Why the White House Press Didn't Get the Watergate Story
Peters, Charles
Why the White House Press Didn’t Get the Watergate Story by Charles Peters One of the great remaining niysteries of the Watergate affair is why the White House press corps failed to get...
...Reston described a lunch he had with former CIA director Richard Helms in January, where he asked if Helms had been bounced from the CIA and if so, why...
...As this spring’s Iceland summit meeting between Nixon and President Pompidou retreats into the past, a reasonable man can conclude that nothing happened there that couldn’t easily have been covered in dispatches from the Reykjavik wire bureaus or from Paris and Washington a few days after the meeting...
...The Air Force press office can tell you what the policy is, but you have to go to Indochina to find out what General Lavelle’s bombers are doing...
...When White House statements represent a total contradiction of what has gone before, reporters often hesitate to say so, preferring instead to quote Senator Muskie...
...His reply was that fewer and fewer government officials facing the possibility of losing office agree with Joseph Kennedy’s “Home holds no terrors for me...
...In such cases, as Clifton Daniel notes of his father-inlaw, Harry Truman, they can say, “It’s none of your damn business...
...The point is not that the press should have launched smear carnpaigns, especially right before the election when false charges would be hard to refute...
...And the guy who runs the Xerox machine is not an intimate friend of the President, will not lose a $42,000-a-year job if he talks to you, and just might put the interests of the country above the interest of the current incumbent in the White House...
...There is one story in the political intrigue between the White House and the Congress and the lobbies in, say, the formulation of educational policy...
...In making these judgments, we were following the traditional standards of journalistic objectivity and fairness...
...Your time is taken up by the large, regular flow of presidential news announcements, the campaign, summit meetings,” says Robert Donovan, who became Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times after serving as White House correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune...
...For the kind of “responsible” journalism we have described, meticuious fidelity to fact is even more important than when merely quoting...
...If these incidents sound commonplace today, it is only a sign of how much things have changed in nine months, for at the time they sounded fantastic...
...It all seems to be very much like the “hurry up and wait” of the Army and jury duty...
...Remember Colson to Hunt, “Don’t tell me,” and Ehrlichman to Sloan, “I don’t want to know...
...The Post arid the Times now cover the White House with two-man teams...
...R. W. Apple one day in March called 17 different White House officials without getting an answer...
...But they don’t have to lie...
...Responsibility is a different concept than objectivity and fairness, which the press should also maintain...
...Hoping It Goes Away While anyone who had ever observed a pack of reporters in a press lounge questioning each other to make sure no one had a special angle might think that their professional camaraderie dominated their interpaper jealousy, petty rivalry among the newspapers also influenced the Watergate coverage...
...Apple notes, “There is a tendency, if you can’t confirm it independently, not to run a story that begins, ‘The Washington Post said today...
...Kaufman continues, “The temptations to establish claims of ignorance are as great when one is truly an accomplice as when one is truly a victim...
...There may be some things they can’t or won’t talk about...
...IRS agents audited the editor’s tax records and those of the paper...
...Sheep with short attention spans...
...But because the President was traveling, an entire press entourage accompanied him...
...How would the press have reported the Emperor’s new clothes...
...They were all on the team...
...I used to work for the Peace Corps...
...Louis Post-Dispatch’s James Deakin, a story by Adam Clymer in The Baltimore Sun, a New York Times Sunday Magazine piece by R. W. Apple, and a May 20 story in The Boston Globe...
...We think it should be revived and expanded to forbid officials to lie to reporters-or to any other citizens...
...Moyers also feared the correspondent who went down the line at the White House to talk to unknown middle- or lower-level assistants who were doing important work but who had every reason to believe that the public...
...By the end of Occober, the press knew that: 1. The President’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, was involved to a considerable extent in improper campaign behavior...
...The Army says that the officers have the right to refuse to talk to us-and that all of them have refused...
...The word “prisoner” may soon replace “conspirator” in describing former members of the presidential staff...
...were reduced to reporting the Post’s accusations and Ron Ziegler’s denials...
...But most think it would be futile to assign them to the White House...
...Moyers also notes that it is not so much that the press is kept too busy, but that they’re kept waiting all day in one room...
