The Washington Post—Richard Nixon

The relationship between The Washington Post and Richard Nixon became a contest not only over Watergate’s facts but over the language used to define them. Nixon’s administration repeatedly portrayed the paper’s reporting as hearsay, innuendo, and an assault on the presidency; the Post continued to publish evidence linking the break-in and related political operations to people close to the White House. The confrontation moved from an early effort to minimize the burglary, through public attacks on the paper and disputes over presidential investigation, to Nixon’s acknowledgment of responsibility and a later attempt by his chief of staff to persuade the Post’s publisher to halt its reporting.

Minimizing the Break-In and Challenging the Paper

At the outset, the White House treated the Watergate break-in as an incident that should not expand into a larger political story. In Key Biscayne, press secretary Ronald Ziegler called it a “third-rate burglary attempt” and said it did not merit further comment. The formulation reduced the event’s apparent scale before the investigation had established how far its connections reached. The next day, the Democratic Party chairman filed a civil suit against the Committee for the Re-election of the President, citing the potential involvement of Charles Colson and arguing that developing facts led toward the White House. The suit sharpened the conflict: what the White House presented as an isolated burglary was already being publicly framed as a question about political responsibility at the campaign’s highest levels.

The confrontation became explicit in October, after reporting on Dwight Chapin’s connection to Donald Segretti brought the story closer to the Oval Office. The White House had damaging information of its own available to Time, yet the Post was selected as the target of its response. At a briefing, Ziegler said Richard Nixon was concerned about the reporting techniques, describing the stories as based on hearsay and innuendo and as relying on guilt by association. He denied that a link between Watergate and the White House existed, and characterized the paper’s continuing charges as unsubstantiated. The response disputed both the Post’s evidence and its right to draw connections from it, recasting investigative reporting as partisan opposition.

The Post’s credibility became a public stake in its own right. A statement attacking the paper accused it of using anonymous sources and scare headlines to create the appearance of a White House connection that investigations had supposedly disproved. It also charged the Post with applying a double standard to alleged campaign disruptions. Across the country, newspapers reported the White House’s anger; in the account of the episode, this effort to make the administration’s credibility answer the paper’s had the contrary effect of giving the Post’s allegations greater currency.

Evidence Against the Language of Denial

The dispute over the Post’s methods became harder to sustain when the New York Times published telephone-record evidence on October 18. The records showed that a telephone or credit card used by Segretti had been used for at least half a dozen calls to the White House and to Chapin’s home, and for at least twenty-one calls to Howard Hunt’s home and office. The records did not by themselves establish every allegation about the political operation, but they offered documentary evidence against dismissing the reporting wholesale as rumor. Woodward and Bernstein encountered the front-page report in the Post newsroom and welcomed the corroboration, even as competitive instincts gave way to relief that the public record had advanced.

A later Post story tied testimony to a secret fund and to H. R. Haldeman. Ziegler answered with an extended denunciation, calling the reporting “shabby journalism” and “absurdity.” He said the term secret fund had been developed by the Post on the basis of anonymous sources and hearsay, and invoked John Dean’s statement that no such fund existed. The exchange revealed the competing frames at their sharpest: the Post treated testimony and sources as grounds for reporting a concealed political fund; the White House treated the paper’s anonymity and terminology as evidence that the story was irresponsible. The administration’s denial did not end the conflict over what the sources and testimony meant.

The struggle also concerned the flow of information from inside the campaign organization. Post reporters found employees unwilling to speak and describing intense pressure. A former campaign treasurer, Hugh Sloan, said he had left because he suspected matters were worse than the public account suggested, but that his lawyers had advised him against speaking publicly because his words could be used in civil litigation. He described the message he had received not as a direct order to lie but as an injunction to “Hold ranks” and “Keep the ship together.” His account suggested how silence could be maintained without an explicit command, while the paper’s reporting sought to assemble disclosures from people constrained by legal and organizational risks.

From Accusation to Presidential Responsibility

The relationship shifted in public tone on April 30. In a televised address, Nixon said that there had been an effort to conceal facts from the public and from him, announced the resignations of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and rejected the idea that he could simply blame aides to whom campaign responsibilities had been delegated. He stated that the person at the top must bear responsibility and accepted that responsibility in the presidency. He also credited the system that had brought the facts to light, including a determined grand jury, honest prosecutors, Judge John Sirica, and a vigorous free press. The address did not erase the earlier attacks on the Post, but it publicly recognized the press as part of the process that had exposed the crisis.

The following day, Ziegler apologized to the Post and to its reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for his earlier criticism of their Watergate reporting. He acknowledged that he had been overenthusiastic in his comments and conceded that the White House had been wrong in that case. The reversal was significant because it addressed not merely a disputed detail but the administration’s treatment of the reporting itself. Woodward later called Ziegler to thank him. The apology and Nixon’s speech marked a change in the public posture, though not the end of the underlying conflict.

Continued Conflict over Investigation and Publication

The administration continued to contest the reach of the investigation and the Post’s accounts. When the paper reported that prosecutors believed questioning Nixon could be justified, Ziegler said the President would not testify before the grand jury or the Senate committee, calling such testimony constitutionally inappropriate and an affront to the separation of powers. He also argued that reporting on the matter abused federal authority and invoked the legal secrecy of grand-jury proceedings. The White House asked Attorney General Elliot Richardson and special prosecutor Archibald Cox to find the sources; if an investigation was opened, the sources were not found. The episode extended the dispute from the accuracy of particular stories to the constitutional limits surrounding scrutiny of the president and the secrecy of the investigation.

By December 28, the conflict had reached the Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham. General Alexander Haig called her from San Clemente after two Post stories appeared on the front page. One reported that Nixon’s campaign to defend himself, known as Operation Candor, had been shut down and that two trusted advisers no longer believed in his innocence. The other said that the President’s lawyers had supplied attorneys for Haldeman and Ehrlichman with copies of evidence being submitted to the special prosecutor. Haig called the stories scurrilous, accused the paper of doing the country a disservice, and appealed to Graham to stop publishing such accounts.

The appeal exposed the continuing divide between the administration’s demands for restraint and the Post’s publication of evidence concerning the President’s defense and his former aides. Haig and Henry Kissinger had, for more than six months, urged Nixon to break with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson, the former aides under investigation. Nixon instead continued to meet and speak with them and built his legal defense in concert with them. Thus the relationship did not resolve into a simple sequence of denial followed by acknowledgment: even after Nixon publicly accepted responsibility and Ziegler apologized, the administration continued to challenge the paper’s reporting and to resist the implications of its disclosures.