Behind the Lines; 201; The press and Watergate

Oh It was the system that has brought the facts to light and that will bring those guilty to justice. A system that in this case has included a determined grand jury, honest prosecutors, a courageous judge, John Sirica, and a vigorous, free press.

The Democratic National Committee is trying to solve a spy mystery. It began before dawn Saturday when five intruders were captured by police inside the offices of the committee in Washington. The five men carried cameras and apparently had planted electronic bugs. The police said they were thoroughly professional. The suspects are saying nothing. Democrats say they have no idea who would want to spy on them. So it began, one of the first reports of the biggest political story of the decade.

Good evening, I'm Brendan Gill, your host, this third season of Behind the Lines. Tonight our subject is Watergate. Not the events themselves, but how you learned of these events. We'll be asking how the press reacted to Watergate, how they decided to cover it and how well they covered it. As we take up these questions, we hope to make a larger point that the performance of the press on Watergate was a textbook case showing certain characteristic strengths and weaknesses in our news media. Of course, some members of the press did better than others. This was apparent even on the very first day. The New York Times, for example, put the news of the break-in on page 38, while its chief rival, the Washington Post, gave it major play on the front page. But what is more significant, the post had two reporters who would keep it there. Barstein and Wood would took the long march for these people. There's no question about it. The lesson learned is that you have to get yourself a couple of hot, you know, fire eaters, you know, like blue and brown saying a given leash.

It was two hungry young investigative reporters who wouldn't quit. It's certainly an important effort by Woodard and Bernstein, a very great effort for which they were properly recognized. As far as the two reporters that did their work on this case, Woodward and Bernstein, I think they did great job. I think we've been given entirely too much credit for some of the things that have happened in Watergate. What we did was not really that extraordinary. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, it would be hard to find two reporters less likely to become the newspaper heroes of Watergate. We found them in Florida, on leave from the post to write a book about their experiences. At the time of the break-in in June of 1972, Woodward and Bernstein were a couple of rather undistinguished police reporters on the post-city desk. It was only because Watergate was at first considered a local rather than a national story that they were given the assignment. Press critic Ben Becdicki in his calculator that out of the hundreds of reporters who cover Washington scarcely more than a dozen were assigned to Watergate.

So while Woodward and Bernstein were putting in long hours that summer slowly piecing together the facts behind the break-in, very few of their colleagues did anything at all on the story. And of the editors around the country, even fewer, saw anything worth doing. We had a hard time finding anything sinister right at first. It just seemed to be people broke into an office so we didn't know what they were after. And I guess most papers try not to overplay it. In retrospect, of course, if we had foreseen how this would become the great issue, we would have paid more attention to it. We couldn't begin to put the number of reporters into the national capital that the Washington Post of the New York Times or the night news papers. The other big operators can. One of the intangibles is somehow someone had a hint of the size of this story. Whether it was you or your editors or the whole operation, knew there was something

there, knew that it was worth the risk, that apparently what didn't exist in other papers. Well, no, I think the point there is just look at the June 17th break-in. The 50 burglaries the day in Washington, and there's never been one like that. Men in business suits, hundred dollar bills, sophisticated electronic and photographic equipment. There was an aroma of not a stink about it immediately, and I don't think even, and not just from the privileged position of today, but even if you, when we looked at it then, I think we were incredulous and said, my God, there must be something there. Woodward and Bernstein's first article, two days after the break-in, Trace D. Howard Hunt to the White House. In the weeks that followed, they established that Republican campaign funds helped pay for the break-in, that other funds had been laundered in Mexico. The post was not completely alone during this period, however. The Los Angeles Times put three reporters on the story, Bob Jackson, Jack Nelson, and Ron Austro. Their work paid off in early October when Nelson got the first interview with Al Baldwin. As with Woodward and Bernstein's

investigative work, the Baldwin scoop resulted from a heavy commitment of time, resources, and editorial support. Both tracking down Al Baldwin and trying to get his cooperation and telling the full story of what he knew about Watergate took several weeks. And when finally, I persuaded his attorneys and him for him to sit down in a tape recorded interview to tell his whole story of what happened, I don't know, it went on another week or so. We were spending on a tremendous amount of time just on the Baldwin aspect of it alone. The point is that there are very few newspapers who have enough correspondents in Washington to be able to concentrate on a story like that, as well as cover other news. There's no question that putting people on the story to the extent that we have does detract from coverage that you're otherwise to be providing, but it's just a scale of priorities. What's more important?

