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Ex-‘Times’ Journalists: We Fumbled Watergate Tip
By JENNIFER PELTZ, Associated Press
New York — The reporter rushed up to his editor, thunderstruck by what the FBI’s acting director had just let him know: The former attorney general — maybe even the president — was complicit in the Watergate break-in two months before.
But The New York Times let the hot tip fall through the cracks, the reporter and editor say after decades of silence about the August 1972 conversation. They say it’s unclear whether The Times pursued information that might have let it beat The Washington Post to the blockbuster story of political espionage, which was described in “All the President’s Men” and helped unravel Richard M. Nixon’s presidency.
“We missed out,” the now-retired editor, Robert H. Phelps, said in an interview yesterday, after The Times published a story about the monumental miscue.
Mr. Phelps revealed it in God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at The New York Times, a memoir published last month by Syracuse University Press. The former reporter, Robert M. Smith, now a lawyer and mediator in San Francisco, confirmed Mr. Phelps’ account.
Mr. Smith was headed to law school and in his last day at The Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau when he went to lunch with acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray on Aug. 16, 1972. Mr. Smith had cultivated a professional relationship with the FBI chief through writing several stories about him that year.
As they discussed the intrigue surrounding the June 17 attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex, Mr. Gray volunteered that former Attorney General John Mitchell was involved, Mr. Smith said yesterday. Mr. Mitchell had stepped down to run Nixon’s re-election campaign.
Mr. Smith said he asked Mr. Gray, “‘Does it go up higher?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’”
Then, Mr. Smith said, “I choked and said, ‘The president?’ And he looked me in the eye,” not denying it.
Mr. Gray also broached the name of Donald Segretti, an architect of the Nixon campaign’s endeavors to infiltrate and sabotage Democrats, Mr. Smith said.
Messrs. Segretti and Mitchell would eventually go to prison for their roles in the roster of political dirty work that came to be known as Watergate — Mr. Segretti for distributing political literature without attribution, Mr. Mitchell for conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice. Mr. Segretti wasn’t involved in the Watergate break-in but was associated with an effort to discredit Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Edmund Muskie.
But Mr. Segretti’s name hadn’t emerged publicly when Mr. Smith hurried back to The Times’ office and told Mr. Phelps what he had heard. Nor had Mr. Mitchell’s link to Watergate been cemented.
Mr. Phelps took notes from and recorded his conversation with Mr.Smith. They said yesterday they don’t know what became of the tape, the notes or the tip.
But The New York Times let the hot tip fall through the cracks, the reporter and editor say after decades of silence about the August 1972 conversation. They say it’s unclear whether The Times pursued information that might have let it beat The Washington Post to the blockbuster story of political espionage, which was described in “All the President’s Men” and helped unravel Richard M. Nixon’s presidency.
“We missed out,” the now-retired editor, Robert H. Phelps, said in an interview yesterday, after The Times published a story about the monumental miscue.
Mr. Phelps revealed it in God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at The New York Times, a memoir published last month by Syracuse University Press. The former reporter, Robert M. Smith, now a lawyer and mediator in San Francisco, confirmed Mr. Phelps’ account.
Mr. Smith was headed to law school and in his last day at The Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau when he went to lunch with acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray on Aug. 16, 1972. Mr. Smith had cultivated a professional relationship with the FBI chief through writing several stories about him that year.
As they discussed the intrigue surrounding the June 17 attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex, Mr. Gray volunteered that former Attorney General John Mitchell was involved, Mr. Smith said yesterday. Mr. Mitchell had stepped down to run Nixon’s re-election campaign.
Mr. Smith said he asked Mr. Gray, “‘Does it go up higher?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’”
Then, Mr. Smith said, “I choked and said, ‘The president?’ And he looked me in the eye,” not denying it.
Mr. Gray also broached the name of Donald Segretti, an architect of the Nixon campaign’s endeavors to infiltrate and sabotage Democrats, Mr. Smith said.
Messrs. Segretti and Mitchell would eventually go to prison for their roles in the roster of political dirty work that came to be known as Watergate — Mr. Segretti for distributing political literature without attribution, Mr. Mitchell for conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice. Mr. Segretti wasn’t involved in the Watergate break-in but was associated with an effort to discredit Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Edmund Muskie.
But Mr. Segretti’s name hadn’t emerged publicly when Mr. Smith hurried back to The Times’ office and told Mr. Phelps what he had heard. Nor had Mr. Mitchell’s link to Watergate been cemented.
Mr. Phelps took notes from and recorded his conversation with Mr.Smith. They said yesterday they don’t know what became of the tape, the notes or the tip.
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