Following the Money Trail

...All the President's Men is not, as some readers might fear, a rehash of the public record on Watergate...

...Not exactly...

...So a million hired girls and motormen's wives'll know what's going on...

...In fact, Sloan did name Haldeman to Woodward and Bernstein, and in their rush to attribute everything to official sources, they assumed he had also done so before the grand jury...

...But the technique backfired into their most serious blunder when they asserted that Hugh W. Sloan Jr., one-time treasurer of the CRP, had involved White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman with secret funds before the grand jury investigating Watergate...

...In the effort to "link" various Nixon apparatchiks to the money, the reporters also overlooked the question of whether "the wads of cash in [campaign treasurer Maurice] Stans' safe had been merely discretionary funds that had been misspent" by underlings...

...Waking people up in the middle of the night to ask them what they think of Mussolini...

...By their own account, they had social acquaintances in both government and the Committee to Reelect the President (CRP...

...2. Woodward and Bernstein were a couple of neophytes covering the police beat who had to scramble without any help from high-level inside contacts...

...Were they paid...

...The sources who gave them information did so for their own purposes, not simply out of a desire to set the record straight...

...They confide about their fears, fantasies and anxiety-provoked stomach aches...

...Where did the money come from...

...That never happened, of course, but the saga of how these "kid" reporters followed a trail of corruption to the door of the Oval Office abounds in episodes nearly as fantastic...

...Who hired them...

...One FBI man who gave Bernstein some information about "dirty tricks" went on to say: "I'm worried about the case...

...The two reporters did such a good job that high FBI officials became convinced they were lifting material from the bureau's files...

...As the story grew, they struggled to hold on to it...

...Who could draw from it...

...A Post story published October 10, 1972, for example, said: "FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage...

...Moreover, some answers will probably never be known because journalism, like history itself, is of limited help in deciphering motives...

...Why, as a reporter, was he entitled to have access to personal and financial records when such disclosure would outrage him if he were subjected to a similar inquiry by investigators...

...Through it all, there is a special kind of exuberant amorality in their conduct...

...Originally mere spear carriers on the Post's metropolitan staff, they were assigned the Watergate break-in because it looked, at first, like a routine local burglary, beneath the concern of the paper's high-powered political writers...

...there in his living room, the former White House "plumber" would spend the evening outlining the whole story of Watergate...

...Reviewed by Stephen R. Weisman Reporter, New York "Times" Listen to who's talking...

...Was there financial gain...

...It can report facts and recount what people did, but it can only begin to answer why...

...The pattern that emerges from this book, finally, reveals Woodward and Bernstein to have been as much characters in the national drama as any of the people they were writing about...

...Furthermore, as they freely admit, the Watergate story was beginning to fade when Federal Judge John J. Sirica, challenging an obviously absurd line of legal defense, threatened to impose the heavy sentences that prompted James W. McCord Jr.'s letter charging he had been pressured to keep silent...

...The Bureau is acting funny . . . there is interest in the case at the top...

...Who could authorize the withdrawals...

...The result is not simply an attractive yet minor ornament to the vast outpouring of commentary on Watergate...

...Intent on connecting Liddy and E. Howard Hunt with "dirty tricks," the reporters followed a trail to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, where they knew the pair had stayed in September 1971, presumably to rendezvous with Segretti...

...they were part of the web of intrigue, not independent of it...

...Certain that the answer would lead them to the people who commissioned the break-in itself, they constructed elaborate hypotheses based on bits and pieces scrounged from their sources, and then played their speculations off each other and against government investigators...

...They did encounter witnesses who had not testified to the prosecutors...

...In most cases, however, they checked everything with Federal agents, who confirmed information the reporters had obtained elsewhere...

...Among the preconceptions they deflate are the following: 1. Woodward and Bernstein cracked the Watergate case open single-handedly-If not for them, it would never have come to light...

...What they did not realize And, in one of their few narrative lapses, fail to mention in the book is that Liddy and Hunt were there for another reason: to pay a midnight call on the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist...

...Who started this...

...and about the role of chance and accident...

...about how they resisted the overtures of the George McGov-ern camp, which tried, in the heat of the controversy, to cozy in on the story...

...This was particularly true, of course, in the case of Presidential Counsel John W. Dean 3d following his dismissal from the White House...

...But more important was their adherence to one of the cardinal rules of investigative journalism: Follow the Money...

...The reporters became obsessed with the secret fund...

...Was their sole purpose political espionage...

...Hildy Johnson in The Front Page A few weeks before the trial of seven men charged with the Watergate break-in, Bob Woodward was nursing a fantasy: G. Gordon Liddy would invite him and his Washington Post confrere, Carl Bernstein, over for a few drinks...

...Not quite...

