Woodward at His Post
The accepted narrative of Nixon as the villain of Watergate is based largely on the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They both were young reporters on the Washington Post’s Metro desk when the story fell into their laps. When it was over, they were household names. Woodward in particular would go on to become the nation’s most visible investigative journalist, and indeed the iconic representation of that genre. The work of “Woodstein” would play a
key role in enhancing the franchise of the Post itself. Yet this oeuvre—in particular the role of Woodward—has become somewhat suspect among those who have taken a second and third look—including Columbia Journalism
Review contributing editor Steve Weinberg, in a November/December 1991
article.
Woodward did not fit the profile of the typical daily print reporter. Young, midwestern, Republican, he attended Yale on an ROTC scholarship and then spent five years in the Navy. He had begun with a top-secret security clearance on board the USS Wright, specializing in communications, including with the White House.
His commanding officer was Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, who would later be implicated in the military spy ring in the Nixon White House, mentioned in chapter 9. According to Silent Coup, an exhaustive study of the military espionage scandal, Woodward then arrived in Washington, where he worked on the staff of Admiral Thomas Moorer, chief of naval operations, again as a communications officer, this time one who provided briefings and documents to top brass in the White House on national security matters. According to this account, in 1969-70, Woodward frequently walked through the basement offices of the White House West Wing with documents from Admiral Moorer to General Alexander Haig, who served under Henry Kissinger.
In a 2008 interview, Woodward categorically denied having any intelligence connections. He also denied having worked in the White House or providing briefings there. “It’s a matter of record in the Navy what I did, what I didn’t do,” Woodward said. “And this Navy Intelligence, Haig and so forth, you know, I’d be more than happy to acknowledge it if it’s true. It just isn’t. Can you accept that?Journalist Len Colodny, however, has produced audiotapes of interviews
by his Silent Coup coauthor, Robert Gettlin, with Admiral Moorer, former defense secretary Melvin Laird, Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim—and even with Woodward’s own father, Al—speaking about Bob’s White House service.
At a minimum, Woodward’s entry into journalism received a valuable outside assist, according to an account provided by Harry Rosenfeld, a retired Post editor, to the Saratogian newspaper in 2004:
Bob had come to us on very high recommendations from someone in the White House. He had been an intelligence officer in the Navy and had served in the Pentagon. He had not been exposed to any newspaper. We gave him a tryout because he was so highly recommended. We customarily didn’t do that. We wanted to see some clips, and he had none of that. We tried him out, and after a week or two I asked my deputy, “What’s with this guy?” And he said well, he’s a very bright guy but he doesn’t know how to put the paper in the typewriter. But he was bright, there was that intensity about him and his willingness, and he acted maturely. So we decided because he had come so highly recommended and he had shown certain strengths that we would help get him a job at the Montgomery County Sentinel.
In 2008, some time after I spoke to Woodward, I reached Rosenfeld. He said he did not recall telling the Saratogian that Woodward had been hired on the advice of someone in the White House. He did, however, tell me that he remembered that Woodward had been recommended by Paul Ignatius, the Post’s president. Prior to taking over the Post’s presidency, Ignatius had
been Navy secretary for President Johnson.
In a 2008 interview, Ignatius told me it was possible that he had a hand in at least recommending Woodward. “It’s possible that somebody asked me about him, and it’s possible that I gave him a recommendation,” Ignatius said. “I don’t remember initiating anything, but I can’t say I didn’t.” I asked Ignatius how a top Pentagon administrator such as himself would even have known of a lowly lieutenant, such as Woodward was back in those days, and Ignatius said he did not recall.
In September 1971, after one year of training at the Maryland-based Sentinel, Woodward was hired at the Washington Post. The Post itself is steeped in intelligence connections. The paper’s owner, the Graham family, were, as noted in chapter 3, aficionados of the apparatus, good friends of top spies, and friends also of Prescott Bush. They even helped fund Poppy Bush’s earliest business venture. Editor Ben Bradlee was himself a Harvard graduate who,
like Woodward, had spent time in naval intelligence during World War II. (As noted earlier, Poppy Bush had also been associated with naval intelligence during World War II: prior to beginning his work with the CIA, he had been involved with top-secret aerial reconnaissance photography.)
