The Senate Watergate investigation began as a congressional effort to reach beyond the break-in itself and examine the political campaign around it. Senator Sam Ervin’s plan to give a special committee broad subpoena power made the inquiry a test of Congress’s authority to demand records and testimony from the executive branch. The resolution passed unanimously, but the effort to narrow or redirect it exposed the political struggle surrounding what the investigation might uncover.

From fragments to a congressional inquiry

Before Ervin’s investigation took shape, reporters at The Washington Post had assembled clues that suggested the Watergate arrests had not ended the underlying operation. A $25,000 cashier’s check payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg had been deposited alongside four Mexican checks; the combined deposit was $114,000, and money was later withdrawn from it. The check connected campaign funds to the Watergate investigation, though the reporters initially did not know who Dahlberg was or what the full trail meant.

A subsequent account reported that funds for the espionage operation were controlled by several principal assistants to John Mitchell and held in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The account contained more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects, and G. Gordon Liddy had received money from it. Records relating to the account had been destroyed. Hugh Sloan’s resignation as treasurer, the report said, followed his suspicions about Watergate. The money trail offered a way to investigate not only who carried out particular acts, but who controlled the funds and authorized their use.

Sloan later told Bernstein that, beginning in 1971, he had telephoned Mitchell at the Justice Department when he was approached for money. Mitchell would tell him to issue it; at first, Sloan said, Mitchell alone authorized such expenditures, with authority later passing to others, including Jeb Magruder. Sloan carefully distinguished what he knew from what he could prove: the transfers did not by themselves establish that Mitchell knew of the bugging, and Sloan allowed for the remote possibility that money had gone to unauthorized projects. Even with that qualification, the reported authorization chain raised a grave question about the use of campaign funds while Mitchell was Attorney General.

Other clues showed why information was difficult to obtain. During evening visits to campaign employees, Bernstein encountered frightened staff members, one trembling and pleading that he leave before others saw him, and another who burst into tears. Employees spoke secondhand of records being destroyed after the break-in. A former CRP bookkeeper told Bernstein that people had already lied to the grand jury and that Sally Harmony and others had lied, while stopping short of specifying what they had concealed. Sloan likewise described an unspoken instruction: “Hold ranks,” or “Keep the ship together.” These reports did not settle who was responsible, but they suggested that ordinary interviews and the existing criminal inquiry might not reach the whole story.

Ervin’s plan and its limits

Shortly after meeting with Deep Throat, Bob Woodward received a call from Ervin’s office. On January 11, Ervin had agreed, at Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield’s request, to preside over a thorough investigation of Watergate and the 1972 presidential campaign. This would extend beyond the preliminary inquiry that Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate subcommittee had pursued since October. Kennedy had warned that without congressional subpoenas for records and documents in areas federal investigators seemed to be neglecting, the prospect of a comprehensive inquiry could disappear.

Woodward told Ervin that the reporters’ stories contained names and incidents still needing verification. He identified secret campaign cash as the investigative key and described the evidence as pointing toward a much larger H. R. Haldeman operation, of which the break-in and the dirty tricks during the 1972 primaries were only parts. Woodward stressed that the reporters had only scratched the surface and did not yet fully understand the scale of what had happened. Ervin, by contrast, said he would be content if the inquiry established Magruder’s role. The exchange captured both the breadth of the allegations and the narrower, evidentiary question a committee might first be able to resolve.

Ervin grounded his proposed investigation in the separation of powers. He intended to seek a resolution granting a special select committee the broadest possible subpoena authority, so it could compel documents and witnesses in the executive branch and elsewhere. He said that everyone named in the reporters’ accounts should have an opportunity to clear his name and that those who declined could be subpoenaed. But Ervin drew a limit: when Woodward asked about Haldeman or other senior aides, Ervin said, “Anybody but the President.” His plan was expansive in its reach into the administration, yet it did not propose summoning the President himself.

Ervin permitted Woodward to report his thinking only without naming prospective witnesses and without direct quotation. Woodward’s account described the intention to summon presidential aides and challenge the claim of executive privilege. The story made visible a conflict that had previously been framed largely as a criminal investigation: Congress was preparing to assert its own authority to obtain evidence from the executive branch.

The resolution and the Senate vote

On February 5, Ervin introduced a resolution allocating $500,000 for a Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to investigate the Watergate break-in and related allegations. The powerful Senate Democratic Policy Committee supported it. The remaining obstacle was a possible White House–Republican effort to alter the resolution before the vote.

On February 7, Woodward went to the Capitol to watch for such a maneuver. A Republican senator’s aide said an amendment would broaden the inquiry to include the 1964 and 1968 campaigns. A White House source confirmed that calls to senators were part of the day’s plan and said Haldeman had much of the White House staff mobilized. In the Senate, Republican leaders attacked the resolution’s breadth and warned of possible abuse. Hugh Scott called its authority “wild, unbelievable” and alleged wholesale Republican wiretapping during the 1968 campaign, but no specific example was offered in the exchange described by the book.

The Democrats defeated every amendment proposed by the minority. When the final vote came, Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues, and the resolution passed 77–0. Veteran Senate reporters told Woodward that the unanimous vote reflected Republican recognition of the Democratic majority’s power. Woodward was less certain that this explained it fully; he read the senators as alert to the political direction of events. As he left the Capitol, a Republican senator identified a Justice Department lawyer near the Senate floor as the person the White House had sent to draft amendments. The proposed intervention had not stopped the investigation, but the episode showed that the administration had tried to shape its mandate.

Scope, stakes, and significance

The investigation’s significance lay in the power it was designed to use as much as in the allegations it would examine. A secret campaign account, disbursements approved by telephone, missing records, and testimony that insiders had lied to investigators formed a chain of leads, not a completed proof of responsibility. Woodward’s caution that the reporters did not yet understand the full operation mattered: the committee’s subpoena authority offered a route to test and extend those leads rather than treat an emerging pattern as a finished account.

The proposed inquiry also brought two levels of conflict into the open. It asked whether campaign activity and the Watergate break-in belonged to a wider pattern of political operations, and whether Congress could compel the executive branch to answer questions about that pattern. Ervin’s insistence that people named in published accounts be given a chance to respond framed subpoenas as a means of securing testimony, while his exclusion of the President marked a boundary around the investigation’s immediate reach. The unanimous 77–0 vote established the committee’s authority despite efforts to amend its scope; it did not, by itself, resolve the allegations. It did establish that the unfolding Watergate inquiry would no longer depend solely on what frightened employees, criminal investigators, or the press could obtain voluntarily.