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c h a p t e r s i x Retracing the Bureau’s Steps August–October 1972 Oh my God. That’s my interview! —FBI agent Paul Magallanes 72 Here’s how the story goes in the popular imagination: Deep Throat leaked in the late summer and fall of 1972, Woodward and Bernstein did a little legwork, and the Post published another front-page scoop that rattled the White House. It was as if Woodward “did little more than show up with a bread basket that Deep Throat filled with goodies,” as one Post editor later put it mockingly.1 In reality the relationship was far more nuanced and complicated. No two Watergate scoops came about in exactly the same way, though Felt played a role in several of the significant ones. Sometimes Woodward and Bernstein got their initial tip from an entirely unexpected source, and Felt served only to corroborate the story. On other occasions, Felt provided the initial guidance that enabled the reporters to replicate the Bureau’s ongoing investigation. And sometimes, Felt, in his eagerness to impugn Gray, broke the deep background rules he himself had set. All these variations were clearly in evidence in September 1972 as the Post duo followed the FBI’s investigative footsteps.2 But another part of the story, again, is the help Felt could have offered to Woodward but declined to extend. It wasn’t because this information was about the cover-up, rather than the crime, and too closely held—as had been the case with the effort to involve the CIA, which Felt had said nothing about in July. The information outlined below was strictly about the break-in itself. And while no whistle-blower is under an obligation to divulge everything he knows, Felt’s conspicuous failure to do so in this instance underscores again that his agenda was something other than exposure of the parties behind the Watergate break-in. 73 Retracing the Bureau’s Steps Early on the morning of June 17, the day of the break-in, Joe Califano, the legal counsel to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), called his good friend Howard Simons, the Post’s managing editor, to alert him about the arrests. In hindsight, the Post would have latched onto the story without Califano’s tip, especially once James McCord’s role had been ferreted out. But that was not obvious initially, and so the telephone call was deemed very sensitive. This was because Califano was not just the DNC’s counsel; he was also the Post’s chief outside counsel, and the paper’s editors feared that its coverage of Watergate would be seen as reflecting a bias toward the Democrats. So the Califano heads-up was obscured for many years.3 The potential for a conflict of interest escalated dramatically on June 20, when Califano announced that Williams, Connolly & Califano would be representing the DNC in a million-dollar civil lawsuit against the burglars , the CRP, and “unnamed others” for conspiring to violate the civil and constitutional rights of the Democrats. Standing with Califano at the news conference was the DNC chairman, Larry O’Brien, who stated without hesitation that the White House, if not the president, would ultimately be found responsible for the break-in. This assertion guaranteed that media coverage of Watergate would be politically charged, and especially for the Post, given its relationship with the law firm and its reputation as a liberal-leaning newspaper.4 Edward Bennett Williams, one of the law firm’s founding partners, had an exceptionally relaxed notion, however, about what constituted a conflict of interest. As Califano later wrote in a memoir, Williams “always stretched to the limit the number of clients we could represent in a particular matter without finding a conflict.” Almost any other law firm would have handed the suit off to another firm to avoid jeopardizing the prestige (and billable hours) that came from representing the Post. Califano practically worked pro bono for the DNC, and the lawsuit might not even be a paying proposition.5 The Republicans’ lawyers were quick to point out the overlapping interests involved. In late June, at the first court hearing on the civil suit, CRP attorney Kenneth W. Parkinson immediately raised the issue of a possible conflict of interest. “I . . . understand that there is some relationship between Mr. Williams’s firm and the Washington Post Newspaper Company,” he understatedly observed. Thereafter, as the newspaper’s commitment to the story deepened, GOP...

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