The disclosure of the Dahlberg check transformed a fragment of bank paperwork into a documented link between money collected for Richard Nixon’s campaign and the account of Bernard Barker, one of the men arrested in the Watergate break-in. Its significance lay both in what the check established—a campaign contribution had entered an account connected to the burglars—and in what it did not yet prove: the document alone did not identify who directed the money’s later use or establish that the campaign’s senior officials had authorized the break-in.

The Fifth Check

The discovery came as Carl Bernstein examined records associated with the Mexican checks. Those checks matched the earlier account: each had been drawn on a different American bank and endorsed with an illegible signature, above a typed notation identifying Manuel Ogarrio D. and an account number. But there was another item. Wider than the others and dated April 10, it was a $25,000 cashier’s check drawn on the First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Florida, and made payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg. Bernstein copied it as a facsimile, preserving the bank, check number, amount, and payee rather than relying on a description from memory.

The account activity gave the document a consequential setting. The $25,000 check had been deposited on April 20 with the four Mexican checks, bringing the deposit to $114,000. Four days later, Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The records thus connected a named campaign contributor’s check to a bank account into which the other checks had also gone, and from which money was withdrawn soon afterward. They supplied a traceable financial path, but not, by themselves, a complete account of the path beyond the withdrawals.

Bernstein left the room at seven in the evening and hurried to a lobby pay phone to call Bob Woodward. He dictated the fifth check’s particulars, then returned to his hotel to find out who Dahlberg was. The first inquiries yielded little: the Boca Raton bank had no immediate answer, the police supplied an emergency contact, and bank officers named Thomas did not remember the transaction. The bank president knew Dahlberg only slightly—as the owner of a winter home in Boca Raton and a director of a Fort Lauderdale bank—and directed the inquiry onward to that bank’s president, James Collins. The search for the person named on the check therefore began with an unusually specific paper trail but no ready explanation of the transaction.

Dahlberg’s Account and the Deadline

Woodward eventually reached Dahlberg. At first, Dahlberg said he did not know what had happened to the check and that he turned all his money over to the committee. He acknowledged the check was his, declined to discuss it, and hung up. Minutes later he called back, explaining that he had hesitated because he was unsure Woodward really worked for The Washington Post. Once the reporter’s identity was settled, Dahlberg said the $25,000 represented contributions he had collected as the campaign’s Midwest finance chairman.

Dahlberg then supplied the crucial next link in the account: at a committee meeting in Washington, he had handed the check either to the committee treasurer, Hugh Sloan, or to Maurice Stans. Stans was Nixon’s chief fundraiser and the committee’s finance chairman. Dahlberg’s qualification mattered. He identified the people to whom he believed he had delivered the check, but could not say which of the two had received it. His account connected the check to the campaign’s financial operation without resolving every step between collection, delivery, deposit, and withdrawal.

The timing made the call immediately consequential. It was 9:30 p.m., an hour before the deadline for the second edition. Woodward began typing a story describing the cashier’s check as apparently intended for Nixon’s campaign chest and reporting its deposit in Barker’s account. The last page reached Barry Sussman just at deadline. Sussman put down his pen and pipe and told Woodward, “We’ve never had a story like this.” The remark registered the change in scale: a burglary investigation that had been met with denials now had a bank record and a contributor’s account tying campaign money to one of the arrested men’s accounts.

From a Financial Link to a Political Test

Woodward called Clark MacGregor, who had succeeded John Mitchell as Nixon’s campaign manager, and told him what the paper had learned. The disclosure undercut the committee’s claims of noninvolvement. Six weeks earlier, Mitchell had publicly affirmed the committee’s dedication to the traditional electoral process; now the available facts showed that money collected for the campaign had entered Barker’s account. That contradiction did not itself establish the full chain of authorization, but it made the campaign’s broad protestations harder to sustain.

The check also became one piece of a widening investigation into the committee’s secret fund. A later Washington Post account, based on further reporting, said that several of Mitchell’s principal assistants controlled funds in a special committee account, that more than $300,000 was earmarked for sensitive political projects, and that records relating to the account had been destroyed. It also reported that Sloan’s resignation followed his suspicions about Watergate. Those disclosures extended the inquiry beyond the single check: the Dahlberg document had offered a concrete financial connection, while later reporting examined the people, accounts, and records surrounding the fund. When Sloan described how he had obtained authorization for expenditures, he said that he had telephoned Mitchell at the Justice Department and that Mitchell told him to release the money. This later account sharpened questions about authority, but should not be confused with what the check itself proved.

The first public response to the secret-fund reporting was strikingly muted. The New York Times did not mention the stories the next morning; neither the television networks nor most newspapers carried them. Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott dismissed Watergate as a concern mainly for George McGovern and the media. The Post’s reporting also drew categorical denials: a committee spokesman called its sources a fountain of misinformation, while other outlets emphasized Robert Mardian’s rejection of the story. These responses showed that producing documentary evidence and an on-record account did not ensure immediate attention or agreement about what the evidence meant.

The disclosure’s durable force came from that combination of precision and incompleteness. The amount, date, bank, check number, payee, deposit, and withdrawals could be set beside Dahlberg’s account of collecting and delivering the contribution. Together they made the campaign connection concrete and forced a new political question: how had money collected for Nixon’s reelection reached an account used by a Watergate burglar? The check did not answer every question, but it changed the terms of the inquiry from a dispute over denials to an investigation of a traceable flow of funds.