TN: Hi I'm Tim Naftali. I'm [the] director [of the] Nixon Presidential Library Museum in Yorba Linda, California.
It's December 14, 2010 and I have the honor and privilege to be interviewing Bob
Woodward, [of the] Washington Post for the Library. Thank you Mr. Woodward for doing this. BW: Thank you. TN: Please tell us about interviewing Dean Acheson. BW: [Laughs] That's when I was in the Navy, here, for my last year. I was working in the Pentagon and doing
this courier service to the White House too occasionally, but I was frustrated.
What am I gonna do, what am I going to be? So I was taking some graduate courses
and one of them was in Soviet history, or political science and I did a paper
comparing George Kennan and Dean Acheson and I called Acheson up and said, "I'd
like to interview you." He was a lawyer at Covington & Burling then, and you know, he was kind of the elder statesman and they did interviews like this for, with
students so I interviewed him for 45 minutes or an hour, and it was, you know,
he had his, he knew what he was going to say, but it was, and he talked about
George Kennan in an interesting way and saw that, you know, they were the two
polar opposites of American foreign policy after World War Two. TN: Please tell us about
meeting Mark Felt for the first time. BW: That it was in the White House when
I was sent by Admiral Moore, who was then not yet Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but
he was Chief of Naval Operations, to courier a package over, that was
always sealed up, and we were waiting in that lobby area that existed outside the
National Security Council and the West Wing, and he was there, and waiting, and I
had no idea who he was going to see, but it was, as I have written, we were like two passengers on an airplane seated next to
each other waiting, and we started to talk or I talked and, you know, found out
what he did, and I was very interested in him and he was stiff and very FBI, white
shirt kind of the shield and barrier went down immediately and I kept trying
to pry in and then followed up. He gave me a phone number and my interaction
with him during my last year at the Navy was kind of career counselor. Should I go
to law school? Should I continue do some more graduate study? Who, who am I
going to be, what am I going to do? And he was very sympathetic to that but again
there was a man who always wore a protective shield. TN: Why did you choose him as a career advisor? BW: I think I was using anyone who
would listen as a career advisor. TN: So there were other people..? BW: Oh sure, oh sure. TN: But why, I mean why, the why
did you choose to try to get under this man's, behind this man's reserve? BW: Because obviously he'd been successful, and his reserve was very attractive, and he had
gone to law school. I think he'd done some graduate work himself at George
Washington University, and he was he tuned in to the idea of this young man
who doesn't know what he wants to do, and of course I was very aggressive in
putting myself forward to him. But it was not, we didn't build a bond it, was more
me calling and pestering. TN: You had no interest in going to the FBI, though? BW: No, I don't think so but I did send away for an application to the CIA which I never filled out. TN: You, at this point, make the decision that you want to be a reporter. Were you, were you a history major at
Yale? BW: Yes. TN: Did you write a senior essay? BW: Well I wrote an unpublished and unpromising novel. TN: Well [laughs] they didn't give you a degree for that. BW: No, they sure didn't, yeah. TN: But had you thought about going into a university? I mean was that one of the
career options you considered? BW: I thought maybe of, yes. I mean I was considering everything. I was doing interviews with Proctor and Gamble at that time to
become one of their product managers. I was somebody lost. TN: Had you thought about politics? BW: No, not really. TN: Government service... BW: No. TN: ...other than the CIA? BW: Not really. TN: Okay so. BW: But anything what was open. I mean to set the atmosphere, I got out of college in 1965
and I was in Naval ROTC so I had to go into the Navy. It was during the Vietnam
escalation. I did not like the Vietnam War. I did not like myself for not having
the courage to kind of do something run away to Canada, but just to kind of go
along I was one of those go along guys, and I was extended for an extra year and
that's when I got the duty in the Pentagon, and so I really felt that I
used to tell friends, "I'm worried that I'd wake up in the morning and find a
raisin on my pillow, and that my brain had dried up and rolled out my ear." That
there was a sense of not doing anything not being engaged, and so I was looking for something to be engaged in. TN: So you turn up at the Washington Post one day, with no background in journalism. BW: No background. I just I was
reading The Washington Post and I knew there was this guy Bradlee who was the
editor and the in the Post in that period, '69, '70 really having the, the energy
and the iconoclastic nature of what it was presenting just jumped off the page,
and I found that very appealing, and so I went to the Post said," I'd like to work
here." TN: And they gave you a tryout? BW: For two weeks, in which I wrote 14 stories or so, none of them published, and Harry
Rosenfeld, who was the Metro editor, said, "See you're no good, you don't know how to
do this," and I said, "Thank you," he said, "Why are you thanking me?" and I said that
because I, I think I found what I want to do I love the engagement the sense of
going to work in the morning and the issue is what's hidden, what's unknown,
find out, explain it, and so he helped. He and others help me get a job at a weekly
paper in Maryland. TN: How was that experience? BW: It was great. Roger Farquhar who used to work at the Post, he'd stayed editor at the Post, was the
editor at the Montgomery County Sentinel and he had four reporters and he was the
classic seasoned newsman, and he would give me stories, pass along tips, and gave
me a lot of rope to pursue investigative stories or do things that were just not
the routine coverage, and he used to always tell me, "You hate the scout work,
but you're, you like doing let's go dig into the records about the Attorney
General of Maryland," which I did in one story. TN: You've got stories picked up, didn't you? BW: Yes by the Post. TN: So how long was this, were you in the farm leagues? BW: One year TN: And then they called you or you went..? BW: Oh no, I called them. I
was pestering. I wanted to work at the Post, and so I was persistent. TN: And so you go back to the Post, you go to the Post I mean, and you have a job, and you start
calling Mr. Felt again. BW: Yes. Well I was I was keeping in touch with him but the
real breakthrough in dealing with him was the assassination attempt
on George Wallace. TN: Can I ask you about something before then... BW: Oh sure, Of course. TN: Because his first leak to you is about Spiro Agnew. BW: That's right. But I didn't see it as a
leak, or I don't think it was a leak that he said that the Vice President's
taking money, and I passed it on to the reporters who had covered Agnew in
Maryland, and they couldn't believe it and you know, but he was right. TN: Yeah I'm stepping on, step back for a moment because some people and who looked at his
motives, see that that he was angry because he didn't replace Hoover, but
Hoover was alive when he gave you this information. So you must have developed
some kind of rapport with him. BW: Well I mean it was very clear I wasn't to use it or quote him, but again you, you've, you know this is the craft of the reporter,
you talk to people, and you listen, and you have to really just let the silence
suck out the truth, and you know I was calling him, and talking to him.
I was working on this was working well, I guess no, this was before the Wallace
assassination, wasn't it? TN: Yeah. BW: Yeah, and he had it right, and the FBI somehow knew, whether officially, whether in investigations, that early, that the Vice
President was taking money. TN: Please and you then passed the story along, I guess
to Richard Cohen. BW: Who just didn't believe it. Thought of it was incredible and I
said, "Well, that's what I've heard." TN: Now let's talk about Wallace. BW: [When] Wallace is shot out here in Prince George's County, Washington suburb, and by Arthur Bremer, and I was a local police reporter and got in on the story, and
Mark Felt knew, you know, everything in the FBI about this or could find it out,
and he helped me and pointed me towards some stories, including the fact that
Arthur Bremer had actually been stalking, I think, Nixon, and of course, the story
they wanted to get out, the FBI and the Nixon White House, was that Bremer acted
alone, which all evidence supports, but that's something I also wrote in the
stories that served their interest. TN: You describe this as a breakthrough. How was it a breakthrough in your relationship with Felt? BW: Well he'd given me something
that I was, I found a way to use it without implicating the FBI or him. That
was the key. TN: In this period before June 17th, how well did you know Carl Bernstein? BW: Didn't know really know just a name and a byline and somebody was over on the Virginia staff. TN: Okay. June 17th 1972. You get awakened, you're at home. Tell me what, tell us what happened. BW: Barry Sussman, the city editor's on the phone, "Can you come in?" That was one of the most beautiful summer days in Washington, and I think the editors kind of got together and said, We've got this break-in, we're gonna need more people,
who would be dumb enough to come in on a nice Saturday? And my name came to the
top of the list, and that's why Sussman called me, and it looked like a local
break-in story, but I came, and was sent down to the courthouse, and there were
the five burglars in their business suits or the parts, yeah I think they
actually wore the business suits at the arraignment, and the key moment there was
the judge, who was persisting you know, "Where have you worked?" And James McCord,
who was the leader of the burglars, kept whispering and the judge said "Where do
you work?" And McCord would go, "[mouths "CIA"], he said, "No, speak up," and finally say
where it was and McCord said, "CIA," and I'm sitting in the front row or the second
room, no I think the front row, and, "Wow, this isn't your average burglar." TN: So you go back to the Post and how is it that you, you start a partnership with Carl Bernstein? BW: Well we were one of six or seven reporters who worked on that story
on Saturday, and he had an Al Lewis byline, a reliable police reporter, and I remember crafting that paragraph with Barry Sussman. That's in the first story about it was not clear who, what the motive was for
this break-in, and who may, if anybody sponsored this. Which is exactly the
unknowns, and we it was unusual to kind of put them out there, and kind of, drill
right to, "Okay, why were they there and who if anyone sponsored them?"
And then the next day, Sunday Carl and I, unmarried, were the ones that
came in and it turned out that, I think it was the AP had the story that McCord
had been the Chief of Security for Nixon's re-election. Not only had he
worked for the CIA, and then that we did that story and you know, if you think
about it, it's pretty striking the former head of CIA security, the head of
security at the Nixon re-election committee, is arrested leading the
burglary team in the Democratic headquarters at Watergate, but it was
interesting the mood in Washington, then was kind of, "Well there's this, but
Nixon's gonna win he's running against McGovern, and Nixon would be too, he's too
smart to be involved in this," and so there was a kind of dismissal of it.
Quite frankly. But not for Carl and myself, it was, "Holy shit,
what's this?" TN: How'd you hear, how did you feel when you heard about the notebooks
that the burglars had? BW: Yeah this is this is Gene Bachinski, who's the night
police reporter who Ben Bradlee regularly identifies as an important
person, member of the staff, and he got the cops to show him the
address books of two of the burglars and he called me and said, "It has this
cryptic entry." I think one was H. Hunt - W House, or H. Hunt WH, and it was obvious
what to do: call the White House and asked for an H. Hunt which I did, and got
him on the phone, and I'll never forget his panic on the end of the phone when I
said, "How come your name is in the address books of two of the burglars
that went into the Democratic headquarters?" and he just paused and
shouted out, "Good God!" and literally slammed down the phone and then left town. TN: You also call Bob Bennett. BW: Yes. TN: Tell us, tell them. BW: And Hunt had, Bennett was a PR person who worked for a firm, the Mullen and Company I believe,
and he had employed Hunt also to do public relations work for him, and Bennett told
me said, "Oh, you know Howard was or is with the CIA." Which of course I didn't
know, and then we did a story about this connection to the White House, but more
importantly what the White House said, or we learned, is that Hunt had been a
consultant who was hired by Chuck Colson, and Chuck Colson was Nixon's special
counsel, somebody who's kind of known as Nixon's hatchet man, and that was a
striking story. Why is there this, this connection between Howard Hunt and the
White House and the burglars? And it was, if you think about it, I mean this was the
Tuesday after the burglary. The story had advanced quite a distance in a very short period of time. TN: Do you, can you recall some of the reaction in the, in the in the newsroom to what you were finding at that point, or some of the
senior, what were some of the senior journalists saying? BW: It was not much reaction. I
remember going and asking the White House correspondent for the Post, "Who's
Chuck Colson?" Because I didn't know, and he explained. But there was a sense of
you know, that's no one was running over from the national staff saying, "Holy shit, what's this?" TN: And you were you are talking to Mark Felt at this point too. BW: Yes, yeah, yeah. TN: Is he encouraging
you, or what is he saying to you? BW: He's chilly, there's the
barrier, but what he is I recall, the information and I've not gone back and
looked at the record on this which is quite extensive in our notes and books,
but as I recall he made it very clear that it would not be unfair to Howard
Hunt to show his connection with the burglars. That there was some concern,
rightly, that this is well could I can have your name and my address book can
go commit a crime and that doesn't mean you put me up to it. But he, he's made it
very clear this is a productive line of inquiry and you're not going to be unfair. TN: And that was very important since you were now in in really unfamiliar
territory. You had not covered the White House. BW: That's correct. TN: And you hadn't covered the CIA either. BW: That's correct. TN: So what kind of background reading, what did you do? I mean you were really and how did you get, because I get the sense
that you were somebody who did his homework, so what did you do to, you know,
to sort of build some context around this? BW: Well I was trying to talk to people
who had worked with Hunt or knew him, were in his neighborhood, or trying to
find out more about Coulson. I knew a woman who worked in the White House for
John Ehrlichman. I was asking her, and you know, just anywhere you can get
information, but again what, what's important to understand this is a
newspaper, and this is, this is not to diminish what we do, but we're a factory.
