COVERING WATERGATE: SUCCESS AND BACKLASH
Alert, courageous newsmen standing as sentries against the abuse of power--that is the dominant image most journalists have of their Watergate performance. On campuses, any newsman remotely part of the action is assured of a hero's welcome. Applications to journalism schools are at an alltime high, and many of the youngsters say that they want to be investigative reporters. Coverage of Watergate and related scandals has won four Pulitzer Prizes and a number of lesser awards. All the President's Men, the how-we-did-it book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, became a bestseller after three weeks in print, and glamorous Robert Redford, who bought the movie rights, will portray Woodward on the screen.
A lot of people would prefer, if he were alive, to cast Boris Karloff in the role instead. At the very moment of its triumph, the press has become a villain to many, for Watergate has also focused attention on journalism's weaknesses. Despite the accomplishments of the past two years, newsmen have ample reason to feel besieged, and many are torn between self-congratulation and self-doubt.
Legal attacks on rights previously taken for granted continue. The Supreme Court last week turned back one of the most serious of these--a suit to compel Florida newspapers to give equal space to political candidates who have been criticized in print. By a vote of 9 to 0, the court ruled the Florida statute unconstitutional because of "its intrusion into the function of editors." Decisions as to what is or is not published, the court said, cannot be dictated by Government. But other legal problems persist. This spring a committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors warned that press successes in Watergate would not diminish challenges by legislatures, law-enforcement officials and grand juries. Many journalists fear that Watergate has created a backlash against a press perceived as having grown too powerful.
Virtually every turn in Watergate and the related cases produces new controversy about journalism's role. Henry Kissinger's connection with wiretapping in 1969-71 is a minor aspect of the overall scandal, and the press did little to explore it until last month, when congressional leaks prompted several stories (TIME, June 24). But the Secretary's dramatic threat to resign put reporters on the defensive. Many congressional leaders hurtled to Kissinger's side. Barry Goldwater charged the press with "incessant nitpicking" and accused the Washington Post of "treason" for publishing a confidential FBI document.
Among columnists, Old-Line Liberal Marquis Childs joined Conservatives James Kilpatrick and Joseph Alsop in the antipress chorus on the Kissinger incident. Alsop gloomed that the treatment of Kissinger--a product of the "enormous, Watergate-induced self-importance of the American press"--might further decrease the value of the dollar and put U.S. foreign policy "on the dung heap of disorder." Well, hardly. But the press--especially Washington newsmen--had indeed given the unfortunate impression of ganging up on the only hero in town.
Is the press biased? Inaccurate? Power-hungry? Poll after poll has shown the credibility problem of newspapers, magazines and broadcast journalism.
In a Gallup survey last January, 67% of those interviewed said they "definitely agree" or "partly agree" that "newspapers are not careful about getting their facts straight." While half of those questioned said newspapers do a good job in presenting both sides of controversial questions, 48% rated dailies as "poor" or "only fair." A TIME/Yankelovich survey taken in May, just after Nixon released his tape transcripts, found that the public considers the press less fair to the President than Congress and the courts have been. Mervin Field's California Poll took a sampling the week before and found that the number of people who think Watergate coverage excessive has grown in seven months from 47% to 51%, while the number of those who consider the coverage unbiased has decreased from 55% to 44%.
Letters to the editor, phone calls to station managers, and man-in-the-street interviews convey the same message. Even papers like the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Phoenix Gazette, which have remained relatively uncritical of the President, receive letters of outrage when they run straight news stories about Watergate developments. "We did not elect the press," Reader Betty Noble told the Philadelphia Bulletin. "We feel more strangled by the press than by our politicians." Says Bill Eames, news director of KNXT-TV in Los Angeles: "Basically, what we hear back from viewers is 'So enough already!' " Station executives all over the country report similar sentiment.
In Tulsa, KTEW-TV news was a steady third in the local ratings until Anchorman Jack Morris began doing brief commentaries in which he attacked the national press for its Watergate coverage. KTEW news is now first in Tulsa. A recent joke tells of a reporter observing Richard Nixon walking on water. The supposed headline in the next edition of the Washington Post: NIXON CAN'T SWIM.