Woodward demonstrated his proclivity for clandestine sources a month before the Watergate break-in, in his coverage of the shooting and serious wounding of presidential candidate George Wallace at a shopping center in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. A lone gunman, Arthur Bremer, would be convicted. Woodward impressed his editors with his tenacity on the case, and his contacts. As noted in a journalistic case study published by Columbia
University:
At the time, according to [Post editors Barry] Sussman and [Harry] Rosenfeld, Woodward said he had “a friend” who might be able to help. Woodward says his “friend” filled him in on Bremer’s background and revealed that Bremer had also been stalking other presidential candidates.
As to Woodward’s initial introduction to the newspaper, nobody seems to have questioned whether a recommendation from someone in the White House would be an appropriate reason for the Post to hire a reporter. Nor
does anyone from the Post appear to have put a rather obvious two and two together, and noted that Woodward made quick work of bringing down the president, and therefore wondered who at the White House recommended
Woodward in the first place—and with what motivation.
Others, however, were more curious. After Charles Colson met with Senator Howard Baker and his staff—including future senator Fred Thompson— he recounted the session in a previously unpublished memo to file:
The CIA has been unable to determine whether Bob Woodward was employed by the agency. The agency claims to be having difficulty checking personnel files. Thompson says that he believes the delay merely means that they don’t want to admit that Woodward was in the agency. Thompson wrote a lengthy memo to Baker last week complaining about the CIA’s non-cooperation, the fact that they were supplying material piecemeal and had been very uncooperative. The memo went into the CIA relationship with the press, specifically Woodward. Senator Baker sent the memo directly to [CIA Director] Colby with a cover note and within a matter of a few hours, Woodward
called Baker and was incensed over the memo. It had been immediately leaked to him.
Woodward’s good connections would help generate a series of exclusive-access interviews that would result in rapidly produced bestselling books. One was Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, a controversial book that relied in part, Woodward claimed, on a deathbed interview—not recorded—with former CIA director William Casey. The 543-page book, which came out as Poppy Bush was seeking the presidency, contained no substantive mentions of any role on the part of Bush in these “secret wars,” though Bush was both vice president with a portfolio for covert ops and a former CIA director.
Asked how it was possible to leave Bush out of such a detailed account of covert operations during his vice presidency, Woodward replied, “Bush was, well, I don’t think he was— What was it he said at the time? I was out of the loop?” Woodward went on to be blessed with unique access to George W. Bush—a president who did not grant a single interview to America’s top newspaper, the New York Times, for nearly half his administration—and the automatic smash bestsellers that guaranteed. Woodward would also distinguish himself for knowing about the administration’s role in leaking the identity of CIA undercover officer Valerie Plame but not writing or saying anything about it, despite an ongoing investigation and media tempest. When this was revealed, Woodward issued an apology to the Post.
To its credit, the Washington Post in these years had other staffers doing some of the best reporting on the intelligence establishment. Perhaps the most revealing work came prior to Nixon’s tenure, while Woodward was still
doing his naval service. In a multipart, front-page series by Richard Harwood in early 1967, the paper began reporting the extent to which the CIA had penetrated civil institutions not just abroad, but at home as well. “It was
not enough for the United States to arm its allies, to strengthen governmental institutions, or to finance the industrial establishment through economic and military programs,” Harwood wrote. “Intellectuals, students, educators, trade unionists, journalists and professional men had to be reached directly through their private concerns.” Journalists too. Even Carl Bernstein later wrote about the remarkable extent of the CIA’s penetration of newsrooms, detailing numerous examples, in a 1977 Rolling Stone article. As for the Post itself, Bernstein wrote:
When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. “It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,” said a former deputy director of the Agency. “Frank Wisner dealt with him.” Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was the Agency’s premier orchestrator of “black” operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his “mighty Wurlitzer,” a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press. Phil Graham was probably Wisner’s closest friend. But Graham, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said.
