>> i think at this point, it's what we know that's important. and we know that this was about a president that used illegal, unconstitutional means as a basic matter of implementing policy. and that that's what makes this unique in our history. and so we have the big picture. and through these remarkable, awful tapes, we hear more and more elaborations on that theme. it enables us to learn about the few gaps in our knowledge, but basically i think we understand it. and that's what that piece in the post was about. >> but i asked him, because captain graham said when will we know everything? you said we may never know everything. >> that's right. and, you know, there were a series of events. the senate watergate committee, alex butterfield's testimony, disclosing the tapes.

and, you know, you asked the question, which is a really good one. what don't we know? and because of the abundance of evidence, we know so much. but what i think is interesting -- try to step back a little bit. richard nixon did not understand what the presidency was, that there is this goodwill that flows to any president. and it is something he could not use, because he was driven by -- oh, so-and-so is an enemy. let's get the irs on him. we don't like the brookings institute. let's break into the office there and get something out of the files. and he never -- again, bud krogh was talking about serenity. he never really found it. you listen to those tapes and it is not only the illegality and abuse of power but the smallness of richard nixon.

he didn't realize that as president he could really do big things. and -- >> some would argue that he did big things but had this character failure and this insecurity and all these other qualities that led him to do the bad things. >> i would say he did big things. and yet they were all done in this tent that he could never get himself out of. that was this tent of anger and revenge and illegality. and it defined his presidency and what -- the way he conducted the white house. you know, if you looked -- one of the reasons that this thing about deflating the notion that the cover-up is worse than the crime, these crimes were enormous. the cover-up has been -- absolutely necessary and

inevitable to hide these white house horrors, as john mitchell called them. the tent was white house horrors. >> and it began early. if you look at the senate watergate record, they really dug into this. and they found all kinds of abuses in illegal operations. in early months, 1969, they decided let's set up an investigations unit in the white house. we don't trust the fbi. nixon's personal lawyer paid $130,000 of excess campaign funds to these people and one of the operations was to get somebody to climb the telephone pole behind joe craft's house. he was a columnist for "the washington post" and tap his telephone. now, you know, if they had been caught at that, maybe there wouldn't have been a watergate. but there were so many things regularly done in secrecy and

hidden and then there was all this money, all this campaign money. they were just throwing it around. >> you suggested in the piece over the weekend there were five wars. war against anti-war movement, war against the media, war against the democratic party, a war against justice. he came to office with those -- to fight those wars. >> yes, he did. because, you see within the first three months the apparatus had been set up to fight all these wars. you hear on the tapes him talking to kissinger and kissinger very enthusiastically embracing the wire tapping of reporters and kissinger saying they must be destroyed, about the reporters and those who might be talking to the reporters. this became the m.o. of the nixon presidency. >> and there was a sense of, we

have total power. and no one is ever going to hold us accountable. just the installation of the taping system. you would think somebody would have a little pause and say, well, maybe somebody's going to get these tapes or find out about the system. you go to the nixon library in california. they have little dollhouse mock-up of the oval office and it says press a button and a red light will go on, where each microphone was in the oval office. you press it. and you almost jump back. >> that's right. >> because there are five microphones on the desk. there are microphones in the chandeliers. and, you know, who is -- who is thinking? i mean, you know, carl and i have often talked about if there was one good lawyer, one strong lawyer who knew early on about some of this stuff might have gone to the president and said stop this. it's against the law.

you don't need to do this. the fact that there was no one in the white house or in the nixon circle who had that world view or had that authority tells you about how he fed and controlled all of this himself. >> and everybody fed his own diabolicalism. >> that's what they said about bring me the dead mouse. the discussions with coleson on those tapes and then you hear nixon say in the presence of very close guys to the top in the oval office, nixon says of the brookings institution, i want to crack that safe. i want to break in. i want to get those papers out of that file. and what was that file for? it was to blackmail his predecessor as president of the united states, lyndon johnson. can you imagine that john adams

is sitting there and saying, i want to break into the safe. let's get the goddamn file and then we're going to blackmail george washington. really. that's basics. >> let's go back to motive. do you believe richard nixon thought everybody -- his view of the world was distorted so that he thought this is the way politics is? everybody else does this? in his own distorted view. so i better get them before they get me. >> i think that's some of t but, again, it was the arrogance and it was that sense of no accountability of one of our old editors at the post. len downey talks about accountability reporting. and in the nixon white house in the early years, i think they said, you know, it's not out there. they're not going to find out what we did or what we're doing. and then when the press started to find out, one of the celebrated horrors in the nixon