Editors and publishers are not laughing. Some news executives indeed agree that biased liberals bent on vengeance are using Watergate to bring down an old foe. That is the view, for instance, of Eugene C. Pulliam (Arizona Republic, Phoenix Gazette, Indianapolis Star), Franklin B. Smith (Burlington, Vt, Free Press) and William Loeb (Manchester, N.H., Union Leader).
While moderate or liberal editors and publishers hardly join in that judgment, many of them wonder whether the press has gone too far and assumed a role greater than the public is willing to tolerate. Says Publisher Marshall Field (Chicago Daily News, Sun-Times): "People feel that we've taken a license that goes beyond basic reporting. Belief [in the press] is as low as it ever has been." Editor Reg Murphy of the Atlanta Constitution surveyed the mood at the recent A.S.N.E. meeting in Atlanta and found it "extraordinarily gloomy." Murphy hardly cheered his fellow editors when he observed, "I'm not sure the First Amendment would pass if you had a referendum on it today."
There is no more pugnacious Watergate warrior than Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who insists that Nixon has only himself to blame for his troubles. Yet Bradlee owns that the press is emerging from the scandal with a "black eye." The volume and complexity of the material, he says, have "made public digestion impossible." He also feels that newsmen generally have done a poor job explaining their mission and methods.
Anger before the Scandal
The press is far more diverse, even fractious, than it appears to its audience in any one place. There is much talk about a New York-Washington "liberal axis," denoting primarily the New York Times and Washington Post, often including the three TV networks, with TIME and Newsweek thrown in for good measure. These voices do agree on some subjects. All of them, for instance, have been sympathetic to the civil rights movement. All have been more or less critical of Nixon concerning Watergate.
Yet the axis is hardly unanimous. During much of the Viet Nam War, there were significant editorial differences. In 1972 the Times supported George McGovern while Time Inc. endorsed Nixon. Among Times columnists last year, Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis were more critical of Spiro Agnew than their colleague James Reston was. Further, the liberals--however that term is defined--hardly have a news monopoly, even in New York and Washington. U.S. News & World Report generally takes a conservative line, and the Washington Star-News is to the Post's right. New York is the editorial home of the Wall Street Journal and the Daily News; the two are conservative, though very different from each other, as well as from the Times.
In colonial times (when American papers were instrumental in fighting British rule) and the early decades of the Republic, the press was highly partisan and rambunctious, often challenging authority or otherwise disturbing the peace. But because the founding fathers saw this role of the press as being essential to democracy, even as they were slightly uncomfortable with it, the First Amendment put a constitutional shield on press freedom, helping U.S. journalism to become the most independent and vigorous in the world. In the process, the business of informing its audience became far more important than polemics, and the U.S. press also developed the unique American notion of "objective" reporting, as distinct from editorial opinion.
Not that newsmen ever forgot their power to campaign for causes. That power has not always been used wisely or in the public interest. Nor has it been used consistently. Investigative journalism, for instance, has run in cycles, flourishing most conspicuously in the first decade of this century, when muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis and Ida Tarbell raged against civic corruption, social injustice and industrial abuses. There was some revival in the 1920s, during Teapot Dome and Prohibition, and again, with different stresses, during the Depression. World War II and the cold war created a sense of common goals in the nation, and had some pacifying effect on relations between the press and the Federal Government.
That began to change with Viet Nam, which produced a generation of new skeptics among newsmen. In Asia, young correspondents like David Halberstam of the Times, Malcolm Browne of Associated Press and Neil Sheehan of United Press International challenged the efficacy of U.S. policy with mounting impact. CBS showed Marines firing peasant huts with their Zippo lighters. Seymour Hersh, then a freelance, made Americans share the burden of My Lai. Contention over the war dragged on for a decade. The press appeared increasingly to be part of the opposition to two Administrations, a role that was emphasized dramatically when newspapers began publishing the classified Pentagon papers.
At home, even before Viet Nam many newsmen were already emotionally committed to the civil rights movement. George Wallace foreshadowed one of the Spiro Agnew themes as he attacked the Northern liberal press for meddling in the South. As racial tension spread, whites in other regions who felt threatened by minority-group pressure also came to resent the press's role.
By the late '60s, the press was reporting on radical activists who attacked, in one way or another, just about every traditional American value. To many Americans it appeared that the press was simply giving a platform to revolutionaries and crazies. Some radical protests seemed staged to exploit TV network coverage--and the networks went along.
There were conflicting pressures. Restless activists, reviving the charges of the old George Seldes-A.J. Liebling school, insisted that the press was far too cozy with the nation's political, industrial and cultural leadership--even as major news organizations were accused of being too sympathetic to radicals.
Some journalists may have overplayed the turmoil of those years, but the press could hardly have avoided reporting the disquieting events of the '60s and early '70s, which represented the deepest divisions in U.S. society since the Depression and perhaps the Civil War. Increasingly, audiences have confused the reportage and analysis provided by newsmen with the events themselves, mistaking the messenger for the message. Post Publisher Katharine Graham quotes Shakespeare: "Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news hath but a losing office, and his tongue sounds ever after as a sullen bell."
Thus the atmosphere was already charged--and the Nixon Administration had for years been using the press as a scapegoat--when reporters began investigating the five bunglers who burglarized the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972. That crime detonated the nation's greatest scandal and journalism's longest-running political story. Yet the tocsin sounded initially by the overwhelming majority of news organizations was neither sullen nor loud.
Even the Post, which performed outstandingly throughout, logically viewed the break-in as a local event. The paper assigned two unknowns who were not veteran sleuths or national political reporters and kept them on the story even as it grew. Bernstein, then 28, had been covering Virginia politics. Woodward, 29, an enrolled Republican who had been with the paper only nine months, was reporting on unsanitary restaurants and petty police graft. More experienced investigators like Sandy Smith of TIME, Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times, Seymour Hersh of the New York Times, and James Polk of the Washington Star-News were later to enter the arena.
Most of the crucial information was assembled by the FBI, the Justice Department, the Government Accounting Office and later, the Senate Watergate committee and the House Judiciary Committee. The reporters probed vigorously in these and other agencies. They analyzed, double-checked and followed up isolated leaks, leads and tips--which is the usual method for investigative reporting. They developed a few prime informants among disaffected Republican campaign staffers. They pursued the disclosures made as a result of Judge John Sirica's pressure on the burglars. By these means the reporters began to reconstruct, artifact by artifact, bone by bone, the mysterious subculture known as Watergate.
The Early Revelations
It was never easy. The White House and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President produced tough, sweeping statements minimizing the scandal in general and denying individual expose stories specifically. Three days after the breakin, Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler refused to comment "on a third-rate burglary attempt." Nixon himself assured the public "categorically" that "no one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident." Subsequently Ziegler and C.R.P. spokesmen attacked the Post for "character assassination" and "shabby journalism." When the Post told of the wholesale destruction of C.R.P. records--the purpose was to expunge incriminating material--a C.R.P. spokesman said: "The sources of the Post are a fountain of misinformation." The initial stories concerning Donald Segretti's dirty-tricks operation and Segretti's connection to White House Aide Dwight Chapin were denounced as "not only fiction but a collection of absurdities." When Jack Anderson revealed that the White House had decided to "nail" the Post for its exposes, Ziegler called the story "flatly incorrect -- wrong, wrong, wrong." These stories, and others that were indignantly denounced, were later to be amply confirmed.
The White House tape transcripts would show the Oval Of ice's private preoccupation with heading off press disclosures and attempting to obtain favorable coverage. On Sept. 15, 1972, Nixon, John Dean and H.R. Haldeman discussed retaliating against the Post, perhaps by not renewing the company's broadcasting licenses. Said Nixon: "The Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one." (This passage was not released by the White House, but it turned up in a fuller transcript leaked by sources on the Judiciary Committee.) On Feb. 28 Nixon mentioned the pressure that Charles Colson had attempted to bring on news executives, particularly the TV networks, and observed, "Well, one hell of a lot of people don't give one damn about this issue of suppression of the press." On March 27 Nixon advised Ziegler not to say much to White House reporters about Watergate: "Just get out there and act like your usual cocky, confident self."
