W. Joseph Campbell

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Watergate footnote: WaPo’s Pulitzer-winning entry included a false story

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Error, Media myths, Newspapers, Scandal, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 21, 2022 at 6:55 pm

The latest burst of self-congratulatory hoopla about Watergate and the Washington Post  subsided weeks ago, with the 50th anniversary of the foiled break-in that set off the country’s gravest political scandal of the 20th century.

Interest, of course, still percolates in the details and finer points of the scandal that toppled Richard M. Nixon’s presidency.

So allow Media Myth Alert to add a Watergate footnote with this post about a seldom-discussed oddity in the Post’s entry that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for its Watergate reporting.

The Post’s entry included an article by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that proved false.

Until recently, MediaMythAlert was unaware the false story had been part of the Pulitzer-winning package.

That it was surely is intriguing.

What makes this something less than a big deal, however, is uncertainty as to when the Post realized its error. It’s difficult to know for sure nearly 50 years later, but that realization may have come after the Pulitzers were announced in early May 1973.

The false report was published October 6, 1972, on the Post’s front page beneath the headline, “Bug memos sent to Nixon aides.”

In the article, Bernstein and Woodward identified by name three men associated with Nixon’s White House or his reelection campaign. The trio supposedly had been sent “memos describing wiretapped conversations of Democratic Party officials” at offices of Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington. The illegal wiretaps had been planted in late May 1972.

The three men denied the claims in the “Bug memos” story.

As it turned out, none of them had been sent the wiretap memos. They had been falsely accused by Bernstein and Woodward — as the journalists acknowledged in All the President’s Men, their 1974 memoir about reporting the Watergate scandal.

So how did the “Bug memos” article come to be part of the Post’s Pulitzer-winning entry?

That’s a mild mystery, and even Media Myth Alert — no friend of the mythical claim that Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting brought down Nixon — finds it hard to believe the Post intentionally entered a false report.

More likely, the “Bug memos” article was thought credible at the Post until sometime after the submission deadline for Pulitzer entries in 1973. The deadline that year was February 1.

That hypothesis seems plausible, given that the Post had referred in follow-on articles in late October 1972 and in January 1973 to the central claims of the “Bug memos” story.

Doubt about the accuracy of the “Bug memos’ story can be traced to testimony at trial in January 1973 of suspects accused in the thwarted Watergate burglary of mid-June 1972, the scandal’s seminal crime.

The testimony was given January 19, 1973, by Alfred Baldwin III, a former FBI agent who who had been the lookout for the Watergate burglars arrested inside DNC headquarters.

Baldwin said in his testimony that he wasn’t sure to whom wiretap memos had been given.

The Post‘s news report about the testimony suggested Baldwin was dissembling. The article, published January 20, 1973, said: “Baldwin is reported to have told others, The Washington Post has learned, that he could remember the names of three White House or Nixon aides who received memos describing the telephone conversations.” The article then mentioned the three men, again by name.

So as late as January 20, 1973, or about two weeks before the Pulitzer-entry deadline, the Post was adhering to a belief the “Bug memos” story was accurate. That seems clear from the tone and content of the article about Baldwin’s testimony.

In a curious and rather sloppy way, Baldwin had been cited as the principal source in the “Bug memos” story. Bernstein and Woodward reported in the article that Baldwin was “known to have told the FBI” names of three men to whom the wiretap logs had been given. Bernstein and Woodward had not spoken directly to Baldwin; the allegations about the three men came from a source described vaguely in All the President’s Men as “a Democratic Party investigator.” They also wrote that the details were confirmed by “a Justice Department source” who was not identified by name.

The day before the “Bug memos” article was published, Baldwin had been the subject of a breakthrough Watergate report in the Los Angeles Times.

The Times’ account was based on a lengthy, in-person interview with Baldwin, which Bernstein and Woodward acknowledged in All the President’s Men “was a major break, not just because it contained a great deal of new information, but because it made the Watergate operation, and the siege mentality behind it, real.” It was an unprecedented, on-the-record, first-hand account by a participant in the unfolding scandal.

