The Truth About Watergate

Last week, Bill Murray was on the Joe Rogan Experience. Their conversation eventually wended to Murray’s departed friend and Saturday Night Live co-star John Belushi. Murray discussed Bob Woodward’s book about Belushi — Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi — and said it was a tsunami of fabrications. Murray even posited that since Bob Woodward’s journalism played an integral role in the demise of the Richard Nixon administration, it’s entirely possible that unseen forces were at work to depose Nixon.

I wrote a book about Watergate — The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars — in which I demonstrate that the Tom Brady of journalism, Bob Woodward, is an unabashed liar and ethical eunuch. If he were Pinocchio, his nose would have a length that rivaled the elevation of the Chrysler Building.

Woodward was born in 1943, and he came of age in Wheaton, Illinois, a conservative, prosperous, and pious enclave on the outskirts of Chicago. Wheaton was a W.A.S.P. Xanadu: 94 percent of its denizens were white and Protestant churches were generously sprinkled throughout the hamlet. Republicans also outnumbered Democrats by a margin of four to one. Woodward’s father was a talented trial lawyer, who would be awarded a county circuit judgeship.

Outwardly, Woodward grew up in an idyllic environment. “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril,” Oscar Wilde said of art, and Wilde’s statement was equally applicable to the Woodward household: His mother had an affair with a Sears’ executive, which ruptured the family. Twelve-year-old Woodward was the eldest of three siblings when his father was awarded custody of the three children. His father remarried a divorcee who had three children, and the couple eventually had a daughter. So the Woodward household mutated from Father Knows Best into The Brady Bunch. 

Woodward has depicted himself as an outsider of sorts throughout his high school years. But he was elected class president during his sophomore year, and he was one of four commencement speakers for his graduating class. He followed in the conservative wake of his father, and his commencement speech was gleaned from The Conscience of a Conservative, a book written by ultra conservative Barry Goldwater.

After Woodward graduated from Wheaton Community High School, he skipped into Yale University on a Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship. He doubled down on his dedication to the status quo when he entered Book and Snake, one of Yale’s secret societies. At Yale, Woodward majored in English and history. A Yale history professor described his conservative bent as “crypto-fascist.” 

Though Woodward eschewed the peace, love, and brown rice of the 1960s, he revealed in an interview after his celebrity that he had become disenchanted with the Vietnam War and thought of seeking sanctuary in Canada. But Woodward’s recollections about his collegiate misgivings on Vietnam diverge from the memories of his high school sweetheart and first wife: When the authors of Silent Coup inquired if Woodward had ever talked about evading his R.O.T.C. commitment to the Navy in Canada, she responded with a resounding, “Heavens no!” She also depicted him as “ruthless” and “extremely ambitious.”

Following Woodward’s graduation from Yale, his R.O.T.C. scholarship mandated a six-year hitch in the Navy — four years of active duty and two years in the naval reserve. He was a communications officer who had a “top-secret crypto” security clearance when he served on the USS Wright and then the USS Fox.

After his four-year tenure in the Navy, he was assigned to the Pentagon, where he served a fifth year of active duty, working for the Chief of Naval Operations. His responsibilities included briefing Alexander Haig. The official Watergate narrative, sanctified by the government, ablates Woodward briefing Haig at the White House in 1969 and 1970. And Woodward’s Big Lie throughout Watergate was that he didn’t meet Alexander Haig until 1973. But his Big Lie is trumped by three sources who maintain that he had, indeed, briefed Haig: The Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Thomas Moorer, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, and also an aide to the Secretary of Defense. Woodward’s Big Lie has seismic implications, which are discussed in The Truth About Watergate.

Woodward was able to forgo serving in the naval reserves after his active duty, and he embarked on his civilian incarnation. After his exodus from the Navy, the evolution of his vocational pursuits was extremely perplexing. Though Woodward was accepted to Harvard Law School, he hit the pause button on his legal aspirations and ostensibly worked out a very unconventional arrangement with The Washington Post. He didn’t have prior newspaper experience, but he offered to work at The Post for two weeks sans compensation: Woodward and The Washington Post ostensibly agreed that if he had the requisite talent to be a Washington Post caliber reporter, The Post would hire him. But Woodward had significant troubles fashioning coherent copy, and, after his trial run, The Washington Post jettisoned him.

Both accounts of Woodward’s brief tenure at the Post and his next professional move are mired in improbability: He continued to abandon his legal aspirations, and he landed a job as a reporter for The Montgomery County Sentinel, a weekly in suburban Maryland. The Sentinel started him out at $110 a week, which was extremely meager when compared to the earning potential of a graduate from Harvard Law School. His career move certainly wasn’t on the trajectory of someone who’s “ruthless” and “extremely ambitious.” 

