Los Angeles Times publishes Alfred Baldwin’s Watergate account

The Los Angeles Times’s publication of Alfred Baldwin’s Watergate account turned a covert operation into a firsthand narrative of surveillance, weapons, and failed plans. Its significance lay not only in the new details Baldwin supplied, but in making the operation and the siege mentality behind it feel real; for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, it was also a major story they had been trying to reach first.

The report arrives

On the night of October 4, Bob Woodward returned home at about eleven to find a call from Bill Brady, The Washington Post’s night editor. Brady told him that the Los Angeles Times was running a long interview with a man named Baldwin. Woodward groaned and said he would come in. Two weeks later, the Los Angeles Times published the account without paying for it, drawing on Baldwin’s five-hour taped interview with reporter Jack Nelson.

What Baldwin described

Baldwin had monitored Democrats’ telephone conversations from the Howard Johnson Motor Hotel across the street from the Watergate complex. James McCord had told him he would perform similar surveillance at the Democratic convention in Miami. Baldwin also said that when he was hired, he was given a gun belonging to Fred LaRue.

The account extended beyond surveillance. Baldwin described an aborted attempt to break into and bug McGovern headquarters, including Gordon Liddy’s suggestion that the men shoot out a street light to make the entry easier. He recounted briefly guarding Martha Mitchell and described Howard Hunt rushing into the Howard Johnson at 2:30 A.M. on June 17, then watching police lead five of his hired men away from the Watergate complex.

A scoop and its limits

The publication gave the Los Angeles Times a major break over Woodward and Bernstein. The Post’s editors had been invited to bid on Baldwin’s story, but declined to pay; the Times obtained it without paying a penny. The account brought substantial new information into public view, while also sharpening the competitive cost of the Post’s decision: Woodward and Bernstein had been aced out of a defining firsthand account of the break-in.

The published interview did not name anyone Baldwin thought might have seen the wiretap memoranda. Yet two weeks before the interview, a Democratic Party investigator had told Bernstein that Baldwin had named Robert Odle and William E. Timmons as possible recipients. That distinction mattered: the Times story supplied Baldwin’s vivid description of the operation, but it did not include those names. The Post had a separate lead, but had not yet turned it into the same kind of public, firsthand narrative.

The operation made visible

The force of Baldwin’s account came from the way separate pieces of the operation—phone monitoring, a gun handed to a recruit, a contemplated break-in, and the aftermath of the June 17 raid—formed a connected course of action. What might otherwise have remained abstract allegations acquired specific participants, locations, and procedures. The narrative made the Watergate operation, and the siege mentality behind it, real to readers in a way that the bare fact of the break-in could not.