The reporters working on the story from the beginning--and their publishers--declined to be cowed or bluffed. Thus the Post revealed in July 1972 that C.R.P. money had gone to one of the burglars. The New York Times reported that funds had been "laundered" through a Mexican lawyer. The Post disclosed that the break-in had been part of a larger intelligence-gathering effort and named those who controlled the program's funding. The Los Angeles Times got an exclusive interview with Alfred C. Baldwin, the ex-FBI agent who had monitored C.R.P.'s tap on Democratic telephones. TIME described the links between the White House and the efforts to sabotage the campaigns of several Democrats. Later TIME revealed another phone-tapping operation, one which had newsmen and officials as its target. The Washington Star-News reported abuses in campaign contributions, including the famous donation by Robert Vesco.
It will never be completely clear how much information would eventually have come out through official channels in the absence of journalistic pressure. Certainly the initial prosecution, resulting in the indictment of only the five burglars plus E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, was limited to the point of farce. The tape transcripts show that the White House hoped these indictments would defuse any accusations of a coverup. Now a total of 18 important participants in the scandals have either pleaded guilty or been convicted by juries. Three of these men are now being tried on additional charges while seven others who maintain their innocence must still face verdicts.
The press did not invent these charges or inflate them out of proportion. The offenses already proved represent nothing less than an attempt to subvert the U.S. electoral system and then to hide the extent of that subversion. The argument, still widely heard, that all this was no more than dirty-politics-as-usual simply cannot be sustained by any halfway dispassionate student of the Watergate affair. Many of the offenders were public officials, men responsible for upholding the law in a law-and-order Administration. What the press did during the initial phase of Watergate, in addition to giving snapshots of truth to its audience, was serve in effect as a surrogate public agency, filling a void created by official misfeasance and nonfeasance. The continuing press coverage helped create a momentum that eventually overwhelmed the coverup.
Writing of that period in the Los Angeles Times, Edward Jay Epstein, a press critic and a former Harvard political scientist, concluded: "Elements of the press, and in particular the Washington Post and TIME Magazine, did an extraordinary job in bringing these facts to the public's attention. Yet. . . the press cannot be assigned exclusive credit." Why only "elements of the press"? Because at first, the great majority of reporters and editors failed to recognize Watergate's significance.
The McCord Milestone
During the summer and fall of 1972, most of the top political reporters were concentrating on the presidential campaign. The biggest headlines were being made by George McGovern's deteriorating position. For one memorable fortnight the country's investigative journalism focused on Senator Thomas Eagleton and his psychiatric history. Political reporters did not know quite what to make of the Watergate business and had relatively little curiosity about it because it was not catching on as a campaign issue. The networks did little original reporting. Reuven Frank, then president of NBC News, says that television at that stage served as a "national echo chamber" for the work of others.
Many newspapers failed even to do that. Some clients of the Los Angeles Times/ Washington Post news service simply failed to run the early Woodward-Bernstein stories, or else buried them. The New York Times, though it did better than most, seemed sluggish. National Editor David Jones recalls: "It was a failure of editing judgment in our Washington bureau and on the national news desk in New York. We didn't perceive early enough the potential ramifications of the story."
That perception changed gradually through the winter, and the major turning point came on March 23, 1973, when James McCord's letter to Judge Sirica was made public. The McCord letter, among other things, confirmed that pressure had been brought to bear on the original defendants to keep silent. It was the most concrete evidence up to that point that a cover-up had been attempted. Newsday might have broken some of the same information months earlier because it had access to another of the burglars, Frank Sturgis. Recalls Publisher William Attwood: "He was ready to talk if we had pushed him and if we had come up with money in five figures." Attwood now regrets keenly that his paper did not extract more information from Sturgis.
