Larry Young

Larry Young was a former fraternity brother and friend of Donald Segretti whose recollections helped The Washington Post connect the campaign’s political sabotage operation to figures close to the White House. Young did not describe himself as a participant in Segretti’s activities; his importance lay in what Segretti had confided to him, and in his eventual willingness to put those accounts on the record. His evidence gave the reporters a more specific chain of relationships, instructions, money, and planned disruption than they had previously been able to establish.

Identity and Connection to Segretti

Young had known Segretti since their undergraduate days at the University of Southern California. The two were expected to form a firm called Young and Segretti, placing Young close enough to hear about Segretti’s political work, though the evidence does not describe him as carrying out that work himself. Segretti spoke to him about his connections to the Nixon campaign and, over time, disclosed fragments of an operation he otherwise guarded closely.

When The Washington Post began pursuing the connection, Robert Meyers found Young in Los Angeles. The timing was significant: Woodward was reading the paper’s October 12 story about the Muskie campaign when Meyers called with the lead. Young’s information immediately changed the reporters’ understanding of Segretti. They had not previously realized that his operation was tied to Hunt’s plans.

Hunt, Chapin, and the Chain of Instructions

Young told the reporters that Segretti said the FBI had discovered his identity through telephone records showing repeated calls from Hunt to Segretti. Hunt, according to Segretti’s account, gave him instructions, although Young did not know which particular events the instructions concerned. He specifically distinguished these instructions from the Watergate bugging operation: Segretti had not connected them to the bugging.

Young also believed Segretti had met with Hunt and Dwight Chapin. Segretti had spoken of going to Miami to see the key people he had previously contacted by phone, and Young understood that Hunt was involved and that Chapin was the general organizer. Segretti repeatedly referred to needing to speak with DC. Young initially thought this meant the District of Columbia, then concluded that Segretti meant Chapin. Young’s account thus supplied reporters with a possible route from the field operative to the President’s appointments secretary, while preserving the distinction between what Segretti had reportedly said and what Young himself could establish.

The money trail was another part of the account. Segretti told Young that he worked for a wealthy California Republican lawyer with national connections and was paid through a lawyer’s special trust fund. He said the lawyer was a high-placed friend of the President and that he had been instructed to protect the lawyer’s identity. Woodward wondered whether the lawyer was Herbert Kalmbach, the President’s personal lawyer, but Young said Segretti had never identified Kalmbach to him and that Young himself did not know who Kalmbach was. The connection was therefore a reporter’s inference, not a name supplied by Young.

Proposed Disruption and Political Mailings

Young recounted a plan Segretti described in connection with Miami. Segretti thought he had been asked—Young did not know by whom—to recruit and organize Cubans for an assault on the Doral Beach Hotel, with the attack made to appear to have been carried out by supporters of George McGovern. Segretti refused, Young said, because he considered the proposal blatantly illegal and violent. The account brought the possibility of physical provocation into the story, beyond the deceptive political tactics the reporters had already been investigating.

Segretti also described what he called political hijinks as part of the President’s re-election drive, intended to create trouble for Democratic candidates. One example was a scurrilous letter or pamphlet to be mailed to members of the Democratic State Central Committee in California. It attacked Hubert Humphrey, blamed him for the war, called him a two-time loser, and was designed to look as though it came from McGovern supporters. Segretti told Young that others were doing similar work and characterized himself as a small cog among many. Young’s recollections therefore presented the operation not as a single isolated trick but as activity involving multiple people and targets.

Panic, the FBI, and the Grand Jury

Young remembered Segretti calling in a panic in August, about two weeks before the Republican convention, after the FBI had visited him. Segretti feared that he would be left exposed without protection or guidance. He had expected to be warned in advance and briefed on what to say; he would not tell Young who was supposed to brief him, only that they were the people he worked for. The episode suggested that Segretti believed someone within the operation would prepare him for contact with investigators—and that he feared being sacrificed when that expectation failed.

After Segretti was summoned before the grand jury, he again tried to reach his people in Miami Beach. He was more alarmed than after the FBI visit and remained especially concerned about Chapin’s name. Around midnight, he called Young to say he was going to Miami. He would not disclose whom he had contacted, but said he had been told to come. There, according to Segretti, he was shown reports of both FBI interrogations and told to tell the truth before the grand jury, not to commit perjury, and not to worry.

Segretti later told Young that the grand-jury questioning began with innocuous matters, including questions about Hunt, and did not initially address the lawyer or the people for whom Segretti worked. A woman on the jury then asked who paid him and whom he knew on the White House staff. Segretti said names emerged, especially Chapin’s, and that he gave the grand jury the name of the West Coast lawyer who paid him. Young’s account led Bernstein to conclude that the Justice Department had information about the involvement of the President’s appointments secretary and personal lawyer but had not followed it up. That was the reporters’ conclusion from Young’s description of what Segretti said, not a firsthand account by Young of the grand-jury proceedings.

From Confidential Account to Published Evidence

Young initially spoke off the record. He said he would consider making his account public if he received legal advice that doing so would not violate attorney-client privilege. He also clarified that Segretti had never retained him as a lawyer and had approached him as a friend. Bernstein, Woodward, and Meyers stayed in daily contact with him while the reporters tested the details and sought to establish which claims could be attributed directly to Segretti.

Young’s account included Segretti’s description of Hunt as a person he knew under an assumed name. Segretti said the phone number that had surfaced in the FBI’s inquiry belonged to Hunt, and described Hunt as speaking in a whispery, conspiratorial manner. Young also described Segretti’s closeness to Chapin: in his impression, they were as close as good friends, had maintained contact over the years, and Segretti had called Chapin at home. At the same time, Young acknowledged that Segretti had been secretive with him.

On October 13, Young agreed to go on the record. Woodward reviewed the details once more, pressing him on whether he could be mistaken or exaggerating Segretti’s dealings with Hunt and Chapin; Young maintained that he was not. Meyers then obtained a sworn statement affirming that the reporters’ interviews accurately represented what Segretti had told him. This gave the forthcoming story a foundation of named, attributable evidence that the White House could not dismiss simply as anonymous-source reporting. Young’s role in the investigation was thus both personal and structural: a friend’s account opened a route into Segretti’s network, and his decision to verify that account publicly helped turn that route into publishable evidence.