Things come in, you do this story, you move on to the next story. There was,
there was something about this story that was very attractive, but I'm at a
point where I'm looking for lots of stories, doing lots of things. Something
was never put in any of the books right at this time, because I was doing police
reporting. I'd done a big story about a big Puerto Rican drug dealer named Pedro
Mijares [spelling unknown], and on the front page and I thought this whole Puerto Rican drug
dealer story was the big thing. On a Saturday, sometime in July, Bradlee took
me to lunch alone, and he sat down and I talked enthusiastically about the drug
story. Not about Watergate, so this is two weeks after the Watergate burglary and
he wanted me to work on a story about the possibility of the Washington Star,
our competition, being bought or sold to somebody. Because that was a big issue from Katherine Graham and for him, obviously. So he's talking about that and
I'm talking about the drug dealer, and as I recall I don't think we talked about
Watergate. TN: The next big break is when Bernstein goes to Miami, and that's after
I would think after this... BW: Yes, yes. TN: ...at the end of July. BW: Yes, right this is the August 1st
story. TN: Tell us what you can recall of how that moves the ball forward for you. BW: Well this was, Carl at his best and most aggressive getting the check
made out to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, but we didn't know who Dahlberg was, and
he was phoning me from Miami, and we'd check the library and couldn't find out
anything, and as I recall one of the people in the library found a picture of
Dahlberg that had run in the Post with Hubert Humphrey. So I thought, "Oh well
maybe he's from Minnesota." So we got the Minnesota phone directory and tracked
down Dahlberg and there was a phone number and I called him, and he was quite
reluctant, but he said, "Yes, the $25,000 check that had been made out to him was
a contribution to the Nixon re-election committee. He'd endorsed it, he had given
it to Maurice Stans, who was Nixon's chief fundraiser, on a golf course. And it
turned out that this $25,000 check had been deposited in the bank account of
one of the Watergate burglars. And so there was this connecting of the dots
that was quite astonishing. TN: Did that change the way in which you approach the story? Or again is this a factory, this is your next story, you move on to the next. Is there... BW: Yeah well... TN: ...is there a momentum that's building? BW: ...there's a momentum
that's building that, because, the city editor Barry Sussman, I remember when
we, he finally edited the story, I think he turned to me and said, "We'd
never had a story like this." TN: Because you know when you look at the at this now it seems inevitable, but of course you didn't know how it was gonna play out. BW: That's correct. TN: And I wondered how important this particular phase was in
building up the momentum. BW: He is saying that this was, "We've never had a story like this," or words to that effect. I also, [had] a friend who was Jerry Landauer, was the chief
investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and we were, we talked, his
girlfriend had an apartment in the same building I lived in, and I think
we had dinner after that, and I remember Jerry Landauer, who was really one of the great digger investigators for The Wall Street Journal, and did campaign
finance said to me, "I would give my left testicle to have had that story." That, and
the facts of it, and what Sussman said made it clear, this is of a new dimension. TN: This is also, I guess in retrospect, a watershed in your relationship with Mark
Felt, because isn't this the time when you discuss how to signal each
other and where to meet? BW: Yes. And this is where the clandestine signaling system develops,
and clearly, more was up than I realized. TN: Could you you've written about it
beautifully, but for for people who were watching could you describe a little bit
about this remarkable clandestine operation? BW: Well it was all his idea, said, "You know this is something that's no one's ever gonna know about," essentially, and so I had a flowerpot on
my balcony and he said, "You move it from the back to the front, and I will know,
and we'll meet in this parking garage over in Virginia just over Key Bridge
and if I need to talk to you, I'll circle page 20 of the New York Times," and he never
explained how he had somebody look at my balcony or how he got the New York Times
to me with the page 20 circled and we all we used it a number of times and it worked. TN: How did you feel about, it's been a long time, but when when he suggested this, this was unusual for you. BW: Yeah but but see I'd only been a reporter now,
you know, at the Post for a year and I thought, "Okay, you know this makes sense
I guess this is the way it works." TN: Tell us, about, about the discussion that, that became the, "follow the money" discussion... BW: Yeah. TN: ...please. BW: You know that's that was the screenwriter for the movie Bill Goldman,
you coming up with that phrase, as best I can tell. I always thought it was in the
book. I always thought he said it, but the record shows he did not. But if you go
into the book he was saying, "Money is the key to this," and but he did not use that
phrase, and but what he did say is, "Look at who financed this, look at where the
authority came, and that's when we got on to the secret fund which was a mechanism
for looking at who controlled these clandestine operations. TN: Just to give them, our viewers, or
listeners, a sense of the chronology, we're talking about September
'72. This is after the indictments correct? BW: That the five burglars, and Howard Hunt,
Gordon Liddy who were the operational managers have been indicted but no one else. TN: So in many, in a sense at that point the story seemed to have stopped. In the sense that as far as
the judicial process was going. BW: But not for us. TN: Not for you, and and perhaps
not for Mark Felt either. BW: Yes that's right, and this is when,
it we did a lot of work with secretaries, the bookkeeper, people in the Nixon
committee, to find out what had happened, and to find out that John Mitchell had
controlled the secret fund, the former Attorney General who had been Nixon's
campaign manager who after Watergate resigned as Nixon's campaign manager for
reasons that were never fully explained. We now know obviously it was because
of his involvement in all of these activities and his closeness to to Nixon. TN: So you have this, you're investigating on one track and then a second track opens
up. Please tell us about your first garage meeting in September when you
start talking about sort of a political espionage. BW: I'd have to go to the was it the
first meet the first meeting was in September, and. TN: In late September you have
the meeting of the offensive secret the offensive security. BW: Offensive security
yes, and this is when it the whole thing the seeds of Watergate isn't just one
operation it's part of a bigger operation and I think the best, as I
recall, the best illustration Carl had, somebody called him up about Donald
Segretti who was running these dirty tricks operations, and Carl talked to
some people that Segretti had tried to recruit and we were gonna do a story
about the Segretti operation, and I remember the night, this
is I think, kind of the 8th of October or something, like that meeting with Mark
Felt, and this this was the crucial turning point where he said, "No no, this
is all much bigger. It's part of a whole campaign," and Carl came up with the
phrase, "a campaign of espionage and sabotage," directed at all of the
Democrats, and that Segretti is just a small part of this bigger
picture and that it is really, though Mark Felt didn't use this language, it is a an
assault on democracy, really. That it's the Nixon people trying to decide who
he's going to run against and of course it turned out that it worked, when you
go back and connect all of the dots on that which we were not able to do at
that time, but the investigators later did. TN: Now you learned from other sources,
you and Carl Bernstein, about Segretti and Kalmbach don't you? BW: Yes. TN: Deep Throat, Mark Felt, does not give you the name Segretti. BW: Yes that's correct. TN: And he doesn't give you the name Kalmbach BW: That's correct. TN: Could you help us put into some perspective how your reporting was working him in to you had other important sources. TN: Yes, in fact we had a couple of sources who were still alive I think that have never been
named in all of this retrospective on Watergate. We were talking to everyone.
We were trying to fit the pieces together. We the key, key moments were this
Segretti operation, and the money, and Hugh Sloan, who was the treasurer for the
Nixon committee, he was a key source on all of this, and you saw that it was a,
this operation to derail particularly the Muskie campaign, Senator Muskie's
campaign and so all of this I mean we were doing it, we're turning out stories, not
daily by any means, but somewhat regularly. TN: Tell us what you can recall of
