Media Coverage and a Federal Grand Jury

American Journalism, 24(2), 7-33
Copyright © 2007, American Journalism Historians Association
Media Coverage and a Federal Grand Jury:
Publication of the Secret Watergate
Transcripts (1973)
Although scholarship about press coverage of the Watergate
scandal has mostly been viewed through a journalistic frame—
focused on debate about the true role of investigative reporters in
precipitating President Richard Nixon’s resignation—a more apt
frame may be a legal one involving the clash between the media’s
First Amendment rights and the judiciary’s Sixth Amendment responsibilities.
As the Nixon administration attempted to cover up its
crimes from the federal grand jury investigating the scandal, journalists
tried to expose that wrongdoing by revealing confidential
grand jury evidence. This article focuses on the single most extensive
leak of secret grand jury information to the press during Watergate:
syndicated columnist Jack Anderson’s publication of verbatim
grand jury transcripts of sworn witness testimony in April of 1973.
Using oral history interviews and documents released after appeals
under the Freedom of Information Act, the author reconstructs and
analyzes a little-known but dramatic chapter in journalism history
that continues to have relevance today.
The role of the news media in uncovering the Watergate
scandal has become as much folklore as fact. A genera-
tion after President Richard Nixon’s
forced resignation, journalists continue to invoke
the legacy of Watergate as their bright,
shining moment in American history. “A mythology
of the press in Watergate developed
into a significant national myth,” sociologist
Michael Schudson observed, “a story that independently
carries on a memory of Watergate
even as details about what Nixon did or did not
By Mark Feldstein
Mark Feldstein is an
associate professor of
Media and Public Affairs
at George Washington
University.
805 21st St., N.W., #400
Washington, D.C. 20052
(202) 994-5806
feldy@gwu.edu
do fade away.” According to this folklore, a vigilant watchdog news
— Spring 2007 • 7

media helped expose a corrupt president and force him from office.
“The press, truth its only weapon, saves the day,” Schudson wrote.
“And the good guys win.” 1
This media mythology continues to be embraced by journalistic
practitioners even as it is contested by scholars who argue that
Watergate reporters were merely conduits for orchestrated leaks and
followed rather than led law enforcement officials who uncovered
the scandal. 2 Whatever its resemblance to historical truth, this Watergate
folklore represents the dominant frame through which media
coverage of the scandal has been debated. Nonetheless, a more apt
frame might view Watergate reporting not through the lens of journalistic
heroics (or lack thereof) but through the prism of news media
coverage of secret grand jury proceedings. After all, it was a grand
jury investigation of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee
headquarters in June of 1972 that first triggered media coverage
of the scandal that would become known as Watergate; and most
of the subsequent reporting on the story occurred as a result of leaks
that were unearthed in the course of the grand jury’s probe of the
original and subsequent crimes. Moreover, such a frame helps place
Watergate reporting in historical context, allowing it to be viewed
not solely as sui generis but as a case study involving broader issues
of grand jury media coverage.
This article examines the little-studied 3 leaking of secret Watergate
grand jury transcripts in April 1973 to syndicated columnist
Jack Anderson, then the nation’s most famous crusading investigative
reporter. Although other journalists would eventually receive
more acclaim for their Watergate reporting—especially Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post—Anderson’s receipt
and publication of verbatim transcripts of the sworn testimony
of witnesses before the Watergate grand jury was the most extensive,
detailed and incontrovertible single penetration of the secret
federal probe by the news media. The case led prosecutors to threaten
criminal sanctions against Anderson and to a dramatic showdown
between the journalist and the judiciary.
This account is based on oral history interviews, court records,
and archival collections, including previously redacted documents
from the National Archives that were released after the author successfully
appealed under the Freedom of Information Act. By explaining
the historical and legal background of grand jury secrecy,
this case illustrates not only the grand jury frame of Watergate reporting
but also the larger issues that can arise in such coverage
when the First Amendment clashes with the Sixth.
8 • American Journalism —

Historical and Legal Background
At first blush, the First and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution
might not seem to have obvious or inherent conflicts with one
another. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression: of
religion, speech, press, assembly and petition. The Sixth Amendment
protects the right to a fair trial, guaranteeing that it be “speedy
and public,” allowing the accused to have an attorney and to present
and confront witness before an “impartial jury.” 4 Both amendments
are part of the Bill of Rights and were designed to safeguard the
liberty of the individual against the power of the state. In many respects,
these rights reinforce each other: watchdog media can help
protect courtroom justice just as judicial fairness can help safeguard
a free press.
In practice, however, First and Sixth Amendment rights have
often clashed, especially when journalistic notions of free expression
have resisted judicial secrecy imposed to guarantee a fair trial.
Numerous legal cases have tried to weigh the right of a free press
to report on legal matters against the need of the courts to ensure
justice. Such balancing tests have involved media access to court
proceedings; 5 journalistic protections for sources and notes; 6 and
prejudicial pretrial publicity. 7
The grand jury system has been a particular arena of conflict
between journalists and judges. The modern grand jury is a special
panel of citizens established to determine whether there is sufficient
evidence to bring a suspect to trial. Federal grand juries are composed
of sixteen to twenty-three people drawn at random from voter
registration rolls. 8 These grand juries have terms lasting eighteen
months and issue indictments in many different kinds of cases that
come before them. This grand jury is wholly different from a trial
(or petit) jury, whose purpose is to determine the guilt or innocence
of an accused person during a trial. While trial juries must determine
a suspect’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” grand juries
need only find “probable cause” of guilt in order to issue an indictment
that will lead to a trial. As a result, grand juries have considerable
latitude in the evidence that they collect. For example, unlike
trial juries, grand juries can consider hearsay evidence and as a rule
are not exposed to defense testimony explaining the side of the accused.
9
At the heart of the grand jury system—and at the center of its
conflict with journalistic expression—is secrecy. Only prosecutors
and stenographers are allowed to be present when federal grand ju-
— Spring 2007 • 9