You have to have editors who believe in this kind of thing, who are willing to have them spend two weeks in New Haven really on a flyer with no guarantee that we're going to be successful. Neither the editors, the publisher, nor ourselves had any preconceived notion about where the story was going to go. If it went nowhere, it went nowhere, but they made the commitment to find out where it was going to go. Wherever the chips fell, they were going to go with it. It was realized initially assigning us to the story full-time. I don't think any other newspaper or news media organization did that. We were allowed to go through that period of July in 1972, the month after the break-in. When we really didn't have a lot of significant stories, but we were still working on it most of the time, gathering information, making contacts, and that's something small organizations cannot do quite naturally. And I think in a sense, that was the significant factor. There's another factor. When we haven't mentioned,

Watergate was competing against a lot of other political news, the Democratic and Republican conventions, and in the fall, the election campaign itself. For example, on the day Woodward and Bernstein revealed that Republican contributions were behind the break-in, the big story was Senator Eglton's removal from the Democratic ticket. Still, there's no doubt that the public was badly under-informed on this issue. A Gallup poll taken in early October showed that more than half the people in the country had never even heard of Watergate. The post says the SBNR's operation on the president's behalf was called the Offensive Security Program. It began in 1971. On October 10th, the post printed its watershed story, the Sigretti story. Using FBI sources, Woodward and Bernstein revealed a massive campaign of political sabotage led by Donald Sigretti. The story implied that the Watergate break-in was just the tip of the iceberg. The story was given a big play in cities like Charlotte, Philadelphia, and St. Petersburg. Some papers,

such as the Baltimore Sun, were cautious with the story, while others in Dallas, Indianapolis, and Tulsa, for example, virtually ignored it. Clearly, the Washington Post was getting mixed reviews around the country, and Ben Bradley, the executive editor, was not very happy about it. We have asked ourselves here, where were you when we needed you? Because we really have been hitting the story regularly with major, major, very significant information, and it has not had a very great play throughout the country, and it somehow seems that from a strictly newspaper point of view, it makes me wonder what editors use as standards for judging stories. It seems to me that public acceptance is part of their standard, and I think that's crazy. We are great believers ourselves in investigative reporting, and

we respect other newspapers for their investigative reporting, but there is always a little bit of uneasiness about their stories, even as they might be uneasy about ours, because we don't know who the sources are, and so we were not reluctant to use the stories, but we were reluctant to overemphasize them, because they could have been wrong. It's terrible to make excuses now, but actually, we did a pretty lousy job of covering Watergate in the first stage. There's no question about it, but I think most other papers did. The Post saw the significance right off the bat and put people on it, and of course, if we had it to do over again, we would have done things differently naturally. Does the Post have a reputation as being anti-Nixon? Could that have been a factor in the hesitancy of editors? Possibly, possibly, because it's well known that President Nixon did not care for the Post in the New York Times. Eastern establishment pressure was called,

and I think probably a lot of editors around the country got worried when the White House lit out so angrily after the Post. I don't respect the type of journalism, the shabby journalism that is being practiced by the Washington Post. Here is a classic case of what Ron Ziegler was talking about. Very skillful journalists, using hearsay. It's a very story touched a vital administration nerve, and the White House responded accordingly with a series of blustery and it hoped blistering attacks. Proven fact from allegation. As engaged in an enterprise which elevates common gossip, to the level of a major front page news, it's time we blew the whistle on the Washington Post. The White House raised the stakes by issuing denials, or what appeared to be denials, and attacking us in our credibility. I think the White House raised the stakes in the whole

water gate issue to the point of no return. If they had just ignored it, they could have won to a certain extent. It would have come out and the President could have said I just didn't know, and it would not be such a big issue, but they made it a big issue in the Washington Post really didn't. But the administration's tactics apparently did work in the short run. When the Post reported on October 25th that HR Holderman controlled secret water gate funds, the sharp White House denials of the story made bigger headlines in many papers than the story itself did. Not many editors were willing to side with the Post. To be perfectly honest, it was a story in which we were getting murdered by the Post. Let's do its embarrassment. For six months, the New York Times attrailed the Washington Post. Finally, Seymour Hirsch, the tireless reporter who broke the Miele massacre story, was brought in to salvage the time's prestige. His January scoop about payoffs to the water gate defendants gave the first indication of

the extent of the cover-up. The problem of getting information that would be fresh seem terrific. To get back to the initial thought about the Washington Post, I think they had grounds for complaint early on. And just to show you, the complaint is that the press ignored them too. You know, I get all these accolades of being such a super duper reporter. I didn't want any part of it either. For a totally different set of reasons. But the point I'm getting at is is that it seemed like an awfully hard story. And they seem to have an awful lot of it. I think during that period last fall, you guys were under a lot of criticism from the White House press guard and also from the guys on your national desk. Could you give us some examples of this or how it affected you? I can think of one example of a reporter whose name I'll just not mention. Works for a big newspaper in Washington who took me to lunch and said, thought it was an interesting series of articles on water gate. This was right around the time of the election a little bit before a little after. But I really think you got carried away.

