Should the press interview grand jurors? Why not?

By Barry Sussman
bsussman@niemanwatchdog.org

After almost 40 years of denials by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, it was revealed this week that one of them, Bernstein, had interviewed a Watergate grand juror in 1972.

The indisputable new evidence is in the form of a New York Magazine excerpt from a book that includes a photo copy of seven pages of notes by Carl Bernstein after the interview.

I personally have known about this for a long time, as I’m the editor who gave them the assignment.

Until now the reporters have admitted trying to interview grand jurors but said they never got information from any of them. Now the two are saying they disguised the source’s identity in their book, All the President’s Men, to protect her – and that it was only after Bernstein had begun interviewing her that he found out she was a grand juror. 

I was the Watergate editor at the Washington Post. I thought it was proper to interview grand jurors then. It wasn't an easy call but I would do it again in a similar situation – that is, if the issues, as in Watergate, involved what appeared to be a cover-up by powerful people on issues of major importance. One thing worth noting: It’s not as though we were creative enough on our own to envision grand jurors as a source. Highfalutin principles aside, it was really by accident that we got the idea.

Here’s what happened, as I remember it.

One day in the fall of 1972 a colleague mentioned that a grand juror was dissatisfied with deliberations and wanted to talk to the press. I then asked a lawyer (not our usual lawyers but one from Newsweek) if he would research a question for me. Not give me his opinion, but research the question. I told him I wanted to know if we could interview Watergate grand jurors. 

"No, you can't; it's out of the question," was his immediate response. But he got back to me a day or two later and said, “This is a gray area. It seems reporters can contact grand jurors and ask them anything they want but the grand jurors can't violate their oath to not reveal deliberations." I felt that was all we needed.

It was clear from our reporting, and that of other news organizations, that the Watergate conspiracy was ongoing and that we were duty bound to track it however we could, as long as what we did was legal. Where to get a better handle on a possible cover-up than through a grand jury before which the Watergate conspirators were testifying? 

So one or both of the reporters almost immediately called on the dissatisfied grand juror. But lo and behold, that person was on a different panel, not the Watergate grand jury at all. 

It was at that point that Woodward went to a DC court building and found and recorded the names and addresses of all the Watergate grand jurors. I sent the full list to Kirk Scharfenberg, our city hall reporter, to check voter registration for each person, with the idea that if there were any registered Republicans on the list, we might want to avoid them. 

Then for one or two evenings, as I remember it, the reporters knocked on doors. The woman in the Bernstein memo was the only one who had anything to say. She congratulated him for the work the Post had done, and reeled off a bunch of names we might want to look into. The names, often, were of those taking part in the cover-up. Haldeman, John Dean, John Ehrlichman, Colson, John Mitchell and others. 

Our attempts at grand jury interviews were short-lived. During deliberations, one juror announced that a reporter had come calling, and then a second person said the same thing, and then a third. Each said they hadn’t given out any information.

The prosecutor, Earl Silbert, apparently believed the grand jurors when they denied giving out information but he was obligated nevertheless to inform the Watergate judge, John Sirica. Early on, at the outset of the Watergate case, Sirica had briefly jailed an attorney and the Los Angeles Times bureau chief for what seemed to be very minor offenses. Silbert wrote a letter to Sirica explaining what had happened and suggesting that he not jail the reporters. Sirica didn’t; he hauled Woodward and Bernstein into court and gave them a tongue-lashing instead.

As an editor and a citizen I’m not sure what the stink is over grand jury deliberations, why they are considered inviolable, sacrosanct. For one thing, it’s hardly unheard of (though not so much in the Watergate case), for prosecutors to feed grand jury information to the press when it serves their purposes; thus deliberations aren’t inviolable after all. For another, there is the very serious matter of the public’s right to know. 

One illustration, for example, since Watergate: I believe the country would be better off if we knew the details of Patrick Fitzgerald’s Valerie Plame inquiry of a few years ago, the one with the prosecutor's “cloud over Cheney” assertion. Obviously a great deal of information was gathered on high-level misconduct – and the result was almost a total fizzle when it came to dealing with wrongdoing in high places.

Our attempt to interview grand jurors won praise from a very high, esteemed legal source. The late Howard Simons, then managing editor of the Post, was at a conference where he met Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart. Simons told me that he asked Stewart his views on our attempts to interview grand jurors.

Stewart told him, Simons said, that given what the Post knew about the Watergate scandal at that point, it would have been derelict of us not to try.

Barry Sussman is the editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project. He is the author of The Great Cover-Up: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, now in its fourth edition. E-mail: sussmanb1@gmail.com

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Watergate - The Political Assassination Posted by Rene Chang 05/126/2012, 05:39 AM Whether we should interview grand jurors is another red herring. The latest doubts about ‘All the President’s Men’ are not the only problems with the accepted account of Nixon and Watergate. It has been said that there is so much material on the Watergate affair that only experts have the time to go through all of them. This is an example of a meme going viral, the idea that there was wrong doing taking root and becoming the accepted truth. Only the foolish dare to question it. One does not have to wade through all the material to ask the simple questions. “Why all the campaigning aganst Nixon? Was he so very diferent from all other presidents?”. Nixon is known to be very thorough. He will examine every possibility before making an informed decision. Can an alternative explanation be made about what was recorded on the tapes? If so the jury is still out although the sentence has already been passed and the ‘prisoner’ lynched. I do not agree with Nixon’s politics, but from a reading of his writings before and after Watergate, one can see that he is first and foremost an American patriot. He would do anything, upset any vested interest group(s) to defend what he thinks is in the interest of his beloved country. I offer my re-interpretation of what may have happened forty years ago by asking key questions such as: 1. Why were the culprits arrested at the THIRD attempt to break into Watergate? 2. Why did the $100 dollar bills have consecutive serial numbers? 3. Why were Howard Hunt’s details in the address books of TWO of the four arrested Cubans? 4. There was a coup attempt in China to prevent the rapprochement. Could the same have happened in the US? 5. Why were the leaks of ‘Deep Throat’ regarded as the gospel truth? 6. Why was a member of the grand jury illegally interviewed? 7. What vital ‘information’ was passed to the intrepid reporter? 8. What has Richard Dawkin’s memes got to do with Watergate? 9. Why would Nixon pass the FEC Act if he was such a bad egg? 10. Why would Nixon order the Watergate raid when he was already 26 points ahead of Senator McGovern? 11. Was Watergate a set-up or a cock-up?

Reliable Sources Posted by keith long 05/127/2012, 08:32 PM I was surprised to see that Howard Kurtz had on Fred Francis and another reporter discussing Deep Throat and Watergate, and no one mentioned Sussman's recent revelation that the FBI guy aka Deep Throat may have been slightly over credited in the whole affair by Woodward. In other words, the dude may not even have known he was Deep Throat. Just saying, Sussman's contributions should have been referenced.

Gentleman and Scholar, Posted by David Reno 05/139/2012, 01:46 PM The Watergate Affair has become a national Roarchach test. Everyone sees that which they have a prediposition to see. One person who contributed, but got little credit was the late Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register. He noted in his text book, Investigative Reporting, (1981), that a close reading of All the President's Men, reaveals "deep throat" rarely revealed anything, but confirmed or denied things. Reread the chapter again. What did "deep throat" say as oppose to confirm or deny. Mollenhoff had a different contribution to Watergate. Being a fellow Republican, and, briefly, a member of the Nixon Administraiton, he wrote a column on the Army's use of draconian sentences to "flip" underlings to lead to the next level in a corruption trial. The column was read by fellow Republican Judge John Sirica, who followed Mollenhoff's suggestion. Jump to top of list