...If Chapin’s relationship with Haldeman had been reported to the public, the people would have had some idea how high the scandal went...
...Such behavior allows the White House virtually to choose the main story for the next day’s front pages by setting off for Iceland, importing Leonid Brezhnev, or announcing major appointments on the day that a scandal is breaking...
...One is suppos,ed to watch the trees, the other the forest...
...But there are always soreheads in the White House and the press should look for them...
...In fact, if he says he stands behind a story, I’m more likely to believe it is true than if he simply quotes a source for the story and says the source “alleges” it is true...
...This administration has not been as open with its friends as previous administrations were with their enemies...
...The government can fine or imprison the taxpayer who lies...
...Conformity did, of course, play a role: “Because you all gather together in one place, because you all focus on one man, because all of you travel together, there is a herd instinct to report the same things the other guys are reporting,” says R. W. Apple...
...Hugh Sidey of Time can’t imagine a Seymour Hersh being welcomed by Ron Ziegler...
...After all, they work for the country...
...If you knew the President was going to bring out a tax bill, you knew there would be consultation with Wilbur Mills and other leaders to see if the Congress would go along...
...Another ball and chain for the prisoners of objectivity is their reluctance to draw obvicus inferences and to supply known background facts that will make the significance of a story clear...
...We went ahead with another Watergate story, “Why the Congress Didn’t Investigate Before the Election” (April, 1973), for which we did have identifiable sources...
...Why didn’t they give us any idea of what was going on in the offices of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman...
...2. Dwight Chapin, the President’s appointments secretary, had clearly been connected with campaign saboteur Donald Segretti...
...It has become justifiable and the accepted thing for public officials to lie...
...It is in the narrow space between the formulation of policy and the announcement of policy that scoops are to be mined,” says Reston...
...This is the very opposite of real responsibility...
...Finally, the press has to deny the President deniability...
...time for anything else...
...For many reporters the goal in preparing a story is finding someone they can quote, someone who will say that the President has been deceptive or that a policy is not working...
...In other words, the seductions of office keep them from resigning and letting the public know what is going on...
...It has been described by Russell Baker as “the tendency to piss all over the other guy’s story, to hope that the story will go away because it makes you look bad for missing it...
...Facing the Realities One thing is clear, the “periphery” of sources must be expanded beyond the senators and ambassadors that gave Reston his scoops...
...It is already an accurate description of some members of the White House press corps, for the constraints they work under make them captives not only of Richard Nixon, but of Charles Peters is editor of The Washington Monthly...
...The failure would be easier to understand were the White House not the most intensively reported institution in the world...
...The question is, when does the reporter decide that the information he has is so important that he must jeopardize information he hopes to get in the future...
...They tend to believe a man with a big title and a big car...
...The most difficult story to write is not the one that angers editors or officials but the one that dries up sources...
...Wise’s hesitation was justified, but it was in a different category from judgments such as the one Walter Rugaber provided in a November 1 Watergate wrap-up for The New York Times: “There has been no public indication that either the President or any of his close advisors played roles in or had advance knowledge of an illegal assault upon the opposition party...
...The judgment of how long to coddle a source can place a reporter midway between a grand jury and God, as he calculates whether avoiding fissinger’s anger is more important than revealing what he has learned about the Vietnam “peace” deal...
...We believe we should have done the same thing with our pieces of this immensely important story...
...My impression is that there is an effort to hold that sort of thing to a minimum...
...They move on to tomorrow’s story without pausing to investigate yesterday’s...
...Some publishers cared more about that than any exclusive their White House correspondent could get...
...I asked him why he thought his sources failed him on the White House attempt to use the CIA to cover up Watergate...
...Since presidential election campaigns amount to a long series of Iceland summits, reporters are left exhausted and stupetied by the interminable string of staged events...
...Everyone agrees there is a need for more investigative reporters...
...But to our knowledge, only a gossiptype story in the Style section of the Post pointed out this key fact before the election...
...I would trust David Broder as much as any source he could name...
...We have to demand that they be open to questioning...
...Instead, in Kaufman’s words, “The journalists focus on programs, the high politics of forming policies, or the sparring footwork of political maneuvering...
...The Post was far more responsible in ascertaining the truth for itself, and then putting its own name behind the charges, than were the papers who waited until they could say “John Dean alleges” and “Ron Ziegler denies...