There was no such hesitancy after the McCord milestone. Now more and more print and TV reporters fastened on the story, and the intensely competitive character of U.S. journalism came to the surface. Exclusives received wide replay. On April 30 Nixon, after stating that he had fresh information about the scandal and announcing the departure of Dean, Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Richard Kleindienst, saw a few reporters in the White House press room. "We have had our differences in the past," he told them, "and I hope you give me hell every time you think I'm wrong. I hope I'm worthy of your trust."
Questions of Accuracy
Since then, Nixon has been the recipient of daily hell and very little trust. He has responded in kind, attempting whenever possible to depict journalists as biased sensationmongers. In a TV speech ten weeks ago, Nixon protested that "the wildest accusations have been given banner headlines and ready credence as well." He was correct about the headlines. What Nixon did not mention is that most of the "wild accusations" about Watergate have turned out to be true. Considering the complexity of the material and the Administration's obfuscation, it is striking how few important factual errors have appeared in the press.
But there were some. A serious Washington Post blunder occurred in October 1972. Immediately after the Los Angeles Times interview with Alfred Baldwin, Woodward and Bernstein came back with a story naming three men as recipients of the phone-tap transcripts that Baldwin had delivered to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. The names were picked up by other publications, but it turned out that the Post reporters had grabbed some raw, garbled FBI data. "The decision to rush into print was a mistake," Woodward and Bernstein wrote later.
The Santa Ana, Calif., Register, which had tracked Nixon's financial affairs concerning San Clemente, reported on May 13,1973 that Senate investigators were looking into the possibility that surplus campaign funds had been used to buy the estate. That story got considerable play, but the basic allegation has never been supported. Newsweek a year ago reported that John Dean had information to the effect that some "lowlevel White House officials at one point considered assassinating the President of Panama." Neither Dean nor anyone else ever corroborated that grabber.
More than a year ago, TIME published a report that turned out to be overstated. Jeb Stuart Magruder was said to have told Government investigators that former White House Aide Charles Colson had known in advance of the telephone taps at the Democratic National Committee. As TIME had it, Magruder was saying "that Colson called him in February and asked, 'When the hell are we going to get this bugging plan approved?' " Colson's denial was printed in the same story. When Magruder subsequently testified in public, he gave a different version of that phone call: Colson did urge him to move quickly in getting information on the Democrats, but "he did not mention, I want to make clear, anything relating to wiretapping or espionage at that time."
Last October, after the Saturday Night Massacre, ABC broadcast a report that Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox had information on a $1 million fund that Bebe Rebozo was allegedly administering for Nixon's benefit. The White House vehemently denied that, and the denial so far has held up.
Not all the mistakes have been committed by "liberal" news organizations. The right-wing Manchester, N.H., Union-Leader got off a beaut last spring when it named Murray Chotiner as the "mastermind" behind the Watergate breakin. Chotiner sued for $3 million, and before he died as a result of an auto accident, the Union-Leader printed a Page One retraction. Nor have all the mistakes been harmful to Nixon's cause. Last Dec. 20, the Post ran a front-page headline saying: HUNT TELLS SENATE PANEL HE SPIED ON GOLDWATER IN '64 ON L.B.J. ORDER. The Story, drawn from a leak of confidential testimony by E. Howard Hunt, seemed to indicate that Democrats had been guilty of practices similar to Republican offenses in 1972. In fact, Hunt's testimony was far less exciting than that; in 1964 he had merely collected published Republican material such as press releases and speech texts. The Post learned that it had swallowed a phony. Hence the follow-up headline: HUNT'S ROLE IN 1964 MINOR, HILL UNIT TOLD.
After the turning point in the spring of 1973, however, when Press Secretary Ziegler announced that some of the White House's previous denials had become "inoperative," accuracy has not been a major issue in the debate over press performance. Too many of the most damning exposes have been confirmed. Thus Nixon's defenders now concentrate heavily on the presumed motives of the press, on the emphasis given to particular stories, on the general "overplaying" of Watergate and on the means of obtaining information. Says Eugene C. Pulliam: "The establishment press is out to get Nixon because it has never liked him."