Woodward’s hire at The Montgomery County Sentinel is also enmeshed in conflicting versions. Woodward has said that an editor at The Washington Post furnished him with a laudatory letter that he presented to the editor of The Sentinel, but The Sentinel’s editor disputed Woodward’s version. The Sentinel editor maintained that Woodward had a laudatory letter, but the genesis of the letter was a “senior officer” in the Navy.

Woodward’s dismissal after only weeks at the Washington Post lends credence to The Sentinel editor’s account, because it seems unlikely that a Washington Post editor would provide a laudatory letter for a lackluster audition at the newspaper. However, The Sentinel’s editor changed his tune after Woodward’s celebrity, asserting that Woodward, indeed, wielded a laudatory letter from a Washington Post editor when he applied to be a reporter for The Sentinel. 

Woodward puzzled his coworkers at The Sentinel: His salary was a paltry $110 per week, but he looked as if he were consistently flush with cash. He never vacated his apartment in Washington, D.C., which perplexed his Sentinel coworkers, because it seemed beyond the means of a Sentinel reporter. He made daily treks to Rockville, Maryland, where The Sentinel was headquartered, in his Karmann Ghia sports car. According to a former Sentinel coworker, he even made jaunts to New York City “at least two weekends a month.” He also had a mysterious gift of portending revolutions in banana republics. 

The Sentinel served as Woodward’s Triple-A farm team: He was at The Sentinel for nearly a year before the Washington Post conscripted him as a full-time staff reporter. He had been at The Post a mere nine months when the Watergate burglars were busted. According to All the President’s Men, a book written by Woodward and Bernstein about the demise of the Nixon administration, a phone call from the city editor of The Washington Post awakened him the morning after the Watergate bust. After he walked to The Post, he learned that the burglars were to appear at the courthouse for a preliminary hearing. Woodward ventured to the courthouse, where the burglars’ “attorney of record” supposedly coughed up the names and addresses of his clients. 

An ensemble of Post reporters hustled and bustled to collectively generate The Post’s first Watergate article, published a day after the bust — “5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats' Office Here.” The article was by-lined by The Post’s police reporter, but eight reporters, including Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were acknowledged as contributing to the article.

The following morning, Sunday, Woodward and Bernstein were summoned to The Post. An Associated Press story had scooped The Post, reporting that Watergate burglar James McCord was the security coordinator for Nixon's Committee to Reelect the President. Accordingly, Woodward and Bernstein focused on McCord. The two reportedly disliked each other: Woodward thought that Bernstein’s longish hair and dress evoked the anarchistic counterculture, which Woodward “despised,” and Bernstein thought that Woodward evoked Ivy League entitlement. 

Despite their reported antipathy towards each other, they began working the phones. Woodward handed the first page of a draft to their editor, and Bernstein perused the draft over the editor’s shoulder. Bernstein subsequently rewrote the article. A June 19 Post article — “GOP Security Aide is Among the Watergate Burglars” — was bylined by Woodward and Bernstein, launching journalism’s preeminent brand.

According to All the President’s Men, the D.C. police had permitted the Post’s nocturnal police reporter to examine the address books of burglars Barker and Martinez, and he discovered the name and phone number of Watergate burglar Howard E. Hunt, “with the small notations ‘White H.’ and ‘W.H.’” The reporter’s leads were then purportedly shuffled to Woodward. In All the President’s Men, after the intrepid cub reporter locked onto Hunt, he made a staccato flurry of phones calls to the White House and Robert Mullen Company, where Hunt was ostensibly employed. 

The Robert Mullin Company was a C.I.A. front, and its C.E.O. was a C.I.A. agent or a C.I.A. asset. Mullin’s C.E.O. met with his C.I.A. case officer less than a month after the Watergate bust, and his case officer deemed his information so sensitive that he wrote a handwritten memorandum on the meeting and personally handed it to the C.I.A. director. At that meeting, Mullin’s C.E.O. boasted to his C.I.A. case officer that he had deterred reporters at The Washington Post and The Washington Star from implicating the C.I.A. in Watergate.

When Woodward purportedly phoned Hunt at the Robert Mullen Company and inquired about Hunt’s name being in the burglars’ address books, Hunt reportedly shrieked “Good God!” and said that he wouldn’t comment on an ongoing case before summarily slamming down the phone. The president of the Robert Mullen Company allegedly disclosed to Woodward that Hunt had been a C.I.A. officer from 1949 to 1970, and the C.I.A. ostensibly confirmed Hunt’s years of employment. But it’s extremely dubious that the C.I.A. would out one of its agents or former agents to a reporter over the phone.

