If Jeff Himmelman thinks his discovery of a December 4, 1972 memo on Watergate is a significant revelation, he is wrong. The memo he has is authentic. To the best of our recollection, someone contacted Carl and said there was a person, a neighbor, who had important information on Watergate. Carl went and interviewed the woman as described in the Dec. 4, 1972 memo. As the memo plainly shows, Carl did not know she was a member of the Watergate grand jury when he arrived at her home.
She gave Carl her phone number—and he later noted “this checked w. grand jury list number” that wehad. If he knew initially that he was interviewing a member of the grand jury, that would have beenstated at the top of the memo, as was our style in all Watergate memos of interviews. He also quotesher in the memo as volunteering, “of course I was on the grand jury” because that was news to him.
Though the woman threw out lots of names of those she suspected of furthering the criminalconspiracy (she had some right and some wrong), she provided no specific information of suspector illegal actions. What she said led to no story. As Carl wrote in the memo, “she advises us to readour articles from Sept. 15 to Oct. 30. “You will have many clues—there is more truth there than youmust have realized. ” We wrote those stories and did realize they were true. Those stories essentiallyoutlined the Watergate conspiracy and alleged that crimes had been committed by Haldeman, Mitchell,Stans, Kalmbach, Magruder, Porter, Chapin and Segretti.
We referred to this woman’s interview in less than two pages (p. 211-213) in our book about coveringWatergate, All the President’s Men. In that book we did not, or course, reveal that she was a member ofthe grand jury—in order to protect her as a source .
When asked on April 26 2012 by Himmelman, neither of us—until after reading the original memoafter 39 years—remembered she had been a member of the Watergate grand jury. The interviewwith her had been of little consequence because she was not telling us much more than we alreadybelieved—and published. And the lack of specifics in her account meant we had little to follow up on.Frankly we were not sure what to make of her comments at the time, and in our book Carl noted thatshe “sounded like some kind of mystic.” But it was one of those interviews that gave us and our editorscomfort that we were on the right track as later demonstrated by the subsequent investigations andhistory. The memo does, however, show that a member of the grand jury thought the prosecutors, whosupervised and ran the grand jury, had missed the real story and the high-level conspiracy.
You ought to publish the whole memo so your readers can see it and understand its clear context.
—Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward