Rockville, Maryland, becomes a working map in The Washington Post’s investigation of the Watergate break-in: a place where reporters pursued James McCord through business directories and neighborhood leads, and where a modest country-club bill connected E. Howard Hunt to the arrested men. The town’s significance lies less in a single dramatic confrontation than in the way its addresses and ordinary records gave the investigation places to go and details to test.

Offices, directories, and the search for McCord

The reporters began with McCord’s private security consulting agency. The telephone book listed the business, but repeated calls brought no answer. They then turned to crisscross directories, which organized phone numbers by street address, and found no response at either McCord’s home or his company. His business address, 414 Hungerford Drive, was in a large Rockville office building. The directory’s tenant listings gave the reporters a new route: they divided the names and called tenants at home, seeking anyone who might know McCord.

That search proceeded through uncertain, secondhand recollection rather than a ready-made lead. One attorney remembered that a teenage girl who had worked for him the previous summer might have known McCord—or perhaps her father had. The attorney could recall only a surname resembling Westall. After contacting five people with similar names, Bob Woodward finally reached Harlan A. Westrell, who said he knew McCord. The sequence shows how the address of a commercial building became an investigative tool: its tenants supplied possible human connections, though reaching a useful one required repeated, imperfect steps.

Westrell had not read the newspapers and wondered why Woodward was asking about McCord. Woodward said he was seeking information for a possible story. Westrell, apparently flattered, offered details about McCord’s background and friends and suggested other people to contact. Information accumulated by referral, with each conversation opening another possible line rather than resolving the case at once.

A Rockville resident under examination

The profile assembled from those calls placed McCord in several worlds. He was a native of the Texas Panhandle, a former FBI agent, a military reservist, and a former chief of physical security for the CIA. He taught a security course at Montgomery Junior College, was active in the First Baptist Church of Washington, and had a family that included an Air Force Academy cadet and a daughter with an intellectual disability. People who knew him described him as conscientious, quiet, reliable, and possessed of rocklike integrity. They also characterized him as a government man: cautious about acting on his own initiative, respectful of hierarchy, and inclined to follow orders.

Those accounts complicated any simple portrait of a burglar. Whatever John Mitchell had said about McCord, people familiar with him agreed that he worked full-time for the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The contrast mattered to the reporting: McCord’s standing as a dependable, orderly professional did not erase his connection to the campaign organization. Instead, his reputation and employment made the question of how he had come to be among the Watergate burglars more consequential.

Woodward later drove to McCord’s home in Rockville. It was a large, two-story brick house in a cul-de-sac not far from Route 70-S, the main highway through the town. Lights were on, but no one answered the door. The visit yielded no conversation, yet it fixed the investigation in a domestic setting: the elusive figure at the center of the reporting was not only a name in a directory or a campaign employee, but a resident behind the lit windows of a suburban home.

The Hunt clue and a small local transaction

Rockville also entered the inquiry through the belongings of two Miami men arrested inside the Watergate. A police inventory obtained by the Post’s night police reporter, Eugene Bachinski, listed two pieces of yellow-lined paper addressed to people identified as Howard and H.H., along with an unmailed envelope. Inside the envelope was E. Howard Hunt’s personal check for $6.36, made out to the Lakewood Country Club in Rockville, accompanied by a bill for the same amount.

The amount was small, but the inventory placed Hunt’s name beside a transaction tied to a Rockville institution and found among the arrested men’s possessions. The detail did not, by itself, explain the connection or establish what role Hunt had played. Its investigative value was that it could be pursued alongside other traces: the address books belonging to the Miami suspects listed Hunt’s name and telephone number, with notations linking him to the White House. The check and bill therefore joined a local payment record to a broader inquiry into the people surrounding the break-in, without making the local clue a complete explanation.

A place within a wider reporting network

The Rockville leads belonged to a method built from separate contacts, records, and repeated calls. Woodward and Carl Bernstein maintained distinct master telephone lists, called sources regularly, and divided contacts so that each could develop individual relationships. Their lists eventually contained hundreds of names, with fewer than fifty duplicates. In that wider practice, Rockville’s office tenants, McCord’s neighbors, and a paper trail connected with Hunt were not self-contained answers. They were points from which another call, referral, or comparison might be made.

The reporting also preserved distinctions between what a clue showed and what it did not. McCord’s Rockville address helped establish where his business and home could be found; the people reached through those addresses supplied a profile and confirmed his campaign employment. Hunt’s country-club check placed a specific payment in the inventory, while other evidence linked his name to the arrested men. The town thus appears not as a backdrop for a single decisive revelation, but as a practical landscape in which ordinary addresses and records acquired investigative significance through accumulation and cross-checking.