Bernstein and Woodward acknowledged their “Bug memos” story had been rushed into print in response to the Times’ report about Baldwin. While it wasn’t a major Watergate story, “Bug memos” turned out to be a story in major error. And a search of Washington Post contents at the ProQuest historical newspapers database does not indicate that it was specifically corrected by the newspaper.

The correction, as it were, appeared in All the President’s Men, which was published in June 1974, about 20 months after the “Bug Memos” article appeared.

“Three men had been wronged,” Bernstein and Woodward wrote in the book. “They had been unfairly accused on the front page of the Washington Post, the hometown newspaper of their families, neighbors, and friends.” They said in the book they “[e]ventually became convinced” that memos the three men received “had nothing to do with wiretapping.”

Among the men falsely accused was William E. Timmons, who in 2009 sat for an interview for the Gerald R. Ford Oral History Project. Timmons noted he had contemplated suing the reporters, about whom he had little good to say.

“Woodward and Bernstein accused me on the front page of the Washington Post of being one of those that received the illegal fruits of the break-in,” Timmons said, referring to the erroneous “Bugs memo” article.

“I protested and had [White House press secretary Ron] Ziegler go out in the press office and deny it. Didn’t know anything about it. … Because Woodward and Bernstein must be right, they always have sixteen sources and they are wonderful and so forth. So I protested. And so I call the general counsel to the President and I said, ‘I want to sue these guys. This is not fair that I’ve been slammed here and surely by now they know that I wasn’t involved in this thing.'”

Timmons said he was dissuaded from taking legal action. “It will just fan the fires,” he said he was advised. “This will blow over. You can’t sue.”

That advice came from then-White House counsel John Dean, who in October 1973 pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and agreed to cooperate with Watergate investigators. Dean served four months of one-to-four-year prison sentence at a small prison at a former Army base in Baltimore.

Timmons, a Republican insider, was never accused of wrongdoing in the Watergate scandal. Years later, he led the would-be transition office for Bob Dole, the losing Republican candidate for president in 1996.

It remains unclear why the “Bug memos” article was included with the Post’s entry, which won the Pulitzer for public service journalism.

Discussing the matter recently by email, Woodward said: “As you may know, the entries for these prizes are made by management and I did not know what they were entering. It was their decision.”

He also said he did not know when he and Bernstein may have determined the “Bug memos” story was in error, adding that the discussion in All the President’s Men “is the only information I have about this now [as to] when we corrected the story and said, ‘Three Men had been wronged.’ It could have been done any time we were writing the book.” (Woodward said they began writing All the President’s Men in July 1973.)

Leonard Downie, who was a deputy metro editor at the Post during the Watergate period, said in by email recently that while he “was one of the editors on the Watergate investigation,” he was “too junior to be involved in the selection of stories for prize entries, and I don’t remember what was in the entry or why.”

An interesting coda to this Watergate footnote is that the Post’s Pulitzer-winning entry in 1973 included 12 additional stories identified as “supplemental reportage.”

Among them was the Bernstein-Woodward article published October 25, 1972, that wrongly attributed to federal grand jury testimony the disclosure that H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s top aide, controlled disbursements from a campaign slush fund. In All the President’s Men, Bernstein and Woodward described their blunder as “a grievous error” and said they thought it might force them to resign.

The misstep prompted them to confront the superior of an FBI field agent in Washington with whom Bernstein had spoken about the Haldeman story. They believed the agent had misled them.

They said they realized that confronting the agent’s superior “was unethical as soon as they had done it,” according to All the President’s Men. “They had endangered the agent’s career, betrayed his trust and risked their credibility with other sources.”

Years later, in an interview with the CBS News “Sunday Morning” program, Woodward referred to the encounter with the agent’s superior as “the worst of journalism.”

WJC

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