And it's too bad you did. And he really followed up on something. Mrs. Graham, the publisher of the post said that if we were wrong about water gate in a sense, it would establish that the Nixon administration was right about at least the Eastern press. And he was sort of saying, you really put everybody's neck on the chopping block, not just your own. And really did you have a right to do that? And I was a little upset about that attitude. It was March when James McCord convicted in the break-in wrote his now famous letter to Judge Sirrica and so the unraveling began with each new thread came a new headline as reporters swarmed over the story. Leakes led to counter leaks. White House aides resigned and all the news was water gate. Mr. Woodward, our Woodward and Bernstein were vindicated, vindicated and celebrated. The president saluted the press, Ron Ziegler apologized to the post,

and newsman everywhere felt an increased pride in their profession. The final tribute of Pulitzer Prize to the Washington Post. But when the elation subsided, a few critics could be heard. Where had the press been in the beginning? And that elite corps, the White House press, why hadn't they broken water gate? You know, they're not even trying. I mean, that's not even looking that way. And I don't even think they feel a particular sense of loss. In fact, most of them were recouping nicely inviting stories about how the Washington Press Corps did it. I would go further. I think the White House press corps has been too comfortable, too odd by the secular monarchy that's been established in that White House, too willing to accept the secrecy, the rationalizations, the lies. And it's only recently that they really have started to revolt and indicate they really had enough of it. And my point is that they should have revolted long time ago and demanded more press conferences, more probing questions, and less official spokesman type facades. The press includes all kinds of people, all kinds of functions. The White House press,

for example. Most of those guys over there aren't the best in the top reporters in town. They have functions to perform. They go over there and it's their beat. They sit there. It shovels out to them some of them are more enterprising than others. And we'll go and try to see White House officials. But you know what that was like in the first term of the Nixon administration. You would make a career out of just simply trying to make an appointment with people. No, we'll pick that around. Washington recently, we bought a group of bureau chiefs, editors, and White House reporters together over breakfast. None had taken part in the early reporting of Watergate. Under questioning by Richard Whalen, a fellow journalist and press critic, they explained why. Because it was in the middle of an election campaign. And I think that our problems parallel to problems with George McGupton, he tried to get the story out and he couldn't. And we tried and we couldn't. In retrospect, we probably could have done more. And I think this is not just a

failing in our part. I think a lot of news people have learned a lot from this story. I'll tell you why. I really don't worry too much about all the press criticisms that I've heard since I've been in Washington. Because it's peaks and valleys. If you wait, the next criticism will cancel the previous ones. Ever since I've been here, I've read in magazines. All the press runs and a pack, press runs and a pack all right in the same story. So what are we getting here together to do? To find out why you all weren't covering Watergate. I'll ring the same story. When a D-read says new house was investigating the V.A., I'm not apologizing for anything that people mind bureau did. They were out investigating plenty of good stories, digging up inequities and injustices in the Pentagon, the Labor Department, you name it. Certainly by last fall it was apparent that the post had sources in the FBI in the Justice Department and presumably the U.S. Attorney's Office. So that it seems to me should have wedded the appetite of the other news gatherers to go find those same sources. Woodward and Bernstein were police reporters and the story we're talking about was a burglary.

And it is that simple. It was a local metropolitan desk story at the Washington Post and they did the very best job they could do on it and they followed it right through. Well I just think that this was an episode when the unknown, uninhibited reporter was at a premium. The profile of the guy, the successful reporter in Washington today is what he's 29 years old divorced so he doesn't run around after girls has no money so they can't get his income tax and is dedicated to the job. I just think this kind of story recalls. Well sure as you knew about the cash that had been stashed away, all the bells should have run. As somebody said early on, this is a story about money and it's still a story. I think the criticism is caressed on that score. I do think that if we have to talk about the town as one, the press as one, I think that it was culpable on that ground. But Pete, remember what happened in that year? Remember Pete King and Moscow?

Right. Remember the world news atmosphere was immense. The war was still going on. Yeah, war in the end of it. My eye point out though that we need allies in this dig. That it just simply isn't a matter of reporters. Would the Washington Post, would they have gotten their material? Had there not been an FBI that gathered just as department lawyers that went out and got it and then leaked it? No, you know that. That's sort of almost every Washington description. That's right. That's right. The great story in this town. Come out of a collusion between the reporter and the eight Senate committee or someone with that. I assume you're that is the best art at all. Oh man, I mean inside because you know there is no way that I can think of that we could have found out some of those things without the FBI. I mean, we are dependent on sources as Hugh says. But do we associate with? Do we have contact with the kind of sources that we really need? Do we not have a tendency too often to go to the man at the top

and in our personal lives as well as our professional lives to associate with people who are not doing that dirty work? And I don't think that the leaks on Watergate or the sources on Watergate were Richard Nixon or John Mitchell or people of that nature. They were the anonymous people in this town that we rarely see. Do you think your own personal status, the fact that you weren't national reporters that you were younger, you didn't know anybody anything? Even the fact you were recently divorced both of you, enabled you to put more energy and more effort in this story. It's a question of reporting method, I think. A lot of talk has been made about the way of reporters work in Washington and they go to lunch with Henry Kissinger and they go to press conferences

and cover stories that way. As police reporters or local reporters, we covered stories differently. We would cover crimes by talking to low-level people not really going to lunch with people that often. And in this story it happened to work. Certainly we had a great advantage in the fact that we're not married. In the early months we had to do an awful lot of work between say eight at night and one in the morning, knocking on doors. You couldn't go see a lot of these people in their offices because you'd get them fired as well as the fact that you might not be allowed in. So I think that definitely helped us a lot. There certainly is a reluctance, I think, on the part of large number of people in the Washington Press Corps to work that way. We worked up instead of down. We started to bottom and then the sources became higher. If we have to have people covering the White House to go out and report what the president says, what's going on in the White House,