ors question a witness. Attorneys for witnesses must wait outside
the grand jury room. Even prosecutors and transcribers are barred
from being present while the grand jury deliberates or votes. And
although witnesses may discuss their testimony afterwards, federal
rules strictly forbid grand jurors, prosecutors or stenographers from
doing so. 10 Grand jury secrecy is designed to protect the rights of innocent
people who may unfairly come under suspicion by prosecutors
but ultimately are not charged. Secrecy can also help encourage
witnesses to testify without fear of publicity and can prevent criminal
targets from fleeing or destroying evidence, or intimidating or
silencing witnesses. 11
The grand jury system has deep roots in both American and
British law. 12 Grand juries were originally dubbed the “People’s
Panel” because they are composed of ordinary citizens and were
intended to be a check on overzealous prosecutors. According to the
Supreme Court, the grand jury has historically “been regarded as a
primary security for the innocent against hasty, malicious, and oppressive
prosecution; it serves the invaluable function in our society
of standing between accuser and accused.” 13 However, grand juries
have frequently been misused for political purposes. During the
1930s, New York prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey greatly expanded
the use of grand juries to force testimony and thereby make it easier
to imprison corrupt politicians. In the 1950s, government officials
used grand juries to interrogate suspected Communists and then jail
them for contempt of court when they refused to answer questions.
By thus abusing the grand jury system, prosecutors were able to find
a way to imprison dissidents even though authorities lacked sufficient
evidence to convict them of any underlying crimes. By the
1960s, grand juries followed the recommendations of prosecutors in
more than 97 per cent of all cases. The trend toward turning grand
juries into proverbial “rubber stamps” of prosecutors—panels that
would, to borrow another cliché, readily indict a ham sandwich 14 —
only accelerated over time. F. Lee Bailey voiced the view of many
defense lawyers of that era when he called the contemporary grand
jury “a flock of sheep led by the prosecutor across the meadows to
the finding he wants.” 15
In 1969, after being elected president on a law-and-order platform,
Richard Nixon expanded the powers of federal grand juries
and used them to crack down on street crime and leftist political
dissent. Under the direction of Attorney General John Mitchell, a
Nixon friend who managed the President’s political campaigns, the
Justice Department began using grand juries to gather domestic po-
10 • American Journalism —

litical intelligence. The Republican administration forced left-leaning
activists to answer questions under oath about who their associates
were, much as the government did during the Redbaiting 1950s;
this raw intelligence was then computerized and used to generate
lists of other dissidents to question before future grand juries. 16 In
addition, Nixon administration prosecutors began using the grand
jury system in obvious “fishing expeditions” to try to force journalists
to reveal confidential sources. 17
In contrast to its original historical design, one scholar noted,
the grand jury system “became an important weapon in the hands
of the prosecutors whose powers it had been created to check.” 18 Or
as another expert put it, “an institution designed to protect us from
the dangers of a police state has been used to bring us still closer to
one.” 19
But ironically, in his second term as president, Richard Nixon
began seeking ways to curb the power of the grand jury that he had
helped to expand. The reason was not a philosophical change of
heart but self-preservation: Nixon himself was personally the target
of the Watergate grand jury.
The Watergate Grand Jury
In June 1972, Washington, D.C., police caught five men with illegal
bugging devices at the Democratic National Committee headquarters
in the Watergate office complex. The arrest of the Watergate
burglars—who turned out to be part of a wide-ranging political espionage
and sabotage operation run by the Nixon campaign—eventually
unraveled a much larger White House cover-up directed by the
President himself, one that would lead to his resignation in disgrace
twenty-six months later. Nonetheless, the President’s press secretary
dismissed the break-in as a “third-rate burglary” and the case was
initially handled in a manner similar to other routine crimes—with
a grand jury investigation led by federal prosecutors from the local
U.S. attorney’s office. 20
At first, media coverage of the Watergate break-in was typical
of any other local crime story, covered off the police blotter by
metro beat reporters who interviewed detectives and attended the
suspects’ arraignment. As the hometown newspaper with the greatest
local bench strength, the Washington Post scored the earliest
scoops about the case, thanks to verbal leaks by police, witnesses,
and attorneys involved in the grand jury investigation. 21 The Post’s
reporting suggested the story was of national import and other me-
— Spring 2007 • 11