...Hugh Sloan, while not a Xerox operator, was a guy down the line who was known to have resigned because of Watergate...
...His source also said that the Cuban mercenaries had been given the impression that they were carrying out thise assignments for high authorities in the government...
...I knew Acheson went to drink whiskey with Senator Arthur Vandenberg every night so I went to see Vandenberg in the morning...
...This doesn’t mean there has to be some legal requirement that government employees see the press...
...The atom bomb, the ICBM, and nation-wide network TV combined to make the presidential power enormous...
...Increasingly, I think the reporters will find their best sources closer to the cutting edge of policy...
...A journalist will hesitate to write tough criticism of Henry Kissinger because in the future Kissinger might give him that extra bit of information on our policy toward Cambodia...
...The Washington Monthly’s greatest scoop, how the Army was spying on civilian politics, came not from the Secretary of Defense but from a captain in the Army Reserve named Christopher Pyle...
...Chapin was Haldeman’s protege in the White House, and insiders knew he wouldn’t turn around without orders from Haldeman...
...Ron Ziegler would not speak to Newsday’s White House correspondent, Morton Schram, for three months afterwards and excluded Schram from the China trip...
...In 197 1, Newsduy, the Long Island newspaper, ran a series of expos& on the financial affairs of Bebe Rebozo, concluding with the editorial comment, “Let’s face it, the deals made by Bebe Rebozo and the Smathers gang have tainted the presidency...
...As Bill Moyers, press secretary to Lyndon Johnson put it, “The White House press corps is more stenographic than entrepreneurial in its approach to news gathering...
...The congressional staffs are full of bright people, each of whom has a piece of what’s going on and is freer to talk about it than the White House staff...
...But he never told Newsweek readers...
...As the story developed last year, the big names from CBS, NBC, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, etc...
...Sy Hersh got the My Lai story from a bunch of guys you never heard of, which is, of course, the way the Post’s Watergate story began...
...This was also enough to put Newsduy on the White House “enemies” list...
...But both Clifton Daniel of the Times and Benjamin Bradlee, managing editor of the Post, say that thes.e efforts need to be supplemented...
...Certainly many of the best reporters are convinced that you can’t find out .the truth about the White House from the President’s staff...
...I got most of my good White House stories from the Hill...
...Thou Shalt Not Lie Congressman Paul N. McCloskey has proposed that it be made a crime for a government employee to willfully lie to a committee of Congress...
...Throughout the fall of 1972, its stories made serious accusations and then attributed them only to unnamed sources...
...So, we have no story...
...Behind these criticisms is a peculiar distortion of the notion of “responsibility...
...Although it is easily forgotten, now that the Post has been proven right, the White House was not alone in labeling the paper’s coverage unfair, biased, irresponsible...
...But why can’t reporters and papers establish their own reputation for reliability...
...The Nixon Administration brought a new strain of paranoia to the nationalsecurity mentality, according to Reston, “Because of their assumption that the press was hostile, I think there was a conspiracy of silence quite carefully calculated by this administration from the beginning...
...This suggests that the reason Nixon and Ziegler covered the White House swimming pool was to provide more room for more reporters to sit around while their initiative was being sapped...
...He took the easy way out, a job overseas (ambassador to Iran), and didn’t seem to feel he had any obligation to disclose...
...Apple adds, “It seems awfully selfpitying and self-serving to write about how mean those fellows are because they won’t return your phone calls...
...This does not mean that they always have to be forthcoming...
...From the time of the break-in, the investigatory momentunti was not with the White House correspondents, even those of The Washington Post, but with two of the Post’s metropolitan reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein...
...It was our job to get the news no matter what barriers they put in the way...
...Reporters religiously attend the sessions because no one wants to miss the meeting at which Ziegler produces some big news...
...The press might well have looked into how that policy was executed...
...Clifton Daniel, who used to cover London for The New York Times, says there was no press room at 10 Downing Street...
...3. A federal court had found that Haldeman, Nixon, and friends had engaged in similar dirty campaign practices in California in 1962...
...Whatever they did they were to keep the press out...
...One small example from The Washington Monthly’s experience illustrates this point...
