The Bookkeeper

The Bookkeeper was an unnamed accountant at the Committee for the Re-election of the President whose account of a destroyed fund ledger offered reporters a rare view into how campaign money had been tracked and distributed. She described a single sheet recording names and payments, identified senior figures by initials, and explained why she had initially understood the fund as ordinary political spending. Her testimony placed intimate bookkeeping detail alongside a larger pattern of silence and concealment.

Identity and Position

Bernstein found the Bookkeeper on September 14, after hearing that she knew a great deal and suspecting that the woman who had gone to prosecutors might be the same person. She worked for Maurice Stans. When Bernstein knocked at a small suburban house, the woman who answered said he wanted her sister; the sister, the Bookkeeper, then came into the room. Bernstein had imagined a gray-haired woman in her fifties, but she was much younger. Recognizing the reporter, she initially asked him to leave.

Her career had brought her close to the committee’s financial operations. She had worked for Hugh Sloan, and after Sloan quit she was promoted to work for Stans. She said that a few employees who caused concern had received promotions. The account does not establish why she was promoted or whether her own promotion was intended to influence her; it records her placing that change within a group of employees whose knowledge worried others.

The Meeting with Bernstein

The conversation shifted from rejection to disclosure. The Bookkeeper observed that the reporters had come close to home, then explained that she had run totals for the people with an adding machine and what she called a deft hand. She described herself as an accountant and apolitical, and said she had not thought she had done anything wrong. Yet she also felt implicated in something rotten at the committee. Her unease was not presented as proof of personal wrongdoing: it arose from the conflict between her limited bookkeeping role and the disturbing pattern she believed the records disclosed.

She defined her loyalties as allegiance to Stans, Richard Nixon’s reelection, and the truth. Bernstein asked about Stans and whether he might be made a fall guy for John Mitchell. During the exchange, the Bookkeeper’s hands shook; her sister offered little indication of what she thought. Bernstein delayed taking notes, promised that nothing unverifiable would be published, and eventually took out his notebook. These details show the reporter negotiating the conditions of a fragile interview, while the Bookkeeper weighed disclosure against loyalty and exposure.

The Fund and Its Destroyed Record

The Bookkeeper said she had not understood the money to be a security fund before the June 17 Watergate break-in. She had regarded it as a general political fund that was not discussed openly, perhaps used for entertaining wealthy donors, while assuming its uses were legal. When Bernstein tested a possible explanation involving $350,000 in dinners, she replied that the money had not been distributed in one lump and that she had worked out what happened by adding the figures.

Her most concrete account concerned the record itself. It was a single lined sheet, the only record, and it had been destroyed. About half the page contained roughly fifteen names, each with an amount beside it. She had seen the sheet more than once and updated it whenever money was disbursed; the amounts kept increasing. Sloan, she said, knew the whole story and had handed out the money. Her description joined three distinct parts of the process: an accumulating list of recipients, her own repeated updates, and Sloan’s role in distribution. The destroyed page could no longer be checked, but her account explained what it had contained and how she had encountered it.

What She Could Identify—and What She Withheld

The Bookkeeper distinguished between the roughly fifteen names on the sheet and the six people she thought were involved. Rather than provide a complete list, she directed Bernstein to isolate the names through the General Accounting Office report, adding that she thought they had all appeared before the grand jury and that some had been named in the press, though not necessarily in connection with the fund. She identified Mitchell’s principal assistants as the top echelon and named Jeb Magruder as one of them. When Bernstein tried to narrow the possibilities through initials, she gave only L, M, and P, then stopped.

She also addressed the committee’s response to the Watergate Grand Jury. She had been called before it very early, she said, but nobody knew what questions to ask because people had already lied. On Sally Harmony, she said they had not discussed the matter, but that Harmony and others had lied. The Bookkeeper did not specify precisely what was false or identify every person involved; her careful limits are part of the evidence, not gaps that can be filled by conjecture.

The encounter makes her important less as a complete expositor than as a link between records and people. She supplied the structure of the missing ledger, described the routine behind its updates, and pointed reporters toward senior campaign aides without naming them outright. Her account also reveals the tension governing her position: she called herself apolitical and professed loyalty to both the campaign and the truth, while acknowledging a fund whose purpose she had misunderstood and a committee where, in her view, people had lied. The surviving story preserves both what she could establish and the boundary at which she chose to stop.