dia outlets hurried to catch up. “If I happened to be standing next
to the urinal with somebody who knew something about the grand
jury,” said reporter Seymour Hersh, “it was in The New York Times”
the next day. Although editors at the Times were normally cautious
about publishing information about ongoing grand jury investigations,
Hersh said, during the competitive Watergate scandal “they
published them because the market was so hot.” 22
Although various news reports suggested that officials connected
to President Nixon directed the Watergate burglars, the federal
grand jury investigating the break-in failed to uncover such evidence.
The Watergate defendants received “hush money” payoffs to
keep quiet and none of the burglars initially implicated higher-ups.
“There is no evidence of a wider conspiracy,” the lead prosecutor
declared. 23
The prosecutors’ lack of success raised suspicions because they
themselves were part of the Nixon Justice Department. In fact, their
boss had been Attorney General John Mitchell, the very man who
would turn out to have authorized the illegal Watergate burglary
in the first place. Democratic National Committee lawyer Joseph
Califano complained that prosecutors “repeatedly tossed cream-puff
questions” at important grand jury witnesses “to avoid the potential
implication of anyone higher up,” and “generously permitted high
Nixon officials to submit written statements to the grand jury rather
than subject them to the possibility of embarrassing questions.” 24
According to Senator Sam Ervin, “the prosecutors fell substantially
short of prying open and presenting to the grand jury the truth.” 25
Partisan Democrats weren’t the only ones who felt that way. Newspaper
editorials and the presiding federal judge, a Republican, also
criticized the grand jury investigation. 26 One Watergate prosecutor
later admitted that his colleagues “had cut off grand jurors’ questions”
as a way to limit the investigation. 27 As the Watergate investigation
stalled in the fall of 1972, Nixon was re-elected to office in
a landslide.
Five months later, on April 16, 1973, syndicated columnist Jack
Anderson began a series of seven articles that quoted extensively
from verbatim transcripts of secret testimony before the Watergate
grand jury, complete with the stammering and ungrammatical responses
of various Watergate figures as well as the exact questions
asked by prosecutors and grand jurors. 28 While Anderson did not
explicitly state that he had obtained the grand jury transcripts, his
extensive and detailed quotations left little doubt. According to a
confidential FBI memo, the court reporters who transcribed the
12 • American Journalism —

grand jury testimony “compared the office copy of th[e] transcript
for that day with the column appearing in the paper and determined
they were identical, even down to the punctuation.” 29 As the Washington
Post put it, “Jack Anderson obviously is in possession of authentic
copies of the minutes of testimony before the federal court
grand jury.” 30
Anderson claimed that his “revelations” from the transcripts
were “startling.” 31 In fact, however, the substance of his columns
was relatively minor in importance since most of the key facts had
already been reported elsewhere as a result of verbal leaks to other
journalists. 32 But the fact that Anderson had obtained the closely
guarded transcripts themselves was startling, since the documents
were so sensitive that prosecutors had locked them in their office.
According to the Washington Post, a source in the U.S. attorney’s
office “said that ‘very, very few’ persons have access to grand jury
transcripts…. Normally, only prosecutors, transcribers and typists
would have access to the transcripts of grand jury minutes.” 33 The
government was forced to acknowledge publicly that Anderson’s
transcripts were indeed authentic and the FBI swept the grand jury
room in an unsuccessful effort to find any hidden bugs that may
have been planted inside the Washington courthouse. “All hell
broke loose,” the columnist remembered happily. “Someone had
broken the law, and the Justice Department and the judges damn
well wanted to know who.” 34
On April 23, 1973, all fifteen federal judges in Washington held
an unprecedented executive session to decide what to do about the
Anderson leaks. Afterwards, chief Judge John Sirica issued an order
from the full court directing the U.S. attorney to conduct a separate
grand jury investigation “of the unauthorized disclosure of Grand
Jury verbatim transcripts in the Watergate matter.” 35 Sirica noted
pointedly that the leaks to Anderson were illegal under Rule 6(e) of
the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Grand jury secrecy “preserves
the integrity of the Grand Jury by protecting the innocent and
encouraging free disclosure by persons who have information with
respect to possible commission of crimes,” Sirica emphasized. 36 According
to Brit Hume, a reporter who worked for Anderson, the controversial
columnist “got himself into a jam far more ominous than
any he had ever been in before.” 37
Under the law, it was a crime for any “agents” of the government—prosecutors,
grand jurors, or stenographers—to leak the
transcripts. Although it was not a crime for Anderson to publish
them, he faced the possibility of being held in contempt of court
— Spring 2007 • 13

if he refused to reveal his source of the transcripts. Ever defiant,
Anderson declared that “I cannot divulge my sources” and would
not do so even if subpoenaed before the grand jury: “Under our
Constitution we are free to publish any and all news generated by
the White House, the Congress, or the courts. No federal rule of
criminal procedure supersedes the Constitution, which grants freedom
of the press.” Anderson argued that other journalists had also
published information about testimony before the grand jury, based
on anonymous sources: “The government is upset, apparently, because
we nailed down the testimony precisely rather than relying
on hearsay.” 38 Anderson reporter Hume expressed exasperation that
“Jack was not only saying publicly that he was being singled out for
his accuracy” but also was preaching “a little civics lecture. I winced
at the thought of how Jack’s statement must have been received by
those fifteen judges who had voted to have him investigated.” 39
Anderson’s defense was not humble but it was accurate on at
least one essential point: he was not the only journalist who disclosed
secret testimony before the Watergate grand jury. In fact,
numerous other news outlets also received leaks about the grand
jury probe, passed on by various Watergate actors using the media
in differing ways to jockey for position. 40 At the Washington Post,
reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unsuccessfully tried
to persuade Watergate grand jurors themselves to leak details about
their secret probe. In response, Judge Sirica publicly upbraided the
two reporters for their “extremely serious” tactics, which he suggested
may have constituted contempt of court. 41 Sirica went even
further and issued a gag order after the Los Angeles Times obtained
an interview with a key grand jury witness; but the Supreme Court
overruled Sirica and the interview was ultimately published. 42
However, these leaks to other journalists were verbal not written;
none consisted of secret government documents such as the
nearly 500 pages of grand jury transcripts provided to Anderson.
Indeed, Anderson received not merely a leak but a veritable flood,
one that continued day after day on the pages of hundreds of newspapers
across the nation, making a public mockery of the grand
jury’s purportedly confidential deliberations. The glaring nature of
Anderson’s breach in judicial secrecy was indisputable. Moreover,
Anderson’s public challenge that he was merely one of many journalists
disclosing grand jury testimony only underscored and further
challenged the judiciary’s inability to preserve its own secrecy.
According to secretly recorded White House tapes, President
Nixon was deeply disturbed by the leak of the transcripts. “Of course
14 • American Journalism —

