Washington Post publishes the Haldeman secret-fund story

The Washington Post publishes the Haldeman secret-fund story at the moment its Watergate investigation reaches the President’s chief of staff. The article’s decisive new claim was that H. R. Haldeman was the fifth person who controlled campaign funds for political espionage and sabotage. That finding dramatically raised the political stakes, but the story also became a test of verification: its sourcing appeared to converge on Haldeman, then Hugh Sloan’s lawyer publicly denied that Sloan had implicated him in grand-jury testimony.

Background: silence, pressure, and the fund

The story emerged from months of efforts to understand the campaign committee’s finances and the people who controlled them. In August, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward began visiting Committee for the Re-election of the President employees at home after work. Their roster of staff names, telephone extensions, and office floors helped them infer who worked near whom and who reported to whom, but it could not make frightened employees talk. One worker pleaded with Bernstein to leave before others saw him; another said she wanted to help, then burst into tears. The visits made the atmosphere around the committee tangible: employees described pressure, fear, and a reluctance to speak.

A former bookkeeper who had worked for Hugh Sloan offered a guarded account of the committee’s internal climate. She said she had been called before the grand jury early, when people had already lied and investigators did not yet know what to ask. She also said that Sally Harmony and others had lied. The bookkeeper had moved from Sloan’s office to a position under Maurice Stans after Sloan left, in a period when employees who were considered worrying had received promotions. Her account did not establish what had been concealed, but it reinforced the reporters’ suspicion that the available public record did not capture the full story.

Sloan supplied a more direct path into the fund’s authorization. He had left because he suspected matters were worse than the explanations then being offered, but his lawyers advised him against speaking publicly about his role as Nixon campaign treasurer. He said no one had expressly ordered him not to talk; the message had instead been “Hold ranks,” or “Keep the ship together.” He acknowledged that interpreting this as an instruction to lie was not unreasonable. His caution mattered: he was willing to describe the system, but he was also exposed to possible civil litigation.

Sloan described a routine process that had once seemed unremarkable within a campaign budget exceeding $50 million. When asked for money, he would telephone John Mitchell at the Justice Department; Mitchell would tell him to release it. Those calls began in 1971. Mitchell had initially been the sole person authorized to approve expenditures from the fund, and authority was later passed to others, including Jeb Magruder. The account implicated a chain of authorization reaching into the Justice Department while Mitchell was Attorney General. It also gave the reporters a basis for asking who else had controlled the money, without by itself proving that every person with authority knew the details of each operation.

The claim and its verification

On the afternoon of October 24, Bernstein and Woodward wrote the Haldeman story. Its central addition was narrow but consequential: Haldeman, the President’s chief of staff, was identified as the fifth person who had controlled the campaign’s funds for political espionage and sabotage. The significance lay not in a new accounting of the fund, but in the office held by the person newly named. As the President’s principal surrogate, Haldeman’s involvement raised the question of whether covert campaign activity could have proceeded without Richard Nixon’s knowledge or approval. That was an inference with immense consequences, not a fact the article could simply assume.

Before publication, the reporters reviewed their sources again. Deep Throat, Sloan, and a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent formed the basis of their confidence. In response to editorial scrutiny, Bob Woodward agreed to attribute Haldeman’s control not only to accounts of sworn grand-jury testimony but also to federal investigators. The same sources supported adding that all five people who controlled the fund had been questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The corroboration strengthened the article’s sourcing, while keeping the claim tied to what witnesses and investigators were said to have established.

Ben Bradlee treated the story as a major escalation. At a 7:00 p.m. meeting, he questioned the reporters about what each source had actually said and pressed them to prove the allegation before it appeared. He later explained that he believed the story might be right but did not want the paper to target Haldeman before it could substantiate the case. That distinction—between believing a conclusion and being able to prove it—shaped the final hours of the reporting. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein told their editors they had no remaining doubts, and Harry Rosenfeld’s proposed attribution to federal investigators was incorporated before the story went to the composing room.

The White House was given an opportunity to respond. Bob Woodward read the story to deputy press secretary Gerald Warren and asked the office to confirm or deny it. Warren called back an hour later: “Your inquiry is based on misinformation because the reference to Bob Haldeman is untrue.” Asked what that meant, he offered no explanation beyond saying that it was all the White House had to say. The denial was included, but it did not supply evidence against the article’s sourcing or clarify which part of the report the White House disputed.

The public contradiction

The story’s confidence was shaken the next morning. Hugh Sloan and his lawyer were entering a law office where Sloan was to give a deposition when a television crew asked about the Washington Post’s account of his grand-jury testimony. Sloan’s lawyer answered: “Our answer to that is an unequivocal no. We did not—Mr. Sloan did not implicate Mr. Haldeman in that testimony at all.” The denial directly challenged the article’s most important attribution. The Washington Post reporters and editors, who had believed their sources were aligned, now had to confront a public contradiction from the person whose testimony had been presented as a foundation for the story.

The episode did not erase the other reporting: the agent and Deep Throat had been treated as independent checks, and the investigation into the fund’s authorization had produced evidence about Mitchell’s calls and the transfer of authority to other campaign officials. But the public denial changed the evidentiary situation. The reporters’ confidence in a convergent account could not substitute for resolving what Sloan had actually said. The scene also revealed the particular risk of a story whose supporting evidence was largely hidden from readers: a forceful claim could reach the front page while the people named in its sourcing remained unable, or unwilling, to confirm it publicly.

Stakes and aftermath

The Haldeman story belonged to a wider confrontation over whether the Watergate investigation would remain confined to the burglars or reach the political operation and the White House. Earlier, Democratic Party chairman O’Brien had sued the Committee for the Re-election of the President for $1 million, citing Charles Colson’s potential involvement and arguing that the developing facts pointed toward the White House. Later, as the White House selected the Washington Post for attack, the confrontation became a struggle over credibility as well as evidence. The Haldeman article made that struggle especially acute by placing the President’s chief of staff, rather than a lower-level operative, at the center of the fund’s control.

The book places the story within a longer reckoning, not as a single report that settled the question of presidential responsibility. In his April 30 address, Nixon accepted responsibility as the person at the top, acknowledged that efforts had been made to conceal facts, and credited the grand jury, prosecutors, Judge John Sirica, and a vigorous free press with bringing them to light. The following day, press secretary Ronald Ziegler apologized to the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein for earlier criticism of their reporting, saying, “When we are wrong, we are wrong, as we were in that case.” Those later acknowledgments did not retroactively resolve the specific dispute over Sloan’s testimony. They did, however, mark how far the controversy had moved from the White House’s early dismissal of Watergate as a “third-rate burglary attempt”: the paper’s reporting had become part of the public process by which the administration’s account was tested and its responsibility confronted.