Questions of Fairness
Certainly there has been little affection or even rapport between Nixon and most of the journalists who have covered him throughout his career. Nearly all political leaders have their grievances against the press and long-running feuds with particular newsmen, but the Nixon-press antagonism runs far deeper. This is not, as some Nixon apologists argue, because he is a Republican. Though it is true that the majority of Washington correspondents and commentators lean Democratic, such diverse Republicans as Dwight Eisenhower, Robert Taft and Everett Dirksen were personally popular with the capital press corps, as are Gerald Ford and Barry Goldwater. Others manage at least workable press relations.
Nixon is an exception. He seems less able than most public men to take criticism in stride (despite all the practice) or to accord aggressive journalism a legitimate role in relation to Government. Going back to his days as a young Congressman, he has been quicker than most politicians to question the motives of those who cross him. The lack of understanding has been mutual. Reporters are accustomed to dealing with evasiveness in politicians; poking behind facades is part of their craft. But as most reporters try to figure out Nixon, one facade seems only to hide another. Not only journalists but many Republican politicians are put off by a quality that comes across variously as insincerity, awkwardness, lack of genuine warmth. It would be disingenuous to argue that a certain visceral dislike did not color the professional attitudes of many newsmen. Seymour Hersh is more vehement (and perhaps more candid) than most: "I can't stand him. I hate Nixon. I don't like any man who doesn't pay his taxes and who blames associates for everything."
The unfavorable chemistry notwithstanding, the press gave Nixon generally fair coverage in his 1968 campaign, and considerable admiration during his first term. Even the cartoonist Herblock, long one of Nixon's cruelest antagonists, observed the traditional honeymoon accorded new Presidents by giving the man a decent shave. Nixon hardly reciprocated. He installed an arrogant press secretary who treated the press shabbily. He dispatched Spiro Agnew and other sappers to harass the enemy. Aides like Clay Whitehead and Charles Colson sought to stifle network commentary as unfair.
But a large majority of the country's newspapers (representing more than 90% of the circulation of dailies that made editorial endorsements) supported him for reelection in 1972. Their coverage of Watergate scarcely reflects a desire to see his second term ruined. The Los Angeles Times and Time Inc. (by means of LIFE editorials) supported Nixon's election in 1968 and 1972. The Washington Star-News, which won a Pulitzer this spring for its Watergate exclusives of last year, had been one of Nixon's favorite newspapers. The Providence Journal-Bulletin had been relatively sympathetic to Nixon, but it broke the first important story about the President's amazing income tax returns (that expose also won a Pulitzer).
ABC's Howard K. Smith had been the preferred network commentator in the White House, but it was Smith, rather than CBS's Eric Sevareid or NBC'S David Brinkley, who called for Nixon's removal last fall. The Detroit News is a conservative bastion, and its editor Martin Hayden had been on friendly personal terms with Nixon for 25 years; last November the News said Nixon could best serve the nation by resigning. Other papers and editors previously more or less partial to the President--including the Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Times, Omaha World-Herald and William Randolph Hearst Jr.-- have also come out for resignation or impeachment.
Hayden and some of the others who were at first slow to recognize the full significance of the Watergate scandals still feel that the press has been guilty of some serious lapses in judgment. Even journalists who have been critical of Nixon all along have reservations about some aspects of the coverage.
Washington is the world's most densely populated press room, and it sometimes operates with a pack mentality. At the same time, the intense competitiveness of the newsmen--once they are fully aroused on a major story--occasionally makes them reach too far. New Republic's John Osborne, perhaps Washington's most judicious Nixon watcher, acknowledges that the press performed a "necessary and proper" function in getting at the basic facts of Watergate. "But," he adds, "I have to say at the same time that they're like dogs who have scented blood and are running the fox right down to the death."
