Hugh Sloan

Hugh Sloan was the treasurer of Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, and his decision to leave the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP) became an early sign that the Watergate investigation reached beyond the men arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Young, cautious, and increasingly burdened by the consequences of his former job, he disclosed how campaign money had been authorized, who had managed the fund, and how officials pressed employees to maintain a united front. His evidence did not arrive all at once: it emerged through hesitation, correction, and eventually testimony, making Sloan’s changing willingness to speak part of the story itself.

Identity and Departure

Sloan was about thirty and served as treasurer of the CRP. The book presents him less as a public figure than as a campaign employee whose position gave him access to its financial operations. When Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sought him out after the discovery of the $25,000 cashier’s check made payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, Sloan had already left the committee. The check had been deposited with four Mexican checks, bringing the deposit to $114,000; some of the money was then withdrawn. At that stage the reporters were still trying to identify Dahlberg, and the check was a lead, not proof of what Sloan himself knew.

His departure attracted attention because it coincided with questions about the campaign’s secret finances. A CRP spokesman described the resignation as being for personal reasons unrelated to Watergate, citing Sloan’s ulcer and his pregnant wife. A campaign bookkeeper gave a sharply different account: she called Sloan a “sacrificial lamb,” said he had left because he saw what was happening and wanted no part of it, and said his wife had threatened to leave unless he stood up for what was right. Those accounts are not identical, and the book does not collapse them into a single explanation. Sloan himself told the reporters that he had suspected the worst and had left for that reason.

A Reluctant Source

The Washington Post’s reporting initially had to reach Sloan at home. After a story described the secret fund, Carl Bernstein visited him in the rain. Sloan left the door open as he spoke in the hallway, saying apologetically that he had not talked to the press. Bernstein argued that the new reporting had changed the situation: Sloan could help clear his own name and explain what the campaign’s cash payments meant. Sloan acknowledged that matters were worse than the story suggested, but did not immediately go on the record. His lawyers had advised against public statements that might be used against him in civil litigation arising from his role as campaign treasurer.

Sloan described the pressure on employees without claiming that anyone had given him an explicit order to lie. No one had told him in so many words not to speak, he said, but the message was always “Hold ranks” or “Keep the ship together.” When Bernstein asked whether that meant lying, Sloan said the reporters could draw their own conclusions and that it was not an unreasonable assumption. He identified Robert Mardian and Fred LaRue as officials chosen by John Mitchell to develop the committee’s response to the Watergate bugging; in Sloan’s description, they had “engineered the response.” He added that this did not mean they had devised a plan to come forward and tell the truth.

His guardedness was not simply a matter of public relations. Sloan said his lawyers feared that anything he said could be used in civil suits. Later, he described the practical cost of the unfolding scandal: he was out of work, nearly broke, still making car payments, and facing legal fees. His disclosures therefore came from a position of personal exposure, not from the safety of an official speaking for the campaign.

What the Fund Revealed

Sloan’s most consequential information concerned the chain of authority behind the campaign’s disbursements. He described an ordinary procedure that, within a campaign budget exceeding $50 million, had seemed insignificant at the time. When he was first approached for money, he simply telephoned Mitchell at the Department of Justice. Mitchell would tell him to release the funds. Sloan said such calls had begun in 1971. The reporters understood the implication: while serving as Attorney General, Mitchell had authorized campaign spending for activities directed against political opponents. Sloan further said Mitchell had initially been the sole person authorized to approve expenditures, before that authority passed to others, including Jeb Stuart Magruder.

Sloan also helped establish that the money was not confined to a single location or account. He confirmed that Herbert Kalmbach could approve disbursements and explained that cash in California and money kept in Maurice Stans’s safe belonged to one fund. The accounts had appeared together on the same burned books, and the fund was known as the Special Projects fund. Asked whether it was for espionage and political sabotage, Sloan said that was what it had been, though he had not known that at the time. His account helped transform the fund from an abstract financial irregularity into a mechanism linking campaign money to political operations.

When The Washington Post reported that Mitchell’s principal assistants controlled money earmarked for sensitive political projects, its account said the fund exceeded $300,000, that G. Gordon Liddy had received money from it, that records had been destroyed, and that Sloan’s resignation followed his suspicions about Watergate. The significance was not only the amount or the names: the indictments had not ended the underlying operation, and campaign employees might know how it had worked. Sloan’s disclosures supplied important links, but the reporting around them also illustrates the need to distinguish a lead from corroborated evidence. Federal Bureau of Investigation interview forms, for example, contained unevaluated statements and suspicions; the reporters recognized that such reports could not, by themselves, establish a claim.

Haldeman and the Limits of a Denial

Sloan later confirmed that five people could approve disbursements. When the reporters named Magruder, Stans, Mitchell, Kalmbach, and someone in the White House, Sloan agreed there was a fifth person but said it was not the President. When they identified H. R. Haldeman, Sloan paused and said he had no problem with a story making that identification. Asked whether it was correct, he said yes.

The apparent confirmation became complicated when Sloan issued a denial of a subsequent story. He said Haldeman’s name had never come up in his interviews with the Watergate Grand Jury, emphasizing that the denial was limited to the published account and that he had not been asked about Haldeman by the grand jury. The reporters initially took his statement as a retreat from what he had told them. On a later visit, however, Sloan explained that he had misunderstood an earlier question: he thought they had asked whether he would have named Haldeman if the grand jury had asked. The episode revealed both how narrowly Sloan framed his statements and how easily an imprecise question could produce a misleading impression. His low-key denial was not, as he explained it, a claim that Haldeman had not controlled the fund.

Testimony and Aftermath

Sloan’s worsening circumstances became visible as the investigation continued. When Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein visited again, he looked pale and defeated, had lost weight, and said that job hunting was going badly because of Watergate’s taint. Trials, civil suits, and depositions were turning him into a professional witness for about $20 a day. The reporters felt that their repeated visits made them seem like vultures, even as they continued to seek information he was reluctant to provide.

In court, Sloan testified that he had paid about $199,000 in cash to Liddy. The prosecutor did not ask who had ordered the payments. Judge John Sirica questioned Sloan himself; Sloan said he had worried about the large disbursements, checked with Stans, and learned that Stans had verified them with Mitchell, who said Liddy should receive the cash. The sequence gave courtroom form to the authorization chain Sloan had described privately: concern about a payment led upward from the treasurer, through Stans, to Mitchell.

Months later, when evidence emerged that money from the secret fund may have financed payments to the Watergate defendants, Sloan was not surprised. He had told the reporters that the fund had continued to exist after the arrests and that money had been transferred from Stans’s safe to Fred LaRue, but they had not published the claim without confirmation or a clear account of how the money was used. Asked how much had been transferred, Sloan would not say. His response preserved an important distinction between suspicion and knowledge even as other disclosures strengthened the case that the fund had been used for hush money.

Sloan’s role is defined by a progression from departure and guardedness to disclosures with direct consequences for the investigation. He described the fund’s operations, Mitchell’s authority, the campaign’s instructions to keep ranks, and his own payment of cash to Liddy; at the same time, he qualified what he knew, feared legal exposure, and sometimes had to clarify what he had said. That combination made him neither a simple whistleblower nor merely a silent functionary. The pressure to remain loyal persisted, but his testimony exposed the financial and administrative links that the campaign’s public explanations had obscured.