the reaction to your October 10th story. BW: The reaction, this was the, this was the probably the most important story that we did, and this generated from Segretti
to Mark Felt saying, "You know, look you know don't, look at the overall here, look
at what what's going on, use your common sense," and the, the reaction was because
it what's what's so astonishing I think the lead of the stories, "FBI files show,"
and no one kind of connected this to the FBI, it was denied it was hard for anyone to pick up on, though the New York Times did
somewhat and found, I think, phone calls that Segretti had made, maybe this was
later to Dwight Chapin in the White House, but there was not that sense at that day
or that week of, "Gee this is really a big deal." TN: Bob Dole gives a pretty harsh speech at this point. BW: Who was head of the
Republican National Committee, and Clark McGregor who was the campaign manager
and, and Ron Ziegler, the White House Press Secretary, the
there was a kind of trifecta of attacks, but this was after the October 15th
story, 1972, time Dwight Chapin who was Nixon's Appointment Secretary, and one of
you know, one of the people kind of in that small inner circle, because Chapin
had recruited Segretti, and then this took it into the White House. This was a, this
was a new dimension to it, and they really went on the attack. They attacked
Bradlee, they attacked us, they attacked the Post, they attacked Katharine Graham,
and essentially said, "This is all part of politics, this is a political attack, we
were carrying water for the Democratic nominee George McGovern." TN: Bob Dole later apologized. BW: Yes he did. TN: Could you tell us about that story please? BW: Well he's, you know, did he apologize to Mrs. Graham at one point didn't he? TN: I don't know. BW: I know I talked to him about it and he just said, "You know I was doing what
the White House told me to do." TN: Tell us because this is a bit complicated but it's important
because it would be the one, it would be the the vulnerability in your armor at that point. Tell us about how you'd pieced together
Haldeman's' role in controlling or not controlling the secret fund, please. BW: We were told by Hugh Sloane that there were five people, and he was the treasurer of
the Nixon committee and he was the one doling out the money, and it
turns out gave, I think $199,000 in cash to Gordon Liddy for
the Watergate operation, but Sloane was one of in ways the perfect source,
helps, confirms, but he wasn't going to lay out who the five people who were who
controlled the secret fund, and of course the the key was, "Was it Haldeman?" Nixon's
top aide, the White House Chief of Staff, and everything seemed to point toward
Haldeman. We had other sources on it, but we went to interview Hugh Sloan, and he
said, and we said, "Well we know it was Haldeman," and he said, "I'm not
gonna dispute that," and it seemed like a confirmation, and then he said he'd
answered all the grand jury questions and so we quite stupidly put A and B
together and said, "Well he must have told the grand jury about Haldeman," and of
course he'd said nothing of the kind. He'd said Haldeman controlled the fund,
but he didn't say he'd told the grand jury and then we had other sources and we ran
the story and we were flat wrong, and I know Ben Bradlee was saying that this
was just a blip. It wasn't a blip. This was devastating to us personally. It was
devastating to the Post coverage because Hugh Sloan's lawyer went out and said, "My
client gave no such testimony." The White House was able to then mobilize. This is
ten days after the Chapin story and fifteen days after the major "sabotage and
espionage" story. They mobilized and said, "See, this is politics." The election was
what, a week or ten days off? The Nixon re-election committee campaign, and we
thought that we might have to resign if it was wrong. Bradlee was
quite upset to say the least and we. TN: Upset with you? BW: Oh yes sure. But, but Ben's style was to never accuse or attack. He was worried
about the story, and we said, "Well, we think it's right." And we quickly figured
out, and I had another meeting with Mark Felt when he said, he said, "Oh, it's a
Haldeman operation," and Hugh Sloan said, "I didn't tell the grand jury
because they didn't ask." TN: So that's he said this to you you went
back to him afterwards... BW: Yes, after the story. TM: ...but didn't you say, "Well your lawyer gave the impression." BW: Yeah, well and he said, "Well, I didn't testify to it," and, I mean,
this is where you have we came to call these the "non-denial denials." You have
to peel the onion here real carefully and figure out what's being said, but
Sloan made it very clear that Haldeman controlled this fund. It turned out he
controlled the fund, and as the years later the investigation showed
there was another $350,000 fund they had in the White House
that Haldeman controlled for these kinds of activities, so it was much broader and we were not, we were not unfair or inaccurate about
the substance of the story, but he hadn't testified to the grand jury, and there is
a kind of sanctity and authority that a grand jury has in American life, and you
know, when we could say he told the grand jury it looked like we really had
something. When he pulled that rug out from under us it looked like we were naked. TN: It was, like it was your first stumble you would had all this good
momentum and you stumbled. BW: More than stumbled. I mean it should be, and I think our writing on this captures that sense of going to the FBI, tracking down the
FBI guy who supposedly confirmed it to Carl over the phone and signals got mixed up. TN: But also you would talk to Felt, while you were trying to figure
this out... BW: Yes and that's... TN: ...and he'd been. BW: ...okay yeah, but he said, "Look it's a
Haldeman operation." That was key. TN: What affect did the CBS news
coverage have on you? BW: This is when Walter Cronkite, before the election, did a fifteen minute, and I think
a seven or eight minute, segment on Watergate essentially reporting on our
stories, and it was a tremendous morale boost, but it didn't change the context
in which we were operating, because, you know, this is, this is something that
should be said directly: people didn't believe our stories. They thought, we had
been, we were off on a jag, that we had bad sources, and when I say people, I mean
colleagues at the Washington Post, other journalists in Washington, certainly
political figures in around town. We were, we were the guys who were wrong,
and when you have the attack machinery that the White House
was able to mobilize at that time it gets your attention, and you feel
diminished, and we felt diminished and in peril. TN: The CBS I, the CBS story is about
the same time as the Haldeman stumble, the Haldeman mistake. Do you think it
helped you through that? BW: It helped Bradlee. I know it was kind of in, in a way and it
was a psychological lift, but you know this what we learned in this story, and
you learned in journalism, it's all about the quality of information you have and
the new information, the new authoritative information you have and CBS didn't supply any new information,
but it was a big boost it was really gutsy of Cronkite and CBS to do this
because this was a finger right in the eye of the White House. This was Cronkite,
CBS, essentially embracing the coverage. If you look at those pieces, they say, "Yeah, the White House denies it, but?" TN: Do your sources dry up a little bit after the election? BW: Yeah, I mean totally and I think Bradlee was saying he was gonna hold our
heads in a bucket underwater to get more stories. TN: At this point, as a team, are you
closer to Carl Bernstein? BW: Yeah, sure. TN: So the experience of the October, a mistake, does that bring you closer? BW: Sure of course Because we did it together, we we were on
this perilous course. TN: When do you start thinking
that it might go to the top? BW: Yeah, this is in October, this there is a moment that we did not put in the book,
which we should have of I think it's October we're doing this story about Mitchell
controlling the fund, and Carl had this interchange with Mitchell where he
threatens Katherine Graham's tit. He said, "She's gonna get her tit caught in a
wringer," and which was a stunning thing for the former Attorney General to say,
as Carl points out, and Bradlee had said, "Look, this you know, we're accusing the
former Attorney General, former chief law enforcement officer of being the being a crook." And Carl realized at first, and we were
in that awful little canteen that used to exist in the Post, and he just turned
around and said, "This is so serious the dimensions are there, this guy, Nixon, is
going to be impeached," and I remember kind of came together for me in my head
and I said, "I, I think that's right, but we can never use that word in this newsroom.
We can never talk about that. We can never, we have to keep following the track." TN: What did you start working on in, the in, in you know, November, and December
January, '73, when this when the Watergate story is drying up a bit. Cover-up is working.