the point is assign somebody to cover the White House and never go there. For instance, he says Liddy met with Colson in February and afterward Liddy came out. It was only when the Senate hearings began that Watergate turned into television's kind of story. Up till then, the evening news was likely to tell you a little more than what Woodward and Bernstein had come up with that day, followed, of course, by the inevitable administration, denial, or denunciation. At those hearings in Washington, we talked with network correspondents about TV's inherent handicaps. Why, we asked, is there so little investigative reporting on TV? As it was before, we have it, but the medium just simply doesn't seem to be suited for it, again, except for television specials. Where you can take the time to really develop it, but on daily broadcast journalism, on our nightly news shows for all three networks, it's been very little really innovative, original, investigative reporting done. It takes more reporters than what you're saying. I'm saying what I think I'm saying is that on a story like Watergate,

it takes a newspaper rather than networks. It's the old line about go find judge crater. What if you don't find judge crater? When you come back and you say, I've been out for six months, I didn't find judge crater. After a while, people stop wanting to pay your salary. After a while, producers with the best will for wanting to be investigative reporters and wanting to have a unit of that nature say, well, if the man can't produce for television, which requires stories every day, then we're wasting money. It's just a built-in problem there. But when a story isn't visual, TV newsmen have another problem. In the early days of Watergate, they tried to solve it with a stakeout, a frustrating exercise in which TV news crews spend hours waiting around court houses and apartment houses in the hopes of filming a Howard Hunt or a John Mitchell. I personally hate stakeouts because, first of all, they're usually unproductive. You spend many hours waiting for somebody who may not appear and when he does, when may walk past you

and sometimes isn't even there to begin with. But while I hate them and while I think there's a better use for the time of some of us, there is something about revelation of personality through the camera that is necessary, even if the person doesn't make long the substantive statements. You, if you're lucky, give the audience a look at someone. You see John Mitchell. John Mitchell comes down from giving a deposition and he says, I don't know where you fell as get these wild ideas, but I'm sure that's probably the wildest I've ever heard in Washington. At least people got a chance to look at him, get a chance to hear him, and if Mitchell was giving a deposition, I was going to have to be there to talk to him when he came downstairs, rather than be out somewhere else trying to pick up on Woodward and Bernstein and leapfrog them. Get ahead of them. I'd like to have done it. I never did it. At first it was called the Watergate Caper. Five men apparently caught in the act. Shortly before the elections, CBS News aired two special reports on Watergate

during the evening news program. The reports developed little new material, but putting the known facts together on television gave them a new impact and brought CBS into the administration line of fire. In all, CBS devoted nearly twice as much coverage in the pre-election phase to the Watergate story as NBC or ABC. As at the Washington Post, the extra ingredient appears to have been editorial commitment. Part of it was that Walter Cronkite himself was the managing editor of his own broadcast, which is after all the flagship of our news fleet. Walter himself was personally interested, but every executive said, you know, go after it. We got to break the story. There was a sense of the voted public service that was involved in it. Though we haven't said much about them, time and news week both committed considerable resources to the story, mostly with commendable results. Not since World War II had a single subject occupied so many covers in so short a time. More importantly, the news magazines, time in particular, dug up and broke significant stories

of their own. Because so many things have been happening and there are so many threats coming out of the whole situation. It's just perfect for the weekly news operation to tie it into one hopefully neat ball that the reader can understand a little bit better than having to take one newspaper to time each day and try to keep it all in mind. Interestingly, I think the Watergate story since it's come into the Senate has been a kind of dual role. We have continued, I think, to make news that is to develop stories from relatively obscure sources. And at the same time we've served, I think it's a very useful function, a very complex story, which is to put it together and put it in perspective once a week. The Watergate hearings, beginning in mid-May and running through the summer,

became a national obsession. As a news story, the transformation of Watergate was now complete from the lonely and private odyssey of two reporters to a public spectacle. For the newsman covering the hearings day after day, a routine quickly developed. And more than that, a sense of family, embracing not only the reporters at the press tables, but the senators and their staffers, the policemen watching the door, even the regular spectators in the gallery. And no matter how serious the testimony, the family seemed to enjoy itself. Committee will come to order. Council will call the first witness, Mr. Patrick J Buchanan. You swire that evidence which you should give to the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign activities to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but truth, the truth. So, help you go. I do, Mr. Chairman. But the question arose, was it necessary for so many reporters to be there, each recording a public event? Woodward and Bernstein conspicuously were absent. Also, the committee's investigation before it becomes public in the form of a leak of one's

sooner or another. It's like H.L. Minken once said, that at any time there's more than one or two reporters covering a story, it's not worth covering. The file might be constructed to destroy his public image and credibility. There's a kind of chronic hurt instinct about the press in Washington that all gathers around a certain major event. I mean, you might wonder why you need so many people to cover the same event in the hearing room or to cover an inauguration or to cover any kind of press conference. They can bring so many creative powers to describing the way a witness scratches his nose or pulls his ear or something like that. There's a lot of other work to be done. That's the troublesome part of it. There's no problem that so many are there unless it's taking away from something else that's important to be done. And that's the price I think that's been paid. We are hurting in that room because everybody must be there. It's like anything else, a reality is different. You could sit and cover this hearing off a television set. You would think, but you really can't. It's better just to be there because you got to talk to the people. You got to get to know them. It's necessary for a hundred people to be duplicating each other's

