Howard Baker

Howard Baker enters the account not through a direct encounter, but through a serious and carefully qualified allegation about his relationship to the White House. A memo attributed to Deep Throat reported that John Dean believed Baker was helping the White House and reporting back to it; a source close to Dean later confirmed that Dean held this view, not that the alleged reporting had been independently verified.

Position in the Watergate Inquiry

Baker is identified as a senator discussed after the Watergate committee had been formed. The account provides no direct statement from Baker and does not describe his response to the allegation. His presence in the narrative is therefore tied to what others said about his position, rather than to a recorded action or public declaration of his own.

The Allegation in Deep Throat’s Memo

In notes taken from a memo supplied by Deep Throat, Woodward typed that Dean had spoken with Baker after the committee was established and that Baker was, in Dean’s view, fully aligned with the White House and reporting to it. The claim suggested a channel between a senator involved in the new inquiry and the administration under scrutiny. As presented, however, it was a report of Dean’s assessment, not direct evidence of what Baker had done.

The Source’s Confirmation and Its Limits

The memo’s claims were tested against information from an associate of Dean whom Woodward and Bernstein met over a long lunch. The associate confirmed most of the memo’s major points and specifically confirmed that Dean believed Baker was helping the White House. That confirmation strengthened the evidence that Dean held the suspicion; it did not, in the account given, establish that Baker actually reported to the White House or independently demonstrate the nature of his dealings with it.

Narrative Significance

The allegation surfaced amid doubts within The Washington Post about whether the accumulating Watergate material was plausible: a meeting on the paper’s roof garden ended without resolution, and the reporters then sought a source who might know what Dean had said. Baker’s brief appearance illustrates the distinction the reporting had to preserve between a claim about a political relationship and proof of conduct. The episode adds a potentially consequential allegation to the widening account of White House efforts to manage the Watergate crisis, while leaving Baker’s actual role unresolved.