Time Weekly

Time Weekly was a news magazine whose reporting brought information from Federal Bureau of Investigation files and the administration’s domestic wiretapping campaign into the public record. During the Watergate controversy, its coverage offered consequential evidence about the political operation while distinguishing documented links involving Dwight Chapin and Herbert Kalmbach from a claim about H. R. Haldeman that it said could not be substantiated with hard evidence.

Reporting on the Political Operation

Time Weekly had developed information as damaging as The Washington Post’s, but the White House chose The Washington Post as the target of its counterattack. That choice gave the magazine a distinct position in the dispute: its reporting could reinforce the substance of the allegations even as the administration concentrated its public assault on another newspaper.

A Time Weekly press release said that information from Federal Bureau of Investigation files showed Dwight Chapin had admitted hiring Donald Segretti to disrupt the Democratic campaign. It also reported that Chapin had told investigators that Herbert Kalmbach, Richard Nixon’s personal attorney, set Segretti’s payment, and that Kalmbach had admitted making payments to him. These reported admissions connected a White House aide and the President’s personal lawyer to the sabotage operation through specific hiring and funding claims.

The same release drew a boundary around a separate allegation. Time Weekly said that no hard evidence could be developed to support The Washington Post’s charge that H. R. Haldeman controlled a fund used for spying and disruption. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein regarded the magazine’s access to Federal Bureau of Investigation files as unquestioned. Their account of the release led with the Chapin–Kalmbach information and Time Weekly’s conclusion about Haldeman, then reported that Hugh Sloan had been asked whether Haldeman was authorized to approve fund payments. The story included Sloan’s statement that his denial had been strictly limited, preserving the distinction between what the magazine’s information supported and what remained unproved.

The Leak-Investigation Report

Two weeks later, Time Weekly published the first detailed account of the Nixon administration’s campaign to trace news leaks by tapping reporters’ and government officials’ telephones. According to its report, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had tapped the phones of half a dozen reporters and twice as many White House and government aides in the name of domestic security. The taps began in 1969 under a reluctant J. Edgar Hoover and continued under acting director L. Patrick Gray III until the Supreme Court decision of June 19, 1972.

Time Weekly reported that Hoover had permitted agents to install taps only after John Mitchell authorized each one in writing. It also said that, when the administration tried to force Hoover to retire in 1971, he resisted by threatening to disclose details of the wiretapping campaign. In this account, surveillance was not presented as an isolated measure: the written authorizations and Hoover’s reported threat placed the leak investigation within a chain of administrative decisions and political pressure.

Verification and Immediate Consequences

On February 26, the day the wiretapping report appeared on newsstands, Carl Bernstein spent the morning at the Justice Department trying to confirm its details. He moved from office to office without success and returned to The Washington Post by cab. The account gives no confirmation from those visits; instead, it records the reporting difficulty that followed Time Weekly’s publication and the sudden arrival of a separate institutional threat.

As Bernstein entered the Post lobby, news aide Laura Kiernan grabbed his arm and pulled him back, warning that someone upstairs had a subpoena for him and his notes. Ben Bradlee did not want Bernstein to go up and receive it. Bernstein ran up seven flights to the accounting department, called Bradlee, and told him where the reporting files were so they could be moved to safety. Bob Woodward was away in the Caribbean, but the two reporters had already agreed that turning over notes or identifying sources in a grand-jury proceeding or judicial hearing was out of the question. The subpoena was not described as a consequence of Time Weekly’s report; its arrival that day instead shows the legal and reporting pressures surrounding the wider investigation.

Place in the Press Conflict

The magazine’s disclosures appeared amid a struggle over whether allegations of political espionage would be treated as a distant, amateurish intrigue or as a matter reaching toward the Oval Office. A New York Times analysis described the White House strategy as denouncing newspapers that published the charges without directly discussing them. It attributed that approach partly to the administration’s belief that a denial could give the allegations greater visibility, and partly to its expectation that much of the public distrusted the Eastern press as elitist, anti-Nixon, and favorable to George McGovern.

The contrast between Time Weekly’s reporting and the White House’s decision to target The Washington Post reveals how the controversy involved both evidence and control over attention. Time Weekly’s account supplied concrete claims about hiring, payments, and surveillance; its caution about the Haldeman allegation also marked the limits of what its reported files could establish. Together, those features made the magazine part of the expanding evidentiary record without erasing the difference between a documented lead and an allegation for which it said hard evidence was lacking.