Kenneth H. Dahlberg’s $25,000 cashier’s check

Kenneth H. Dahlberg’s $25,000 cashier’s check gave reporters a concrete financial link between the money deposited in Watergate burglar Bernard Barker’s account and the Nixon campaign. Its details helped turn an investigation of the break-in into an inquiry about campaign money: the check could be traced through a bank deposit and, the next morning, Dahlberg identified Maurice Stans as the person to whom he had given it. The evidence made the connection newsworthy without, by itself, establishing exactly what the money was intended to finance.

Identity and Transaction

The check was dated April 10 and drawn on First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Florida. Numbered 131138, it was payable to the order of Kenneth H. Dahlberg. It stood out among the other checks in the records Martin Dardis showed Carl Bernstein: it was slightly wider than the four Mexican checks, and was a cashier’s check rather than another check drawn on an American bank and endorsed with the typed notation naming Manuel Ogarrio.

The amount and deposit gave the document its importance. On April 20, Barker’s account received the $25,000 check together with the four Mexican checks, for a total deposit of $114,000. Four days later, Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The records established the check’s passage into an account associated with a Watergate defendant, but did not alone explain the purpose of the deposit or the subsequent withdrawals.

Discovery and Identification

Bernstein copied the check as if making a facsimile. When Dardis returned, Bernstein was finishing the work; soon afterward he hurried down the hallway to a lobby pay phone and called Bob Woodward. At seven o’clock, he dictated the check’s identifying numbers and other details, then returned to his hotel to investigate who Dahlberg was. The document’s physical particulars—its date, bank, number, payee, and amount—were now a lead the reporters could pursue rather than an unexplained entry in a financial record.

The search initially yielded little. The bank in Boca Raton did not answer, and the bank officer reached through the local police had never heard of Dahlberg. Neither of two bank officers named Thomas remembered the transaction. The bank president knew Dahlberg only slightly: as the owner of a winter home in Boca Raton and as a director of a bank in Fort Lauderdale. That limited identification led Bernstein onward, to the president of the Fort Lauderdale bank.

The next morning, Woodward spoke with Dahlberg. Dahlberg said he was caught in the middle of something he did not understand, but was then certain that on April 11 he had given the $25,000 check personally to Stans. The check’s date and its reported delivery were distinct: it was dated April 10, and Dahlberg placed the handover the following day. That account connected its named payee to the Nixon campaign’s chief fundraiser and CRP finance chairman, while leaving the check’s ultimate purpose unresolved.

Publication and Response

With the second-edition deadline an hour away, Woodward began typing the story at 9:30 p.m. The report described the check as apparently earmarked for Richard Nixon’s campaign chest and said it had been deposited in Barker’s account. The qualification mattered: the account records and Dahlberg’s identification supplied a substantial connection, but the story did not present the check alone as proof of the entire route or use of the money. Barry Sussman received the last page just at deadline and remarked that the newsroom had never had a story like it.

The response came through several channels, none of which immediately settled the check’s significance. Stans’s secretary said there would be no immediate comment, describing him as agonized by confusing circumstances that made it impossible for him to explain what had happened and reaffirm his integrity. At the White House, Ron Ziegler said Richard Nixon continued to have full confidence in Stans and directed questions about the $25,000 to CRP. A statement issued under Clark MacGregor’s name said further comment would not be proper while the matter was under investigation.

Significance and Limits

The check’s force lay in what its documentary trail joined: a named payee, a specific bank instrument, a substantial deposit in Barker’s account, and Dahlberg’s identification of Stans. It supplied an unusually tangible point of contact between a campaign-finance figure and money that entered an account tied to one of the arrested burglars. In reporting the story, The Washington Post made that relationship visible to readers while retaining the word apparently rather than treating the check as a complete account of the funds’ destination or function.

The check also belonged to a larger inquiry into concealed campaign financing, but it should not be confused with proof of every allegation that later reporting made about the secret fund. Subsequent coverage described a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President controlled by principal assistants to John Mitchell, with more than $300,000 set aside for sensitive political projects. Those findings widened the investigation beyond the individual instrument; the Dahlberg check’s particular contribution was to give that expanding inquiry a traceable transaction and a named connection to Stans.