Watergate East · Watergate West

Watergate East / Watergate West was the shorthand used in The Washington Post newsroom for two investigations that could no longer be treated as separate: Watergate and the case surrounding Daniel Ellsberg. The phrase gives a compact name to the widening scandal’s two centers of gravity, linking the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters with the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and the government’s investigation of news leaks.

A newsroom name for two cases

In early May, after the disclosure that Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy had supervised the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, the reporters recognized that Watergate and Ellsberg’s trial in Los Angeles had become inextricably linked. In the newsroom, they called the two stories Watergate East and Watergate West. The expression was an informal editorial shorthand, not a claim that the cases were identical: it marked how people and methods associated with one investigation carried the other into view.

The label also holds together two different kinds of inquiry. Watergate centered on a break-in and the political activity around it; the Ellsberg case concerned the leak of the Pentagon Papers, the prosecution that followed, and the government’s efforts to investigate the leak. The burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office made the connection concrete, while subsequent reporting on wiretaps widened it beyond that crime.

Reporting across the divide

Months earlier, Deep Throat had given Woodward the names of two New York Times reporters, Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, whose telephones had allegedly been wiretapped as part of the Pentagon Papers leak investigation. In early May, Woodward and Bernstein considered reporting the alleged taps, but could not find a second source to confirm the reporters’ names; following their cautious approach to serious allegations, they left those names out. They did find a possibility that Ellsberg himself had been overheard on a tap, a consequential lead because he had leaked the papers to Sheehan.

At Ellsberg’s trial, the prosecution maintained that no taps involving Ellsberg existed. Judge Matthew Byrne asked the government to search its records again. Acting FBI director William D. Ruckelshaus found that Ellsberg had been overheard at least once—not on Sheehan’s phone, but on the home telephone of Morton Halperin, a former National Security Council staff member of Henry Kissinger. The relevant logs were missing, but Ruckelshaus said aides had told him of the interception. His announcement that Halperin’s phone had been tapped for 21 months provided the first confirmation that the administration had used wiretaps to investigate news leaks.

That confirmation changed the stakes of the West side of the newsroom’s shorthand. The government had not disclosed all its wiretap information to Ellsberg’s defense attorneys, an omission described in the account as illegal. What had begun as an effort to establish whether Ellsberg might have been overheard thus exposed both surveillance of a former national-security official and a failure to provide the defense with relevant wiretap information.

The struggle over what the stories meant

The phrase emerged against a sustained contest over how the Watergate reporting should be understood. At first, the White House minimized the break-in: Ronald Ziegler called it a “third-rate burglary attempt” and said it did not merit further comment. Coverage of the secret-fund stories was sparse the next morning; most major outlets did not carry them, and Hugh Scott dismissed Watergate as a matter of interest to Senator McGovern and the media rather than the average voter. When The Washington Post later published its account of a nationwide sabotage operation, the wire story received broad pickup, including front-page placement by several subscribers. The movement from limited attention to wide circulation illustrates how the perceived scale of the story could shift as reporting accumulated.

The administration’s replies sought to make the reporting itself the issue. Ziegler described stories about the Segretti connection as based on hearsay, innuendo, and guilt by association, and insisted that no link between the White House and Watergate existed. A Post editorial was denounced for using anonymous sources and unsubstantiated charges to suggest such a connection. In a separate briefing on the alleged secret fund, Ziegler called the Post’s reporting shabby and absurd, disputed the term secret fund, and accused the paper of character assassination. These attacks confronted the newsroom’s effort to connect actions across cases with a counterclaim that the connections were manufactured by its reporting.

A New York Times analysis of the counterattack described a White House strategy of denouncing newspapers without directly addressing the allegations. It identified two assumptions behind that approach: that the public saw the alleged conspiracy as distant from the Oval Office, and that years of attacks on the Eastern press had weakened public confidence in its fairness. One White House aide expressed the same calculation more bluntly, saying the administration was not worried because it believed the public viewed the Eastern press as elitist, anti-Nixon, and pro-McGovern. Against that background, Watergate East / Watergate West names not only a widening investigation but also the struggle to make its connections legible amid official denials and attacks on the press.

The phrase’s larger significance

The shorthand’s force lies in its juxtaposition. East and West suggest separate fronts; the reporting shows the links running between them. The Ellsberg burglary connected figures involved in Watergate to an operation directed at a person associated with the Pentagon Papers, while the wiretap inquiry reached into the administration’s response to leaks and the government’s handling of evidence in court. The cases did not collapse into one another, but events disclosed in one altered the meaning and reach of the other.

Later, Richard Nixon acknowledged an effort to conceal facts from the public and from himself, accepted responsibility as the person at the top, and credited a vigorous free press among the forces that brought the facts to light. His address did not erase the earlier dispute over what could be established or how the reporting should be judged. Read in that longer arc, Watergate East / Watergate West is a compact name for the investigative convergence that turned apparently separate episodes into a broader account of political operations, surveillance, and concealment.