Before Woodward’s staccato flurry of phone calls, he alleges that he phoned Mark Felt in the guise of Deep Throat who told him that the story was about to “heat up.” After further phone calls, he again phoned Felt in the guise of Deep Throat, who told him that the “F.B.I. regarded Hunt as a prime suspect in the Watergate investigation.” Woodward then wrote an article that was also by-lined by the Post’s night crime reporter, published on June 20, three days after the bust — “White House Consultant Linked to Bugging Suspects" — elucidating Hunt’s links to the White House and Watergate burglars. The fabricated, inextricable legends of Woodward and “Deep Throat” were thus imprinted on the American zeitgeist. 

Felt may very well have been a source for Woodward early on, but the unfolding chronology of Watergate largely eliminates Felt from being a later source. In 2005, Woodward rolled out a senile Mark Felt as his sole Deep Throat source throughout Watergate — Felt had been the F.B.I.’s associate director. Woodward has maintained that he initially encountered Felt at the White House when he was a lowly errand boy for the Navy. 

According to All the President’s Men, Woodward set up his meetings with Felt by repositioning a flowerpot with a red flag on his apartment’s sixth floor balcony, and Felt made daily treks by Woodward’s balcony. When Felt supposedly noticed the repositioned red flag, he and Woodward would have a 2:00 A.M. rendezvous at an underground garage in Arlington, Virginia. On the days that Woodward signaled Deep Throat, the intrepid, young reporter would take “two or more taxis” to the garage to ensure that he wasn’t followed to his late night, subterranean encounter with Deep Throat.

Woodward ostensibly started signaling Felt when he lived in an apartment on P Street in D.C. He has reportedly stated that he lived in the P Street apartment until “early 1973.” But Secret Agenda notes that Woodward lived in the P Street apartment until mid-November of 1972. He then lived in an apartment near The Washington Post until January of 1973 before moving into a high rise in southwest D.C. 

Felt was “forced out” of the F.B.I. in June of 1973. But All the President’s Men specified that he acted in the capacity of Deep Throat into November of 1973. Throughout the 1970s, Felt lived in Virginia. Accordingly, if Woodward’s accounts of Felt’s treks by his balcony from June of 1973 until November of 1973 are truthful, Felt would’ve made daily jaunts from Virginia into D.C., perusing Woodward’s balcony after his departure from the F.B.I. An implausible tale indeed! 

But his accounts of his meetings with Felt are superimposed on additional absurdities: When Adrian Havill wrote Deep Truth, he discovered that Woodward’s balcony, which faced a sunken courtyard, could be viewed from two vantage points. The first vantage point necessitated Havill exiting his car in an alley, walking “fifty-six steps,” and then looking upward at an extremely sharp angle: Havill found that Woodward’s balcony was barely visible from this vantage point, and it would’ve been extremely difficult for “Deep Throat” to see the flowerpot. Havill also noticed that a myriad of apartments could observe a trespasser in the back of Woodward’s apartment building, so daily jaunts to peruse Woodward’s balcony without detection would’ve been virtually impossible. The second vantage point from which to scrutinize Woodward’s balcony was from the courtyard behind the apartment building, but access to the courtyard required passing through two locked doors and within view of a reception desk. So, in addition to daily treks from Virginia into D.C., Felt would’ve had to exit his car and surmount the aforementioned obstacles to view Woodward’s balcony.

In All The President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein wrote that when Deep Throat sought to contact Woodward, he would etch a clock on page 20 of The New York Times that was delivered to Woodward’s apartment door every morning before 7:00 A.M. The clock delineated the time of their prospective meeting. However, The New York Times wasn’t delivered to Woodward’s apartment door, but, rather, a stack of newspapers were left at the reception area.  The residents of the building then had to retrieve their copies of The New York Times from the lobby. So, yet again, the veracity of Woodward and Deep Throat’s legendary communication schema is deconstructed by reality. 

Woodward may also have had a cozier relationship to the C.I.A. than merely his relationship with Mullin’s C.E.O. The Watergate Committee’s senior Republican had a hunch that Woodward was affiliated with the C.I.A., and he directed one of the Watergate Committee’s counsels to inquire about the association. But the C.I.A. rebuffed the counsel’s inquiries. So, the senator dispatched the counsel’s request and a letter to the C.I.A.’s director, inquiring about Woodward’s relationship to the C.I.A. A “few hours” after the senator dispatched the letter, he received a phone call from an “incensed” Woodward. His relatively prompt phone call to the senator suggests that he may have had a very snug rapport with the C.I.A. director. 

Carl Bernstein, like his crony Bob Woodward, would have a 10th degree blackbelt in mendacity if such distinctions were awarded. When Bernstein was a Washington Post reporter, ostensibly cracking open Watergate, he had an imperious id. He befriended a notorious D.C. pimp who owned an adult bookstore, and he made repeated visits to the pimp’s porn parlor. The pimp even lavished Bernstein with pornographic materials. He was also a participant in a swingers’ club that was primarily composed of C.I.A. officers and their girlfriends or wives. 