...We now know he was deeply disturbed, disturbed enough to take his concerns to Stans, Chapin, and Ehrlichman in July, 1972...
...But to pin the leader to the wall, the press must zero in on the subordinate...
...According to Bill Moyers, the White House reporters are reluctant to criticize the press secretary “because they are dependent on his benificence for whom they see and where they traveleven for favors like getting their publishers a private luncheon invita‘tion from the President...
...General Abrams was praised by congressional committees and his promotion approved because he said he didn’t know that General Lavelle was bombing the hell out of North Vietnam...
...not to mention their friends back home, didn’t know it...
...The more power, the greater the need for skepticism, and this is where the press failed...
...Another eiement in the journalists’ Watergate failure is the trepidation which the presidency creates even in veteran r e p o r t e r s . “They get goose pimples when they hear ‘Hail to the Chef,’ ” says Douglas Kiker of NBC...
...Prisoner of the Source Rare is the reporter who has not at some time or other felt himself bound by his news sources...
...They were small, but they could have fit with other pieces of the larger puzzle, particularly if other papers and magazines were publishing all they knew-knew without a doubtregardless of whether they could name the source...
...The change took effect on January 1, 1973, but was announced several months before...
...I didn’t look for soreheads at the White House because I assumed there weren’t any...
...If the reporter writes the story, his sources will dry up and the public will be denied any further information...
...They sit and sit and shift a leg and sit some more...
...James Reston says, “I worked in this town for 20 years as a scoop artist...
...Too many of them are sheep...
...The number of reporters triples for major presidential trips and soars into the hundreds for press conferences...
...When asked to explain their attentiveness to these ceremonial functions, reporters often mention the “assassination mentality”the fear that, if the President were killed, their paper might have to pick up the story from the wire services...
...Because of the failure of past attempts to legislate openness in governmentwitness the marvelous skill of the federal bureaucracy in evading requests for documents under the Freedom of lnforniation Act-little attention has been paid to McCloskey’s proposal...
...One factor may have been the leadership transition in the Washington Bureau from Max Frankel to Clifton Daniel...
...While Frankel is a first-rate journalist, such announcements almost always detract from or undeirmine the motivation and authority of the man to be replaced and may have accounted for the Times’ failure during this crucial period...
...Who was the reporter who called him up in JLI~YW?h o found out that Magruder advised Sloan to commit perjury...
...They very much want to believe the President of their country,” which implies that they don’t want to call him a liar...
...Remember that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were there with Nixon that grotesque night in November, 1962, when he revealed his hatred of the press after losing the California governorship .” 2. Some reporters found that their trusted sources lacked the courage to speak out on Watergate...
...But the officers are public employees, and the public has a right to know what they are doing...
...Again, in foreign policy, you knew Acheson would try out ideas with the British and French ambassadors, so you would call up Wilbur Mills and the ambassadors...
...I think there’s a certain accountability they should fulfill...
...We used to get a once-a-week briefing from the Prime Minister’s press secretary...
...Another place to look is the place where the policy is being executed...
...Reston says, “Turner Catledge [former managing editor of the Tinzesl had a strong feeling that we should not seem to be whining and complaining about lack of access...
...It was for seeming to ignore these standards in the handling of the Watergate case that the Post was criticized, even by its own staffers...
...Although we trusted our source and accepted his trust of the people who told him, we did not publish the story...
...Doug Kiker recalls the Marvin Watson-Bill Moyers rivalry under Lyndon Johnson, which meant that you could get almost anything out of one if you mentioned some threat from the other...
...Me1 Elfin, Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek, told us he had never been able to get an interview with H. R. Haldeman...
...He said a trusted source, who refused to be identified, had told him the Watergate burglars had been involved in two other incidents: a break-in at the Chilean embassy and an attempted physical assault on Daniel Ellsberg as he spoke on the Capitol steps...
...There is hardly ever an examination of subordinate behavior that would instruct leaders...
...The assassination mentality is evident in the importance accorded the press secretary’s daily briefings...
...It saps initiative,” says Moyers...
...In doing so, of course, the press has an obligation to give their readers enough detail to provide them with a basis for deciding on their own if the story “smells” right, just as you ordinarily want to give them the name of your source so they can make their own judgment of his reliability...
