McLean, Virginia

McLean, Virginia, became a consequential reporting location in The Washington Post’s investigation of the secret fund at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. At Hugh Sloan’s home, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward pressed the former committee treasurer to explain what he knew about the fund and the cash distributed to campaign officials. Sloan’s disclosures clarified who could authorize payments, but his caution also marked the limits of what the reporters could responsibly claim about the Watergate break-in.

Setting and Investigative Approach

Bernstein’s first documented trip to McLean followed a day in which coverage of the secret fund had drawn little notice from national outlets. He signed out a company car and drove from the newsroom to see Sloan. A journey that ordinarily took about half an hour lasted more than an hour and a quarter in the rain; Sloan lived in a new development that Bernstein struggled to locate on foot. Its imitation Tudor houses stood along narrow pedestrian lanes, with traffic and parking kept apart from the residential paths. The setting was a domestic neighborhood rather than a campaign office, but the subject of the visit was the money and authority Sloan had encountered inside the Nixon campaign.

The first meeting did not begin with Sloan. His wife answered the door and explained that he was downtown and would not return until about 7:30. She was friendly and asked how Bernstein could be reached. Bernstein knew she had worked as a social secretary at the White House and had been an important influence on Sloan’s decision to leave the Nixon campaign. He tried to distinguish himself from the many reporters seeking the couple out by acknowledging the strain of Sloan’s position: a former presidential staff assistant and campaign treasurer, under suspicion and appearing in news reports while facing grand-jury scrutiny, with his wife expecting their first child. The encounter made the consequences of the investigation visible at the household level without resolving the questions Bernstein had come to ask.

Sloan’s Account and Its Limits

When Sloan answered the door a few hours later, he allowed Bernstein into the hallway but left the door open. He said he had not spoken to the press, and Bernstein urged him to put what he knew on the record. The reporter argued that the day’s coverage had made clear Sloan himself was not responsible for the Watergate break-in, while suggesting that he might know facts that could lead to those who were. Sloan interrupted the appeal with a sharper assessment: matters were worse than the story indicated, and suspicion of that possibility was why he had left. He said he wanted to speak but had been advised by his lawyers against making public statements that might be used in a civil suit over his service as campaign treasurer.

Sloan described the pressure on committee employees without saying that anyone had explicitly ordered him to remain silent. The instruction, as he understood it, was to preserve unity and keep the organization together. When Bernstein asked whether that amounted to a direction to lie, Sloan left the inference to him and acknowledged that it was not unreasonable. His account connected organizational loyalty to silence, while also showing how legal advice and the risk of litigation constrained what he was prepared to disclose.

The Return Visit and the Secret Fund

Two days later, Sloan offered Bernstein a short meeting the next morning, provided the reporters could reach McLean quickly. Sloan had to clean the house before his in-laws arrived. When Woodward and Bernstein reached the house, Sloan was dressed casually and holding a broom; he declined Woodward’s offer to help and offered coffee instead. A framed Christmas card showing Richard Nixon and his wife at home in the White House hung near the kitchen table. Elsewhere were another Christmas card, White House matchbooks bearing the Presidential Seal, and souvenirs from the 1968 campaign. These objects situated Sloan’s former campaign and White House associations inside the home where he was now weighing what he could say about the fund.

The discussion repeatedly circled the possibility that the secret money had paid for legitimate, routine intelligence work, such as recording opposition speeches or clipping newspapers. Sloan said circumstances had made him assume the worst, but invited the reporters to offer information that might change his view. Asked about authorization, he said five people had authority over the fund, including John Mitchell and Maurice Stans. He nodded when asked whether Mitchell knew of payments to Jeb Magruder, Porter, and G. Gordon Liddy. Yet Sloan drew a firm evidentiary distinction: knowledge of those disbursements did not prove knowledge of the bugging. He allowed that the recipients might have spent the money on unauthorized projects, though he considered that possibility remote. McLean thus became the setting for a consequential confirmation, but not for a claim Sloan could not substantiate.

Significance in the Investigation

The McLean meetings show how the Post’s reporting moved through repeated contact rather than a single comprehensive disclosure. Sloan first described his reasons for leaving and the constraints on speaking; on the follow-up visit, he helped define the fund’s authorization structure while withholding certainty about what its recipients had done. That distinction mattered to the reporters’ developing practice of not presenting an unconfirmed criminal allegation as established fact.

The location also holds a domestic and political contrast. Sloan’s home contained reminders of his closeness to the Nixon campaign, while the conversations there concerned a fund whose uses he feared might be worse than publicly understood. His statements did not settle the central question of who knew about the Watergate operation. They did, however, give Bernstein and Woodward a more specific account of who could authorize withdrawals and why a former insider believed the situation warranted suspicion. McLean’s importance in the investigation rests on that combination: access to a key witness, a concrete account of the fund’s authority, and a careful boundary between suspicion and proof.