Jack Anderson has them—ugh—verbatim,” Nixon complained to
his aides. “Let me tell you, in view of this Jack Anderson thing, that
may damage this grand jury. [T]he way the leaks are coming out, I
mean, it gives the impression that we really aren’t getting at it [investigating
the scandal].” 43
Theories varied about who leaked the transcripts and why. The
assistant U.S. attorneys in the case believed that Anderson obtained
the transcripts from an employee of the company that transcribed
grand jury proceedings for the Justice Department. FBI agents interrogated
the company’s stenographers but they denied supplying the
transcripts to Anderson. 44 Several federal judges suggested that one
of the assistant U.S. attorneys working on the case was Anderson’s
source since his column portrayed the prosecutors posing tough and
incisive questions to dissembling grand jury witnesses. 45 Unnamed
Justice Department higher-ups told the Washington Post that they,
too, “suspected” one of the three assistant U.S. attorneys was the
leak and had “castigated” them for it. 46
But Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, who had replaced
John Mitchell, told the President that Anderson’s source must have
been a grand juror or court stenographer. “Cut the crap,” Nixon
snapped, according to his White House tapes. “We both know it
came out of the Justice Department.” 47 The President, well aware of
how he had tried to shut down the grand jury investigation, believed
that career prosecutors were leaking the transcripts in an effort to
keep the probe alive. “I think there’s terrible significance to…these
continuing leaks,” Nixon told his staff, because they suggested a
deliberate effort by prosecutors to publicize the evidence implicating
the White House. 48 The President’s cover-up depended on secrecy,
and if grand jury deliberations could not be kept secret what
could be? “The least you should do is to take the three members
of the prosecuting team and put them to a lie-detector test,” Nixon
instructed assistant attorney general Henry Petersen. “Now, I do that
with members of my staff and I’m therefore directing you do that
to them.” 49
Anderson never revealed who leaked the transcripts to him. He
told the press that the source was “not a court reporter, not an officer
of the court, not a prosecutor—he was none of those things.” The
columnist added, disingenuously, that the leak came from a “man
with high connections in the administration. I didn’t ask and he
didn’t say where he got his information from.” 50
But in interviews decades later, Anderson revealed that he obtained
the documents through “pure luck,” thanks to courthouse
— Spring 2007 • 15

trash bins, when a man he had never met before simply walked in off
the street and offered the original carbon paper used to make copies
of the typed transcripts. 51 “We were so excited we didn’t know what
to do,” recalled Les Whitten, a reporter who worked for Anderson. 52
Although the walk-in source wanted money in exchange, Anderson
delicately finessed his request for a bribe. “I never pay for documents,”
the columnist said later, “but we had a fish on the line and I
didn’t want to lose him…. We appealed to the man’s patriotism, and
he ultimately gave us the transcripts gratis.” 53
Before acquiring the sensitive documents, Anderson reporter
Whitten drove the source around downtown Washington in his
car while colleague Jack Cloherty watched “to make sure that we
weren’t being followed.” As Whitten collected the paperwork, Cloherty
acted as a “third-rate Mob look-out in a cloak and dagger
operation whose job was to make sure nobody saw us. We raced
back to the office” with the carbon papers, Cloherty remembered,
so that Anderson’s secretary “could tape them to a lampshade” to
view and then re-type them on her own typewriter: “We all had dirty
carbon hands. I had to scrub mine several times to get the ink off.”
Anderson’s staff worked round-the-clock for the next week typing
and collating the grand jury transcripts. 54
At least one federal judge was so angry about the leak that he
urged prosecutors to try to find a way to imprison Anderson. The
judge suggested granting the columnist immunity from prosecution
in order to force him to reveal his source to the grand jury. If Anderson
still refused, the judge urged jailing the reporter for contempt
of court and filing additional charges against him for obstruction of
justice. 55 Anderson fully expected to go to prison: “When you’ve got
all the judges in the District of Columbia and the U.S. attorney on
your tail, and you know that the White House is using every armtwisting
method it knows, you’re not too sure you’re gonna win.” 56
Anderson reporter Whitten began burning sensitive documents
in his fireplace at home to prevent the government from seizing
them. Whitten said that he and Anderson devised a plan to keep
the FBI from confiscating their files by locking themselves in their
office and “chucking all the stuff out the window…blocking them
with our bodies. I know it sounds romantic and crazy, these two
overweight middle-aged people…physically trying to keep them
from getting into our files…but we were determined to do this…as
a sort of tribute to the First Amendment.” 57
But the Nixon administration decided not to make a martyr out
of the columnist. “I don’t want to go too far there, because I don’t
16 • American Journalism —