Do you start drifting to other assignments? BW: Well, we're still, you know,
we're I think all in at that point so we're trying to find more stories and
we're not having much luck. Carl got this story about the secret phone in the White House that was installed. We couldn't tell what it
meant to Hunt with a strange with a phone number that was a Virginia phone
number, I recall or something like that, and Ehrlichman was connected, Nixon's
chief domestic adviser, but we didn't have much. We were, and the trial of the
seven burglars, was, began in January, I believe, and this is, the trial was
important because the prosecutors presented it as Gordon Liddy as the
mastermind. No higher-ups involved, and the prosecutors will argue, Well that was
just our way of doing that, then we were gonna go on to higher ups," but we knew
them and talked to them and they were pretty passionately convinced
they had cracked the case. TN: That this was an independent
operation by G. Gordon Liddy? BW: Yeah, that's right he was the mastermind. TN: And how did he, and, and
the money just happened to be from from the committee to re-elect the president? BW: Yeah it was security money and so forth but it was not, none of it was plausible, and this is,
this is important to understand or address and this goes to the question of, you
know, there's this line, "The Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon," and
which is not the case, as I've always said, as Carl has always said, but what
happened, we wrote these stories, and when you are in journalism, you have multiple
audiences, the people who buy the paper, people who are in government, but the
Washington Post went to two people it turned out were really important in the
unraveling of Watergate, and the first was Judge Sirica, and years later I
talked to Judge Sirica about this, and in the trial the prosecutors were saying,
"Liddy's the mastermind." Sarika didn't buy it. He had read our
stories which said, "Haldeman, Mitchell Maurice Stans," who was the chief
fundraiser, thousands of dollars and secret hundreds of thousands of dollars
in secret funds and so forth. So he had on one hand, what was in the Post and
what was being presented in the trial and the dissidence was so great, and he
said, so that fueled his natural inclination to be tough, to ask questions,
and he was gonna put the burglars away for I think twenty-five years, and he said, "I just
did not believe it. In part, in maybe even large part, because of your stories," and
that pressure led to James McCord's famous letter to Judge Sirica in March
saying, "Look, there were other higher-ups involved there was a cover-up here and
so forth," and that was the somebody from the inside... ...becoming state's evidence, becoming the
government's witness, and that was significant, and according to Sirica,
a part of the backstory in his mind to act so aggressively on the burglars. TN: To what extent did you sense that your stories had moved the Congress to look into this? BW: Well that's I should have done some preparation. It was forty years ago about dates, but I think isn't it January when Sam Ervin calls me up. TN: Late January, early February. BW: Yeah yeah and calls and says, "Come on up, I wanted to talk to you, we're gonna do
an investigation of Watergate," and, "Can you give us your, your sources?" and
I just said, "No," and he said, "I understand," and essentially said, "Maybe we'll find
out and get to the bottom of the role of Jeb Magruder," who was the deputy Nixon
campaign manager. He wasn't particularly optimistic, but he had read the stories
that we had written, and he knew that there was a whole series of very serious
allegations about money, and about sabotage, and espionage, and that's where
I say that two most important subscriptions in terms of the Watergate
story that were, that the Washington Post subscribers had were Judge Sirica and
Sam Ervin, and that, that atmosphere of immense doubt they had naturally, but
with specifics of names, and money, and a, if you will, theory of the case. The
theory of the case we were presenting was that this sabotage and espionage is directed to a purpose of not just kind of making
campaigning inconvenient for Senator McGovern, Senator Muskie, and the other
people seeking to run against Richard Nixon but to divert it so they would get
McGovern, a much more left-wing candidate, somebody who would, who could not run as
a centrist at all, whereas Muskie could, to a certain extent, and the significance
of the stories quite frankly is not their impact on the public, because I
don't think public, you know, Nixon won in the landslide, I don't think this was
absorbed by the public, but it was absorbed by two key players in the
process, and Judge Sirica for, you know, many, really a couple of years after that,
really played a role in this as did Senator Ervin's committee,
which is the gold standard for Congressional investigations. They had
all the witnesses, they uncovered the existence of the taping system, they had
John Dean testify, so it's a kind of, I think, it's the way journalism works. I
think it's not often, it's often described as, well you know, we wrote these stories
and there was this wave of public opinion. No, the exact opposite. The wave
of public opinion was, "Let's reelect Nixon in a landslide," and that it was
inconceivable that these things had gone on. TN: Let's help the viewer a bit,
because the, the '70s in popular culture became famous for sort of a paranoid
view in film, "The Parallax View", "The Conversation", "Three Days of the Condor",
that comes afterwards doesn't it? BW: Yes. I would have to check their dates, but
this, this is the, you know, if you look for the merging of the skepticism and
doubt of about Vietnam and Watergate they come together here, in a way that
feeds into this doubt, and you know ultimate distrust of power,
concentrations of power, and government. TN: So your stories are not falling on
sympathetic ears? There's a little bit too, people are not, I mean it because again, there's a sense of inevitability now, when you go back and look at your
stories, but of course it wasn't then. BW: Yes, that's quite correct,
and it was, I run into people all the time who say they read the stories at
the time and so forth, and you know, whether they did or didn't, but
at the time, there was a sense, I mean we weren't the underdogs, we were the dogs.
We were wrong, and we had, if you will, the essential Nixon wrong. That, of course he
would never do anything like this. This is illegal, Nixon's a lawyer, it would
be stupid, he was gonna win anyway in '72, and you "unpacked" that, to use your term,
and you go back and look at those moments and it was it was not absorbed by the culture. TN: Would you like some water? BW: Yeah, thanks. TN: It's not absorbed by the culture but you
get an opportunity to write about it. When do, you when you start thinking
about what would become, "All the President's Men?" BW: Well, that was a again an
accident. We had signed up to do a book about Watergate and it was unraveling in '73. Day after day, there was the Ervin
committee, eventually a special prosecutor, and you couldn't keep track
of it, and if we got something new it would come out within weeks or days, and
so Carl and I decided we have to write about what we know, our own
experience covering this story. TN: Because the story hadn't ended yet. BW: That's right. TN: President Nixon he was still in office. BW: Of course. TN: You didn't know what was going to come. BW: That's right, we have to, we have the practical problem of, of
getting a book out, meeting our, our obligation, and to finish it, and I remember
sitting on a Sunday morning having brunch with Carl in August of '73, and we've said,
"We've got to get this damn book written, what are we gonna do?" and the story's
cascading, and my mother had a house down in Naples, Florida and she let us use it
for six weeks, and he and I went down there and locked ourselves away, and
wrote a draft of almost, "All of the President's Men." Carl sitting in his
shorts out by the pool on a little table with his typewriter and all of his notes,
and I was inside, and we set a goal of doing ten pages a day each, which we were
able to do, and it was just kind of, you know, we'll get this book out, and we'll
be done because the editor who didn't like the idea of writing about the
reporting initially, saw I did a couple of chapters, and she kind of said,
"Oh okay that works, do it that way." TN: Did Robert Redford play a role
in shaping how this came? BW: Yeah at some point, and again I'd [have to check] the chronology,
he called and said he found what's interesting about Watergate is,
the reporters and the unknown reporters just kind of challenging the system in
this way, in challenging the White House and the President and the newspaper
printing it, and it's setting in motion this the stream of events. TN: Did you, did you feel like
you were challenging the system? BW: That's a great question, and I
realized we were, but I try to, you know, particularly over the years think about
this. It was a, we were living in a bubble, here, in the Washington Post. It was the
newsroom, underground garages, phone calls, visits in the night, visits to people's
office, and Bradlee and the editors were encouraging us, and protecting us, and so
there was a sense of, and I, I think I'm using the right word, a "factory." We turned
this out, we get more, we, you don't think about the impact or the consequences of
it all, as Howard Simons, the managing editor, used to always say, "It's like
getting in a bathtub and turning the water incrementally hotter and hotter
and hotter and eventually, eventually you can kill yourself, and not feel that
you're going past a threshold," and so our stories are incremental, and some large,
some small, but there is, there is not the sense of we've passed a point of no, well
we I think we passed the point of no return, but that we've crossed a
threshold that takes it beyond the realm of a newspaper story. Now in ['73], in
1973 when other things were coming out, the McCord letter of the investigations
and so forth, indeed it was, but in '72, I don't recall a moment of, "You've
really stepped into another realm." Does that make any sense? TN: Yes. Oh yeah it
sounds as if you, you didn't sense that the two of you were avengers. BW: Well, no. I mean I. TN: Tell. BW: We both were determined to keep it neutral. TN: And in your case you weren't necessarily,
in political terms, but in ideological terms, that unfriendly to the Nixon administration. BW: Yeah I had voted for Nixon in 1968 when I was in the Navy. Absentee
ballot because I thought he could end the Vietnam War. He had a better chance
of ending it than Hubert Humphrey. TN: What do you recall of your reaction to the
McCord letter when you heard about it? BW: That was a big deal because that was the
first break from the inside of somebody, and again you know, this is only, almost 40 years ago. TN: I know, I apologize. BW: I think we, I think it was I should have gone and
done some review. Wasn't it Howard Simons or somebody said, "You know there's this
letter," and looking at the letter and there it was, you know, essentially the
outline of a concealment, and the argument that higher-ups were involved. TN: Did you help the Senate committee investigators in any way? Did they come to you for help? BW: Sam Dash, who was the chief counsel, tried to hire me, and I said, "You know, I'm gonna
keep doing what I'm doing," and he said, "Who would you hire?" and I said, "Well I'd
hire smart people," and he said, "Who's the smartest person you know?" and I gave him
the name of Scott Armstrong, who became, he hired as an investigator, and Scott
played a critical role in discovering the taping system. Scott,
very persistent investigator, you know, looked at all the satellite
witnesses after Dean's testimony, who can corroborate, or who would dispute Dean's
testimony, and Alexander Butterfield was one of them. Actually, Scott had asked
me, "Who would, who's, who are the satellite witnesses?" and I think Butterfield's name
came up. I, again, it's in the, "All the President's Men." One of us raised it and
I said, "Oh yeah, I'd tried to talk to him and he wouldn't talk" and somebody said,
he was connected to internal security, which suggested eavesdropping, and they
then called Butterfield then and grilled him for hours and he finally
disclosed the taping system. TN: Before we get to the disclosure and its effect on you, what
was it like to watch Dean's testimony? BW: It was... potent because he was, he was going
further than we had gone. Remember we'd we never had a story saying anyone said,
"Nixon was at the center of this," and what Dean said was, "Nixon was at the center
and involved", and he had all of the dates and the meetings and so forth, so it was
an escalation of the story beyond where we had taken it. TN: Tell us please about the
middle of, middle of April 1973. Mark Felt tells you that that Dean and Haldeman
are out, there gonna go out, and that's a story that the Washington Post does not run. BW: That's right, because we went to Bradley with it and he went, you know, "Wow,"
and then he told a famous story, which I think we reprint in "All the President's
Men," about his Newsweek bureau chief running the story that J.