white house was the 17 wiretaps against reporters and white house aides. they thought he was a national security threat. well, he was when he went on to be a columnist for the new york times. but not at that time. and if you go into why -- why they tapped his telephone, it was because he was hanging out with somebody that they thought was a national security threat, another reporter. >> when you were trying to explain the story, trying to understand the story, what was the biggest mistake you made? >> well, the biggest mistake was actually one of attribution. we said that held the fund that paid for all of these. the grand jurors and the

prosecutors had never asked haldeman the question. that was the big mistake. >> and that was a real low moment. >> awful. >> because we did -- we wondered, were we wrong in substance? were we wrong in attribution? we fanned out and found out that, in fact, the story was true. when you look at the record now and the tapes and the trial of bob haldeman and even his own memoir, you see this was an operation. because he was the person closest to richard nixon. >> what was ben's reaction to this? >> bradley? >> stand by the boys. he sat there and he typed out his own nondenial denial. we called what the nixon white house did the nondenial denial.

he said let's stand by the boys. he typed out this thing saying we stand by the story and, in fact, substantively, the story was right but we had made a serious error of attribution. >> when he did that statement, let's stand by the boys, he didn't come in and waterboard us or hold us upside down. he just said what happened? and we explained, as best we can. and, you know, goddamn it. >> there was a lot more than that. >> no kind of -- maybe even something worse. >> yeah. >> but instead of -- he believed in the empirical method. okay. go find out where you screwed up, which we did. and we found out.

and we corrected it in the newspaper. and went on. and that was -- you know, i mean, we weren't happy that we screwed up but we were happy we weren't fired. >> what pressure -- what pressure did you feel when you were building the story? >> i think this story was like getting into a warm bath and then it got hotter and hotter and hotter. so, you were able to withstand the heat. i think the most remarkable thing was early on, about eight weeks after the break-in, we found out john mitchell, nixon's campaign manager, former law partner, former general of the united states control this had secret fund. we were having coffee off a vending machine room. i put a dime in and i felt this chill go down my neck and said to woodward, oh, my god, this president is going to be impeached and woodward looked at me and said, oh, my god, you were right. and we can never use that word

impeach around this newspaper, lest ben bradley or someone else thinks we have an agenda and we don't. and i think there was awe at that moment and some fear, that the stakes became so obviously huge. we're 28, 29 years old. every day the spokesman for the leader of the free world is getting up and making the conduct of the press the issue in watergate, our conduct specifically that of "washington post." bradley, bob, myself. >> and did you feel the pressure that was being put in terms of the paper itself and journalism itself and katherine graham and ben bradley? >> no, because we were kind of operating in a bubble. >> that's right. >> go get the story. what's the next story? and there was an absence of that pressure.

we knew -- we could turn on the television and see ziegler, for 15 minutes, scream and denounce us and the campaign manager for nixon and so forth. there was a point in october, october 10th, 1972, when we did a story that essentially was the dna of watergate. it said, look, it was part of a basic campaign, spying and sabotage, directed at the democrats. and if you look at what, in all of these five wars of watergate, the most insidious one was nixon and his people saying we're going to hire saboteurs and we're going to pick who nixon runs again. they derailed and helped destroy senator muskogee and pat buchanan wrote a memo saying this is great. our strategy paid off.

so, the idea -- you think about this. we've talked at some length about it's really an attack on the free electoral process to say, oh, i'm running against somebody in your -- let me pick who i think will be the weakest candidate. and the idea that somebody is going to do that who is president of the united states in all of these people around him is pretty horrifying. >> you come back in a piece saying was nixon the central factor in all of this, in all of the wars, in all of the execution. >> that's what's so astonishing about the tapes. always, it's nixon saying bring me the dead mouse. and he is the one that says break in, break in, break in. i want those files.

he comes back to it time and time again. and it's he that is insistent about getting ted kennedy's tax returns, about saying let's get my old secret service agent from when i was vice president, put him in ted kennedy's secret service detail, get him to report back and maybe we'll catch the son of a bitch in a compromising position and ruin him so he can't run in '76. that's what this was about. that's what's so brazen and horrifying. >> how important was deep throat? >> deep throat helped us a lot. he was confirming -- >> confirming is the word? >> basically. like the october story, it started out as carl had found three people who were recruited to do this sabotage and spying and none of them had done it. i went to meet with mark feld and it's one of the times where he said, no, this is much bigger.

and that's when he said there are 50 who did this. and that's been a number that was disputed for a long time. all you have to do is read the senate watergate committee and their report. and it's astonishing. they had 22 people that the chief saboteur paid. they had spies named ruby one, ruby two, sedan chair one, sedan chair two, chapman's friend and on and on. they hired infiltrators. they threw stink bombs at campaigns. there was nothing off limits. >> why do you think people persist in asking questions about deep throat? for example, on a plane coming from new york to washington, a diplomat that i know came over and said where are you going? i said i'm going down to interview carl and bob as the watergate's 40th anniversary, and there's a big conference to talk about it. and he said ask him how many deep throats there were. curiosity about deep throat. >> one, there was one.

>> people didn't believe there was one for a long time. they thought it was -- i think we have a problem, cultural problem to some extent that revisionism -- revisionism can be a great thing if you're open minded and open things up and say let's enlarge the record. but if the person is to merely discredit or to merely debunk, i think there's been an awful lot of that with watergate and particularly because -- here, to me, is the most important thing about this anniversary. that it not be seen as in the cultural landscape and world fair of ideological conflict that goes on today. one of the things that happen heard -- you heard it from bill cohen and the others. decision to work in that democrats, republicans voted 77-0 to create the watergate committee. nixon's appointees to the supreme court, three of them, including the chief justice of the united states, said you have to turn over these tapes, mr. president, because you're not above the law.

this was not an ideological exercise, partisan exercise. it was not about the republican party. it was about nixon. >> that's true. we should answer the question about -- we should be accountable. >> yes. >> when we wrote "all the president's men," we sat down and said we went to grand jurors. we need to acknowledge that. carl got phone records from private people. we need to acknowledge that. we need to acknowledge and deal with the genuine emotions when we screwed up on the haldeman story, so on and so forth. we should have no objection to people saying how many deep throats there were. happily seven years ago, mark feld, on his own, decided to

come out and unmask himself. that day, carl and i were in the newsroom and bradley and len downey are saying, you've got to confirm it. and we weren't worried that he's being taken advantage of. he's over 90, dementia. they're saying, looks this is reality. we need to confirm it and disclose it. we did. happily, then people started checking and felt wrote another book with his lawyer and so forth. all the details are laid out. so there's not a mystery about this. quite frankly, if he had died before that happened or we were able to write the book "the secret man" to tell about that story, you would have had more doubters. >> did you go to him at any point in the process before it was disclosed and he acknowledged that he was deep

throat to ask him to consider coming forward? >> yes. when we were writing "all the president's men" i called him up and said how about coming clean? click. i know what that meant. >> and who conceived the idea of how you would meet? >> he started out -- >> plant, flower and all that? >> he said open the drapes. i said now wait a minute. i'm maybe going to let the sun in. so i said this flower pot, which was sitting out there, said i'll move it back. and again it's come out, fbi people have said they were working with him somehow, it's not clear to me, to see that this signal could be observed. i was living in an area where there are all kinds of foreign embassies and the fbi was very active. and having informants in the embassies and so forth. so, it worked. now, i was 29 and i thought this

was the way you always met people. >> when he told me this is what was going on, i looked at him like he was out of his mind. what the hell? you know, every once in a while you go to a fire, put on a fireman's running coat but i never heard of this. >> neither did i. but, you know, you do these things -- doing a second book on obama now. and working on the white house and so forth. and out of the blue, one of the key people in the white house that i wanted to talk to e-mailed me and said let's meet. and i didn't come back and say why do you want to meet? i just said, fine. tell me when and where. let's do it. so you don't set those terms of engagement with the source. and this was a source early on who told us when gene -- bless him, the night police reporter who found the entries in the

notebook, h hunt w house. when carl heard that w house he said it could only be one of tw things. >> true story. >> yeah, true story. so it calls it the whore house and i call it the white house. >> that's right. >> it was -- you know, mark felt -- i have your name in my address book and go commit a crime, that doesn't mean -- >> that i knew anything about it. >> exactly, in the least. so you have what's called a link that may mean something, may not. i call up mark felt. he said don't worry. howard hunt is up to his ears in this. so the word stage is when he helped us but the real, quite frankly, turning point in

