. The reporters could not let the confusion persist, however. Bernstein called the agent back.

“Yeah, Haldeman, Bob Haldeman,” he replied. “I can never remember first names.”

Deep Throat, Sloan, the FBI agent. The reporters concluded they had the story firmly in hand, finally. They left for home before midnight feeling secure.

Next morning, they told Sussman what they had, and did not hide their jubilation. This story would be different from all the preceding
ones about the secret fund. Instead of unnamed sources, it could be attributed to secret grand-jury testimony by Hugh Sloan, former treasurer of the CRP, former White House aide of H. R. Haldeman.

For months, the ante in Watergate had been steadily upped; with Haldeman, the stakes had become awesome. H. R. Haldeman was the principal surrogate of the President of the United States. When he acted, it was in the President’s name. Given the nature of his relationship to Richard Nixon, it seemed unlikely that Haldeman would become involved in arrangements for funding clandestine operations without either the implicit or the explicit approval of the President. Especially if those operations had represented the basic re-election strategy of the Nixon campaign.

Bernstein had spent most of the previous night unable to sleep, thinking about the implications of what they had written and what they were about to write. What if they were being unfair to the President of the United States, damaging not just the man but the institution? And, by extension, the country? Suppose the reporters’ assumptions were wrong. That somehow they had been horribly misled. What happened to a couple of punk reporters who took the country on a roller-coaster ride? Could it be that the wads of cash in Stans’ safe had been merely discretionary funds that had been misspent by a few overzealous underlings? Or that the reporters and their sources had fed on one another’s suspicions and speculations? No less awful, suppose the reporters were being set up. What if the White House had seen its chance to finish off the
Washington Post
and further undermine the credibility of the press? What if Haldeman had never asked for authority over the money, or had never exercised his authority?

Maybe all the fears were inflated and irrational. Maybe Nixon never read the damn paper anyway. Maybe nobody paid any attention (sometimes it was almost a relief when the polls showed that Watergate wasn’t having much impact).

Bernstein was a shambles when he arrived at the office the next morning—sleep-starved, full of doubts, timorous. He confided in Woodward. It was not the first time one of them had gotten the shakes. They often reversed roles. Woodward had the reputation of being the more cautious, more conservative of the two—at the outset
of Watergate, he probably had been. But over the months, each had worked as a brake on the other. If either of them had any doubts, they told the editors they were in agreement on holding off, no matter how much they might disagree privately. Or they told the editors nothing and held off.

Woodward, too, had gone through periods of apprehension about whether the foundation of their reporting—largely invisible to the reader—was strong enough to support the visible implications. Before informing Sussman that they had established the Haldeman connection solidly, the reporters reviewed their bases again. The exercise was reassuring—something like what astronauts must experience when they check their systems prior to lift-off and watch the green lights flash on one by one.

The afternoon of October 24, they wrote the Haldeman story. Essentially, it contained only one new fact—that the fifth person who had been in control of the campaign’s funds for political espionage and sabotage was the President’s chief of staff.

“The numbers,” Ben Bradlee noted, were “getting terribly, terribly heavy.” Bradlee was calling it a major escalation. He summoned Simons, Rosenfeld, Sussman, Bernstein and Woodward to his office.

“I was absolutely convinced in my mind that there was no way that any of this could have happened without Haldeman,” he told the reporters later. “But I was going to do everything in my power to be sure that we didn’t clip him before we had him. I felt that we were aiming higher and I suspected that you guys  . . . had him in your targets maybe even before you should have. That maybe you knew it but you couldn’t prove it. I was determined to keep it out of the paper until you could prove it.”

During that 7:00
P.M
. meeting, just before the deadline, Bradlee served as prosecutor, demanding to know exactly what each source had said.

“What did the FBI guy say?” Bradlee asked.

The reporters gave a brief summary.

“No,” Bradlee said, “I want to hear exactly what you asked him and what his exact reply was.”

He did the same with Deep Throat, and the doorstep interview with Sloan.

“I recommend going,” Rosenfeld said.

Sussman agreed.

Simons nodded his approval.

“Go,” Bradlee said.

On the way out, Simons told the reporters he would feel more comfortable if they had a fourth source. It was past 7:30; the story could not hold beyond 7:50. Bernstein said there was one other possibility, a lawyer in the Justice Department who might be willing to confirm. He went to a phone near Rosenfeld’s office and called him. Woodward, Simons and Sussman were going over the story a final time.

Bernstein asked the lawyer point-blank if Haldeman was the fifth person in control of the secret fund, the name missing from Hugh Sloan’s list.

He would not say.

Bernstein told him that they were going with the story. They already had it from three sources, he said; they knew Sloan had told the grand jury. All we’re asking of you is to warn us if there is any reason to hold off on the story.

“I’d like to help you, I really would,” said the lawyer. “But I just can’t say anything.”

Bernstein thought for a moment and told the man they understood why he couldn’t say anything. So they would do it another way: Bernstein would count to 10. If there was any reason for the reporters to hold back on the story, the lawyer should hang up before 10. If he was on the line after 10, it would mean the story was okay.

“Hang up, right?” the lawyer asked.

That was right, Bernstein instructed, and he started counting. He got to 10. Okay, Bernstein said, and thanked him effusively.

“You’ve got it straight now?” the lawyer asked.

Right. Bernstein thanked him again and hung up.

He told the editors and Woodward that they now had a fourth confirmation, and thought himself quite clever.

