Personal History (90 page)

From the point of view of Watergate, the challenges came during the time when the story had dried up after the election and we were sweating about where the trail had gone. Others wondered too. The administration’s power—and anger—were at their greatest after the landslide election, and we were at our weakest. Our public stance throughout the license challenges was that we were confident of renewal. Indeed, we had reason
to be confident: at each station, we had strong local management and we emphasized independent news and editorial judgment. Both Florida stations had impeccable reputations for integrity and programming of high quality. We had met, even exceeded, all of the FCC tests for a good station. One reason I personally felt we ought to be safe was that I didn’t see how the FCC could take away our licenses without jeopardizing virtually every television licensee in the country, or at least making them all nervous—including Nixon friends and admirers—so well had we run these stations. But despite our confidence that the challenges were unfounded, we were scared. Among the worst effects was the sharp decline in our stock price that naturally ensued, from $38 a share to $28 in the first two weeks after the challenges, and continuing on down to $16 or $17, decreasing the value of the company by more than half. As for the direct effect on our finances, the legal costs of defending the licenses added up to well over a million dollars in the two and a half years the entire process took—a far larger sum then than now for a small company like ours.

Equally important were the eroding effects on the people trying to run the stations with these threats hanging over their heads and in this hostile atmosphere. We tried to reassure them by telling them to go on as they always had, but decisions are hard to make under such circumstances. At neither station could we recruit people easily, since there was concern about who would hold the license in a few months’ time. It was also difficult to air the kind of advocacy editorials we wanted to, knowing they would be used against us.

T
HE
W
ASHINGTON
P
OST
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OMPANY
had been in the public eye for several months—certainly more than I was comfortable with, and in ways we might not have wished. We didn’t seek out the celebrity; it was thrust on us. During a
Newsweek
sales meeting at the time, I said it reminded me somewhat of the old story about the man who’d been tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. When asked how he felt, he said, “Except for the honor of the thing, I would rather have walked.”

By early 1973, I was growing increasingly anxious and thought I ought to meet with Woodward and Bernstein in addition to the editors. Surprisingly, to this point—seven months into the story—I had had hardly any contact with the reporters. So, on January 15, Bob and Howard and I sat down to lunch together (Carl was out of town). Characteristically, Bob went right downstairs to the newsroom afterwards and made extensive notes about what we’d said—even going so far as to write down what we ate, the main course being eggs Benedict, which led to our future reference to this gathering as the “eggs-Benedict lunch.”

My apprehensions about the whole Watergate affair were evident. “Is
it all going to come out?” Woodward reported that I asked anxiously. “I mean, are we ever going to know about all of this?” As Bob later wrote, he thought it was the nicest way possible of asking, “What have you boys been doing with my newspaper?” He told me then that they weren’t sure all of it ever
would
come out: “Depression seemed to register on her face. ‘Never?’ she asked. ‘Don’t tell me never.’ ”

It was also at this lunch that Woodward told me he had told no one the name of Deep Throat. “Tell me,” I said quickly, and then, as he froze, I laughed, touched his arm, and said that I was only kidding—I didn’t want to carry that burden around. He admitted that he was prepared to give me the name if I really wanted it, but he was praying I wouldn’t press him. This luncheon was reassuring for me—or at least I gave the appearance of being reassured—but I remained nervous. Looking back, I’m surprised I wasn’t even more frightened.

The period leading up to the trial of the “Watergate Seven,” which began on January 8, 1973, had been extremely tense. Colson was talking around Washington about going to our national advertisers or our investors. A Wall Street friend of mine, André Meyer, a man with administration contacts, called me and asked me to come to see him. When I did, he advised me to be very careful of everything I did or said and—just like in the movies—he warned me “not to be alone.” “Oh, André,” I said, “that’s really absurdly melodramatic. Nothing will happen to me.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’ve talked to them, and I’m telling you not to be alone.” André never explained what his fears were based on, and I still have no idea what he had heard or even meant, but I certainly got the point about how serious he was. I lay awake many nights worrying, though not about my personal safety. Beyond its reputation, the very existence of the
Post
was at stake. I’d lived with White House anger before, but I had never seen anything remotely like the kind of fury and heat I was feeling targeted at us now. It seemed at times that we should really be worrying about some bizarre Kafkaesque plot—that maybe we were being led down a road to discredit the paper.

The moments of anxiety increased in quantity and intensity. Naturally, we were worried when our stories were denied repeatedly and vehemently. Even we, it seems, underestimated for a long time the capacity of government to hide and distort the truth. Finally, a series of events began to unfold in our favor. Three days after the beginning of the trial, Howard Hunt pleaded guilty to six of the charges against him. Four days later, the other burglars followed suit. On January 30, Liddy and McCord were convicted, continuing to claim that no higher-ups were involved and that they had not received any money. In fact, Hunt had urged the burglars to plead guilty and go to jail, assuring them he would take care of them.

Toward the end of February, a civil subpoena was served on five of us
from the
Post
, and we were ordered to appear in the U.S. District Court to testify on our sources in the Democratic Party’s civil suit against the Committee to Re-elect the President. The subpoena required that we produce a whole host of material, including documents, papers, letters, photographs, tapes, manuscripts, notes, copies, and final drafts of stories about Watergate. As Ben Bradlee put it, they asked us to bring “everything except the lint in our pockets.” My name was misspelled, but I was subpoenaed, along with Woodward and Bernstein, Howard Simons, and another reporter, Jim Mann, who had worked on a few of the early Watergate stories. Our lawyers decided to give me some of the reporters’ notes. Bradlee had reassured Bernstein and Woodward that we would fight this case for as long as it took, adding:

At some point, Woodward had met with Deep Throat, who told him that the subpoenas were part of a response induced by Nixon’s rampage against the
Post
, and that he, Nixon, would use the $5 million left over from his campaign “to take the Post down a notch.” “It will be wearing on you but the end is in sight,” Deep Throat told Woodward.