Edgar Hoover is out as FBI director, and he got it from one of Johnson's top
aides, and ran the story, and then that the morning that came out in Newsweek,
Lyndon Johnson said to Moyers or somebody, "You, you tell Brandt, Ben Bradlee, F You," and then went out and appointed Hoover director of the FBI for life, as a
way to kind of, and so Ben would say, you know, "Who says they're out, when, for what
reason, what does it mean," and it needs to be said, and it's shown in the record on
this, that Ben is a powerful editor, was not just what he was willing to print,
but what he put the brakes on which he a number of times did and that's one example. TN: How close do you think you came to getting the Plumber story? BW: Which part of the Plumbers story? TN: Well actually I mean you're so close when you're following
Hunt, but I asked Mr. Bernstein about this, and he felt you, he thought you
had come close. Ultimately Seymour Hersh, I think, figured that out. BW: Well I think it came out in a in a court proceeding. You
mean the Ellsberg burglary... TN: Yes, the Ellsberg burglary. BW: ...in Los Angeles? What we got a court document that was a
stipulation for the trial of the Hunt and Liddy and the five burglars about things they had done, and one, that they had gone to
Los Angeles in September 1971 and stayed at the Beverly Wilshire, and Carl and I
were perplexed by this, "What were they doing out there?" And so we went to the
Beverly Wilshire, this is in the days when the Washington Post, you just say, "I
want to go to Australia," and they'd say, "Fine," you know. And so we went to to L.A., stayed at the Beverly Wilshire, and of course
what they were doing, which we did not know, and by the way did not come really
close to finding out, was they burglarized Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, what Dr. Lewis Fielding, and when we were
in L.A. we were scratching our heads going around talking to people trying to
figure out and we could not, and this is was one of our many faults, we couldn't
go to 30,000 feet and say, "Okay what business are these guys in? Burglary
breaking and entering. Well let's take those dates they were here and check the
police blotter and see if there were any break-ins during that period. It's
conceivable we might have found Lewis Fielding, seen him, connected it to
Ellsberg I don't know, I don't but it it is an interesting demonstration
of not connecting the dots. TN: In May of 1973 this is when you have a meeting with Mark
Felt, and he scares you a little bit. BW: Yeah. TN: Could you please tell us what you remember then? BW: Scare, I mean this is where he said, "The stakes are so high lives
could be in danger." There's eavesdropping going on, there are
all kinds of covert activities by the CIA and so forth, and you know which,
which if you fast forward you realize what he was you know this is the FBI,
which distrusted the CIA and they realized the CIA was into domestic
spying and that's what he was talking about I believe, but we focused on, and I
focused on, and I think in a overly paranoid way about lives could be in danger. Meaning our lives are in danger, and you
know, this, the whole environment of meeting in the middle of the night in an
underground parking garage, I don't know that you've ever been in one at 2:00 or
3:00 a.m. when no one's there, it's pretty chilling, and it got to me, and I
think my report was a little overly emotional, but we took it seriously and I
think what he was saying was, "Don't let your guard down, the stakes are really
getting out of control here," and we actually met a different part of
the Post and had our phones checked. TN: Now when Haldeman and Ehrlichman and
Dean and Kleindienst leave the White House, do you think that's the end of, I
mean in sense, that this is before John Dean testifies, and as you say... BW: This is April 30th... TN: …April 30th. Is this, I mean in a sense is your story over then? I mean is that
why writing "All the President's Men" is possible? Because in, in retrospect "All the
President's Men" is and it was written before the ultimate conclusion. BW: Oh indeed. It was published... TN: Yes. BW: ...before the ultimate conclusion. TN: So in a sense at that point,
did you think the story ended with them? BW: No, it was obvious it wasn't ending but
that was a big turning point because we had accused Haldeman, and this, you know,
story that we had screwed up, you know, only, what, six, you know, six months, seven
months, earlier so the, the, the splatter from that was still on us, so there was a
sense of, ah, now he's resigning because of the, you know, Watergate cover-up and
so forth and the whole thing. I mean, there was a sense of the Nixon
Presidency unraveling at that point, but not over. TN: What was your reaction when you heard that there was a taping system? BW: This story we tell in "All the President's Men". After Butterfield was grilled two
people involved in that told me that there was a taping system, and I just
mean everything, all the office meetings, all the phone calls, and I stewed on it
all day, this was a Saturday, and I called Bradlee at home at night, no chain of
command, and I said, "There's a taping system. Got good sources on it. What do
you think?" and he, he said, and I think it's in the book, "Well don't bust one on it." It kind of was, you know, I think he was disbelieving,
also it was late Saturday night, so we, I took Sunday off, and Monday. Then
Butterfield is called and testifies to it, and Ben came by my desk, because I
think he said, also on Saturday, said, "Well it's a B+ story," and said, "Oh it's
more than a B+," and there then was the sense, "Oh, there's a record." TN: Did you have a little joke with Richard Cohen later that summer when the Agnew material came out? BW: Yeah, yeah. I mean he was, I don't remember what he said, I know he was astounded. TN: About because you had... BW: I told him... TN: …about a year earlier, over a year. BW: …over a year, yeah, yeah.