efforts. In other words, the argument is, why aren't you out being with other water gates? Finding other water gates? I suppose that a case could be made for that, but I'm still a great believer in individual styles and newspapers. I don't think we should ever get a homogenized national journalism television offers enough of that already. Nobody's saying everyone should be out following the story. It's just that I think some of us do have a gnawing worry that too much of it has not been investigated either by the congressional committees or the press. I think some of the more enterprising people probably talk to staff members between sessions and get little tidbits about what's coming and the politics and strategy and so forth. It isn't a question, but it's a question of having information that he now gives us for the first time, which is quite intense. Somebody's told me before. But it's true. It was too young to release reporters without them. None of us would be here today. It shouldn't that tell us something

all about these tables, but maybe we should not be here. We should be out trying to do what they did. Yes, except that some of us can't do it. It's a gift to investigative reporting, and a lot of people don't have it. They don't have the stomach fart, they don't have the will fart, they don't have the brass that it takes to go up to a total stranger and take them by little bells and say, now you tell me. It's not everybody can do it. I can't, for instance. You are comfortable in this situation, I think. Yes, it's all handed to me on a platter. I just have to sit here and take it all in. It's much easier than going around, knocking on doors at midnight and meeting people in underground parking spaces in the dead of night, which is what, as you know, would wouldn't have been staying dead. But you're going to say there's something of value in you're being here, I hope. It keeps me off the street, yes. We followed a story, I think, as a story should have been

followed pretty much. We did a good job on it, but it was not the kind of thing that others shouldn't have been able to do. At the beginning of this program, we were asking how the press covered Watergate? The answers turn out to be unsurprising. Perhaps all the more valuable to us because they're unsurprising. It's useful to be reminded that it takes an awful lot of time and money and effort and intelligence, and his Mary McGrory points out sheer brass to investigate a story on the scale of Watergate. A scale, by the way, that is still far from clear, since every day the story casts a wider and darker shadow over the fabric of government and therefore over all our lives. We've seen how modestly the whole thing began with Bernstein and Woodward grabbing the tip of the tail of what seemed to most people at the time a nasty little local rat. Now that rat has emerged as an immense crooked-minded dinosaur. One is tempted to compare Watergate to a cumbersome

prehistoric beast because we find in its manifold operations so little evidence of even ordinary intelligence, only a low water of animal cunning. It succeeded only as long as nobody noticed it was there. The press harried Watergate into the headlines, since then it has seemed to expand of its own accord, requiring less and less prompting on the part of the press to spill out its disgusting guts. I have never heard or seen such outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting in 27 years of public life. Outrages, vicious, distorted. By the end of October, the vigorous free press had once again become presidential enemy number one. In Washington,

I joined Anthony Lewis, the administration critic and columnist for the New York Times, George Will, columnist for the Washington Post and national review magazine, and John Lofton, a syndicated columnist and former editor of Monday, the publication of the Republican National Committee. We began by discussing that extraordinary press conference. Any politician worth his salt and the president is a politician worth his salt can control a press conference. Simply because of what Tony says, there's no systematic follow-up. And I really think that in our copious spare time down in Washington when we get a current commotion settled, someone's going to have to sit down and think about the press conference as an institution, the East Room of the White House. With these, I mean, look at the curious situation we had at the most recent press conference. There obviously was a concern, and I'd like to get to whether or not this should be a concern, but there was a concern about the president's emotional stability. And some members of the press were bound and determined to ask questions about that. But here you had the press, sweaty,

shouting, hair matted on its forehead, jumping up and down, shrieking, and worrying about the president's emotional stability. I had grave doubts about some members of the press before they were done there. And I don't think anyone, the press, the public, the president is served by a demeaning display of such rank unreason as you get in these press conferences. You can't say that without going back a little bit. I think the formula, as I've already said, we're in agreement on, it's not very effective. But I think the very fact that we have come to the point of members of the press asking the president about his emotional state, going back to the San Clemente press conference, more or less asking if he was a criminal virtually. I mean, I find that, I must say, and I do not have a very high opinion of Richard M. Nixon, but I still find that rather painful to watch, because I was brought up with the feeling of respect for the office, very strong feeling of respect. And if anything, I'd have always thought that there were inhibitions on dealing directly with the president. And the fact that we've come

to this, I think, I must say, reflects a, just a performance in office and an evasion of the truth over such an extended period of time that the press has been driven rather frantic. I would distinguish, however, between the question about, are you, have you committed felonies for which there is some reasonable grounds for doubt? And the question, whether or not your emotional stability is all that it ought to be, because that's a question you simply, that's not a question that you can answer. There's a McCarthy, when he was riding high, the bad McCarthy in his heyday, he used to say, we have not yet got any evidence that this man is disloyal to the country. Well, everyone was waiting for the shoot to drop then. And I think it's terribly unfair to reach a point where, on the evening news, it is considered news to say, Mr. Nixon went through another day in good emotional health. I mean, that just is not a legitimate news report, it seems to me, particularly because we have no reason to doubt that he is, indeed, bearing up rather well, considering the abuse that's coming his way, much of which I grant he's earned.

