"Woodstein" Meets "Deep Throat"

When their editors first suggested that Washington Post Reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward team up on the Watergate story, neither exactly danced on the city desk. The dissimilarities of the two junior reporters boded a stormy working partnership. To Bernstein, 30, a University of Maryland dropout, Woodward was a smooth Yalie who drove a 1970 Karmann-Ghia and smelled of ivied clubs. To Woodward, also 30, the shaggy Bernstein symbolized one of those unseemly counterculture journalists. But when they accepted the Pulitzer Prize in May 1973 for their pioneering probe of the Watergate scandal, it was obvious that the odd couple made an ideal journalistic team.

As recounted in their book All the President's Men (Simon & Schuster), to be published in June, the collaboration began falteringly. Each kept his own list of phone numbers and stumbled over the tracks of the other while chasing Watergate exclusives. Even after their joint bylines finally began appearing six weeks after the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters, the two fought vehemently over points in their stories. Yet their dissimilarities effectively checked and balanced each other's performance. Woodward, a registered Republican, was cautious, an awkward writer and shy interviewer. Bernstein was brash, ready to take a chance, a polished writer and cunning interviewer.

Extremely Sensitive. Both men credit their success to drudging pursuit of the facts. But it was their handful of well-connected informants that basically accounted for their success and was the envy of the Washington press corps --and the despair of the White House. Foremost among their key sources was a man whom the authors still tantalizingly refuse to name. They called him "Deep Throat," and report only that he was a preWatergate friend of Woodward's, a trusted and experienced Executive Branch official with "extremely sensitive" antennae that seemed to pick up every murmur of fresh conspiracy at the capital's power center.

If Woodward needed to see Deep Throat, the reporter would send a signal by moving a flower pot with a red flag in it to the rear of his apartment balcony; by prearrangement the two would then meet about 2 a.m. in an underground garage. If Deep Throat wanted to set up a meeting, he would send a message via Woodward's morning copy of the New York Times; on the lower corner of page 20, clock hands would be drawn to indicate the time of the rendezvous. Woodward says he never figured out how Deep Throat got hold of his newspaper. Despite his impeccable connections, Deep Throat was reluctant to feed the reporters new information. His main function was to corroborate their findings, steering them away from false leads and confirming their true ones. It was Deep Throat who, among other things, told the pair that the burglary was only part of a wide political intelligence network and that former Attorney General John Mitchell knew about it.

The only major source whom the reporters reveal by name is Hugh Sloan, the slight young Nixon operative who resigned as treasurer of the Committee to Re-Elect the President when he learned of C.R.P.'s sordid political involvements. Sloan led the reporters onto the fact that funds for the burglary came from C.R.P. Among other sources who pepper the book's pages with their tips: "the Bookkeeper," a conscience-stricken woman who served C.R.P.'s finance chairman, Maurice Stans. "Something is rotten in Denmark and I'm part of it," she tremblingly warned Bernstein in her home one night a few weeks after the breakin.

The tips were pure gold, but seldom freely proffered. Woodward and Bernstein received no sudden revelation of Watergate's wider dimensions, used no James Bond wiles to score their scoops. They dug out the story in tortuously mined fragments, relying on shrewd hunches, dogged legwork and constant checking. Their efforts paid off on the night of Sept. 28, 1972, when a phone call from an unidentified Government lawyer steered Bernstein to a Tennessee state official, Alex Shipley, who said that he had been approached in June 1971 by Donald Segretti, an Army pal from Viet Nam days. Segretti wanted Shipley to work for the Nixon forces as part of an undercover dirty-tricks campaign against Democratic presidential contenders in 1972. The tireless tracking down of Segretti brought the reporters confirmation of his underhanded activities, his apparently unlimited travel funds and his tie to several old University of Southern California friends, among them Dwight Chapin, who had by then become President Nixon's appointments secretary.

Bernstein learned from Senator Edmund Muskie that Muskie's campaign had been plagued by a series of strange mishaps: stolen documents, canceled rallies, schedule breakdowns. Then an unnamed Justice Department source revealed that Segretti was under Government investigation and guardedly confirmed Bernstein's suspicion that a connection existed between Segretti and Chapin. Deep Throat then confirmed that the dirty-tricks group was funded by C.R.P. After Woodward and Bernstein's story on Segretti's spy-and-sabotage operation and the Chapin connection appeared on Oct. 15, 1972 --showing how the President's men sanctioned a massive effort to subvert the election process--the meaning of Watergate became clearer. Write the authors: "The spreading stain of Watergate had finally seeped into the White House."

Their work had just begun. Sources hinted that if Dwight Chapin was tied to Segretti, higher White House aides for whom Chapin worked were likely involved: perhaps Presidential Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. In following that lead, the reporters suffered their first crippling setback. They had been imbued from the first with the need for caution--"When in doubt, leave it out," their editors ordered--and had decided early to forgo generalizations in favor of only the specific and solid. They checked every fresh fact against at least two different sources. But the pressure of keeping one scoop ahead of the competition--notably TIME's Sandy Smith--inevitably led to slips in the pair's failsafe procedure. A hasty conversation with Hugh Sloan resulted in a misunderstanding and a Woodward-Bernstein story containing the erroneous assertion that Sloan had told the grand jury that Haldeman was involved in funding the political espionage scheme. It was a serious mistake, giving critics of the reporters an opportunity to challenge the credibility of their previous stories. Sloan's lawyer brusquely denied the story, and the White House denounced it as "shabby journalism." Confused and angered by their mistake, the reporters rashly exposed one of their prime sources, an FBI agent, to his superior. They were so shaken by their error in the story that they considered offering their resignations to the Post.

Their story apparently also had dramatic repercussions in the White House. Woodward learned from Deep Throat that the President, infuriated over news leaks, had told aides that some $5 million in leftover campaign funds might as well be used "to take the Washington Post down a notch. Nixon was wild, shouting and hollering that 'we can't have it and we're going to stop it [the leaks]. I don't care how much it costs.' " Not long afterward rival Florida broadcasting companies filed a challenge through the Federal Communications Commission to the Post's ownership of two Florida television stations. The Post is still fighting to retain its licenses.

Fearful of possible retribution from the President's men, sources began avoiding the reporters and new leads dried up. For five weeks after the Haldeman story, the reporters were unable to provide another Page One expose. In desperation Woodward and Bernstein tried to reach Watergate grand jury members for information, a rash move that outraged Federal Judge John Sirica and nearly landed the pair in jail for violating the secrecy of grand jury proceedings. A warning from Deep Throat that the two might be targets of Government surveillance--or worse--plunged them into fears for their safety. Both suspected their phones might be tapped, their lives in danger. They never found evidence to support either fear.

Hard Work. It was only in March 1973 that Watergate Burglar James Mc-Cord confirmed much of Woodward and Bernstein's reporting, when he implied to Judge Sirica in his celebrated letter that the case had wider ramifications. Up till then, other publications--with the exception of TIME and the New York Times--had been slow to respond to the Post team's lead, perhaps because neither reporter enjoyed national prestige. After McCord's bombshell, the rest of the press turned more aggressive. By then, Woodward and Bernstein, dubbed "Woodstein" by their colleagues, were hard at work on their book--a tale which grippingly suggests how close Americans came to remaining blinkered from Watergate's true dimensions.

For Bernstein and Woodward, the rewards have been substantial. Before they began reporting on Watergate, the two earned together less than $30,000 a year. Now, from raises and book advances, magazine, paperback and movie rights (Robert Redford wants to play Woodward), each reporter stands to earn more than $500,000 before taxes from the book, a sum that could surpass President Nixon's net worth--after he pays all his back taxes.

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