want to get into a diversionary battle with Jack Anderson,” assistant
attorney general Henry Petersen said to Nixon. The President
agreed: “Oh, hell, no. It would pay too much attention. I agree. I
agree. Well, what I mean is, do the best to control it.” 58
The best way to control Anderson was with honey, not vinegar,
prosecutor Seymour Glanzer said years later in an interview. Since
Anderson was not an “officer of the court,” Glanzer believed, it was
“not clear legally” if he could be indicted anyway. More importantly,
Glanzer observed, “we didn’t want to prosecute the crime, we
wanted to prevent it. We wanted to get the transcripts returned.”
Glanzer suggested finding a solution that would not “compromise
Anderson as a reporter” by trying to force him to reveal his source.
Instead, the prosecutor proposed a plan, “put in the light most favorable
to Anderson,” that would appeal to his “patriotic” desire for
“the investigation to be successful.” Glanzer recommended telling
Anderson that “we don’t want you to surrender the transcripts to us”
but to Judge Sirica. 59
On April 25, 1973, at Anderson’s initiation, the columnist and
his attorneys met with Watergate prosecutors in their office in Washington’s
federal courthouse. “Jack had been warned repeatedly by
both his lawyers before going into the meeting that the law was
against him and that he must take a penitent approach,” Anderson
reporter Hume wrote. 60 One of the columnist’s lawyers pointed out
that “Jack really doesn’t have much to bargain with.” 61 Another Anderson
attorney emphasized that “[w]e are coming in as supplicants,
not as aggressors.” 62 According to Hume, Anderson, “one leg already
in the jailhouse door,” was unconcerned. “Don’t worry,” he
told his lawyers, “you let me handle it.” 63
For nearly two hours, the attorneys and the columnist argued
back and forth. Prosecutors stated that they had been ordered by the
panel of judges to find out who Anderson’s source was and that they
had to comply with that order. The columnist’s lawyers replied that
federal rules of procedure did not apply to journalists. Prosecutors
countered that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Branzburg v.
Hayes, 64 which ruled that journalists may be forced to reveal their
confidential sources to a grand jury, meant that the rule did indeed
apply to Anderson. But the columnist, a devout Mormon, remained
unconvinced. “Not only would it be a violation of my professional
ethics for me to divulge my source,” Anderson argued, “it would be
a violation of my religion. The Mormon faith holds that the Constitution
of the United States is divinely inspired. So I could never
consent to identifying a confidential source, no matter what.” But
— Spring 2007 • 17

what if the Supreme Court, which was established by the “divinely
inspired” Constitution to interpret its meaning, instructed Anderson
to do so? “If the Supreme Court were to order me to reveal my
source,” Anderson told prosecutors solemnly, “I would only have to
conclude that the Supreme Court was in error.” 65
Anderson also criticized prosecutors for previously “using the
grand jury process to protect the guilty” but added that “I think you’re
trying to make an honest investigation now.” Assistant U.S. attorney
Seymour Glanzer was offended: “What do you mean, ‘now’?” According
to Hume, “Jack was playing boldly with a weak hand, but
I have watched him intimidate other formidable people with that
booming voice, ringing with certainty, and that stern expression of
his.” Anderson upped the ante by saying that his “inclination” was
to start handing out copies of the grand jury transcripts to the New
York Times and other media outlets that had requested them. “But
before I do,” Anderson added, “I wanted to hear your case.” 66
Prosecutors then repeated their familiar arguments about the
importance of grand jury secrecy. “They were reasons well known
to Jack,” Hume wrote, “as they are to any experienced reporter.
But he listened most attentively.” At the end of the prosecutorial
lecture, Anderson surprised his audience. “You’ve convinced me,”
he declared. “I have no desire to interfere with the investigation of
the case.” Anderson agreed to stop publishing quotes from the transcripts
and turn over his copy to Judge Sirica. But he added, “I want
you to know that I will never tell you any more before a grand jury
than I am telling you here today.” He vowed that under no circumstances
would he ever reveal the identity of the confidential source
who gave him the grand jury transcripts. 67
Anderson emerged from the meeting and told a crowd of reporters
who had gathered outside the courthouse that prosecutors had
been receiving anonymous phone calls “saying, ‘We have information
but we’re afraid to come in’” and reveal it to the grand jury for
fear it would be published in Anderson’s column. Anderson also
quoted prosecutors as saying that the testimony of some government
witnesses “will be terribly restrained because they’re afraid
their bosses will read about it in the column the next morning.” As
a result, the reporter announced, he had voluntarily decided to stop
publishing grand jury transcripts. “I don’t want to hamper their investigation,”
Anderson said. “They made such a passionate point of
it.” 68 The columnist did not mention that he had already milked all of
his transcripts for everything that was newsworthy in them. 69 But he
did emphasize that he had not been cowed: “There was no intimida-
18 • American Journalism —

tion, no threats, no coercion of any kind. If there had been, I’d have
walked out and handed the transcripts to everybody [in the media].”
Anderson stressed his “great respect for Judge Sirica,” but also that
he “would continue to dig for leaks from the grand jury—just not
publish any more verbatim transcripts.” Anderson insisted that “I
still believe that what I was doing was right—I don’t apologize for
it.” 70 In a more formal written statement, Anderson added that “as a
journalist, I have an obligation and a right to continue to report any
and all pertinent information on this sordid scandal that so many
people in high places have worked so hard to keep from the public.”
71
The compromise was widely praised by almost all sides. Former
Nixon speechwriter William Safire, a newly minted columnist
for the New York Times, called Anderson’s move “gallant,” an adjective
not normally applied to the muckraker, especially by Nixon loyalists.
Other newspapers lauded Anderson’s “good judgment” and
“sense of responsibility.” “Jack ended up gaining recognition for
breaking the story,” Hume marveled, “and nearly as much for stopping
it…. It was one of the most remarkable Houdini acts anyone in
trouble with the government has ever made.” 72
In his memoirs, Anderson wrote that he “respected the sanctity
and secrecy of grand jury proceedings” but published the transcripts
anyway because “I didn’t trust Nixon to prosecute his own wayward
aides.” Anderson, too, believed that the grand jury was deliberately
being steered away from pursuing higher-ups involved in the scandal:
“I had heard from inside sources that [Nixon] looked upon the
grand jury as a safe rug to sweep the Watergate scandal under. His
intention, my sources said, was to lift a corner of the rug just enough
to quiet the public clamor. He believed that as president he could
control the prosecutors.” 73 In fact, as the President’s secret Oval Office
tape recordings later demonstrated, that was exactly what Nixon
was doing. In numerous conversations with top Justice Department
officials that he had appointed to office, the President attempted
both to pump them for information about where the supposedly secret
grand jury investigation was heading, as well as to direct the
probe away from his own criminality. 74
However, Anderson’s claim that a Nixon cover-up justified
publication of grand jury transcripts actually turned out to be weaker
than it appeared. Although the columnist was correct that Nixon
was trying to contain the scandal by controlling the grand jury, the
President’s cover-up had largely failed by the time Anderson began
publishing the secret transcripts on April 16. Nearly one month ear-
— Spring 2007 • 19