John, do you have a feeling about that? Is that an unjust thing that the press is now doing? Is there any becoming much more common every day? Well, I would distinguish between the things that the press is doing, and I'm not sure that I would call them all unjust. And when I make a distinction, I'm talking about things that the news media said themselves, as opposed to things that other people said that the news media quoted, and I think maybe the President got them all lump together. Specifically, I'm thinking about Senator Harrison Williams of New Jersey, Robert Bird of Virginia, Harvard University law professor, Ralph Berger, who all three compared the President to Hitler following the Cox firing and the tape release, B.F. Sisk of California moderately conservative Democrat, who wondered about the President, Sanity. Ralph Nader combined both, saying he was a mad tyrant, I guess he got both of them in there. And there was also what I would call some outrageous, vicious, and distorted editorializing, and I thought Tony Lewis has come in, and his column about there being a smell of a coup d'état

in the air might fit into that category. I was in Washington that day, I don't know where he was walking, but I didn't smell any coup d'état. Where were you, by the way? I was in the White House press room during the moment of a climax. It was a smell of a coup d'état, a White House press room. Well, I think quite a lot of people think it's a little overstated. I didn't at all, not at all, not when a general, a somewhat retired general, who is the president's chief of staff, calls up a civil officer of the United States and says the president wants to do something and adds that's in order from your commander-in-chief. That represents to me such a gross misunderstanding of what this country is about and what the government is about, that it really worried me. I can only tell you, not only me, but quite a few people that day, who my respect had a feeling of something quite funny and wrong going on. Barbara Tuckman had a piece. I noticed in the Washington Post saying, the army is next. He has no place to go. Now, Barbara Tuckman is a very sensible historian. She said that it may be wrong, but I think there was something of that smell

in there. But it's once that we can all exhaust the evening with documentation of exaggerated rhetoric in a difficult time. Oh, that's not, God bless. That's what I could do with press. I mean, the point is, there's a lot when the president is charging that the reporting was outrageous, vicious and distorted, citing examples of outrage and vicious reporting and distorted reporting is pretty relevant. Well, if the press reports that someone like Ralph Nader says, Charles I, Ted, is Cromwell, the president of the prophet, from his example, etc., then that's worth distinguishing as to what the president's complaining about. Maybe Ralph Nader shouldn't talk that way, but someone's going to report him if he does. It has to be reported if a person is sufficiently important. Says the thing of this kind. That's what choice have you got? Well, no, no, remember, I started out by saying that I was making a distinction. I wasn't objecting to the press. I was objecting to all these things, editorials, columns, and just news reporting, all being lumped together and saying, the press says this. I noticed the networks came on after the president was through and said that during the bombing controversy,

we did not say things about the president. The president didn't say that the network said them. It said the networks carried similar remarks about impeachment having lost his mind. They didn't say the network said them. Yeah, and who said the worst thing said about the president December when he bombed Cambodia was said by the junior senator from Ohio, or as he's senior, Saxby, a Republican. He said the president's taken leave of these senses. That's news, if Saxby wants to say that. News if Mr. Meeney shows a little more important than Ralph Nader, says the president has taken leave. That's right. And I would not attack the media for reporting it. I would attack Meeney or Saxby for saying it. Could I offer a suggestion for you to knock down or confirm or do what you'd like to? My complaint, if there's a complaint about the press with regard to Watergate from the start is this, that they haven't done a very good job, not that they've been biased. Everyone's biased, not that they haven't been unfair, which is not the same thing as being unbiased. I think they've been pretty fair. I don't think however they've served

the country as well as they should have, particularly in the last weeks when the issues got more subtle and more complicated. They haven't served the country by, it seems, me analyzing with proper sophistication, the legal issues involved. Is that a fair assessment for me to ask what you mean, which legal issues involved? You don't have the tapes, or IOTK, or the Rebozo, or particulars, or the tapes. Well, we can take all of those, but let's stick with the tapes. I do not think that Charles Allen Wright, the president's lawyer, is a cynic. If anything, he's principled to a fault. I do not think Robert Bork is a cynic. Again, he may have the principled to a fault, but I have never yet seen a news treatment of the issues in this that didn't treat Mr. Cox as having legal reasons, and the president is having political reasons. Now, it seems to me the president's case, while quite probably wrong with regard to the tapes, was a defensible interpretation of the doctrine of separation of powers. That is honorable men of goodwill can and do disagree about

it, and I did not get that impression from the news coverage of it. Well, let me just forgive me for making a personal point. I don't usually quote myself at people, but this is the duty talk of the court again. See, I'll try to mention the begin if I can. No, I happened to feel exactly as you did, that on the substantive issue of whether the president had a privilege that he could properly invoke, there was a serious argument, and I wrote a column about the argument before Judge Sirica, and again wrote about the argument before the Court of Appeals, in which I think I said both sides were honorable, serious, and so forth. I have no agree with you. I don't think there was any serious argument, whatever, for the proposition that a man can fail to appeal a judgment of a Court of Appeals, and then announce that he's doing something else. I mean, I just don't think there is any support for that, and I regard it as the most subversive possible thing for a president of the United States to do. This White House invests so much energy in worrying about the press. They must think it's terribly important. And it doesn't only the press,