...Bill Moyers recalls that Lyndon Johnson once forbade him to give any White House exclusives to the St...
...But rivalry among papers takes over when the herd instinct leaves off...
...Russell Baker translates this into: “When I was covering the State Department, I always looked for the sorehead, the guy who was coming out of the meeting defeated and angry and ready to talk...
...He was dumped from the Air Force One press pool...
...Bill Moyers says that when he was press secretary, the reporters he most feared were those who followed the agency head out the White House door and back to his office where lie would immediately tell his assistant what had happened at the White House...
...The rest of the time I was free to dig where I thought best...
...Prisoner of Objectivity Shortly after the 1972 election, a Washington journalist-a veteran correspondent we knew to be totally reliable-walked into the office of this magazine with a tip...
...One of the most important things the reporters could have done to prevent Watergate was to have alerted the public about their inability to report the presidency...
...whoever holds the office...
...Another way newspapers could have made their readers aware of how the story was being hidden is suggested by James Deakin: “I’m convinced that if the press had regularly printed the transcripts of Ziegler’s press briefings from last June on, the public would have become aware much earlier of the pattern of evasion and deception...
...Although the Post’s Sanford Ungar reported this before the election, it was pushed aside in the Post by “Peace is at Hand” and was buried in the other papers (The New York Times ran it far inside...
...R. W. Apple says, “The press doesn’t demand to see the White House staff members often enough...
...My job was to evaluate Peace Corps programs overseas...
...In an important new book with an unfortunate title, Administrative Feedback, Herbert Kaufman points out that leaders “may resort to a strategy discouraging feedback about administrative behavior because they privately approve of the behavior they know they should, according to law and morality, prevent...
...We have been trying t o do a story on the enlisted men who are assigned as servants to military officers...
...The Watergate plans were conceived, carried out, and covered up in White House offices only yards away from the press lobby where at least a score of correspondents wait each day...
...In addition, one suspects that while it may not have been true of men so secure in their jobs as Elfin, Apple, and Reston, many reporters were afraid to admit their lack of access because it might reflect on their competence to do the job...
...Me1 Elfin of Newsweek says the lesson of Watergate to ’him has been to beef up Newsweek’s coverage of the Department of Justice, particularly the FBI, where Time’s Sandy Smith had been beating News week-and of the 1 o b b yi s t - t r ad e a s s o c i a t i o n - superlawyers group where so much of the town’s hanky-panky originates...
...The energy devoted to local-color stories about Iceland and TV shots of diplomats entering buildings might have been enough to break the whole Watergate case if it had been directed at the White House...
...If the Republic could be destroyed before you could get Congress through the downtown traffic to Capitol Hill, obviously you had to give the President tremendous power over life and death...
...From then until June of this year, this crucial information seems to have appeared only a few places, including a series by 7he St...
...Only in April, 1973, did Christopher Lydon of the Times begin uncovering the various cliques in the Nixon Whte House that had existed from the beginning and which could have been used to find out the truth about Watergate...
...It seems only fair that the taxpayer have some remedy against the government official who lies...
...The way you did it was to work the periphery...
...Russell Baker, who once covered the White House for The New York Times, says, “I was always fed enough information by [Eisenhower’s press secretary] Jim Hagerty to take care of page one...
...Of course, Henry Kissinger shouldn’t have to give every interview requested-if he did, he wouldn’t have...
...As Apple observes, “Watergate is but one example of the kind of story that’s missed by the White House press corps...
...James Reston cites two other reasons to explain why the press failed on Watergate: 1. The reporters paid too little attention to the tremendous growth of the presidential-national security power in the post-World War I1 era...
...Its reports of what his subordinates are doing must be searching-not simply to inform the public as we have already argued, but to make sure the President cannot plead ignorance of their behavior and thereby escape responsibility for it...
...We will give immunity to a very good source as long as the information he offers us is better than what we’ve got on him,” columnist Jack Anderson has said...
...Even the President’s press secretary can become a protected source...
...David Wise recalls that, shortly before the 1960 election, he got a tip about the Howard Hughes loan to Nixon’s brother...
...It seems to be the view of everyone that President Nixon should escape liability if actual knowledge of Watergate can’t be pinned on him...
