All the President's Men by Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein Read Free Book Online Page B

Office—the federal auditing agency.
    Unlike the Justice Department and the FBI, which are part of the Executive Branch and report to the President, the GAO is the investigative arm of Congress and therefore operates independently of the Executive. Hughes said that the story in that day’s Post had revealed “for the first time [that] the bugging incident was related to the campaign finance law. . . . There’s nothing in Maury’s [Stans] reports showing anything like that Dahlberg check.”
    Hughes, who had worked at the Bureau of the Budget during the Eisenhower administration when Stans was its director, added: “We’re going to conduct a full audit and find out what’s up.” The audit would be the first undertaken under the Federal Campaign Expenditures Act, which had gone into effect on April 7, establishing tighter control of campaign donations and requiring that all expenditures be reported.
    A GAO investigator called Woodward that afternoon for additional information on the $25,000 check. Woodward told him that he and Bernstein had written everything they knew about it.
    Before writing a follow-up on the GAO audit, Woodward tried to reach Hugh Sloan, the CRP treasurer. But he no longer worked for the re-election committee. A reporter on the city staff drove to Sloan’s home in suburban Virginia: Sloan was young, about 30, polite, and refused to discuss Watergate, except to say that he had cooperated with the FBI and the grand jury.
    Van Shumway told Woodward that Sloan had resigned “for personalreasons” unrelated to Watergate. “He was getting an ulcer and his wife is pregnant.”
    •   •   •
    Woodward called the GAO investigator every day to learn how the audit was progressing.
    “Hundreds of thousands of dollars in unaccounted cash,” the GAO man said one day. “A slush fund of cash,” he said the next. “A rat’s nest behind the surface efficiency of computerized financial reporting,” the third. With each day that Woodward did not write a story, the investigator felt freer to talk to him. Fitting these remarks together with another investigator’s, Woodward was becoming convinced that the cash “slush fund” was the same “convention security money” Bernstein had heard about early in July. The fund, which totaled at least $100,000, included the money from Barker’s bank account obtained from cashing Dahlberg’s check, according to the investigator.
    Bernstein made one of his regular calls to the former administration official and was told: “There was a large fund over which Gordon Liddy had supervision. . . . Yeah, it’s the same one. The present plan is for Liddy to take the fall for everyone. The story that the re-election committee will put out has nothing to do with the truth. They’ll say they were deeply concerned for the security of their convention and that they had a big fund to be sure they were secure from interference. That’s the word that will trickle out. Mitchell said to get the story out. Too many guys knew about the fund.”
    The reporters waited. Several days later, on August 16, Clark MacGregor met with a select group of White House reporters and made the first public attempt to shift the responsibility to Liddy. While serving as CRP’s finance counsel, MacGregor said, Liddy had spent campaign funds on his own initiative “for the purpose of determining what to do if the crazies made an attack on the President” at the Republican convention.
    Later that afternoon on the telephone, MacGregor was angered by Woodward’s attempt to get a fuller explanation. “I have no idea why the departed Gordon Liddy wanted cash,” MacGregor shouted. “It’s impossible for me to tell. . . . I never met Liddy. . . . I don’t know what’s going on.”
    Woodward suggested that MacGregor was implying that he was out of touch with the campaign he was supposed to be running.
    “If you print that, our relationship is terminated,” MacGregor said, and