Indictment of the Watergate Seven

The Indictment of the Watergate Seven was the federal grand jury’s September 15, 1972, charging of E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and the five men arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17. Each faced as many as eight counts involving conspiracy, burglary, and violations of the federal statute against electronic interception of oral communications. The charges marked a formal legal response to the break-in, but they did not resolve its political purpose or identify who had authorized or sponsored it. For The Washington Post, that gap made the indictments less an ending than a test of what the investigation had chosen to pursue.

Charges and the Questions Left Open

The grand jury returned the indictments late on September 15. The Post reported that the charges did not touch the central questions about the purpose or sponsorship of the alleged espionage. The distinction mattered: the indictment addressed the break-in and its alleged participants, while leaving unresolved whether the operation connected to a larger political effort or to officials above those charged.

Attorney General Richard Kleindienst presented the indictments as the culmination of an intensive and objective investigation that had reached cities across the United States and foreign countries. His public description emphasized the breadth of the inquiry. The Post’s account, by contrast, stressed what the charging document omitted. The two descriptions placed the same outcome in opposing frames: as the completion of a thorough investigation, and as a set of charges that had stopped short of the questions most consequential to the political scandal.

The Evidence Against the Measure of the Investigation

At The Washington Post, the indictments sharpened an existing question about the government’s access to financial evidence. Why, the reporters and editors asked, were the $89,000 remaining from the Mexican checks, Kenneth H. Dahlberg’s $25,000 cashier’s check, and the slush fund associated with Maurice Stans absent from the indictment? The figures had a concrete paper trail: the Dahlberg check was deposited with four Mexican checks, bringing the deposit to $114,000; later, $25,000 was withdrawn, followed by separate withdrawals of the remaining $89,000. That transaction did not by itself establish who had authorized the espionage, but it made the omission from the charges difficult for the newsroom to treat as incidental.

The question also concerned testimony. Bernstein asked a Justice Department official how the limited indictment squared with information from Hugh Sloan and The Bookkeeper. The evidence they had provided, the reporters understood, linked the fund in Stans’s safe to the bugging operation and placed control of the money with assistants to John Mitchell. The official initially responded evasively, then confirmed that the government had this information, including the assertions of both witnesses. The Post therefore was not simply asking whether investigators possessed the same leads as the newspaper; it had received confirmation that important parts of its account were already known to the government.

That confirmation complicated the official claim of investigative completeness. The Post considered publishing an accusation that the government had ignored evidence, but the official insisted that investigators had all the facts and that the newspaper was not supplying anything new. He described the investigation as, for the present, at rest, and said it seemed highly unlikely to be reopened. The exchange established the immediate consequence of the indictments for the reporters: the official process had reached a stopping point even as the central questions remained alive in their reporting.

A Case Set Against a Wider Pattern

The reporters’ doubts rested on a growing body of testimony and fragmentary disclosures from inside the Committee for the Re-election of the President. In nighttime visits to committee employees, Bernstein encountered fear as well as silence: one employee trembled and pleaded for him to leave before others saw him; another said she wanted to help, then burst into tears. These were not testimony about the grand jury’s precise decisions, but they conveyed the pressure surrounding the information the reporters were trying to assemble.

The Bookkeeper, who had worked for Hugh Sloan and was later promoted to work for Stans, told Bernstein that people had lied to the grand jury before it knew what questions to ask. She also said that Sally Harmony and others had lied. Her account did not specify everything concealed, but it reinforced the concern that the formal record could be incomplete even when witnesses and investigators had encountered relevant information. Sloan, for his part, said he had left because he suspected matters were worse than they appeared. He described the message within the organization not as an explicit order to lie, but as a repeated call to hold ranks and keep the ship together.

The financial evidence likewise reached beyond the particular charges. In a later report, The Washington Post said that funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by principal assistants of John Mitchell and kept in a special Committee for the Re-election of the President account. The account contained more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects; G. Gordon Liddy had received money from it, records relating to the account had been destroyed, and Sloan’s resignation had followed his suspicions about Watergate. Taken together, those details gave the indictment’s narrow scope a continuing significance: the charged burglary could not, on its own, account for the funding and organizational questions that the reporting was uncovering.

Aftermath and Significance

The indictment did not end the Post’s investigation, nor did it settle the dispute over whether the federal inquiry had gone far enough. Instead, its omissions became a point of comparison: the grand jury had charged the alleged burglars and conspirators, while reporters continued tracing the money, testimony, and links to campaign officials. Subsequent disclosures further widened the account. Jeb Stuart Magruder later told federal prosecutors that John Mitchell and White House counsel John Dean had approved and helped plan the bugging operation, and that Mitchell and Dean later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. Those were later allegations, not findings contained in the September indictments, but they underscore how far the unresolved question of sponsorship extended beyond the charges announced that day.

The event’s importance lies in the contrast between legal action and explanatory reach. The seven men were formally charged under statutes addressing conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping; the indictment did not identify the political purpose or sponsorship of the espionage. With government officials saying that the case was at rest while confirming the existence of evidence the Post considered central, the indictments became both a milestone in the prosecution and a sign of how much remained outside its public account.