Watergate reporting - 12 May 1973

On the floor of the Senate the other day, a man got up who comes from Wisconsin, which is the state that bred the late and all too well remembered Senator Joseph McCarthy. This man is Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat, usually called a liberal Democrat, and I make the point about his being his state successor in the Senate to McCarthy because he made it. What he said, in the most pungent sentence of his speech was this:

"When former White House counsel John Dean is reported throughout the country, to have privately told grand jury investigators that the president was directly involved in a Watergate cover-up, President Nixon is being tried, sentenced and executed by rumour and allegation. And I find this kind of persecution and condemnation without trial McCarthyism at its worst".

Well, we've had enough time to recover from the barrage of shocks about all those White House aids and members of the FBI and CIA – I think at the moment, there are seventeen men who can be called suspects – by now, we've had time to look back over the whole business and consider where we got all our juiciest information. And the fact is that practically all the malodorous details, and the smelly accusations, have come from leaks.

Now, the Washington Post, no question, is to be highly praised for the unflagging detective work of two reporters, who have been on the Watergate case exclusively all this year. They didn't get their information from documents or other public sources – these are poor guides in any case of graft or scandal, because the criminals are usually very careful to leave no public record at all. And in criminal cases, reporters, like the police, don't get very far without willing, if contemptible, informers.

Now, the documents in the Watergate case, such as they are, are presumably in the White House or in the personal files of the suspects. Forty pages were actually taken out of the White House by the man who's been the big leak in the case, the president's White House counsel John Dean, who got the sack, and promptly gave the shakes to heaven knows how many men in the White House by promptly announcing that he was not going to be made the scapegoat and was in the mood to tell all. Mr Dean took those documents from his office without checking on the ethics of so doing, and locked them away in a safe deposit box in the Virginia bank. And then he gave the keys to a federal judge.

Well to get back to my remark that practically everything that has come out about the Watergate scandal was fed in the first place to the Washington Post by leaks, by associates or names given by the five men originally, the five men already convicted for the burglary, which – and it's very hard to keep remembering this – was done by a possse of eager beavers who broke into the Democratic headquarters to get some documentary proof of their wild suspicions that the United States was in imminent danger of being over thrown by, of all people, Cuba's Fidel Castro. Well one name lead to another, and at last into the White House.

And the Washington Post and its affiliated weekly Newsweek – they're both under the same management – they have had a non-stop ball, piling up accusations and lurid stories given to them by the likes of John Dean. Hardly a morning has gone by when we have not read in the papers, what some witness or other had told the grand jury investigating the case the previous day.

I think I mentioned last time, and keeping Senator Proxmire's point in mind, I'd better remind you again, that a grand jury is an official legal and secret preliminary hearing to see if a trial is justified. The transcript of grand jury hearings is sealed, and may only be quoted at a subsequent trial to show perjury or some other legal discrepancy. Yet, as I say, we have been reading what various key witnesses are said to have testified before the Watergate grand jury, almost as if the court reporters' daily shorthand notes had been translated into a full text and made available to reporters, as they are in court trials.

How does this come about? Obviously somebody in the grand jury hearings has been feeding summaries or bits of testimony to the press. Most noticeably to the unflagging ditch diggers of the Washington Post. Now, quite apart from the dubious ethics involved in publishing what it is legally declared to be strictly secret material, there is a great hazard in putting into print what somebody told you somebody else had said in a grand jury room. And looking through many many issues of the Washington Post, and most recent issue of Newsweek, a reporter who has done little modest digging in his time, is bound to feel his eyeballs starting out of their sockets at the thought that, if these charges are false, the publicising of them would entail a blizzard of libel and slander suits.

The shame of the McCarthy era was that McCarthy cheerfully announced that there were two hundred-odd communists in the state department. He didn't track down a single one. He cloaked himself with the reputation of a great patriot and he dragged down into humiliation, or and unemployment several score men who were undoubtedly innocent. But, in the Watergate case, an overwhelming amount of the stuff printed by way of allegation, seems to be turning out to be true.