...Too often they do not...
...But none of these standards should require a reporter to withhold what he knows to be true merely because lie cannot find anyone to say it for attribution...
...As the assistant told his assistant and so on, the story would soon reach someone of sufficiently modest loyalty to the Administration that the reporter could get him to talk...
...It does mean that civil servants should accept some reasonable availability to the press as part of their responsibility to the public they are supposed to be serving...
...In response to the President’s statement that he favored neither instant segregation nor instant integration, b o r y asked .whether the years 1954 through 1968 could be termed “instant...
...But only one or two papers printed epen one of these transcripts...
...James Reston has not been able to interview Nixon, Haldeman, or Ehrlichman since 1968, but he had never reported this fact in his column...
...Anyone with a knowledge of law would understand that the last thing a lawyer-especially a lawyer representing a public official in the middle of a campaign-would do is make a potentially embarrassing move unless he knew his client would approve...
...he wasn’t able to use the story because he could not confirm its accuracy in time...
...But he, too, has not reported these rebuffs...
...Bob Donovan says, “The White House staff is a perfect source for letting you know how great the Administration is...
...There’s almost always something going on that deprives one of the time to dig underneath.’’ Donovan’s predecessor at the Herald Tribune, David Wise, remembers that his editors put pressure on him to do those regular stories better than the AP, instead of looking for the story AP was missing...
...My best sources were not the top bureaucrats but the volunteers out there doing the job...
...Helms was obviously angry at the White House clique, but not one thing did he say about the Watergate connection...
...The correspondents are like a herd of seals waiting for the fish that are reliably tossed their way instead of looking elsewhere for susten’ance...
...He goes on to suggest that “one approach would be to abandon the fiction that leaders are by virtue of ignorance untouched” by responsibility for the actions of their subordinates...
...Reston looked for his scoops in the gap between the formulation of a policy and its announcement...
...Sy Hersh says, “The little guy who runs the Xerox machine may only be able to give you an extra copy, but that may be all you need...
...A more important story may be out in the schools where that policy is being carried out...
...The temptation to reveal the inside knowledge that proved their importance was often overwhelming...
...At a presidential press conference in 1969, Stuart Loory, the Los Angeles Times’ White House correspondent, asked one of those questions that explains why there aren’t more Jim Deakins...
...On January 9, 1972, The New York Times published a story saying that some months earlier the White House had decided to do something about all those leaks and that a group devoted to plugging them had been formed under the leadership of Egil Krogh and David Young...
...The result was that Loory began losing his access to the news...
...1 wasn’t encouraged by my paper to get anything else...
...Peter Lisagor, White House correspondent for The Chicago Daily News, calls this a “psychological undertow that can obscure and minimize things that the public generally ought to be hearing about...
...I think a case can be made that the Times did not devote the resources it should have to Watergate until the second month of this year...
...But there is no excuse for the H. R. Haldemans who refuse to be interviewed at all...
...Throughout the Watergate affair, but especially in the fall of 1972, the Post took responsibility for printing facts even when it could not name sources...
...What Can Be Done Remedying the press’ defects is important not simply in terms of preventing another Watergate...
...The average reader should have had the chance to consider this inference, but the reporters didn’t supply the necessary background...
...Louis Post-Dispatch’s James Deakin, simply because Johmson thought Deakin’s questions at press briefings were too tough...
...I felt my main mission was to rub Washington’s nose in the realities of the field...
...This happened to Reston, whose knowledge of what the CIA was up to had included before-the-event awareness of the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs...
...And Los Angeles Times reporters were not invited to Administration background briefings held to discuss the next year’s State of the Union message...
...On one Nixon trip to California, when the President ‘Invited several reporters to interview him while walking on the beach, Loory was left out even though his was the home paper and would have devoted much more space to the event...
...Why the White House Press Didn’t Get the Watergate Story by Charles Peters One of the great remaining niysteries of the Watergate affair is why the White House press corps failed to get the story...
...Look for the Shredder-Man Another version of “looking for the sorehead’’ is “going down the line...
...This would also protect the public from th:ose reporters who heard the contents of the transcript first-hand but faikd to report the legitimate inferences...
Vol. 5 • July 1973 • No. 5