I may say, we've had General Hague on the television, bristling at the notion that the American Bar Association, that gang of revolutionary radicals, would dare to disagree. They're just much too frightened, they're much too backed up. What do you think is back of the fact that they estimate the power of the president? Well, what does it consist of? I don't know, because Mr. Lewis works for a terribly Augustineist paper, and I really don't think they've carried the country on any of the issues recently. I mean, the chief complaint about the press, if you ask most conservatives, if whom I'm one, is that they were too soft on the students when there was campus disorder, which they were, and that in fact, they did not give proper reporting to the war in Vietnam, but before the press was done, students were the most detested group in the United States, student radicals, and the war went its merry way until the bombers and the diplomats settled, and it was not really ended by American public opinion as swayed by the press. So, to actually document that the press has the power that would justify the administration worrying about it,

it's such an enormous length, seems to be very difficult to do. I'm not sure I all to get angry with that. Just as a footnote to begin, I think public opinion did have something to do with the conduct of the Vietnam War. It forced Lyndon B. Johnson from office in a sense, public opinion, so we can't altogether discount it. But then you have to establish the connection between press opinion and public opinion. Oh, yes, I really don't disagree with you, and I think the issue here is slightly different, what we've been talking about. I think press power is vastly overrated. I think press performance is vastly overrated. I think on the whole, if anything, the press in this country over the last 25 years should be criticized for the inadequate reporting, that is investigating that it does, the inadequate analysis that it does, this is the Stawill's legal point, and you know, it shouldn't be criticized for doing too much, but for

doing too little. Now, what about the fact that it's a notable exception to that? I may say the performance of the Washington Post, a notable exception. I'd like to just give what is my favorite example of outrageous, vicious, and distorted reporting. And again, I go back to examples, because when I came on the show, that's what I was told we were going to talk about the administration and the press and why they probably feel in the White House the way they do about some of the press. In the Washington Post, a Joseph Kraft column was talking about the Nixon presidency as a kind of mafia organization. He's quoting, I'm quoting Kraft now, and that evidence of this emerges almost daily. And Mr. Kraft cites the latest being a theft from the Federal Home Loan Bank Board of the files of a suspicious transaction with Charles Rebozo, the president's close friend who has already implicated in some highly dubious dealings involving money for Mr. Nixon, given by the tycoon Howard Hughes. Now, the Washington Post news story about the theft of the file from the Home Loan Bank Board doesn't even imply, hint, there's absolutely nothing

in it that indicates that anyone in the administration had anything to do with the theft. I mean, it's just an incredible charge. I talked to Joe Reppert, the information officer of the board, who's right on top of the investigation, says it's a ridiculous absurd charge. No connection with the administration. Is this not an example of vicious, distorted reporting? I think, take a stand on this one. I think we don't know yet as far as my stand. Exactly. When Mr. Kraft wrote it, there was nothing, an inference may have been drawn, but I have to say that if you had said to me two years ago that we were going to have evidence that members of the White House staff had committed burglaries in psychiatrist's office, and so on and so on, I'd have regarded that as pretty incredible, too. Still, but that's not a license to know. Of course not, and I think all of this has to be very careful. I think that's what I'm just saying that if we're going to talk about incredible things that have happened, one sense of the imaginable has been vastly expanded in the last two years. But I think John's point is that Mr. Kraft's not in business to imagine.

No, but it was not an area, man. That's what it wasn't, and it was reported. But I have other papers to decide, of course, for him to cite as evidence that the Nixon presidency is a kind of mafia operation, and that this evidence emerges almost daily, the latest being the theft. Well, there's absolutely nothing in the new story to imply it. Not information stories, but there's nothing to relate it to the administration at all. Matter of fact, it says that the theft of the file was discovered only after the material appeared on CBS television, which Mr. Kraft was in a speculating mood. It would seem he would wonder if perhaps CBS is not stolen. I'm a little, I don't think it's fair for us, frankly, to go on on this line about Mr. Kraft. He's not here to defend himself, and he might well have a reason for doing this. That's assuming he didn't get what he got out of that story. I'd like to go back then a little bit to the question of the difference between the television, which simply reports and doesn't do, and the investigative of a very little investigative work. Do you think there's something necessary in the way television is set up? It's going to make it impossible for it to do investigative work? Would you always want to have this be double the