The result can be questionable scoops. In April, for instance, the Chicago Daily News and the New York Post gave prominent play to a statement that Nixon two years ago met Robert Vesco, the businessman and G.O.P. campaign contributor who was later to become a fugitive from federal prosecution. The story called the development a "new bombshell." In fact, the source was the fallen financier, Bernard Cornfeld, a Vesco enemy fresh out of jail himself. His account lacked proof that the meeting had taken place; even Cornfeld did not claim firsthand knowledge of it. The New York Times last January front-paged a long piece revealing an investigation into the possibility that Bahamian gambling money had found its way into the Nixon campaign kitty. The article was crammed with suspicious names and impressive figures, but no proof of wrongdoing had been found. The story amounted to an interesting, extended innuendo.
On the part of some editors, there has also been a tendency during the latter stages of Watergate to overemphasize developments damaging to Nixon's case and give relatively scant treatment to stories supporting it.
The Leak Problem
Nearly all of the important Watergate revelations, and the marginalia as well, have been "source stories"--articles drawn from anonymous investigators of, or participants in, the scandals. The sources have usually been, as reported, "reliable," "knowledgeable," "highly placed" or otherwise certified adjectivally as credible. The use of unattributed stories makes the press vulnerable. Editorialists across the country demand that Nixon reveal all his secret conversations while at the same time insisting that journalists have the right to total confidentiality. The apparent double standard seems all the more blatant when newspapers become preachy on the issue. Last summer, during the height of the Agnew investigation, the New York Times, Washington Post and Washington Star-News agreed in editorials that the beleaguered Vice President had been abused by the stream of leaks from Justice Department sources damaging to his public defense. Yet the same three papers (along with other publications, including TIME) had considered it legitimate to publish incriminating information in their news columns.
All newsmen would prefer to identify their sources in print rather than mask them. It is often all too easy for sources to talk without having to take full responsibility for what they say. In many cases, however, attribution is impossible because people who possess highly sensitive information cannot be expected to sacrifice their careers in order to divulge it. A Capitol Hill staffer or an FBI official, for instance, may have evidence of serious abuses that should be aired. If he cannot get a hearing within the bureaucracy, his only outlet may be a reporter who will protect his anonymity while publishing the facts. Most newsmen feel that without leaks, the Government would simply control all news about itself.
There can be hazards on both sides. The leaker may be fired if discovered; the reporter puts his professional standards on the line. There are some situations in which leaks should not be printed. If the material contains real national security secrets--there are some--restraint is clearly called for. If a leak clearly violates accepted legal procedure--in a grand jury hearing or a trial, for instance--publication is justified only if it serves some obvious and overriding public interest. Such cases are rare, and the leaks that are all too common in criminal proceedings, though ostensibly published to satisfy the "people's right to know," often amount to sensationalism.
Those who give out secrets are often serving their own interests. In the late stages of a political campaign, for example, one side will sometimes attempt to smear the opposition when there is no time to reply adequately. Newsmen have an obligation to consider such motives, check the material with the utmost care, and give the person under attack a decent chance to defend himself. Occasionally journalists fail to take these precautions, and the articles that result are unfair or incomplete.
All this imposes serious moral responsibilities on the reporter and editor, who must judge each case on its merits (see TIME ESSAY, page 74). But if the journalist does his homework carefully, and if the choice then comes down to killing a significant story or attributing it to unnamed informants, the obligation is to publish. Without reliance on such sources, the principal Watergate exposes simply would not have been possible. Leaks have been commonplace in Washington for generations, and the Nixon Administration uses them too. The President knows the drill well. Martin Hayden, who as a correspondent met Nixon in 1949, recalls that the young Congressman was a generous, reliable --and anonymous--source for a few reporters covering the investigation of Alger Hiss.
The use of leaks becomes even more controversial and complex when a case is before a grand jury or about to be presented to one. Most lawyers are horrified by the press's intrusion on grand jury privacy. Jack Anderson published transcripts of some of the testimony given to the Watergate grand jurors. Woodward and Bernstein, desperate for new information when other sources went dry for a while, approached members of the same jury, attempting to get them to violate their oath of secrecy.
A grand jury hearing is not an adversary proceeding with the stringent rules of evidence and the right of cross-examination that exist in a trial. Prosecutors present material that may produce an indictment, but a suspect puts up no organized defense. Says Columbia Law Professor Benno Schmidt: "What you get if the press prints a story about a grand jury proceeding is by definition a one-sided story. The press has always, typically, published that kind of story without built-in qualifications." Many journalists are also uneasy. Howard Simons, managing editor of the Post, admits that violating grand jury secrecy "is really an anguishing thing."
