The New York Times

The New York Times was a major reporting institution in the unfolding Watergate investigation, at once competing with The Washington Post and repeatedly strengthening the public record with its own sources, documents, and scoops. Its coverage helped move the story from isolated allegations toward documented connections among campaign operatives, secret money, the White House, and the effort to contain the damage. Its importance lay not simply in publishing parallel accounts, but in making new evidence visible when other outlets remained silent or official denials still framed the scandal as marginal.

Following the Calls and the Money

The New York Times reported that at least fifteen calls had been placed from Bernard Barker’s phones in Miami to the Committee for the Re-election of the President. More than half fell between March 15 and June 16, and went to a telephone in an office shared by G. Gordon Liddy and another lawyer. The disclosure brought a concrete communications trail into a story that had largely depended on tracing people and their affiliations. It also sent Carl Bernstein back to his telephone-company contacts, although he had misgivings about obtaining private call records. A source confirmed the calls already listed by The New York Times but could not provide a fuller account because Barker’s records had been subpoenaed by the Miami district attorney.

The newspaper’s financial reporting supplied another trail. While flying to Florida, Bernstein read its front-page report, datelined Mexico City, that traced $89,000 in Barker’s bank account to four cashier’s checks issued at Banco Internacional to Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre, a prominent Mexico City lawyer. The story attributed its information to sources close to the investigation. Bernstein suspected that its reporter, Walter Rugaber, had obtained the information in Miami before flying to Mexico City to file; that was Bernstein’s inference, not a fact established by the account. The report nevertheless put a specific sum, four checks, and a named recipient into public view, sharpening the question of how money connected to the Watergate operation had moved.

From Sparse Attention to National Coverage

The New York Times did not initially give the Washington Post’s secret-fund stories attention. The next morning, the Times did not mention them; neither did the television networks, and most newspapers did not follow. The contrast exposed how far the Post’s claims remained from a shared national agenda. When the Post later published its account of Donald Segretti’s approaches to political operatives and a wider campaign of espionage and sabotage, the Times responded quickly: its Washington bureau contacted Alex Shipley, Dixon, and Nixt, and each confirmed Segretti’s approaches. The Times’s late city edition placed its story at the bottom of page one, leading with Shipley’s account and summarizing the allegations of a nationwide campaign directed by the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

That report followed a broader shift in the story’s reach. The Post’s own story had gone out over the Washington Post–Los Angeles Times News Service wire, and more than half of its 220 domestic subscribers used it, with several placing it on page one. The Times’s independent calls and publication added confirmation beyond the original account. Its coverage therefore did not merely echo a rival’s report: it tested the allegations with people approached by Segretti and gave the claims a separate route into the national press.

Documents Against Denials

On October 18, The New York Times published telephone-record evidence that Donald Segretti’s telephone or credit card had been used for at least half a dozen calls to the White House and to Dwight Chapin’s home in Bethesda, Maryland. The same records linked Segretti’s phone or card to at least twenty-one calls to Howard Hunt’s home and office. For The Washington Post’s reporters, the front-page account was a welcome independent confirmation; for the White House, it was harder to dismiss the allegations as hearsay or innuendo. The following day, the Post placed both Ron Ziegler’s response and the Times’s findings on its front page, while Ziegler continued to evade questions about the reporting.

The Times also described the strategy behind the administration’s counterattack. White House officials, according to its analysis, attacked newspapers that published allegations without fully discussing the accusations themselves. The analysis identified two assumptions among Nixon’s inner circle: that the public regarded the alleged conspiracy as distant from the Oval Office, and that suspicion of supposedly partisan eastern media would blunt the newspapers’ claims. An unnamed White House aide expressed the same calculation more bluntly, saying the administration believed the public saw the eastern press as elitist, anti-Nixon, and pro-McGovern. In this account, the press attacks were not separate from the Watergate story; they were part of the effort to shape how much weight the public gave it.

Fund Disbursements and the Cover-Up

The Times’s coverage also supplied facts that complicated public claims about the campaign fund. After Clark MacGregor confirmed that the committee had a cash fund, The New York Times put its story on page one and added that sworn testimony from people connected with the Nixon committee showed $900,000 in cash disbursements from it. The figure materially enlarged the picture of the fund: it established not only that a cash pool existed, but that substantial sums had been paid out.

Later, Seymour Hersh of The New York Times reported that James McCord had testified that cash payoffs to the Watergate conspirators came directly from the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The disclosure supplied an inside account of the connection between the committee and the payments. Earlier, Hugh Sloan had told the Post reporters that the secret fund survived the arrests and that money had been transferred from Maurice Stans’s safe to Fred LaRue; they had not published those details because they could not confirm them or determine how the money was spent. McCord’s testimony changed the evidentiary picture by identifying a direct source for the hush payments. The Times’s scoop helped turn a long-standing suspicion—that the committee had bought the conspirators’ silence—into a claim attributed to testimony from within the operation.

The paper also reported on the continuing pressure surrounding the defendants. In a story by Hersh, it said the four Miami men were still being paid by persons not yet named, and that Bernard Barker had said John Mitchell knew of and encouraged the Watergate operation. Time magazine and Jack Anderson soon published related accounts of promised or delivered payments. The reporting eased the Post editors’ concern that publishing a story about Howard Hunt’s maneuvers would expose their reporters to a court order demanding disclosure of sources. The Times’s account thus affected not only what readers knew, but also the practical decisions facing another newsroom.

Reporting Beyond Watergate

The Times’s work extended into the related investigation of the Pentagon Papers leak. In early May, Bob Woodward and Bernstein decided to report that two Times reporters’ telephones had been wiretapped as part of the leak investigation. Deep Throat had previously supplied the reporters with the names Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, but the Post could not find a second source and withheld the names. The episode placed Times journalists among the people affected by the administration’s surveillance while showing the Post’s evidentiary threshold: even information from a confidential source was not enough to publish identifying details without independent confirmation.

The Times also continued to produce scoops that shaped the developing account of responsibility. It reported that John Mitchell had told associates he had heard proposals to bug Democrats at three meetings in 1972 and had rejected them, while expressing doubts about Jeb Magruder. A Mitchell associate confirmed the account to Bernstein, illustrating how anonymously attributed versions from associates had become a new reporting channel as Watergate figures faced legal and political pressure. Later, when the Times reported that Henry Kissinger had played a role in identifying aides as possible leakers, the Post followed with its own account a day afterward. Across these episodes, the Times’s relationship to the Post was competitive but consequential: its independent reporting confirmed, challenged, or extended what the other paper could establish, and the two newsrooms together made the scandal’s expanding network of evidence harder to contain.