time problem? Well, in the first place, television can do a superb job of investigative reporting. CBS is running their retrospective series, and they're very good. They wear fairly well. Second, almost the best piece of investigative journalism I've seen all year was Mike Wallace's demolition of Colonel Herbert and his book Soldier, where he just demonstrated to my satisfaction. And Mr. Herbert was not telling the absolute strict truth about all he had in that book to put it gently. But there is this. In covering a news story, television is slave to a superficial instrument, the camera. If you have a beef shortage, there are interesting and complicated reasons for a beef shortage. But they're not telegenic. What's telegenic is a housewife waving a pork chop. So you go out and you get the housewife waving a pork chop, and some of the more complicated issues, the proper coverage of which would instruct the country on the dangers of trying to regulate the economy in any fine way, tend to get lost. So there is a limit. I think I'm right about this, that if you took the transcript of a half hour evening news show,

it would fill about three quarters or two thirds of the front page of Mr. Lewis's newspaper. That's not a lot of type. No, I think they do amazingly well considering the time and the limitations in the evening news. They don't do as well in serious analytical or investigative work, as for example, the BBC does much, much better. Or they do, they have occasionally. And that may just be difference of pressures. In this country, if we have the press, has been going too far. If they have been adopting more than an adversary position vis-a-vis the administration, if they were really out as Nixon is hinting to and risking the destruction of the whole country in the name of destroying him, is there any hard evidence for that, John? Do you do you think that the press has any such notions of that? Well, as I said at the beginning, I think the President overstated the case, but I think that it's not totally without foundation. And while I don't agree with all of the things that bother people in the White House,

I was trying to talk about some of the things and describe what it is. I think irks them. I'm trying to describe the situation without saying that I subscribe to it. Do you think there is a crisis of public confidence? And do you think if there is such a thing that the press is to blame for it, the press is reported. Well, I don't think that the press is to blame for it at all. And particularly the television media, I watched very closely, all three networks, during the cox firing and the tapes disclosure, and I didn't think they were all that bad. I think one thing we ought to say is that all of this may assume that a President of the United States is rather a sort of powerless individual up against this mastodon of the press, whereas in fact, we all know the President has immense power over public opinion. We've just had a rather thoughtful report from the 20th century fund about his ability to just preempt television time whenever he wants. We've already said, I think all of us in agreement that the format of the press conference is an inept one on the press's side and any President ought to be able to win in that situation. I think the power of the press of the President is much greater than that of the press in almost any situation. And I would have to say about Watergate and the

larger ripples from it that what has happened is a result not of some mystique about the press, but of the substance of what went on, the corrupting of institutions, the danger to the United States, if that's what it is, didn't come from the press. It came from those appointed by the President of the United States. I think sort of interestingly, it turns out that all of us feel that if anything the press simply should do better, should be even more skilled in its investigations and work harder at these things, and so that there isn't any risk, apparently, in our eyes involved in that. The press simply can do its job even better than it has and then see what happened. I think one other thing we ought to say, and we're going to be critical of the press, and we ought to be a little bit. I had thought during, especially the agnew affair, that there was a terrible danger of a, or at least a danger of a kind of Gresham's law operating in investigative reporting. And that is that I happen to believe in the secrecy of grand juries, for example, and there was one leak from the grand jury, and then, of course, all the other papers or

news magazines, especially in that case, had to compete to get their leak. And the situation, I think, was inevitable because it was the vice president of the United States. It wasn't an ordinary grand jury, but I don't know how you deal with it, but I was worried about it. Well, one of the problems with the press is that it's not a profession in the normal sense. It doesn't have the strong professional cohesion, the sense of professional ethics that doctors say have, that lawyers have, and it seems to me the press is going to have to develop a professional sense to deal with just this kind of story that they're extorting from grand juries. John, I'll give you the last word. We're beginning to run out of time. Well, and what? What if you want to say something about the press as a profession, or as a collection of people who are not capable of being in a profession? I'd say one last word, and that is, I think, over the last few months, the press, while not perfect, has shown up rather better than some lawyers. Yes, that is the most shocking thing of all. I think that, but the lawyers, the interesting point is the lawyers know exactly what, what, which ethics have been violated. Oh, yes, no, there's a standard there.

And there's a sense in which journalism cannot have quite that that kind of standard, but they can have some, and we think Tony put his finger on one, that they could start with, and that is, there must be something which, when someone comes to you with it, you'll say, we don't print that. Very well, I'm sorry, that's, well, say one last word in fairness, you know, the Wall Street Journal had a lot of the material on Agnew years before, and they did just that. They said it's not enough to convince us we won't use it. Very good. That's an optimistic note to end on. Thank you very much. One final word. The staff of behind the lines is often asked about the cooperation we get from our fellow journalists, and putting together our programs. Our experiences, the journalists are generally more wary about being interviewed than people in other professions. For this program, James Reston of the New York Times was happy to talk to us for background, but said he doesn't do television. Tom Brady, Washington Bureau Chief of the Associated Press declined to take part

in our breakfast discussion. And William South are the pro-administration columnist for the New York Times, wouldn't even talk to us on the telephone. On the other hand, most newsmen, dependent as they are on the cooperation of others, honor our requests as a professional obligation. What we found most ironic in preparing this program was that the Nixon administration, all was so quick to blame the press for its troubles, was unable to provide a single spokesman to argue their case. I'm Brendan Gill.