One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Watergate story has been the way the press has handled it: what began in the summer of 1972 as one of the great media-bungles of the century has developed, by now, into what is probably the most thoroughly and most professionally covered story in the history of American journalism.
When I boomed into Washington last month to meet Steadman and set up the National Affairs desk once again, I expected—or in retrospect, I think I expected—to find the high-rolling news-meisters of the capital press corps jabbering blindly among themselves, once again, in some stylish sector of reality far-removed from the Main Nerve of “the story” . . . like climbing aboard Ed Muskie’s Sunshine Special in the Florida primary and finding every media star in the nation sipping Bloody Marys and convinced they were riding the rails to Miami with “the candidate” . . . or sitting down to lunch at the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn on Election Day with a half-dozen of the heaviest press wizards and coming away convinced that McGovern couldn’t possibly lose by more than 10 points.
My experience on the campaign trail in 1972 had not filled me with a real sense of awe, vis-à-vis the wisdom of the national press corps . . . so I was seriously jolted when I arrived in Washington to find that the bastards had this Watergate story nailed up and bleeding from every extremity—from “Watergate” and all its twisted details, to ITT, the Vesco case, Nixon’s lies about the financing for his San Clemente beach-mansion, and even the long-dormant “Agnew Scandal.”
There was not a hell of a lot of room for a Gonzo Journalist to operate in that high-tuned atmosphere. For the first time in memory, the Washington press corps was working very close to the peak of its awesome but normally dormant potential. The Washington Post has a half dozen of the best reporters in America working every tangent of the Watergate story like wild-eyed junkies set adrift, with no warning, to find their next connection. The New York Times, badly blitzed on the story at first, called in hot rods from its bureaus all over the country to overcome the Post’s early lead. Both Time’s and Newsweek’s Washington bureaus began scrambling feverishly to find new angles, new connections, new leaks, and leads in this story that was unraveling so fast that nobody could stay on top of it . . . And especially not the three (or four) TV networks, whose whole machinery was geared to visual/action stories rather than skillfully planted tips from faceless lawyers who called on private phones and then refused to say anything at all in front of the cameras.
The only standard-brand visual “action” in the Watergate story had happened at the very beginning—when the burglars were caught in the act by a squad of plain-clothes cops with drawn guns—and that happened so fast that there was not even a still photographer on hand, much less a TV camera.
The network news moguls are not hungry for stories involving weeks of dreary investigation and minimum camera possibilities—particularly at a time when almost every ranking TV correspondent in the country was assigned to one aspect or another of a presidential campaign that was still boiling feverishly when the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17. The Miami conventions and the Eagleton fiasco kept the Watergate story backstage all that summer. Both the networks and the press had their “first teams” out on the campaign trail until long after the initial indictments—Liddy, Hunt, McCord, et al.—on September 15. And by Election Day in November, the Watergate story seemed like old news.
It was rarely if ever mentioned among the press people following the campaign. A burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters seemed relatively minor compared to the action in Miami. It was a “local” (Washington) story, and the “local staff” was handling it . . . but I had no local staff, so I made the obvious choice.
Except on two occasions, and the first of these still haunts me. On the night of June 17, I spent most of the evening in the Watergate Hotel: from about eight o’clock until ten I was swimming laps in the indoor pool, and from ten thirty until a bit after one I was drinking tequila in the Watergate bar with Tom Quinn, a sports columnist for the now-defunct Washington Daily News.
Meanwhile, upstairs in room 214, Hunt and Liddy were already monitoring the break-in, by walkie-talkie, with ex-FBI agent Alfred Baldwin in his well-equipped spy-nest across Virginia Avenue in room 419 of the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge. Jim McCord had already taped the locks on two doors just underneath the bar in the Watergate garage, and it was probably just about the time that Quinn and I called for our last round of tequila that McCord and his team of Cubans moved into action—and got busted less than an hour later.
All this was happening less than one hundred yards from where we were sitting in the bar, sucking limes and salt with our Sauza Gold and muttering darkly about the fate of Duane Thomas and the pigs who run the National Football League.