lier, on March 20, Watergate burglar James McCord broke ranks
and implicated administration higher-ups, who soon fell like dominos,
one by one knocking down more important Nixon advisors. 75
Nearly two weeks before Anderson’s articles were published, White
House counsel John Dean began cooperating with prosecutors and
implicated the President himself in the criminal conspiracy. 76 Thus
Anderson’s justification for publishing the transcripts—that it was
necessary to counter the administration’s ongoing cover-up—does
not withstand chronological scrutiny. 77 Still, while Anderson’s publication
of grand jury transcripts may have come too late to influence
events, a case can be made that he published them in good
faith at the time in the belief that prosecutors might still cover-up the
crimes of administration higher-ups.
In subsequent years, Anderson exaggerated the role he played
in uncovering the Watergate scandal. For example, the columnist
claimed that his publication of grand jury transcripts convinced the
President that he “could no longer use the grand jury as an excuse
for stonewalling…. Nixon’s strategy collapsed after I got hold of
the secret testimony.” 78 In fact, however, the President continued to
stonewall for more than another year, all the way to the end of his
presidency. 79 “Did the publishing of this information [grand jury
transcripts] affect the outcome of Watergate?” Anderson asked rhetorically.
“The answer is clearly yes.” Anderson even told one interviewer
that his columns—along with White House counsel Dean’s
disclosures to prosecutors and the Senate’s televised hearings—led
to Nixon’s resignation. But this over-simplification is self-aggrandizing
hyperbole. 80
In any case, as promised, Anderson duly dispatched his attorney
to Judge Sirica’s chambers with a copy of the grand jury transcripts.
The judge complained that the hundreds of pages of documents were
out of order and asked Anderson attorney Betty Southard Murphy
to straighten them up. Murphy refused, saying she did not want her
fingerprints to appear on them. She did not tell Sirica that Anderson
reporter Les Whitten had mixed up the pages of the records on purpose,
“just to be nasty.” Sirica handed the lawyer a receipt for the
transcripts and locked them in his safe. 81
Nearly nine months later, Judge Sirica announced that a grand
jury investigation into the Anderson leak failed to disclose the columnist’s
source, despite “FBI interviews of court stenographers, assistant
U.S. attorneys working on the Watergate case and others.”
The only other “reasonable avenue of investigation,” Sirica said,
was to try to force Anderson or his staff to reveal their source to the
20 • American Journalism —

grand jury. But the new attorney general, Elliot Richardson, “declined
to take the further step of summoning Mr. Anderson, giving
him immunity and demanding his disclosure to the grand jury of
his source. Due to this position…it is impracticable for the court to
pursue the matter further.” 82 In short, stated an internal FBI memorandum,
prosecutors “decided not to call Anderson before a Federal
grand jury or prosecute anyone in this case” and therefore “closed
this investigation.” 83
Conclusion
Jack Anderson’s receipt of nearly 500 pages of verbatim transcripts
of sworn grand jury testimony—and his publication of the
highlights of this confidential testimony day after day in nearly onethousand
newspapers across the country—was the most blatant and
extensive single penetration of secret grand jury proceedings during
the Watergate investigation.
Examined through a legal prism, the case demonstrated the
Watergate grand jury’s gravest clash between the First Amendment
rights of a free press and the Sixth Amendment rights of a defendant
to a fair trial. But in this instance, where the grand jury was corrupted
by a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, collective media
disclosures about the usually secret proceedings arguably strengthened
rather than weakened judicial integrity.
Viewed through the frame of journalism history, Anderson’s
publication of the Watergate transcripts illustrated both his greatest
strength and his greatest weakness: his independence from cautious
editors and his imperviousness to the norms of Washington’s mainstream
media establishment. While the columnist demonstrated
enormous courage in challenging a panel of angry federal judges,
his disclosure of grand jury minutes was one of the less meaningful
Watergate leaks because most of his information had previously
been reported by other journalists. Despite Anderson’s attempts to
exaggerate the importance of his columns, their effect on the rapidly
accelerating pace of the unfolding Watergate scandal was marginal
at best. Moreover, the leak to Anderson turned out to be a random
and idiosyncratic one; his source was not one of the principal players
trying to influence events but a tangential, low-level actor motivated
first by money and then by the excitement of playing a bit role
in the unfolding national drama. Ultimately, Anderson’s publication
of the secret transcripts would have less impact on Watergate than it
would on his own career, and only then as a symbol of Anderson’s
— Spring 2007 • 21