The Agnew case last year provided plenty of anguish for all concerned. Even before the prosecutors were ready to go to the grand jury, the substance of their investigation was leaked and thoroughly laid out in the press. The disclosures drew vehement criticism from several sources, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which is hardly an enemy of press freedom. The case was being tried in the press, it was said. Agnew was being denied the protection that liberals demand for ordinary muggers. That argument is persuasive in most situations. But the Agnew case was so extraordinary that different standards might apply. The official who could have succeeded the President at any moment was implicated in gross venality. It can be argued that the national interest was best served by Agnew's rapid removal; the intense publicity probably hastened the process.
In the Watergate scandal, while the Administration was in its see-no-evil stage, newsmen who suspected that monstrous wrongdoing had occurred were justified in getting information as best they could. It was sometimes argued that a leak from a committee or an investigation merely got out news a little earlier than it would have been published anyway; but it is also possible that without publicity, the outcome of the proceedings would have been different and the facts would never have been disclosed. That justification, however, diminished as the official inquiry became more vigorous. Joseph Kraft and others have argued that after the special prosecutor's office demonstrated that it would be thorough, the press had an obligation to respect grand jury secrecy--to cease speculating, for instance, about the number and identity of those about to be indicted.
There are still many dark corners in the Watergate maze, however. The Los Angeles Times pried out another grand jury secret when it finally confirmed that the jurors had voted to name Nixon as an unindicted coconspirator. That put to rest months of rumor. The transcripts of Nixon's conversations with his aides, as released by the White House, were ostensibly a full and accurate account intended to set the record straight on many disputed points. But when the House Judiciary Committee began comparing the written version with the actual tape recordings from which they were drawn, discrepancies arose. The L.A. Times--taking advantage of another leak--recently reported new evidence that the texts as edited by the White House were misleading in some important respects.
Should the press have refused to print these leaks and waited for the Judiciary Committee's own report? Few editors would think so. The President put the original transcripts out as part of his defense, along with other statements and documents at various times. He was appealing to public opinion, which is his right. It is the press's right--and obligation--to explore the truth of his appeals.
Presidential Power
The notion that the President cannot be heard in the roar of negative stories is of course a myth. The Nixon Administration, any Administration, has vast powers of communication. Nixon can and periodically does command network prime time to present his case. He can hold press conferences as often (or seldom) as he likes, schedule speeches before predictably friendly audiences, grant interviews to sympathetic correspondents. Like his predecessors, he can release information selectively, announce new programs that must get serious coverage. He can take a journey abroad that assures him of day after day of upbeat print and television treatment.
Against these powers, the press responds with its own relatively limited resources--and its will to see the Watergate story through. In declining to give Nixon the benefit of the doubt, in refusing to yield him the last word, the press has become--as its critics contend--more than an observer and expositor. It has become, quite involuntarily, a participant in a phenomenon that is partly a complex whodunit and partly a historic test of the U.S. system's ability to cleanse itself through constitutional machinery. The press is no more accustomed to this function than Congress is to running an impeachment proceeding.
One part of the press's role is to attempt to solve the mystery. The other is to assure that the test is run through to a final conclusion. It is this that accounts in large measure for the massive volume of Watergate coverage by many news organizations. Certainly most readers and TV listeners cannot absorb that mass of detail (newsmen themselves have trouble keeping up). Certainly some of the stories reach too far and some of the interpretations are off base. The preoccupation with Watergate has also distorted network news programs, the front pages of newspapers and the opening sections of newsmagazines, often squeezing out other stories. Yet the alternative at this stage, to rest on the original exposes and now allow official proceedings to take their course, would be an intolerable evasion. If the press were to stop digging, analyzing and attempting to keep the record straight, the investigative momentum could easily falter once more. The press can help assure that the constitutional process continues to function. After all that has happened, the country is entitled to a definitive verdict.
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