In 1965-66, an accredited Newsweek stringer in the Far East was in fact a CIA contract employee earning an annual salary of $10,000 from the Agency, according to Robert T. Wood, then a CIA officer in the Hong Kong station. Some Newsweek correspondents and stringers continued to maintain covert ties with the Agency into the 1970s, CIA sources said.
Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements.
When the Watergate burglary story broke, Bob Woodward got the assignment, in part, his editor Barry Sussman recalled, because he never seemed to leave the building. “I worked the police beat all night,” Woodward said in an interview with authors Tom Rosenstiel and Amy S. Mitchell, “and then I’d go home—I had an apartment five blocks from the Post—and sleep for a while. I’d show up in the newsroom around 10 or 11 [in the morning] and work all day too. People complained I was working too hard.” So when the bulletin came in, Woodward was there. The result was a front-page account revealing that E. Howard Hunt’s name appeared in the address book of one of the burglars and that a check signed by Hunt had been found in the pocket of another burglar, who was Cuban. It went further: Hunt, Woodward reported, worked as a consultant to White House counsel Charles Colson.
Thus, Woodward played a key role in tying the burglars to Nixon.
Woodward would later explain in All the President’s Men (coauthored with Bernstein) that to find out more about Hunt, he had “called an old friend and sometimes source who worked for the federal government.” His friend did not like to be contacted at this office and “said hurriedly that the break-in case was going to ‘heat up,’ but he couldn’t explain and hung up.” Thus began Woodward’s relationship with Deep Throat, that mysterious source who, Woodward would later report, served in the executive branch of government and had access to information in the White House and CREEP.
Based on tips from Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein began to “follow the money,” writing stories in September and October 1972 on a political “slush fund” linked to CREEP. One story reported that the fund had financed the bugging of the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters as well as other intelligence-gathering activities. While Nixon coasted to a landslide victory over the liberal Democrat George McGovern, the story seemed to go on hiatus. But just briefly.
Poppy Enters, Stage Right
If someone did want to undermine the president from outside the White House, he couldn’t have found a better perch than the chairmanship of the Republican Party.
Right after the election, Poppy Bush, again utilizing his pull with Nixon, had persuaded the president to bring him back from his cushy U.N. post and install him at the Republican National Committee. This put him at the very epicenter of the nationwide Republican elite that would ultimately determine whether Nixon would stay or go.
As chairman of the RNC, Poppy was expected to be the president’s chief advocate, especially to the party faithful. He would travel widely, interact with big donors and party activists. If anyone would have their finger on the pulse of the loyalist base, it was Poppy. He would have a good sense of what would keep supporters in line, and conversely, what might convince them to abandon ship.
But Poppy was unique among RNC chairmen over the years in that he had convinced Nixon to let him maintain an official presence at the White House. Just as Nixon had permitted him to participate in cabinet meetings as U.N. ambassador, he now continued to extend that privilege while Poppy ran the RNC. This was unprecedented for someone in such an overtly partisan position.
Here was a man closely connected to the CIA, as we have seen, now both running the Republican Party and sitting in on cabinet deliberations. An intelligence officer couldn’t have asked for a better perch. Moreover, this put
him in the catbird seat just as Watergate began heating up.
But Poppy was even more wired into Nixonworld. When he came to the RNC, he hired Harry Dent and Tom Lias, the top officials of Nixon’s Political Affairs office, which had established the Town house Operation. Dent was the architect of Nixon’s Southern strategy, with which Poppy Bush and his backers were closely allied. Lias had ties to Poppy from before working in the White House. He had been a top organizer for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, strategizing how to elect people like Poppy to formerly Democratic seats in the South.
After Poppy came to Washington, the two often socialized. According to Pierre Ausloos, stepfather of Lias’s daughter, and a friend of the family, “On weekends, Bush would always invite [Lias] for a barbecue party at his house here in Washington.” Ausloos also remembers that during the 1968 Republican convention, Liasís daughter’s babysitter was Poppy’s son, George
W. Bush.
Thus, at the time Dent and Lias were installed in the White House Political Affairs office, they were already close with Bush. Indeed, right after the 1970 election and the termination of the Town house Operation, Bush took Lias with him to New York, where Lias served as a top aide on Poppy’s United Nations staff. The U.N. choice struck people who knew Lias as odd. Lias had no relevant qualifications or knowledge for the U.N. post, just as Poppy himself didn’t.