But you know in fairness to him, and I mean what was the "it?" There was
no name, there was no amount of money, there was no date. TN: How was your relationship with Mark Felt in the summer of ['73], you know, and at the end of '73? BW: Well he'd left the FBI. He'd been, and he didn't, he still kept in touch, and he was the
one who gave us, gave me, the tip that there was an erasure on one of the tapes,
and that was a big deal, and I never found out he's out of the FBI, but you
know it's like the CIA, once you're in you never leave, I guess. TN: Did you find that people in the White House started to want to talk to you? BW: Yes, sure. TN: And when, what's the tipping point for this? BW: That's, that's an excellent question, I mean, I'd have to back to the chronology and the dates, but there was a point, where in May of '73 I
think Ziegler publicly apologized to the Post and to Carl and myself by name, and
so that, and you know, he said, "And they were right and we were wrong," and that
was a rather incredible statement, and so then we had we found we could talk to
people in the White House, some, not, never enough. TN: Well, you know David Gergen has
told us... BW: Yeah, yes. TN: ...he's talked to you but you you felt you could ... did you begin to
sense that some of them were, you don't to, obviously, I'm not asking you to name
them, but that they were starting to talk to you because now they were
beginningto doubt? BW: Oh sure. I mean, there was a lot of doubt and a lot of Republicans were kind of, there
was movement in the chair about "Hey what is this? Maybe we got it all wrong." We, the
Republicans, who were defending him like George Herbert Walker Bush, who was
chairman of the Republican National Committee. TN: Well, when I mean, did you, we
know, about his statement, I mean, you know, he writes a diary entry about telling the
President, "You ought to leave," but that's, that's in August of... BW: Yes. TN: ...that's in August '74 but are
we, are you, seeing doubt there? BW: Yeah, I think so, sure. There were enough, I mean, just on its
surface, what's going on here? TN: Well can you recall someone in the late part of '73 perhaps after the Saturday Night Massacre, comes to you, and I mean you,
you're much more prominent now than you were before, both of you and Carl
Bernstein, and says, "You know, you guys are, you might be right or." BW: Boy, you have to
help with what who. TN: I don't know what, I was just, I'm just trying to help. BW: Well there were people in the White House who were still alive, who were
confidential sources who were saying things. I mean I think I talked to Fred Buzhardt,
or it was one of Nixon's lawyers, on the record, and I think we were in a
front-page story of Buzhardt saying not that he had doubt, but that it's hard to
get the facts, and hard to find out. You know, here's the President's lawyer on the record
saying, "I can't find out what happened." TN: You win the Pulitzer. Instead by
the, the newspaper wins a Pulitzer for your reporting in '73. What does the Pulitzer mean for a
journalist? BW: Well, you know, there was an ambiguity about this. It was to the paper
and not to us, and for a while we were upset, and this was our, we shouldn't have
been upset, you know, we're identified with the story. It's, but it's as I tell
people who win Pulitzer Prizes, you win a Pulitzer Prize on Tuesday, and on
Wednesday you go to work. It really doesn't change much, and it, if you're
thinking about it, it shouldn't change much inside either. TN: What, though, you become
celebrities at a certain point. Doesn't, is it not more difficult to be a
reporter, or is it easier if? BW: It cuts both ways, and you know I don't, it's
you know, I did, my, and Bradlee's advice always was, you know, "Keep your
head down, keep your head down." TN: What, what do you recall of your reaction
to the Smoking Gun Transcripts? BW: Yeah, that that was, this is August, early, August... TN: '74. BW: ...that was, that was
a big deal, obviously, and you know, there's the tape that shows Nixon right
in the middle of it, right in the thick of it, and it wasn't that, you know it's
called the Smoking Gun Tape. Actually there have been other tapes that were, I
think, more smoking guns about the money and conversations with Dean, but it was
the, another disclosure it was after the Supreme Court ruled eight to nothing
that Nixon had to turn over his tapes, and there was a, and there was the, the
impeachment votes at that time, and so you have the Congress turning against Nixon, the
Supreme Court turning against Nixon, Republicans turning against Nixon, and
those, you know, the graphic language in that final tape of so-called Smoking Gun
Tape of, you know, he clearly is concealing. TN: Did you ever have a chance to
ask Mark Felt about that particular incident when the FBI was told to not to do something? BW: Not really, no. No. Because see, he was out of the FBI... TN: Yes. BW: ...and after the last thing I think he gave me was about the erasure on that tape, and so
we're developing active sources, and everything goes on in through '74, and
then we publish "All the President's Men" in April of '74, and I called to ask him, to see if I could identify him, and he went bananas
that I'd even think about it, and then the idea that there was a secret source,
a Deep Throat, he was, you know, he was really angry about it. That, you know, the
barrier became a cement wall. TN: Because one wonders, and you know, we
can only speculate about how that, how the pressure the CIA put on the FBI, which
lasted about a couple of weeks, how that affected his thinking about where this
investigation was going to go. BW: Yeah, exactly but because you've got the, the
mysteries of the Mark Felt motive and the uncertain motive, and the multiple
motives of, he didn't get the job as FBI Director, even acting, and he thought he
was entitled. This guy Gray, Pat Gray, is brought in, who's you know, not
experienced, the former submarine skipper, and Justice Department official,
a sense of the White House is really abusing the FBI, a level of personal
outrage about it, but a sense of you're exactly right. I think when you go back
and look at it, the idea that the CIA was curtailing an FBI inquiry was just ten
red flags to any FBI person including Felt, who had these suspicions and
distrusted the Nixon White House. TN: But as you look back and you have to,
I know, look at your notes I suppose... BW: Yeah. TN: ...he, he wasn't, was he sending you any signals
that the CIA was engaged in a political operation? BW: Not that, I mean, not that I recall. I mean if you have to look at the whole record,
and the notes, and but I don't see anything like that. TN: When you wrote "All
the President's Men," you had to edit it so that you protected Mark Felt.
What did you leave out? BW: His name and... TN: Yes. BW: ...specifically that he worked for the FBI or the Justice Department. I think the identification in "All the President's Men" is a
sensitive position in the Executive Branch. TN: But did, or were there some details
he had given you, or some moments in the story that you had to? BW: Boy I don't, I mean the notes are at the University of Texas. TN: What effect do you think
your achievement, the journalistic achievement, had on journalism? As I mean,
you were a participant but I know you also were an observer. What happened? BW: They made a movie about it, it had the consequence of being part of the story
that led to Richard Nixon's resignation, and it seemed to have a glamour to it. You know I, I think what people have said is, you know,
"Oh look, this." There was even a magazine story called, "Wood-Stein U," university.
I think the Atlantic had a cover of Redford and Hoffman play, you know, and
that this has drawn all these people to journalism school. I certainly had an impact. I think it all began with Vietnam, but the the doubts
about the Vietnam War not only merged with Watergate, but I
think had a tremendous impact on people, and the population, public opinion, and
certainly on me, because I was in the Pentagon reading Top-Secret reports
about what was going on in Vietnam, and then looking at what was being said
publicly, and there was a clear disparity. So the distrust really began with
Vietnam and merged, and so it's very appealing to become a journalist and
deal with this government that does, engages in a corrupt war and,
and political corruption. TN: What do you recall of the
day that President Nixon resigned? BW: Sitting in Howard Simon's office on the floor eating a bologna sandwich, and feeling you know, just kind of quiet and silent,
and not, no Bradlee was really, you know, no high-fiving, no, and he, and he was
right, and there was no way to feel that. There was a sense of something that
moved across the threshold that was totally unexpected and unintended. TN: You write a book about fifteen years later about the legacy of Watergate, "The Shadow." Tell
us, one of the things that's striking about that, is that you wrote that Nixon's
successors did not comprehend the distrust he left behind. BW: Yes. TN: Would you sort of unpack that
a little and explain what you meant by that? BW: What they didn't get that,
the press is more aggressive and they kind of knew it and they would
articulate it but they didn't think it pertained to them, that the Congress is
more aggressive, the public is more skeptical, and so the effort at
concealment and not having a transparent White House and government persisted in
a way that, you know, there's something about the White House that
makes people feel, that you know, "Okay, in a sense, the history of scandal doesn't
apply to us, because our motives are pure, and and everything is fine," and so
they pull back and I think to their own detriment. TN: So even President Clinton, who was very much active, and live in the
Watergate period, and Hillary Clinton, who'd been counsel to, I believe, the House Judiciary Committee... BW: Yeah. TN: ...for them, that was somebody else's story? BW: Yeah, kind of, and I mean look at what happened in the
Clinton Presidency. If they just turned over all the White Water documents it
would have gone away, but they were kind of, "Oh well, the press will misuse the
truth." In the end the job of a reporter is to get people to trust you with the truth,
and I think seasoned political people, people in government, the smart ones
realized, "Yeah, you know, you got to get it out, you got, you can't hide it doesn't
work." As Nixon said, "The cover-up is worse than the initial incident," and I found in
researching that book on Ford, and Carter, and Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton, that,
that the theory of the case was the, the Presidents didn't get it enough, and
hadn't really learned the lesson of Watergate: just get it out and take, take
your medicine, and don't get involved in a war with Congress or the
Supreme Court, or with the press. TN: Have Presidents learned that since? BW: Well, you know, there's people make,
made stabs, and I mean this is a subject we could talk, I did four books
on Bush, and interviewed Bush for hours, and he would say, you know, "You're trying to
get into my head, that's okay I want you to," and the government opened up at times
and then it kept lots of things secret, too many things secret, and you see it up
to Obama today. Secret, secrecy is more often a disease than a remedy. TN: Did you sense back when you were doing the Watergate story, did you have the
sense that you and Carl were more aggressive than your generation of
journalists? Because of course we just, I mean, did you, did you know you
were setting a standard? BW: Of course. I mean, we were just, again it's a factory. I don't mean to, you know you go in. TN: But you know when I say the people later on, again, look back in this and see the
two of you as paragons of a new journalism. BW: But see, we were young, as I said before,
you have to look at the publication of the Watergate stories who was taking a risk?