Neither Bob Woodward nor Carl Bernstein from the Post were invited to McGovern’s party that night—which was fitting, because the guest list was limited to those who had lived through the day-to-day nightmare of the ’72 campaign . . . People like Frank Mankiewicz, Miles Rubin, Rick Stearns, Gary Hart, and even Newsweek correspondent Dick Stout, whose final dispatch on the doomed McGovern campaign very nearly got him thrown out of the Dakota Queen II at thirty thousand feet over Lincoln, Nebraska, on the day before the election.
This was the crowd that had gathered that night in July to celebrate his last victory before the Great Disaster—the slide that began with Eagleton and ended, incredibly, with “Watergate.” The events of the past six months had so badly jangled the nerves of the invited guests—the staffers and journalists who had been with McGovern from New Hampshire all the way to Sioux Falls on Election Day—that nobody really wanted to go to the party, for fear that it might be a funeral and a serious bummer.
By the end of the evening, when the two dozen bitter-enders had forced McGovern to break out his own private stock—ignoring the departure of the caterers and the dousing of the patio lights—the bulk of the conversation was focused on which one or ones of the Secret Service men assigned to protect McGovern had been reporting daily to Jeb Magruder at CREEP (the Committee for the Re-election of the President), and which one of the ten or twelve journalists with access to the innards of George’s strategy had been on CREEP’s payroll at $1,500 a month. This journalist—still publicly unknown and un-denounced—was referred to in White House memos as “Chapman’s Friend,” a mysterious designation that puzzled the whole Washington press corps until one of the president’s beleaguered ex-aides explained privately that “Chapman” is a name Nixon used, from time to time, in the good old days when he was able to travel around obscure Holiday Inns under phony names . . .
R. Chapman, Pepsi-Cola salesman, New York City . . . with a handful of friends carrying walkie-talkies and wearing white leather shoulder-holsters . . . But what the hell? Just send a case of Pepsi up to the suite, my man, and don’t ask questions; your reward will come later—call the White House and ask for Howard Hunt or Jim McCord; they’ll take care of you.
Right. Or maybe Tex Colson, who is slowly and surely emerging as the guiding light behind Nixon’s whole arsenal of illegal, immoral, and unethical “black advance” or “dirty tricks” department. It was Colson who once remarked that he would “walk over his grandmother for Richard Nixon” . . . and it was Colson who hired head “plumber” Egil “Bud” Krogh, who in 1969 told Daniel X. Friedman, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago: “Anyone who opposes us, we’ll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn’t support us, we’ll destroy.”
Colson, the only one of Nixon’s top command to so far evade Watergate’s legal noose, is the man who once told White House cop Jack Caulfield to put a firebomb in the offices of the staid/liberal Brookings Institution, in order to either steal or destroy some documents he considered incriminating. Colson now says he was “only joking” about the firebomb plan, but Caulfield took it so seriously that he went to then White House counsel John Dean and said he refused to work with Colson any longer, because he was “cra
zy.”
Crazy? Tex Colson?
Never in hell. “He’s the meanest man in American politics,” says Nixon’s speechwriter Pat Buchanan, smiling lazily over the edge of a beer can beside the pool outside his Watergate apartment. Buchanan is one of the few people in the Nixon administration with a sense of humor. He is so far to the right that he dismisses Tex Colson as a “Massachusetts liberal.” But for some reason, Buchanan is also one of the few people—perhaps the only one—on Nixon’s staff who has friends at the other end of the political spectrum. At one point during the campaign I mentioned Buchanan at McGovern headquarters, for some reason, and Rick Stearns, perhaps the most hardline left-bent ideologue on McGovern’s staff, sort of chuckled and said, “Oh yeah, we’re pretty good friends. Pat’s the only one of those bastards over there with any principles.” When I mentioned this to another McGovern staffer, he snapped: “Yeah, maybe so . . . like Joseph Goebbels had principles.”