Poppy’s decision, once he moved to the RNC, to hire both Lias and Dent—the two men supervising Jack Gleason’s Town house Operation— is surely significant.
Meanwhile, Poppy Bush and his team had already been in contact with John Dean.
In a brief 2008 conversation, in which a prickly Dean sought to control the conditions of the interview, I asked him whether he had any dealings with Bush. “I think there are some phone calls on my phone logs, but I never met with him personally,” he said.
Indeed, phone logs show that on June 24, 1971, Ambassador Bush called Dean, and on December 6, 1971, Tom Lias of Ambassador Bush’s office called. The logs show other calls from Lias as well. It is not clear—nor did
Dean volunteer an opinion—why Bush and Lias would have been calling him at all.
Slumming in Greenwich
When the Senate created a committee to investigate Watergate, there was no guarantee that anything would come of it. The perpetrators—the burglars and their supervisors, Hunt and Liddy—were going on trial, and it was uncertain
whether the hearings would produce any further insights. Moreover, the committee featured four rather somnolent Democrats and three Republicans, two of them staunch Nixon loyalists.
This left only one wild card: Lowell Weicker, a liberal Republican from Connecticut.
A freshman, and an independent one, Weicker was not disposed to knee-jerk defense of Nixon. Furthermore, he saw himself as a crusader. At six feet six, Weicker was imposing, considered basically well-intentioned, a little naive, and in love with publicity. He had gotten his political start in the Bush hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut; and like the Bushes, he was heir to a family fortune, in his case from two grandfathers who owned the Squibb pharmaceutical company.
But there the similarities ended. Weicker chose for his base Greenwich’s hird Voting District, which consisted almost entirely of working-class Italians. “Just decent, hard-working, down-to-basics families,” Weicker would say. “Had I been raised as a typical Republican in the salons of Fairfield County, discussing international issues at teas and cocktail parties, I know my career would have been a short one once off the Greenwich electoral scene.” In 1960, Weicker aligned himself with Albert Morano, a congressional candidate opposed by the Bush family. Now the Bushes saw Weicker as a traitor to his class. Over the years, Weicker and Bush would generally maintain a cool but civil relationship, driven by political expediency.
“I think he was viewed as an outsider from day one, and it was a perspective he relished,” said Townhouse operative Jack Gleason. ”Because he always used to joke about ‘the Round Hill boys out to get me again’ every time he was up for reelection.”
Weicker had arrived in Washington in 1968, following his election to the House of Representatives. Given the past, this would have made him a not-very-welcome colleague of Poppy Bush. And Poppy probably was not enthused when, after only two years in the House, Weicker was elected to Prescott Bush’s old Senate seat—in the same year Poppy lost his second Senate bid. Weicker’s star was rising faster than Poppy’s—and in the Bush
home state to boot. It must have rankled.
Still, Weicker’s least endearing qualities—his considerable ambition, love of publicity, and penchant for self-aggrandizement—would shortly prove useful in at least one respect: as a champion of the “truth” on the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, commonly known as the Watergate Committee. The same Republican maverick who had no qualms about challenging his party’s leadership in Connecticut would soon debut his maverick persona on the national stage.
In his memoirs, Weicker writes that he was given the Watergate Committee assignment because he was one of only two Republicans who volunteered and that his interest in “campaign financing” and dwindling faith in the democratic process spurred his personal interest. Interestingly, the other Republican volunteer, stalwart conservative Edward J. Gurney of Florida, had won his seat with the help of Bush’s top political lieutenant, Jimmy
Allison—and eldest son George W. Bush, who took the extraordinary step of securing a leave from his National Guard unit in 1968, when he had barely begun his military training. The other Republican on the committee was Minority Leader Howard Baker, a moderate. Weicker was the only Republican on the committee with the inclination to prove his independence from the party and openly challenge the president.