After Bernstein's Watergate celebrity, his voracious libidinal cravings did not seem to wane, because, after all, fame and power are the ultimate aphrodisiacs. In fact, New York magazine recounts an anecdote of Bernstein hitting on a 16-year-old at a dinner party. Though he brought a date to the dinner party, he, nevertheless, encountered the 16-year-old in the kitchen and rubbed his body against hers as he attempted to solicit a date. 

In 1976, Bernstein married Nora Ephron, who was en route to becoming a renowned writer and director. Bernstein, however, couldn’t put a brake on his philandering and the marriage disintegrated by 1980. His ex-wife exacted revenge by writing a thinly veiled novel about their marriage. In the novel, Heartburn, Ephron wrote that her satyr of a husband would have sex with a venetian blind. I realize that her aspersion may sound anatomically difficult, if not impossible, but perhaps she had insights into Bernstein that have eluded the public?

Alas, when libido drives the car, it often parks in the wrong garage. Now...let’s talk about Watergate....

In addition to Woodward’s lies about Deep Throat, All The President’s Men wielded inexplicable lies that were apparently incorporated to heighten dramatic tension. In All The President’s, Bernstein reportedly drove to McLean, Virginia on September 18, 1972 to interview the treasurer fore the Committee for the Re-election of the President, Nixon's election war chest. According to All The President’s Men, the jaunt would’ve usually taken one-half hour, but an afternoon downpour prolonged his drive to “an hour and a quarter.” He, of course, became “soaked” when he exited the car and, on foot, searched for the C.R.P.’s treasurer house. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration begs to differ with Bernstein’s account, recording that the day in question had a minuscule two-hundreds of an inch of rain between 4:00 P.M. and 5:00 P.M. and four-hundreds of an inch between 5:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. 

All The President’s Men wielded an additional lie about Bernstein’s interview with the C.R.P. treasurer: He reportedly discovered that the C.R.P. treasurer wouldn’t be home until 7:30 P.M., and he again braved the rain when he returned to his house later that night. But, yet again, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration begs to differ with Bernstein's account, recording that there was no rain after 6:00 P.M. that day. 

All The President’s Men espoused a whopper about Bernstein ducking a subpoena on February 26, 1973: Woodward and Bernstein wrote that the C.R.P. attempted to serve Bernstein with a subpoena, but, when he was in The Washington Post’s lobby, he was alerted that the server was in the newsroom.  He then sprinted to the stairwell and swiftly ascended seven flights to the accounting department. Bernstein then ducked into an office and phoned the Post’s executive editor who told him to go see a movie. In All The President’s Men, he spent the afternoon watching the porno flick Deep Throat. 

Although Deep Throat would seem to meld naturally with Bernstein's sense of aesthetics, his anecdote about watching the porno flick on that day was an unabashed lie. The film Deep Throat had played in D.C. during the summer and fall of 1972. However, four months prior to his ostensible evasion of the subpoena, D.C. police raided D.C.’s adult theaters and confiscated hard-core pornographic films. At the time, the fate of hard-core pornography was in the midst of being adjudicated in the courts: The film Deep Throat wasn’t even listed in Washington’s newspapers in February of 1973, and the theaters that had previously shown Deep Throat were forced to run either soft porn or action-adventure movies. 

In All The President’s Men, Bernstein cultivates an exceptional source — “Z” — who imparts information about the malfeasance of the president’s men in truncated sentences that read like Zen koans. Woodward later said that Z was as important a source as Deep Throat. In the passage where he made his first contact with Z, Woodward and Bernstein carefully crafted and manipulated their semantics, implying that Z was an employee of the Nixon White House or the Committee to Reelect the President. But Z was a Watergate grand juror!  And to compound the lie, Woodward and Bernstein were very naughty boys, because they maintained in All The President’s Men that Watergate grand jurors never granted them an interview. 

Bernstein had punctured the sanctity of the grand jury probing Watergate, and he gave his notes on the contact to Ben Bradlee, The Post’s salty, Boston Brahmin executive editor, to apparently safeguard from subpoenas emanating from the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office. The latter action demonstrated that The Post’s executive editor was, likely, in on the charade. In fact, in The Truth About Watergate I discuss how Bradlee oozes a morass of lies about his relationship to the C.I.A. 

Woodward’s cover story about Deep Throat is extremely defective, and I’ve discussed Bernstein's turpitude. Woodward and Bernstein are not the honorable knights for truth and justice depicted by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the film All The President’s Men. Indeed, their lives and their Watergate reporting are, unfortunately, a sprawling net of lies that are moored to the monolithic lie of Deep Throat. This article only scratches the surface of the fabrications Woodward and Bernstein have promulgated over the decades. The Truth About Watergate presents comprehensive, unflinching litany of their lies.