Really Katherine Graham was taking a risk. You know they attacked the Post 's FCC
licenses. There was a question of credibility. She asked me once, "When is all the truth gonna come out?" and I said, "Never," and she
said, "Never, don't tell me never." So she was taking the risk. Bradlee was taking the risk. Carl and I, you know, if it turned out not
to be provable, and therefore in the public mind, in the journalistic
community's mind, "not true," you know, I could have gone to law school, and Carl
could have gone to write rock and roll criticism, which he always aspired to. So
we were not really taking a risk as we saw it, it was just find out what
happened, and check it out. TN: What did he, go ahead.. BW: No. TN: I was gonna say, would be fair to say
that the "it" also kept changing? BW: Yes. Exactly it did, and you don't know what the "it" is, so you
just keep, you know, how do we find out, you know, we were look, this, we were
blessed by Barry Sussman who's, who was the city editor, had not received
enough credit for the great work he did. Harry Rosenfeld, was the Metropolitan
editor, Howard Simons, who was a driver of this, Bradlee has received the credit,
rightly so, because he's at the top, he's the guy who had to make that decision. It
was a the synergy among the editors and Carl and myself was the right one. TN: Did you, you talked to Ehrlichman afterwards. BW: Yes. TN: What was that like it? BW: It was a couple of years
after Nixon resigned, I think, maybe '77, '78. Went to Paris to be on some
French TV show, and he was one of the other people, and afterwards I said, "Well
let's talk," and he said, and he was kind of a, a amateur artist, and we went to a
Cezanne exhibit, I remember, and he essentially said, "Look, if you want to
talk and not re-plow the past, we can talk, and so [to] a certain extent be
acquaintances or friends, but I'm, you know, that's over, I paid my price, I went
to jail, and I'm moving on, and if we can do that, let's do it," and we did. We had [a]
great time together in Paris and he'd come to Washington, we'd have lunch
a couple of times, he helped me, quite frankly, on a couple of books like
the Supreme Court book on how Nixon decided on certain nominees and so forth,
but I always admired a part of him for kind of saying, "Look I've gotta stuff
that away, that's passed, and let's, you know, let's look at the future." TN: Did you talk to him about Watergate? BW: Yeah, a little, yeah. TN: Anything you wanted? BW: I mean, I did, it was
never stunning. He's somebody who realized, who didn't realize how he
sounded or how he came across. I remember his, you know, kind of snarling Senate
Watergate committee testimony. He was not, but there was nothing
I recall now that really was, but I, what was important was, I thought it was [what]
allowed him to move on, if I just say, "Look, you want to rehash that?" "No." TN: Did you ever have a chance to
talk to President Nixon or Haldeman? BW: No. I did not, but I got
to talk to Herb Kalmbach, who was Nixon's personal lawyer, and at one point he was
here in Washington to testify, and I, he came to my apartment, and we talked about
it, and he broke down crying. About what he had done, about what had happened ,what
it meant, how it got out of control, it was a very emotional, confessional, evening. TN: Is there any other anecdote you'd like to preserve? That we didn't get to? BW: No, no, no. TN: Well. BW: I have one quick, as I've kind of looked at and tried to
address the question, "What was Watergate?" That in a sense it was five wars
launched by Nixon, and the first was before Watergate, before the break-in, the
war against the anti-war movement. Nixon of course was leading the Vietnam War,
hated the anti-war movement, and if you look at the things they, the spying and
disruption of the anti-war movement, it was the first war. The second war was
against the press, was kind of, because the press was reporting on the anti-war
movement, the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg the anti, you know, the the suspicion
about the the press was intense. Then the third war was against the
Democrats who were gonna run against him, and that was Watergate, and the espionage,
and sabotage operation, and if you look at the personalities and the apparatus,
not an accident that the people who did the Ellsberg burglary in war two did the
Watergate break-in in war three, and then war four was the war against justice. That
was the cover-up to conceal, and then it led to the resignation when everything
unraveled, and the fifth war was the war against history, which Nixon launched for
the rest of his life. It was just a blip, it was, you know, the Frost interviews, the
whole repackaging of what it was, rather the kind of facing up to what it was, and so those are the five wars. What strikes
me is that Nixon had within him the intellect to, at moments, get what had
happened. The day he resigned, the famous speech in the East Room in the White
House, televised with, you know, the wife, daughters, son in-laws there. No script,
he's sweating, talking about his mother and his father reading from Teddy
Roosevelt's diary, and he kind of waves at one point like, "This is why I called you here," and, and then he says that really
important line he said, "Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate
you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself," and at that
moment when he's resigning he realized that the poison was hate. That the piston
driving him was hate and that is such an intellectual self-revelation to present
right at that moment, in public you know, you have to, I mean you almost want to
say, "You get it now." You know, it's not that he could stay and not resign, at
that point, but it was, it was the Nixon, the power of Nixon's intellect which is
apparent in so many things. At that moment getting what, how he had destroyed himself. TN: Did the system work? BW: You know that the, the system did work, and I think properly. I think if, if I ever
did another book on Nixon it would be called, which I won't, I hope, it'd be called,
"The Wrong Man." That he was outside the mainstream of American Presidents.
Whether you disagree with American Presidents or agree with them, there
generally is, they're trying to connect to the high purpose of the Presidency.
You listen to the Nixon tapes and it's too much about Nixon. It's too much about
use the power of the Presidency as an instrument of personal revenge.
"Let's get, screw so-and-so, get the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, on so-and-so," and I've
not listened to all of the Nixon tapes or read transcripts, but it strikes me
and maybe, and you can correct this, is there ever on a tape where somebody says,
in Nixon's inner circle, or Nixon says, "What would be right? What would be good
for the country?" Does that ever happen? TN: I haven't heard all of them, but I haven't heard that... BW: Yeah. TN: ...in what I've listened to. BW: But isn't that what the President should be asking, kind of everyday in the White House? TN: What's the legacy of Watergate? BW: Somebody else is gonna write that. TN: Are there any questions you have
left about Watergate that didn't get? BW: Yes, lots, and they get into the details of
things that I never, I've kind of are lingering, not but not, they don't
wouldn't change the story, I don't think. You were suggesting the other night
there's a cover-up of something that worked? TN: Well, we'll leave, we'll leave that for others. I wanted to know what questions you had. BW: Yeah. TN: Bob Woodward, thank you very much. BW: Thanks.