Simons was still nervous. Smoking a cigarette, he walked across the newsroom and sat down opposite Woodward’s typewriter.

“What do you think?” he asked. “We can always hold it for one more day if there is any reason. . . .”

Woodward told Simons that he was sure the story was solid.

Next Rosenfeld trooped over to Woodward’s desk and asked if he had any doubts. None, said Woodward.

Rosenfeld suggested a change in the lead paragraph. He wanted Haldeman’s control of the fund attributed not only to “accounts of sworn testimony before the Watergate grand jury,” but to federal investigators as well. Woodward said fine; the FBI agent had confirmed it and Deep Throat had also made clear that the investigators knew it. The change was made.

The same two sources were the basis of another addition that said all five who controlled the fund had been questioned by the FBI.

With the deadline only minutes off, the story dropped down to the composing room to be set. There would be an insert for the ritual White House denial.

Woodward called the White House press office and read the story to deputy press secretary Gerald Warren, asking that it be confirmed or denied.

An hour later, Warren called back. “Your inquiry is based on misinformation because the reference to Bob Haldeman is untrue.”

What the hell does that mean? Woodward asked.

“That’s all we have to say,” Warren replied.

Woodward and Bernstein picked over the statement for some time. They decided that it was halfhearted and weak. They inserted it into the story.

Shortly before nine o’clock, Woodward got a call from Kirby Jones, press secretary for the McGovern campaign. “I hear you’ve got a good one for tomorrow,” Jones said. “How about sending a copy over?”

Woodward blew up and said
Post
stories on Watergate were not written for Democrats or McGovern or anyone else in particular, and that he resented the request. Jones seemed stunned. He didn’t see anything unreasonable about it, especially since the paper would be out in a few hours.

Woodward said that he and Bernstein were having enough trouble already with accusations of collusion. He told Jones to get his own copy of the paper at a newsstand, like everyone else, and slammed down the phone.

Before they left that night, the night suburban editor showed them a long item off the Maryland AP wire. Senator Robert Dole had delivered a 20-minute attack on the
Post
before members of the
Maryland State Central Committee in Baltimore. The speech contained 57 references to the
Post.
*

The reporters finally left the paper, forgetting to give Hugh Sloan a courtesy call to alert him that the story was coming. He would be besieged by other reporters, and they should have warned him what to expect. But they had to finish putting together their outline for a book on Watergate. The outline had to be submitted at lunch the next day.

They were up almost until dawn writing, and met the next morning at nine in the coffee shop of the Madison Hotel. At breakfast, they quickly read through the Haldeman story in the
Post’s
final edition, and at about 10:30, Bernstein and Woodward strolled across 15th Street to the
Post
and went into Sussman’s office for a general discussion of how they would follow the Haldeman story. It was a lighthearted session. This time they really had the White House. The attribution to Sloan’s grand-jury testimony was something Ziegler would not be able to duck. That was not hearsay. Hugh Sloan was the guy who’d handled the money, and he had sworn an oath.

At their desks, Bernstein and Woodward were going through their notes to decide whom they should see that afternoon. Eric Went-worth, an education reporter, came over to Woodward.

“Hey,” said Wentworth, “have you heard about what Sloan’s attorney said?”

Woodward hadn’t.

“Sloan’s attorney said that Sloan didn’t name Haldeman before the grand jury. He said it unequivocally.”

Woodward was stunned.

Wentworth repeated his words, then went to his desk and typed out what he could recall from a CBS radio account he had heard on his way to work. Woodward followed him. Wentworth handed the piece of paper to Woodward, who returned to his desk because he had to sit down.

He called Sloan. No answer. Then he tried Sloan’s attorney, James Stoner. Stoner was not in his office. He asked Stoner’s secretary urgently to have him return the call the minute she heard from him.

Woodward went over to Bernstein’s desk and tapped him on the shoulder. We may have a problem, he said softly, and handed Went-worth’s note to Bernstein. Bernstein suddenly felt sick and thought he might throw up. Flushed, he sat in his chair until it passed over.

Then he and Woodward walked into Sussman’s office and passed him the note. All three went into Rosenfeld’s office and turned on the television. What they were to see on the screen was something they would never forget. Sloan and his attorney, Stoner, were walking into a law office where Sloan was to give a deposition: Daniel Schorr, the veteran CBS correspondent, was waiting there with a camera crew. Schorr approached Sloan and asked him about the
Post’s
report of Sloan’s testimony before the grand jury. Sloan said his attorney would have a comment. Schorr moved the microphone to Stoner.

“Our answer to that is an unequivocal no,” he said. “We did not—Mr. Sloan did not implicate Mr. Haldeman in that testimony at all.”

Sussman, Woodward and Bernstein looked at one another. What had gone wrong? They had been so sure.

A few minutes later, Bernstein, Woodward, Sussman, Rosenfeld and Simons met in Bradlee’s office. Bradlee had seen the CBS interview.

He would later recall: “You all want to know my lowest moment in Watergate? It was watching Dan Schorr shove a mike in front of Sloan and then his attorney the next morning and say the
Washington Post
said you told the grand jury that Haldeman had control of this fund, is
that true and all that, and Sloan’s attorney said no. . . . Those bastards on the television, walking down the street, turning right into the courtyard and there’s Dan, big, dangerous Dan Schorr, whom I’ve only known for thirty years, really tucking it to them and winding up tucking it to us.”