My own relationship with Buchanan goes back to the New Hampshire primary in 1968 when Nixon was still on the dim fringes of his political comeback. We spent about eight hours one night in a Boston hotel room, finishing off a half gallon of Old Crow and arguing savagely about politics: as I recall, I kept asking him why a person who seemed to have good sense would be hanging around with Nixon. It was clear even then that Buchanan considered me stone crazy, and my dismissal of Nixon as a hopeless bum with no chance of winning anything seemed to amuse him more than anything else.
About eight months later, after one of the strangest and most brutal years in American history, Richard Nixon was president and Pat Buchanan was one of his top two speechwriters along with Ray Price, the house moderate. I didn’t see Pat again until the McGovern campaign in ’72 when Ron Ziegler refused to have me on the Nixon press plane, and Buchanan intervened to get me past the White House guard and into what turned out to be a dull and useless seat on the plane with the rest of the White House press corps. It was also Buchanan who interviewed Garry Wills, introducing him into the Nixon campaign of 1968—an act of principle that resulted in an extremely unfriendly book called Nixon Agonistes.
So it seemed entirely logical, I thought—going back to Washington in the midst of this stinking Watergate summer—to call Buchanan and see if he felt like having thirteen or fourteen drinks on some afternoon when he wasn’t at the White House working feverishly in what he calls “the bunker.” Price and Buchanan write almost everything Nixon says, and they are busier than usual these days, primarily figuring out what not to say. I spent most of one Saturday afternoon with Pat lounging around a tin umbrella table beside the Watergate pool and talking lazily about politics in general. When I called him at the White House the day before, the first thing he said was “Yeah, I just finished your book.”
“Oh Jesus,” I replied, thinking this naturally meant the end of any relationship we’d ever have. But he laughed. “Yeah, it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.”
One of the first things I asked him that afternoon was something that had been simmering in my head for at least a year or so, and that was how he could feel comfortable with strange friends like me and Rick Stearns, and particularly how he could possibly feel comfortable sitting out in the open—in plain sight of the whole Watergate crowd—with a known monster whose affection for Richard Nixon was a matter of fairly brutal common knowledge—or how he felt comfortable playing poker once or twice a week sometimes with Rick Stearns, whose political views are almost as diametrically opposed to Buchanan’s as mine are. He shrugged it off with a grin, opening another beer. “Oh, well, we ideologues seem to get along better than the others. I don’t agree with Rick on anything at all that I can think of, but I like him and I respect his honesty.”
A strange notion, the far left and far right finding some kind of odd common ground beside the Watergate pool, and particularly when one of them is a top Nixon speechwriter, spending most of his time trying to keep the Boss from sinking like a stone in foul water, yet now and then laughingly referring to the White House as The Bunker.
After the sixth or seventh beer, I told him about our abortive plot several nights earlier to seize Colson out of his house and drag him down Pennsylvania Avenue tied behind a huge gold Oldsmobile Cutlass. He laughed and said something to the effect that “Colson’s so tough, he might like it.” And then, talking further about Colson, he said, “But you know he’s not really a conservative.”
And that’s what seems to separate the two GOP camps, like it separates Barry Goldwater from Richard Nixon. Very much like the difference between the Humphrey Democrats and the McGovern Democrats. The ideological wing versus the pragmatists, and by Buchanan’s standards, it’s doubtful that he even considers Richard Nixon a conservative.
My strange and violent reference to Colson seemed to amuse him more than anything else. “I want to be very clear on one thing,” I assured him. “If you’re thinking about having me busted for conspiracy on this, remember that I’ve already deliberately dragged you into it.” He laughed again and then mentioned something about the “one overt act” necessary for a conspiracy charge, and I quickly said that I had no idea where Tex Colson even lived and didn’t really want to know, so that even if we’d wanted to drag the vicious bastard down Pennsylvania Avenue at sixty miles per hour behind a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass, we had no idea, that night, where to find him, and about halfway into the plot we crashed into a black and gold Cadillac on Connecticut Avenue and drew a huge mob of angry blacks who ended all thought of taking vengeance on Colson. It was all I could do to get out of that scene without getting beaten like a gong for the small crease our rented Cutlass had put in the fender of the Cadillac.