By the spring of 1973, six defendants had been sentenced in the DNC burglary, and the Watergate hearings were due to begin. There was now an opportunity for Nixon to put the whole Watergate affair behind him, without mortal damage to his presidency. Weicker, however, already saw his role as an honest broker, and he criticized Nixon’s attempts at tamping down the matter. “I think the national interest is achieved by opening, not closing, the
White House doors,” he said. He added that he would vote in favor of subpoenas for White House officials to appear before the committee.
Poppy Bush apparently agreed. On March 20, the day after Weicker’s remarks, Poppy went to see Nixon at the Oval Office. In his usual oblique way, ascribing his advice to others, he urged Nixon to send John Dean to testify.
BUSH: We’re getting hit a little bit, Mr. President . . . It’s building, and the mail’s getting heavier . . .
NIXON: What do you think you can do about it? . . . We’ve got hearings coming up. The hearings will make it worse.
BUSH: . . . I was speaking with the executives at the Bull Elephants …The guy said to me,… why doesn’t the President
send Dean? . . . The disclosure is what they’re calling for.
NIXON: We are cooperating… They don’t want any cooperation. They aren’t interested in getting the facts. They’re only interested in [politicalgains?]… I wish there were an answer to Watergate, but I just don’t know any . . . I don’t know a damn thing to do. [emphasis added]
John Ehrlichman remembers that meeting well, as noted in his memoirs. “Bush argued that the only way to blunt the current onslaught in the newspapers and on television was for the president to be totally forthcoming—to tell everything he knew about all aspects of Watergate.”
This was a significant moment, where Poppy demonstrates a possible connection to and interest in Dean. It was a sort of specific advice that warrants attention, because it is an indication that the outsider Bush is unusually well informed about who knows what inside the White House— and encourages Nixon to let Dean begin confessing his knowledge. When I asked Dean in 2008 why he thought Poppy Bush was suggesting he testify, he said he had no idea.
Nixon resisted Poppy’s advice to have Dean testify because, Nixon maintained, there was no White House staff involvement in Watergate, and therefore Dean’s testimony would serve only to break executive privilege, once and for all. “The president can’t run his office by having particularly his lawyer go up and testify,” Nixon told Poppy.
If Poppy Bush seemed to have unusually good intelligence as to what was happening in the Oval Office, it might have had something to do with a good friend of his who was right in there with Nixon and Dean during the most critical days of Watergate. Richard A. Moore, a lawyer who served as a kind of elder statesman off of whom Nixon and Mitchell could bounce ideas, was, like Poppy, an alumnus of Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones. Moore served as special assistant to the chief of military intelligence during World War II and is believed to have transitioned to civilian intelligence after the war. Over the years, Moore was practically a member of the extended Bush clan, exchanging intimate notes with Poppy and even joining family dinners.
Moore shows up in background roles on a number of Nixon tapes, and phone logs show a flurry of phone calls between Moore and Dean, especially in the final weeks before Dean turned on Nixon. In a little-reported taped telephone conversation from March 16, Dean tells Nixon that he and Moore are working on a Watergate report; he also mentions that he and Moore drive home together. On March 20, in an Oval Office meeting featuring Nixon, Dean, and Moore—just prior to Nixon’s meeting with Poppy Bush— Moore can be heard typing the report in the background.
Dean would later write that the term “cancer” as used in his famous “cancer on the presidency” briefing had been suggested by Moore—who though a close Nixon adviser in these sensitive days, managed to emerge from Watergate
obscure and unscathed. His Watergate testimony did not support Dean, but he tended to be ambiguous. As Time magazine noted on July 23, 1973, “The Moore testimony was certainly not evidence that the President had had prior knowledge of the Plumbers’ felonious break-in. But it seemingly betrayed a curious nonchalance on the President’s part toward questionable activities by White House staffers.”
Later, with Nixon departing and Ford preparing to become president, Moore urged Ford to make Poppy Bush his vice president, arguing that Bush had strong economic credentials. Moore specifically cited Poppy’s ties to Wall Street through his father and grandfather, “both highly respected investment bankers in New York.” Moore would go on to work on all of Poppy Bush’s presidential campaigns, including his unsuccessful 1980 bid, and would in 1989 be named by Poppy as his ambassador to Ireland.
Continued on next page…
