Bob Woodward Interview (page: 3 / 9) Investigative Reporter	Print Interview

Mr. Bradlee, at what point did you get the inkling that the Oval Office was involved? Do you remember?

Ben Bradlee: Well, right away, with Hunt's name and the White House telephone number in there.

And Nixon himself?

Ben Bradlee: Nixon himself? I can't remember, but there were so many. Haldeman? Yes. Ehrlichman? Yes. All of the guys who later went to jail. Mitchell? Yes. It was inconceivable that Nixon wasn't. But of course, that all became academic when the tapes came out. It came out in the Ervin Committee hearings in the Senate. We were told that before we could write it, but yes, we knew it. It was so important. The whole reputation of the paper was hanging on that by the time. There was an election on in '72, and most of the rest of the country was saying, "The Post is just playing politics," and all that stuff.

Mr. Woodward, at what point did you realize that President Nixon was implicated in this?

Bob Woodward: Quite late. We were reporting on the President's men, and the White House people, the Attorney General, John Mitchell, people in the Nixon campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, and the focus was not Nixon. It was only later, when Dean testified, and the tapes came out, that it was quite clear that not only was Nixon involved, he was in charge of the cover-up.

And that this wasn't just a cover-up of a burglary.

Bob Woodward: That's right.

That was the key. The important discovery for Carl and myself was that Watergate wasn't isolated. There were other burglaries. There was the whole intelligence-gathering apparatus. There were spies in all the Democratic candidates' campaigns that had been planted and paid by the Nixon campaign. That they would sabotage campaigns. Things that seemed to be simple and innocuous but were quite devastating, false press releases, and accusing people of various activity and so forth, and a kind of sowing the seeds of discord.
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Talk about how it affected Muskie, for example.

Bob Woodward: There was a letter forged, saying that Muskie had made some disparaging remark about Canadians, and Muskie got very upset. It was never conclusively established that this had been done by the Nixon campaign, but one of the people in the White House acknowledged to one of our reporters that he had written it. Muskie, in the emotion of the campaign, was trying to explain what had gone on. There had been some disparaging remarks made elsewhere about his wife, and he cried, in the snow, in New Hampshire, standing on the back of a flatbed truck, and it's generally believed that was the end of his candidacy. And of course, Muskie was going to be the strong candidate against Nixon.

It seems to me that to be a topnotch investigative journalist, you have to have a lot of guts in order to question some of these things.

Bob Woodward: No. The guts are supplied by the owners of the newspaper and the editors. They have always backed what I do. I'm out there doing it, and if there's pressure or debate or controversy, they're absorbing that pressure. Certainly during Watergate, it didn't get transmitted to Carl Bernstein or myself through them. They said, "Keep going. Get to the bottom of it."

Didn't you have a chat with the Post's publisher, Katharine Graham, in the midst of all of this?

Bob Woodward: About six months after Watergate, after Carl and I had written many of -- almost all of -- our main stories, she called me up for lunch. And she had a style of "I want to know what's going on. I want to offer some ideas. Kind of parse it out." But she wasn't the editor. She was the publisher. She had what I call, "Mind on, hands off." She was intellectually engaged in the news, but her hands were not directing, not saying, "Investigate this, don't investigate that, give the emphasis here." That was Bradlee and the editors' job. But she was quite curious, quite well-informed, plugged in. And she said, "When will we know the full story of Watergate? When will all the truth come out?" Quite optimistically. She posed this, almost suggesting that it was inevitable. And my reaction was, I told her, "Well, Carl and I think that it will never come out, that Nixon and his White House are so good at obscuring things, of sealing off information, preventing disclosure, that we'll never know." She looked at me quite stricken and said, "Never? Don't tell me never." And I remember thinking and feeling quite motivated that she was saying the standard here is the bar is quite high. "Don't tell me 'never.' Get to the bottom of it." That your resources, the resources of the newspaper, should be directed at completing this story, getting the full tale, if you would. And it in many ways is, I think, the principle under which she and her son, Don Graham, tried to run The Washington Post. "Don't tell me 'never.' Don't let things elude us. It's our job to figure them out."
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