Devan Shumway

Devan Shumway was the public-relations director of the Committee for the Re-election of the President during the early Watergate investigation, a former wire-service reporter who had come to the committee from the White House staff. In that role he became a recurring intermediary between the campaign organization and reporters: announcing an internal inquiry, explaining an employee’s departure, defending the committee against financial allegations, and responding as reporting increasingly challenged its account. His significance lies less in any disclosed private action than in the sequence of public statements through which the committee’s explanations shifted under pressure from new evidence.

Position and Early Responses

Within an hour of Richard Nixon’s statement about the Watergate break-in, Shumway told reporters that John Mitchell had ordered an in-house investigation of the break-in at Democratic headquarters. The announcement presented the committee as conducting an inquiry of its own, at a moment when Democratic Party chairman O’Brien was preparing a civil suit that alleged a line of involvement leading toward the White House. Shumway’s statement was an early, concrete account of the committee’s response, though the available evidence does not describe what the in-house investigation did or what it found.

Shumway also supplied an explanation for the departure of Hugh Sloan, the committee’s treasurer. When Bob Woodward tried to reach Sloan before reporting on the General Accounting Office audit, he learned that Sloan no longer worked for the re-election committee. Shumway described the resignation as being for personal reasons, unrelated to Watergate, and cited Sloan’s health and his pregnant wife. Sloan himself declined to discuss Watergate publicly at that point, saying only that he had cooperated with the FBI and the grand jury. The contrast matters: Shumway offered a personal explanation for the departure, while Sloan’s limited public response did not confirm that explanation or address the reasons for leaving.

The Security Fund and Changing Claims

The sharpest test of Shumway’s public credibility came with the General Accounting Office’s preliminary audit findings. On August 22, the Washington Post reported that the audit had identified more than $500,000 in mishandled campaign funds, including at least $100,000 in an apparently illegal security fund. The existence of such a fund was especially damaging because Shumway had spent more than five weeks insisting that none existed. He had also told Carl Bernstein that he would never knowingly give him false information.

After the preliminary findings, Shumway said that he had since learned that a security fund did exist and expressed concern that people at the committee were not telling him the truth. That qualification is part of the record: he acknowledged that his earlier account had been wrong, while attributing the discrepancy to information withheld from him. The audit report was due for public release that day, but the General Accounting Office delayed it an hour before publication. The sequence left Shumway speaking amid a dispute not only about the committee’s finances but also about who inside the organization knew what.

When Woodward sought the committee’s response to a later report on the secret fund, Shumway called back with a statement acknowledging that the committee had cash funds for purposes such as reimbursing expenses and advancing travel costs. It denied that anyone currently employed by the committee had used funds illegally or improperly. Its limitation to current employees and its distinction between legitimate cash funds and improper use meant the statement did not simply deny the reported existence of cash accounts. The wording addressed a narrower claim than a blanket denial would have, and the reporting continued to test what the committee’s descriptions left unresolved.

Public Defense and the Wider Crisis

As coverage broadened, Shumway’s responses became more directly adversarial. After a Washington Post story carried implications that conflicted with the account in the Watergate indictments, he dismissed the paper’s sources as a fountain of misinformation. The book’s account notes that major outlets mostly ignored the story or emphasized denials by Robert Mardian, who would not speak to the Post. Shumway’s brief attack therefore formed part of a larger contest over whether the reporting or the official denials would define the story, rather than settling the underlying allegations.

That contest intensified in October, when the White House selected the Washington Post as a target even though Time had developed comparably damaging information. The Post’s reporting brought the political-operation connection closer to the Oval Office, and the White House’s challenge to the paper’s credibility gave its allegations greater currency. The next day, the New York Times published telephone-record evidence of calls linking Donald Segretti to the White House, Dwight Chapin’s home, and Howard Hunt’s home and office. Those records supplied documentation that was harder to dismiss as hearsay or innuendo. Shumway’s earlier attacks on the Post belonged to an increasingly strained effort to counter reporting that now had corroboration from another major newspaper.

The Limits of the Record

The evidence establishes Shumway as a highly visible spokesman, but it does not establish that he organized the activities being investigated, knew the full extent of the committee’s secret funds, or deliberately lied about them. His account of the fund changed after he said he had learned that it existed; his stated explanation was that some people at the committee were not telling him the truth. The reporting also shows an organization in which information was difficult to obtain: employees feared being seen talking to reporters, and a committee bookkeeper said that people had lied to the grand jury. Those accounts give context to Shumway’s claim of being misinformed, but they do not independently verify what he knew at any particular time.

His trajectory in the available record is therefore one of repeated public explanation under worsening evidentiary pressure: an announcement of an internal inquiry, a personal explanation for Sloan’s departure, a correction about the security fund, a narrowly framed statement about cash and improper use, and an attack on the reporting. Each statement addressed a different stage of the unfolding controversy. Together, they show how a press representative could become a visible part of a political crisis without the record resolving whether he was merely relaying an incomplete institutional account or knowingly defending it.