...Nonetheless, the Follow-the-Money approach was filled with hazards: It led them down some blind alleys and accounted for their biggest oversight...

...they had not even asked whether Haldeman had exercised his authority, whether he had actually approved any payments...

...All the President's Men is a major contribution to understanding how the press works, and it comes at a time when that institution has moved from the defensive to perhaps the most influential position it has occupied in this century...

...Consider, for instance, this passage on Bernstein's decision to try to elicit information from the telephone company: "He [Bernstein] was always reluctant to use [his sources in the Bell system] to get information about calls because of the ethical questions involved in breaching the confidentiality of a person's telephone records...

...And no matter how much anyone feels he knows about Watergate, the authors will have some surprises...

...Persuaded by their sources, and by their own deductions, that Haldeman loomed behind 'Watergate,' they had grasped a slim reed the secret fund...

...They were stymied at critical junctures, only to be rescued by the work of other reporters, notably those at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Time magazine, whom they give generous credit...

...But we are offered few clues for what has become one of Washington's favorite guessing-games...

...One of these was "Deep Throat," the sobriquet given Woodward's personal friend and most important source, a senior official with access to the Executive Branch, FBI files and the CRP...

...Even if Woodward and Bernstein were not dealing with the greatest political scandal in the nation's history, their account would be a fascinating glimpse into the psychology and methods of the working press...

...Fascinating, too, is the reporters' arms-length cooperation with Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., after their task evolved from "a matter of 'investigative' reporting-evaluating information, putting together pieces in a puzzle, disclosing what had been obscured" into an effort merely to "find out in advance the testimony of witnesses who would eventually take the stand in public...

...Woodward and Bernstein take an almost adolescent delight in their own cunning, and in the different personalities they affect to worm their way into the living rooms of reluctant Republicans...

...They recount here the skull sessions with their editors, the behind-the-scenes deliberations on how to authenticate and present their information...

...3. Woodward and Bernstein pursued their research independently of the FBI and Justice Department investigators...

...To this day, the Haldeman connection remains unproven...

...It wasn't until after they implicated Haldeman with the fund in print that they recognized "they had assumed too much...

...It was a problem he had never resolved in his mind...

...the two would get it all down on tape...

...Woodward and Bernstein seem to recognize these limitations, for they have wisely chosen to write about what they know best themselves...

...Journalists...

...indeed, Deep Throat's identity has been concealed even from a jealous Bernstein...

...This strategy allowed the Post to enhance its credibility by attributing its own findings to official sources A standard technique of investigative journalism...

...Woodward's clandestine late-night meetings in an underground parking garage with this fearful, chainsmoking figure are the book's most extraordinary scenes...

...Though the methods practiced by Woodward and Bernstein may seem highly specialized, their tale tells more about the mentality of all journalists than any other recent book...

...He had not because the prosecutors never asked him And the story blew up in their faces, severely damaging the progress of their expose...

...They take pleasure in their mutual friendship, born in rivalry and suspicion, and nurtured by crisis and, eventually, vindication...

...In this pursuit the General Accounting Office's audit of the CRP was indispensable, for it turned up the existence of a secret cash fund that Woodward and Bernstein determined was the source for payments to the Watergate burglars and Donald Segretti's "dirty tricks" operation...

...The attitude that this was no time for moral niceties extended even to Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of the Post, who let Woodward and Bernstein loose on a desperate effort to interview grand jurors, in knowing defiance of the law...

...Woodward and Bernstein almost entirely overlooked the plumbers because their activities had nothing to do with the secret fund...

...It was during pretrial hearings of the Watergate burglary trial that Judge Sirica said: "This jury is going to want to know: What did these men go into that headquarters for...

...And for what...

...Heavy with humor, suspense and intrigue (if light on introspection and analysis), it belongs to a grand tradition of American newspaper yarns...

...Running after fire engines like a lot of coach dogs...

...A lot of lousy, daffy buttinskis, swelling around with holes in their pants, borrowing nickels from office boys...

...Since the financing came from the same source, Woodward and Bernstein concluded that Segretti's operation and the Watergate burglary were both part of the CRP's "basic strategy" to reelect President Nixon...

...Actually, it was Woodward and Bernstein who established the truth of that statement, based on information they learned the FBI had...

...They describe the endless hours of spade work, of checking leads, of knocking on doors during nocturnal fishing expeditions...

...Stealing pictures off old ladies of their daughters that get raped in Oak Park...

...The reader won't find all the answers here...

...Only partly...

...Without dwelling on his problem, Bernstein called a telephone company source...

...It is a book about journalism And as such, it is a classic...

...The reporters' liaisons with Federal agents offer more than a hint, as well, that the agents were insuring their findings would not be ignored by the officials in charge of the investigation...

...Peeking through keyholes...

...It was a move they regretted once it was discovered by a furious Judge Sirica...