decline as the nation’s leading muckraker while a new generation of
younger investigative reporters took over the field. 84
Still, Anderson’s flagrant defiance of grand jury secrecy was a
symbol of just how much the relationship between the press and the
Nixon administration had changed as a result of Watergate. Just a
year after the media’s major setback in the Supreme Court’s Branzburg
v. Hayes decision, which forced reporters under certain circumstances
to reveal confidential sources to the government, Anderson’s
unapologetic publication of secret grand jury transcripts in some
ways reversed the power dynamic. While Branzburg affirmed the
government’s ability to use the grand jury system to investigate reporters’
sources, Anderson managed to use the grand jury system to
investigate the government itself. Where once journalists had been
hunted by the Nixon administration, now they were the hunters; and
it was the White House, not the media, that had become the prey.
Although the Watergate leaks to Jack Anderson and other reporters
understandably disturbed judges charged with protecting
grand jury secrecy, they also provided a vital independent journalistic
check on grand jury abuses. In so doing, they did not resolve
the old conflict between the First and Sixth Amendments. Just the
opposite: in the aftermath of Watergate, media coverage of secret
grand jury proceedings would become increasingly common—leading
to ongoing conflicts between the press and the courts over grand
jury secrecy that continue to the present day. 85
Endnotes
1 Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember,
Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 104.
2 Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon
(New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1990), 226, 255, 271, 615, vii-vii; Gladys
Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, The Battle for Public Opinion: The President,
the Press, and the Polls During Watergate (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 302-04; Edward Jay Epstein, Between Fact and Fiction: The
Problem of Journalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 21-32; and Mark
Feldstein, “Watergate Revisited,” American Journalism Review, v. 26, no.
4 (Aug./Sept. 2004), 60-67.
3 Literature about columnist Jack Anderson’s publication of Watergate
grand jury transcripts has been spotty, mentioned only briefly in news accounts
of the time and a handful of subsequent books: Jack Anderson and
Daryl Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (New York:
Forge, 1999), 257-62; Brit Hume, Inside Story (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1974), 284-96; James H. Dygert, The Investigative Journalist:
Folk Heroes of a New Era (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
22 • American Journalism —

1976), 99; and Timothy Mark Chambless, “Muckraker at Work: Columnist
Jack Anderson and the Watergate Scandal, 1972-1974,” unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah, 1987), 306-
29. All four of these accounts are sympathetic to Anderson and accept his
version of what happened largely at face value. None accurately examines
the impact of the case on the Watergate scandal nor analyzes deeper issues
involving grand jury secrecy and the tension between the First and Sixth
Amendments.
4 U.S. Constitution, Amendments I and VI.
5 Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia, 448 US 555 (1980) and Press-Enterprise
Co. v. Riverside County Superior Court, 464 US Media L. Rep., 1161
(1984).
6 Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 US 665 (1972).
7 Sheppard v. Maxwell, 384 US 333, 356 (1966); Nebraska Press Association
v. Stuart, 427 US 539 (1976); U.S. v. Noriega, 752 F. Supp. 1045,
(1990); Marshall v. U.S., 352 F.2d 1013 (9th Cir. 1965); Irvin v. Dowd, 366
U.S. 717 (1961); Rideau v. Louisiana, 373 U.S. 723 (1963); and Estes v.
Texas, 381 U.S. 532 (1965).
8 Susan W. Brenner and Lori E. Shaw, Federal Grand Jury: A Guide to
Law and Practice, 2nd ed. (Eagan, MN: Thomson/West, 2006), passim. The
votes of twelve or more grand jurors, a majority, are required to issue an
indictment. Before 1968, federal grand jurors were not chosen randomly
from voting rolls. Instead, courts used the so-called “key man” system in
which law enforcement authorities, city officials, and former grand jurors
picked future ones. “Soon the institution became a kind of select Rotary
Club for middle-aged, middle-class white men who enjoyed each other’s
company and rarely challenged a prosecutor’s decision,” one scholar wrote.
“Of equal consequence, the juries’ power of independent investigation…atrophied.”
Paul Cowan, “The New Grand Jury: A Kind of Immunity That
Leads to Jail,” New York Times Magazine (29 April 1973), 36; and “The
Grand Jury—What It Is and What It Does,” US News and World Report (21
May 1973), 19.
9 Brenner & Shaw, passim.
10 Ibid.
11 Julie R. O’Sullivan, “The Bakaly Debacle: The role of the Press in High-
Profile Criminal Investigations,” 60 Md. L. Rev. 149. See also Richard M.
Cooper, “Grand Jury Leaks,” National Law Journal (12 October 1998), B-
20+.
12 In colonial times, grand juries often restrained authorities from arbitrary
prosecutions. In 1743, for example, after a trial jury had already acquitted
newspaper printer John Peter Zenger on charges of seditious libel, two
subsequent grand juries refused attempts by the Crown to indict Zenger
on lesser charges. Other grand juries rejected the Crown’s attempts to
charge colonists for similar political expression in protesting the Stamp Act
and “libeling” another royal governor. Cowan, 36. In reality, however,
the grand jury system has not always been such a reliable bulwark against
abuse of power. The earliest British grand juries issued indictments that
— Spring 2007 • 23