Which brings us back to that accident report I just wrote and sent off to Mr. Roach at Avis Mid-Atlantic Headquarters in Arlington. The accident occurred about three thirty in the morning when either Warren Beatty or Pat Caddell opened the door of a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass I’d rented at Dulles airport earlier that day, and banged the door against the fender of a massive black & gold Cadillac roadster parked in front of a late-night restaurant on Connecticut Avenue called Anna Maria’s. It seemed like a small thing at the time, but in retrospect it might have spared us all—including McGovern—an extremely nasty episode.
Because somewhere in the late hours of that evening, when the drink had taken hold and people were jabbering loosely about anything that came into their heads, somebody mentioned that “the worst and most vicious” of Nixon’s backstairs White House hit men—Charles “Tex” Colson—was probably the only one of the dozen or more Nixon/CREEP functionaries thus far sucked into “the Watergate scandal” who was not likely to do any time, or even be indicted.
It was a long, free-falling conversation, with people wandering in and out, over a time span of an hour or so—journalists, pols, spectators—and the focus of it, as I recall, was a question that I was trying to get some bets on: How many of the primary Watergate figures would actually serve time in prison?
The reactions ranged from my own guess that only Magruder and Dean would live long enough to serve time in prison, to Mankiewicz’s flat assertion that “everybody except Colson” would be indicted, convicted, sentenced, and actually hauled off to prison.
(Everybody involved in this conversation will no doubt deny any connection with it—or even hearing about it, for that matter—but what the hell? It did, in fact, take place over the course of some two or three days, in several locations, but the seed of the speculation took root in the final early morning hours of McGovern’s party . . . although I don’t remember that George himself was involved or even within earshot at any time. He has finally come around to the point where his friends don’t mind calling him “George” in the friendly privacy of his own home, but that is not quite the same thing as getting him involved in a felony-conspiracy/attempted murder charge that some wild-eyed, Nixon-appointed geek in the Justice Department might try to crank up on the basis of a series of boozy conversations among journalists, p
oliticians, and other half-drunk cynics. Anybody who has spent any time around late-night motel bars with the press corps on a presidential campaign knows better than to take their talk seriously . . . but after reading reviews of my book on the ’72 campaign, it occurs to me that some people will believe almost anything that fits their preconceived notions.)
And so much for all that.
What will Nixon do now? That is the question that has every Wizard in Washington hanging by his or her fingernails—from the bar of the National Press Club to the redwood sauna in the Senate gymnasium to the hundreds of high-powered cocktail parties in suburbs like Bethesda, McLean, Arlington, Cabin John, and especially in the leafy white ghetto of the district’s northwest quadrant. You can wander into Nathans tavern at the corner of M Street & Wisconsin in Georgetown and get an argument about “Nixon’s strategy” without even mentioning the subject. All you have to do is stand at the bar, order a Bass ale, and look interested: the hassle will take care of itself; the very air in Washington is electric with the vast implications of “Watergate.”
Thousands of big-money jobs depend on what Nixon does next; on what Archibald Cox has in mind; on whether “Uncle Sam’s” TV hearings will resume full-bore after Labor Day, or be either telescoped or terminated like Nixon says they should be.
The smart money says the “Watergate hearings,” as such, are effectively over—not only because Nixon is preparing to mount a popular crusade against them, but because every elected politician in Washington is afraid of what the Ervin committee has already scheduled for the “third phase” of the hearings.
Phase Two, as originally planned, would focus on “dirty tricks”—a colorful, shocking, and essentially minor area of inquiry, but one with plenty of action and a guaranteed audience appeal. A long and serious look at the “dirty tricks” aspect of national campaigning would be a death-blow to the daily soap-opera syndrome that apparently grips most of the nation’s housewives. The cast of characters, and the twisted tales they could tell, would shame every soap-opera scriptwriter in America.