In the end, the subpoenas were quashed, but not before we had spent a great deal of energy and money. The intervening drama was intense. I wrote a friend, “The outrage of it is lost in the absurdity,” also noting that one of the editors on the
Post
, who was not served, was said to be suffering from a case of “subpoena envy.”

The administration also struck a tough blow at Ed Williams’s law firm in connection with this suit. The firm had only about twenty-five lawyers at the time, five of whom worked at representing the Teamsters. After the suit was filed against the Committee to Re-elect the President, the president of the Teamsters told Ed that the suit represented such bad judgment it reflected on the judgment of the firm. Ed’s response was, “Nobody tells us who our clients are.” As a result, the Teamsters moved its business.

At the same time, though, we were gathering allies, however unwitting. One of the principal ones was U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica, who said he was “not satisfied” that the whole Watergate story was being revealed in his courtroom. Equally crucial, the Senate voted seventy to
zero to establish a committee to investigate Watergate and other alleged campaign abuses.

I was on a trip to the Far East in behalf of
Newsweek International
when an important call reached me in Hong Kong. Howard Simons was phoning to tell me the stunning news that James McCord had written a letter to Judge Sirica charging that perjury was committed at the Watergate trial, that the defendants had been pressured to plead guilty and keep quiet, that higher-ups were indeed involved, and that “several members of my family have expressed fear for my life if I disclose knowledge of the facts in this matter.” McCord agreed to tell what he knew about the original burglary in exchange for a more lenient sentence.

What a relief—or, as Ben would later write, “Bingo!” This was the first real break in the case, and in the story, altering the reporting of the Watergate scandal from that point on, as well as changing the nature of reporting for the future. McCord’s letter confirmed our stories, making what we’d said sound much more plausible and changing the image of the paper, as well as my own image in some ways. Suddenly people realized there was proof to back up our reporting; there was evidence that what we had been saying was true. We had been through many long months of hanging out there, and now the press appeared in droves, finally lifting the rugs to look for leads. Piling on began. The
Post
was no longer alone, although we were still out front. We began to get more competition in reporting the story, both from other papers and from the newsmagazines, including
Newsweek
, which started to do cover after cover.

So much that followed stemmed from McCord’s letter—our increased visibility, my higher profile, more requests for speeches and interviews. All of this surprised me at the time and worried me later. Because I was still on the Asian trip when McCord’s letter became public, mine was a baptism by fire, with interview requests pouring in from news media all over the Far East. But since the aim of the trip was to promote
Newsweek International
, I welcomed the increased opportunities to speak out.

By the time I returned from the trip at the end of March, the situation for the administration had started to unravel. Henry Kissinger recalls that it was shortly after this that he began to realize Watergate was real and was not going to go away. Having been unable to fathom that our reporting might be accurate, Henry had worried mostly about the effect of Watergate on the development of our foreign policy and on the administration’s “freedom of maneuver” in conducting it. Early on, he had had lunch with Joe Califano and had asked, “What are you Democrats going to do now?”—to which Joe replied, “We’re going to get well on Watergate.” Henry then went to either Haldeman or Ehrlichman and said, “What’s he talking about?” The response: “It’s wishful thinking.”

But a great deal was going on behind the scenes at the White House, and several resignations were announced on April 30, along with John Dean’s firing as counsel. Elliot Richardson, the new attorney general, was given the right to appoint a special prosecutor. Nixon came on television at 9:00 p.m. that night. There weren’t many televisions in the newsroom, so several of us, including Woodward and Bernstein, crowded into Howard Simons’s office to watch Nixon’s speech. It was one of those many times throughout Watergate when I just wanted to be at the paper with friends and in the thick of things. Bernstein and Woodward, who wrote everything down, even reported that when Nixon came on, seated at his desk with a picture of his family on one side and a bust of Lincoln on the other, I said, “Oh, my God, this is too much.”

Nixon, in his speech, accepted the responsibility but not the blame for Watergate. He resorted to his old formulas: “The easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I delegated the responsibility to run the campaign but that would be a cowardly thing to do.… It was the system that has brought the facts to life … a system that in this case has included a determined grand jury, honest prosecutors, a courageous judge, Judge Sirica, and a vigorous free press.” After the televised address, he gratuitously stopped by the White House pressroom and said, “We’ve had our differences in the past, and just continue to give me hell when you think I’m wrong.”

All of this created a huge stir in the newsroom. Howard Simons said to staff members, “We can’t afford to gloat,” a sentiment that I shared. Though Watergate was no longer a lonely project for the
Post
, we were proud of the part we had played, but it was now on its way to becoming a national tragedy, and we had no impulse to flaunt our role, though every reason to feel relief at vindication.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the worst of Watergate for us, things had deteriorated for me personally, as my beloved colleague Fritz, ill with cancer, declined rapidly. By the last day of April, 1973, Fritz was in the hospital in critical condition. He listened to Nixon’s speech from his bed. His wife, Liane, later told me that, at the point during the speech when Nixon accepted some of the responsibility, Fritz raised his arm with his fist pointing upwards and, as Liane wrote me, “his face all one proud grin, ‘Thank you, Thank you!’ he shouted enthusiastically, ‘GREAT! HURRAH!’ That was Fritz’s last salute to the Washington Post! Yes, he was fully aware of what was going on! He was beaming for a short while there—excited, thrilled about it all and with you all.” Fritz died the next morning. For me the simultaneity of these events—confirmation of our reporting and Fritz’s death—brought satisfaction and joy mixed with profound sorrow and loss.