Keeping Up the Pressure

...newspapers and magazines are, at heart, advocates for one position or another and therefore amount to no more than manipulative organs of opinion, subject to being manipulated in turn...

...There was no need to guarantee sources of information...

...The reporters whose phones were bugged relied heavily on Henry Kissinger as a source...

...Apparently the White House climate was then so amoral that it did not particularly matter to the principals whether the Post's allegations were true or false...

...The only real disagreements, therefore, would be in judgments about the same facts...

...He contends privately that were it not for the aroused press corps the story would soon recede in importance...

...But such claims are hardly likely to stem the onrushing tide of Watergate revelations, even though Nixon and his designated fustigator, Archibald Cox of Harvard-for quite different reasons, to be sure?have temporarily teamed up on the antipublicity side of the issue...

...The President's "news summary," written by Patrick J. Buchanan, reinforces this outlook...

...This news summary was also distributed to most of the senior White House staff, but in keeping with the overblown manner of the Administration, the binder was stamped "For the President's Eyes Only...

...its Watergate stories were upsetting the President's otherwise smoothly functioning reelection drive...

...He now defends the move by throwing a "national security" blanket over it...

...Mencken observes in Newspaper Days 0 that sources who provided him with "inside stuff" were moved to do so "(a) by a sense of public duty gracefully performed, and (b) by an enlightened desire to keep on the good side of newspapers...

...The reasons for divulging secrets to journalists haven't changed much since Mencken started writing for the old Baltimore Herald 70 years ago...

...His underlying error, quite common among politicians, has been the notion that U.S...

...With unconscious irony, the White House now complains that the erring media are abridging the civil rights of potential defendants and dragging innocents into the scandal...

...Historical perspective, of course, did not keep the Nixon Administration from trying to suppress leaks to the press through unethical and, quite probably, illegal means...

...it was [Judge John] Sirica's handling of the defendants' sentencing...

...and every effort had to be made to undermine one of the country's leading newspapers, including a broad charge of yellow journalism...

...unfortunately for him and his paper, the Cuban angle led up blind alleys...

...Yet, as Vice President Ag-new recently observed in the Washington Post, "it wasn't the newspaper reports that broke the Watergate matter loose...

...His forthcoming suit, and similar court actions by others, could keep this phase of the Watergate story going for years...

...While pretending to ignore the newspaper charges, Nixon would scan the Post's stories each day as sifted by his aides and typed up in a leather loose-leaf binder...

...Its tactics, we now know, had more in common with police states than with a democracy...

...Other Washington bureaus, with the exception of the Los Angeles Times and CBS News, failed to pursue Watergate diligently...

...One veteran who has won several major journalistic prizes for unearthing official corruption over the years told me: "My problem was that I had known Liddy when he was at Treasury...

...For more solid data, the President had the FBI bug the telephones of reporters and White House aides...

...Nixon's task was eased by the fact that the Post had the main elements of the scandal to itself...

...And the media are being called on both to report the Watergate reality and to hold things together until that reality can be absorbed...

...The main danger in the coming months is that their unceasing barrage-necessarily based in large part on information from faceless quarters-will cause the public to lose faith not only in Nixon but in the press as well...

...Upon reading the Watergate accounts, Nixon would write comments in the margin about how particular charges should be refuted...

...At most it might be said that the public has become more aware of this staple feature of the Washington scene as the government's mania for withholding information has grown...

...Times have changed...

...This has caused some officials to argue that the media, having brought the scandal to light, have a vested interest in keeping it alive...

...This is not surprising if it is remembered that the digest contains no more and no less than what the President requires of its editor...

...Nixon's problem was that he took (and, for all I know, still takes) an essentially European attitude toward the press...

...For his part, Nixon hopes that the scandal has hit bottom and fears that it has not...

...Experienced bureau chiefs simply could not bring themselves to believe that the entire government apparatus was lying to them in maintaining that the break-in was a sideshow...

...But when at least one senior FBI official regarded the procedure in a different light and warned that J. Edgar Hoover might use the transcripts to blackmail Nixon, the White House quickly took possession of them for safekeeping...

...During Mencken's era, journalism operated in compact communities that permitted people to verify the honesty of the news through their conversations with those who made it and those who reported it...

...By its nature, though, the Buchanan news summary can do no more than hint at who might be leaking what to whom...

...Buchanan's digest is often more of a press agent's scorecard of air time, front-page space, favorable mentions and bad ones than a serious review of what the news media are saying...

...I wonder whether this isn't too much to ask of a profession that is no longer, as Mencken once described himself, "young, goatish and full of innocent delight in the world...

...Washington reporters, widely duped into underplaying the story last year, are determined not to repeat their mistake...

...And to this very day, as the President struggles to maintain his authority in the aftermath of Watergate, the pursuit of secrecy continues unabated...

...Because if the defendants had not changed their attitudes at that time, the information wouldn't have been available to be leaked...

...Well before Election Day, Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward uncovered and published the basic elements of the scandal...

...The New York Times, though possessing comparable investigative resources, was side-tracked by the Cuban-exile identity of several of the Waterbuggers...

...who has extensive contacts within the anti-Castro community, on the story...

...They were obvious, and equally accessible to all men...

...Still, it was the Post's editors who recognized early in the game that the break-in at the Democratic National Committee amounted to more than a "caper," the word used to describe Watergate in the beginning...

...One of the syndicated columnists involved plans to sue the former White House agents who cooked up the scheme...

...Anyone who spent more than five minutes with him couldn't help but come away feeling Liddy was a nut...

...The environment," Walter Lippmann wrote, "was so familiar that one could take it for granted that men were talking about substantially the same things...

...It put Tad Szulc...

...Although it cannot be proven, the common assumption here is that Kissinger and not the journalists was the true target of the surveillance...

...Aside from a few Washington columnists who fear that impeachment proceedings would send the country into an uproar for months, the press is continuing the pressure for disclosure...

...In their view the Post was serving as a propaganda mill for the Democrats...

...We can no longer take it for granted that men are talking about the same things...

...Commenting on it in a recent address to the American Society of Magazine Editors, Fred W. Friendly, the Ford Foundation's television advisor and a member of the Columbia School of Journalism's faculty, observed: "The President views the performance of the news media through the distortion of this convex lens, this narrow-band filter which distorts and views everything in polarized extremes...

...With the support of their publisher, Katherine Graham, plenty of front-page space was cleared for the story during the Presidential campaign...

...Meanwhile an impatient Spiro Agnew has been lamenting that much of what the press is saying on Watergate is "repetitious...

...So it was inconceivable to me that John Mitchell or anybody else in authority would trust that fellow with anything requiring more judgment than cleaning out the pencil sharpeners...

...The White House attitude was summed up by former Attorney General John Mitchell, who told a reporter: "Katie Graham is going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer...