“The higher up you go, the more you have to have them by the balls”

“The higher up you go, the more you have to have them by the balls” is prosecutor Earl Silbert’s rule of evidence for pursuing responsibility at senior levels. Spoken amid the Watergate investigation, the line names a practical imbalance: the more powerful the person under scrutiny, the less enough it is to have a plausible theory, circumstantial connection, or impressive volume of testimony. The phrase becomes especially resonant beside the reporters’ own account of how an apparently solid claim about H. R. Haldeman outran what their sources had actually confirmed.

Silbert’s Rule

Silbert offered the maxim while describing the limits of the government’s case. He had stressed that the evidence did not justify indicting more than the seven men caught in the Watergate break-in, even as he spoke of a formidable record: sixty witnesses and what he called an airtight case against the operation’s alleged boss, Gordon Liddy. To Silbert, the number of witnesses did not erase the need for evidence that reached the people above the men already charged. The phrase makes that standard physical and unsparing: to proceed against someone higher up, investigators needed a firm hold on the proof connecting that person to the conduct.

The maxim sits beside Silbert’s insistence that the investigation would please no one. His stance was not that senior officials were beyond suspicion, but that suspicion could not substitute for evidence sufficient to support an indictment. The words thus turn a procedural caution into a compact image of the difficulty of moving from the visible operatives to those who may have directed or authorized them.

The Money Trail and the Reach of Authority

The reporting’s account of the campaign fund shows why establishing a chain of responsibility mattered. A $25,000 cashier’s check payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg had been deposited with four Mexican checks, bringing the total deposit to $114,000. Four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The check connected campaign money to the Watergate defendants’ financial trail, but a connection in the records was not by itself proof of who had authorized particular expenditures.

Hugh Sloan described a more direct route to authority. When he was first approached for money, he said, he called John Mitchell at the Justice Department; Mitchell told him to distribute it. Sloan said there had been a number of such calls beginning in 1971. Mitchell had initially been the sole person authorized to approve expenditures from the fund, and later that authority passed to others, including Jeb Magruder. Sloan’s account placed Mitchell’s campaign authority alongside his government office: while Attorney General, he had authorized campaign-fund expenditures for activities directed against the political opposition. Yet Sloan remained careful to distinguish what he believed from what he could prove about Mitchell’s knowledge of the bugging.

A subsequent report said that John Mitchell’s principal assistants controlled the special campaign account, which held more than $300,000 for sensitive political projects; that Liddy had received money from it; that account records had been destroyed; and that Sloan’s resignation followed his suspicions about Watergate. Those details made the fund a route into the wider operation, not a complete answer about every participant’s knowledge or authorization. The distinction between tracing money and proving responsibility is precisely the pressure contained in Silbert’s maxim.

A Confirmation That Failed

The same evidentiary problem shaped the Washington Post’s reporting about Haldeman’s alleged control of the fund. With the deadline approaching, editor Howard Simons wanted a fourth source. Carl Bernstein called a Justice Department lawyer and asked point-blank whether Haldeman was the fifth person who controlled the secret fund. The lawyer would not answer. Bernstein proposed a silent test: he would count to ten, and the lawyer should hang up if there was any reason to hold the story. The lawyer stayed on the line, and Bernstein took that as confirmation.

The procedure was not reliable. The lawyer had understood the instructions backward and had meant to warn the reporters off the story. The article’s lead was also strengthened by attributing Haldeman’s alleged control not only to accounts of sworn testimony before the Watergate grand jury but to federal investigators. The reporters said an FBI agent had confirmed the information, and they relied as well on Deep Throat; the story added that all five alleged controllers had been questioned by the FBI. Several apparent supports could create the impression of independent confirmation without resolving whether the underlying claim had been established clearly.

Sloan later said that Haldeman’s name had never come up in his grand-jury interviews and that he had not been asked about it. His denial was narrowly limited to the article’s claim that he had named Haldeman before the grand jury; it did not disprove Haldeman’s control of the fund. The reporters recognized that distinction only after publication. They had not asked Sloan whether Haldeman had actually exercised his authority, what precisely the grand jury had asked, or whether Sloan’s answers supported the attribution they were making. They had heard the confirmation they expected rather than securing an unambiguous statement.

The Maxim as a Reporting Lesson

The reporters’ retrospective analysis makes Silbert’s phrase applicable beyond the prosecution’s charging decisions. They had followed a tangible trail from campaign cash to covert political activity, and their sources and deductions led them to believe that Haldeman stood behind Watergate. But they treated the inference that he controlled the fund as though it also established what he had done with that authority. In their later reckoning, the error was not simply a mistaken name: they had skipped questions that could have separated control, actual approval of payments, and grand-jury testimony.

They also judged their methods of confirmation inadequate. Bernstein’s questioning of the FBI agent had been perfunctory, and the agent might have been saying more than he knew. The reporters recognized that confronting the agent’s superior had endangered the agent’s career and risked their credibility with other sources. Bernstein’s silent test with the Justice Department lawyer had been too complicated to communicate safely. Woodward, for his part, had put too much faith in a coded confirmation from Deep Throat instead of requiring a clear statement. Each failure shows how proximity to a powerful figure can tempt reporters to treat circumstantial or indirect signals as proof.

The phrase therefore holds two related meanings in the book. For Silbert, it is a standard for when the evidence can support pursuing people higher in an alleged conspiracy. For the reporters, it becomes an implicit measure of the care their own claims demanded: as an accusation climbed toward the White House, every link needed to be stated, tested, and distinguished from inference. The fund could illuminate the machinery of the operation, but it could not, without further proof, answer every question about who authorized what.