“this particular incident”

“This particular incident” is the phrase Richard Nixon used in his first public comment on the Watergate break-in, and its importance lies in the boundary it seemed to draw: the White House, he said, had no involvement in this one event. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein lingered over the qualification. As the investigation widened, the phrase came to sit beside a larger vocabulary of containment—staff told to hold ranks, employees afraid to speak, and insiders who eventually described what silence had concealed.

The qualification in Nixon’s denial

At a press conference on June 22, Nixon declared, “The White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident.” The sentence was emphatic in its denial but narrow in its object. Woodward and Bernstein focused on the words “this particular incident,” rather than treating the statement as a broad answer to the questions accumulating around the break-in.

Their attention to the wording came amid a growing set of reported connections. One suspect’s address book contained a sketch of hotel rooms intended as headquarters for Senator George McGovern at the Democratic convention; an architect in Miami said Bernard Barker had sought plans of the convention hall and its air-conditioning system; and James McCord had been carrying an application for press credentials to the convention when arrested. The reporters also learned that some of the accused burglars had been in Washington weeks earlier, when offices of Democratic lawyers in the Watergate office building were burglarized. Against these details, a denial confined to “this particular incident” could sound less like a resolution than a carefully bounded statement.

A phrase answered by silence

The book places Nixon’s public wording alongside the pressure surrounding people inside the Committee for the Re-election of the President. In mid-August, Bernstein and Woodward used a committee roster—names, extensions, floor numbers, and secretaries—to infer who worked near whom and who reported to whom. Their evening visits to employees’ homes brought no immediate full account, but they did reveal the human conditions in which information was being withheld. One employee trembled and asked Bernstein to leave “before they see you”; another said, “I want to help,” then burst into tears.

The Bookkeeper later described a committee where “People had already lied to” the grand jury. She said that Sally Harmony and others had lied, while the surrounding account connected the lack of candor to protecting other people. The phrase “this particular incident” is not itself shown to have caused this silence. Its resonance comes from the book’s juxtaposition: a public statement restricts the scope of what is denied, while the reporters encounter witnesses who are frightened, constrained, or unwilling to specify what they know.

The language of keeping ranks

Hugh Sloan’s account gave the reporters a more explicit formulation of the pressures operating within the campaign. He said that no one had told him outright not to talk, but that the message had been clear: “Hold ranks,” or “Keep the ship together.” Asked whether that meant lying, Sloan said Bernstein could draw his own conclusions, adding that the assumption was not unreasonable. These phrases turn silence into a collective discipline: the instruction is framed as loyalty to the group, while its implications extend to what investigators and the public might be told.

Sloan also explained that he had left because he suspected matters were worse than the public account suggested. He wanted to speak, he said, but his lawyers had advised against public statements that might be used in a civil suit concerning his role as campaign treasurer. His account therefore adds legal exposure to the pressures of loyalty and fear; withholding information did not have a single cause.

From bounded denial to disclosed links

Later accounts further unsettled the impression that Watergate could be contained as a discrete incident. Donald Segretti told Bernstein, “I really want to tell the whole story and get this thing over with,” and said that he had not been told what the broader operation was about. Asked who had kept him in the dark, he answered, “The White House.” His testimony, as presented in the book, gives the phrase’s boundary a wider context: an operative could know only his own assigned role while remaining unaware of the larger undertaking.

After James McCord’s disclosures connected cash payoffs to the conspirators directly to the Committee for the Re-election of the President, a committee official told Woodward that the White House’s handling of the matter had undermined the Presidency. The book had earlier reported Sloan’s account that the secret fund continued after the arrests and that money had passed from Maurice Stans’s safe to Fred LaRue; McCord’s testimony now made the possible use of that money for silence newly consequential. Read across these episodes, “this particular incident” remains Nixon’s exact phrase, but its significance grows through contrast: a narrowly framed denial at the outset, set against later accounts of concealed connections, enforced reticence, and payments linked to keeping the defendants silent.