The Washington Post for instance, first dared to say that former Attorney General John Mitchell was implicated, and it gave names and places. Mr Mitchell you may or may not recall, was just about the first and the proudest of Mr Nixon's original cabinet appointments. Throughout the presidential election campaign of 1968, Mr Nixon went round saying that what was wrong with the United States was the coddling of criminals, was the habit of permissiveness which gave every doubt to the criminal and made life perilous for the innocent. And he put this down in the main to Lyndon Johnson's attorney general, another Texan, Ramsey Clark whose views on the rights of criminals, lots of people don't share but there has never been any doubt that Ramsey Clark is a serious, and dedicated lawyer of unimpeachable integrity.

"What this country needs," Mr Nixon used to say "is a new attorney general. A man who will restore the nation to a proper sense of law and order, with justice." Plainly the attorney general is a post of the highest responsibility, and, since he's at the head of the national administration of justice, an attorney general must be not only a decent, and if possible a learned man, but he must be scrupulous.

Well, these muckraking journalists said that Mr Mitchell knew all about Watergate and was implicated deeply in covering it up. That was the item that flung the case into big black headlines on the front page. Mr Mitchell appeared twice before the grand jury. And what happened? Last Thursday the jury indicted him along with another former Nixon cabinet officer, the secretary of commerce, he had been, Maurice Stans.

This is the first time in fifty years that American government officials of this status have been indicted by a grand jury. The jury charges them with conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstructing justice of all things, and making false statements to a grand jury. Specifically they are linked with a financier who's been accused by the government itself – after an investigation by the security and exchange commission – accused of defrauding foreign investors in mutual funds, controlled by Investors Overseas Services, of two hundred and twenty four million dollars.

Now Mr Mitchell and Mr Stans are accused of having taken from this man, this financier, two hundred thousand dollars in cash, as a secret contribution to the re-election of Richard Nixon, on the understanding that they would try and influence the government investigation of his financial shenanigans at the expense of the overseas investors. I say secret contribution, because it was delivered after a new law made it compulsory to publish all election campaign contributions. Mr Mitchell and Mr Stans will be brought to a federal court on the 21st of May, and if they are found guilty they could face ten years in prison and fines of about fifteen thousand dollars. If – that is the word that ought to be stressed, it's a word not often used in the flood of allegations that the newspapers have carried in the past few weeks. Senator Proxmires' protest is, to put it very mildly, the reports constantly failed to remind us that these were allegations that somebody said they were true, that neither Mitchell nor Stands nor many others of the suspected men, have come to trial.

As I say, the two former cabinet officers have been accused by the grand jury as well as by the newspapers. And the enormous amount of confident detail the Post has printed does suggest that the Post has been privy to the secret testimony and feels on safe ground in so to speak indicting the men, before the grand jury does.

The most serious charge of all is one attributed to John Dean. He said that President Nixon was not only involved in covering up the Watergate scandal but actually congratulating him on the fine job he'd done. This is extremely serious, since it immediately implies that the president too has lied, and by extension obstructed justice.

But now both the justice department men who are looking into the case, and the Senate committee that's taken it up, both told the New York Times that John Dean has no evidence at all which suggests, either that the president knew anything about Watergate and the seventeen men now suspect, or that he took any part in the cover-up. It is on the basis of the newspaper reporting and the leaked grand jury testimony, that over half the American people according to the Gallup poll now believe that the president was involved. I am afraid that what is more certainly involved, is that common form of wishful thinking we call hate – the people, often of high intelligence, who hate Richard Nixon, are eager to see him proved guilty.

To the extent that he is going to have to be thought guilty until he proves his innocence, Senator Proxmire is right in saying that Nixon has been meanly treated, though I think the parallel with McCarthyism is a little rash. But, the flurry of unsubstantiated charges is so serious that maybe we should all take a deep breath, wait for all the indictments, wait for Senator Ervin's committee findings, wait for the trials and the verdicts, and then come to a conclusion. This exercise in self restraint is long overdue. It's not however, I admit, a good recipe for selling newspapers.

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