Seymour Hersh

14. Digging into Watergate

144 CHAPTER 14 Digging into Watergate Missing the Greatest Story In August 1972 Robert M. Smith, a thirty-two-year-old reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, took the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, L. Patrick Gray, out to lunch at a fancy French restaurant. Smith had written three page-one stories about Gray, who succeeded J. Edgar Hoover; Gray had taken a liking to the Harvard-educated Smith. In a room crowded with diners, and with Smith unable to take out his reporter’s notebook, Gray leaned in and confided. People in very high places in the White House—including the former attorney general, John Mitchell, then heading Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign—were involved in the break-in at the Watergate complex that took place on June 17. And the president? Smith asked. “He looked me in the eye without denial—or any comment,” Smith said. “In other words, confirmation.” The director of the FBI had just implicated the President and the former top law enforcement officer in the country in the yet-toemerge Watergate scandal.1 Smith slumped in his chair, shocked, his appetite gone. The FBI director had just laid out the Watergate scandal before anyone—including the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—had the story. Unfortunately for Smith, it was his last day. He was leaving the Times and going, the next day, to Yale Law School, although Gray did not know that when they scheduled lunch—or when he leaked his news. Smith raced back to the Times office and grabbed the news editor, Bob Phelps, insisting they go into Phelps’s office. “This is incredible,” Smith said, as he tape-recorded his recollection of the conversation while Phelps took notes. “There we were with leads from the acting director of the FBI,” Phelps recalled, indicating the president DIGGING INTO WATERGATE 145 was involved in Watergate, long before anyone suspected, and that it was part of a large-scale White House espionage effort.2 With Smith leaving, Phelps had to figure out what to do with the tip. But somehow the story just died. “Why we failed is a mystery to me,” said Phelps, who finally disclosed the missed story in 2009 when he was eighty-seven years old. It would have been logical for Phelps to turn to his crackerjack staff of thirty-five reporters. “We had one of the world’s finest new bureaus at anytime,” observed Smith. The Washington Post feared Walter Rugaber more than any other reporter; his early “beats” rivaled Woodward and Bernstein, but Tad Sculz, who had broken the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, correspondents Robert Semple, James Naughton, Christopher Lydon, John Crewdson—all good reporters—were also nibbling at the story. And then, of course, there was the thirty-six-year-old Sy Hersh, who the Times hired specifically to be their ace investigative reporter. He was the most logical candidate to be given the Gray leak. “I never knew about the conversation,” Hersh said.3 Smith, still angry about the bumbled opportunity three decades later, observed: “I do not know what happened. I assumed the paper, for some reason, could not confirm it. It was tremendously shattering. Why didn’t Phelps do anything with it?” The week after debriefing Smith, Phelps and his wife went on a month’s vacation; he thought he gave the notes and the tape to a reporter or editor. When he returned, he never followed up. “It defies any sense,” Smith said. “He wasn’t a stupid editor.” But some wondered if the hands of bureau chief Max Frankel or even powerful columnist James Reston had entered the mix. Hersh was sure that Frankel had talked to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who assured him the break-in did not reach the Oval Office. But Phelps said if Frankel was told the story had no merit, he never passed it on nor did anything to call off the staff. “From the top editors on down we all shared in the blame,” Phelps said.4 Which didn’t convince an angry Smith and a dubious Hersh. On one level it is easy to see how the Times could miss the story. It was a police story, a break-in, burglars caught red-handed, albeit in the headquarters of the Democratic Party, wearing surgical gloves. The Washington Post was a local newspaper; DC was its town. Reporters knew cops and courts and had...