watergate is when carl found the bookkeeper. the bookkeeper had the details on the money and who controlled it and who got the money. if you look at "all the president's men" i think the bookkeeper is the key source on money and then that led to all of the other -- >> i don't want to -- >> this one question. could you have discovered the story? could you have uncovered the story without mark felt? >> without his -- >> i think that we had uncovered the story. more than anything, he did contribute key details at various points. but, really what he did that was so terrific is he gave us his assurance that we knew we were right, that he confirmed these things and it eliminated a lot of doubt that i think we might have had.

>> and i think in the end it was very -- even though ben never asked for the name of the source while we were doing the coverage, i think it was very comforting to bradley to know that there was something high up in the justice department who was saying, you know, this -- yeah, this is exactly right. this all fits together. >> bradley never asked? >> he never asked. and he wrote in his memoirs, didn't quite understand why he didn't ask, but he never did. he later did, believe me. >> meaning? >> meaning, i think it was -- i told him. when we wrote "the secret man," which was the whole story of the relationship with him, ben came over to my house in 2002 and

read it and said really i wanted to make sure that it conformed with all of his memory and what he said and, interestingly enough, ben said -- because we were thinking of writing this story before mark felt died. and he had dementia. i had been in touch with him. and ben said look, the guy you made the deal with about not naming him is now different. and you can't unilaterally decide you're going to break that agreement. so, we didn't break the agreement until felt came out all to our surprise. >> after 33 years. >> and you were an associate editor. >> they didn't tell me they were working on this story. >> bob hasn't changed, has he, carl, in terms of the willingness to go out? he was on with me about a year ago, i think it was. you had gone out to see somebody

and knocked on their door at 8:30 at night, because they had refused to see you. and getting their story was important. you still do that shoe leather thing occasionally? >> this was a general. this was a general. i guess i can -- and he just wouldn't talk. and i needed detail. there's a perfect time to visit a general at home, that's about 8:15. if they're home, they've eaten. that's kind of their down time. i knocked on the door. he opened the door and looked at me and i'll quote him. he said, are you still doing this shit? and i just kind of learned how to look innocent from carl. i looked innocent and he said, come on in. >> and told you everything you wanted to? >> not everything. no one ever tells everything. he told enough. >> the technique is to go find other people that can build on the story so that you have the whole thing? and you can go back to him and ask questions because somebody else has told you something that he didn't tell you and then you have reason for him to add more?

>> you get notes and memos and you get -- and you try to get an authentic -- >> suppose you had the internet and e-mail and twitter and all that we have today. would it have made covering watergate different? >> yeah. two things. one, i think that the tally of information would be received by readers and viewers would be very different, because there's so much inclination to look at information from a partisan or ideological source and use that information to reinforce preconceived prejudices and beliefs. different in the way it's received. but in terms of going out and getting the information, there's no substitute whatsoever for the basic methodology. i mean, i went to work when i was 16 at "the washington star." and that's what you learned to

do. that's what we still do. you need to talk to people. you got to -- you know, you know this, charlie. one thing that's happened in journalism and a lot of us, there's a lot of manufactured controversy when people throw a microphone in front of you or come in with a notebook. tell me what this is all about and they leave the room. you learn things by sitting and listening and really learning and being open minded. preconceived notion of a story that you have when you go out is never the same as what the story turns out to be. it's because you're there in person. >> human sources are the key. >> human sources. >> to answer your question, i think the internet could have helped with connections and so forth. but we've talked to some journalism students at schools and they somehow think that the internet is a magic lantern and that you could just google

secret fund and out would come all the data you need. >> yeah. >> and, you know they're just not true. the good stuff is not on the internet. >> the night that we found the check that established that the burglars, that the nixon money had gone into the burglars -- nixon campaign fund had gone into the burglars account, i called woodward back in the office. he went back to the library and found about a dozen city directories and we had a name. kenneth h. dahlberg. we thought he was from minnesota. we found the minnesota guide. and found the guy. the difference is that you would find him quicker through google but the basic methodology remains. >> was there anything about covering this story that you could not confirm, even though you found it fascinating and interesting and -- but you could never nail it down so you couldn't report it? >> i mean, there are lots that