The Watergate Watershed: A Turning Point for a Nation and a Newspaper

This article was excerpted from the 1997 book "Personal History" by Katharine Graham, chairman of the executive committee and former publisher of The Washington Post.

On Saturday morning, June 17, 1972, Howard Simons, The Post's managing editor, called to say, "You won't believe what happened last night." He was right. First he told me of a car that crashed into a house where two people had been making love on a sofa and went right out the other side. To top that, he related the fantastic story that five men wearing surgical gloves had been caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office building.

President Nixon was in Key Biscayne, Fla., at the time. His press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dismissed the incident as "a third-rate burglary attempt," adding, "Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is." None of us, of course, had any idea how far the story would stretch; the beginning -- once the laughter died down -- all seemed so farcical.

The story of the break-in appeared on the front page of Sunday's paper. Among the staff writers contributing to the story were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. This was the beginning of their famous collaboration. Their first big story, over a month later, revealed the connection of the burglars to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP).

The Post was ahead on the story from the beginning. And from the beginning, Nixon began making threats of economic retaliation against the paper. "The Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one. They have a television station . . . and they're going to have to get it renewed. . . . [T]he game has to be played awfully rough." Of our lawyer, Nixon said, "I wouldn't want to be in Edward Bennett Williams's position after this election. We are going to fix the son of a bitch, believe me."

Two weeks later, a seminal Bernstein and Woodward article appeared on Page 1 of The Post. They had dug up information that there was a secret fund at CRP that was controlled by five people, one of whom was then-Attorney General John Mitchell, and which was to be used to gather intelligence on the Democrats. Thus the story reached a new level.

In an effort to check it out, Bernstein called Mitchell directly, reaching him at a hotel in New York, where Mitchell answered the phone himself. When Carl told him about the story, Mitchell exploded with an exclamation of "JEEEEEEESUS," so violent that Carl felt it was "some sort of primal scream" and thought Mitchell might die on the telephone. After he'd read him the first two paragraphs, Mitchell interrupted, still screaming, "All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's all been denied. Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published. Good Christ! That's the most sickening thing I ever heard."

Bernstein was stunned and called Ben Bradlee at home to read him Mitchell's quotes. Ben told Carl to use it all except the specific reference to my "tit." The quote was changed to read that I was "gonna get caught in a big fat wringer." Ben decided he didn't have to forewarn me. (Later he told me, "That was too good to check with you, Katharine." I would have agreed with Ben's decision.) As it was, I was shocked to read what I did in the paper, but even more so to hear what Mitchell had actually said, so personal and offensive were the threat and the message.

It was quite a temper tantrum on Mitchell's part -- and especially strange of him to call me Katie, which no one has ever called me. Bob Woodward later observed that the interesting thing for him was that Mitchell's remark was an example of the misperception on the part of the Nixon people that I was calling all the shots. In any case, the remark lived on in the annals of Watergate and was one of the principal public links of me with the affair.

That day Ziegler began his morning briefing at the White House charging that "stories are being run that are based on hearsay, innuendo, guilt by association. . . . [I]t goes without saying that this administration does not condone sabotage or espionage or surveillance of individuals." That same afternoon, Clark McGregor, Nixon's campaign chairman, said that The Post's "credibility has today sunk lower than that of George McGovern," the Democrat running against Nixon.

During these months, the pressures on The Post to cease and desist were intense and uncomfortable. I was feeling beleaguered. Many of my friends were puzzled about our reporting. Joe Alsop was pressing me all the time. And I had a distressing chance meeting with Henry Kissinger just before the election. "What's the matter? Don't you think we're going to be reelected?" Henry asked me. Readers, too, were writing to me, accusing The Post of ulterior motives, bad journalism, lack of patriotism.

Nixon's campaign to undermine public confidence in The Post was intensifying. The investigation of such a tangled web of crime, money, and mischief was made much harder given the unveiled threats and harassment by a president and his administration. Bearing the full brunt of presidential wrath is always disturbing. Sometimes I wondered if we could survive four more years of this kind of strain.