were more akin to sentences, since “trial” often consisted of a harrowing
ordeal such as being “cast into the depths of the sea;” if the suspect “sank,
he was adjudged not guilty; if he swam, he was pronounced guilty.” Leroy
D. Clark, The Grand Jury: The Use and Abuse of Political Power (New
York: Quadrangle, 1975), 8. In 1164, some 500 years before grand juries
were brought to colonial America, Britain’s King Henry II established the
first known type of grand jury—not to safeguard citizens from oppression
but to wrest authority from rival feudal barons and the Church. Even the
“independent” grand juries of colonial times failed contemporary standards
of justice. “Grand juries have always served the interests of whichever
political element could control them,” one scholar wrote. “Where grand jurors’
sympathies were with the patriot faction, as in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts,
they frustrated the Crown’s efforts to punish radicals. In other
colonies, where they were sympathetic to Royal officialdom, they served
Royal interests as well. The image of the grand jury as a shield, important
though it was in the minds of the framers of our Constitution, was based on
a mythology of sorts.” Gary P. Naftalis and Marvin E. Frankel, The Grand
Jury: An Institution on Trial (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 7-8. After
the American Revolution, the onetime colonists who had been spared prison
because of an independent grand jury system were shaping the laws of the
new republic. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison made sure to continue
these “people’s panels” that had previously served the patriots so well by
enshrining them in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Jefferson,
however, soon learned first-hand about the limits of the grand jury system.
In 1791, the future president complained that the opposition Federalist Party
had managed to transform grand juries “from a legal to a political engine”
by encouraging them “to become inquisitors on the freedom of speech.”
Cowan, 36; Charles E. Goodell, “Where Did the Grand Jury Go?” Harper’s
(May 1973), 16; and U.S. Constitution, Amendment V.
13 Clark, 5; and Naftalis and Frankel, 11.
14 The dismissive phrase that grand juries were capable of “indicting a ham
sandwich” was coined by New York judge Sol Wachtler and later immortalized
by writer Tom Wolfe in his novel Bonfire of the Vanities. Marcia
Kramer and Frank Lombardi, “New Top State Judge: Abolish Grand Juries
& Let Us Decide,” NY Daily News (Jan. 31, 1985), 3; David Plotz, “Judicial
Restraint,” Slate.com (April 16, 1997).
15 Because of this problem, the British government, which invented the
grand jury system, abolished it in 1933, opting instead to weigh the validity
of indictments in open court. Some states in the U.S. do the same, especially
in the West, where the grand jury system often failed to take root at
the local level. In very rare instances, “runaway” grand juries still assert
themselves, wresting control of a criminal investigation away from prosecutors.
U.S. News, 19; Clark, 8; Naftalis and Frankel , 7-8; Cowan, 36-7;
and Goodell, 24, 16. See also Linda Himelstein, “Rocky Flats Grand Jurors
Seek Immunity to Tell All,” The Recorder (25 Nov. 1992), 3+.
16 Goodell, 24, 22; and Cowan, 19.
17 Clark, 73-87.
24 • American Journalism —

18 Cowan, 37.
19 Goodell, 24, 22.
20 Washington, D.C., is not a state and has limited self-government under
“home rule” run by Congress. As a result, the nation’s capital has no local
district attorney and so all criminal cases there, no matter how small, are
handled by the federal U.S. attorney’s office. Keith Melder, ed., City of
Magnificent Intentions: A History of the District of Columbia (Washington,
D.C.: Intac, Inc., 1983), 560.
21 David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2000), 607-08, 615.
22 Seymour Hersh interview with Lowell Bergman, PBS Frontline (Jan. 8,
2007), www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/interviews/hersh.html
23 James Doyle, Not Above the Law: The Battles of Watergate Prosecutors
Cox and Jaworski (New York: William Morrow, 1977), 32.
24 Lawrence Meyer, “Prosecutors Accused of Leak,” Washington Post (25
April 1973), A-1.
25 Doyle, 80.
26 Ibid., 32.
27 Stanley I. Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free
Press, 1997), 335.
28 For example, McCord answered a question about how many burglars
were at the Watergate break-in by saying, “Seven Cubans and me, or I. I
think that’s correct.” The grand jurors were colorfully described as seeming
“incredulous” or “br[eaking] in” to interrupt testimony with their skeptical
questions. Jack Anderson, “Watergate Team Hit Democrats Twice,” Washington
Post (April 16, 1973), D-13; Jack Anderson, “Secret Testimony on
Delivery of Cash,” Washington Post (April 19, 1973), G-11.
29 According to the FBI memo, the president of the company that transcribed
the testimony “explained that she had no idea how Mr. ANDERSON had obtained
this transcript…[and stated that she is in] no way involved in JACK
ANDERSON’S obtaining any Grand Jury transcripts and has no reason to
believe any employees at [her company] may have been responsible.” FBI
memo from FBI special agents Robert E. Hill and John W. Hinderman,
WFO 139-166 (30 April 1973), 2, National Security Archives, Michael
Dobbs collection, George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C.
30 “Column’s Quotes Termed Authentic,” Washington Post (20 April 1973),
A-14.
31 Anderson and Gibson, 260.
32 Anderson’s columns confirmed earlier news reports that the Watergate
burglary was part of a much larger political espionage operation; that burglar
James McCord had received hush money to keep quiet about it; and
that White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman controlled a cash slush
fund. The Anderson grand jury transcripts also revealed for the first time
that the Watergate burglars had successfully broken into the Democratic
headquarters three weeks before they were first arrested; that White House
aide Jeb Magruder had incriminating files removed from his office to elude
— Spring 2007 • 25

prosecutors; and that to cover his tracks, burglar McCord had “tossed in the
Potomac [River]” eavesdropping equipment that the police had not seized.
Jack Anderson, “Watergate Called Part of Vast Plan,” Washington Post (18
April 1973), D-19; Jack Anderson, “McCord Tells of Watergate Payments,”
Washington Post (17 April 1973), B-15; Jack Anderson, “Secret Testimony
on Delivery of Cash,” Washington Post (19 April 1973), G-11; Jack Anderson,
“Watergate Team Hit Democrats Twice,” Washington Post (16 April
1973), D-13; Jack Anderson, “Web Tightens Around Nixon Advisers,”
Washington Post (20 April 1973), D-19. Anderson’s final columns quoting
the grand jury transcripts offered little that had not already been reported.
Jack Anderson, “Testimony on Segretti Hiring Differs,” Washington Post
(21 April 1973), C-11; and Jack Anderson, “‘Gemstone’ Drew Watergate
Noose,” Washington Post (23 April 1973), D-13.
33 Lawrence Meyer and Timothy S. Robinson, “Jury Leaks Probed,” Washington
Post (24 April 1973), 1.
34 Memo from FBI special agent R.J. Gallagher, “Watergate” (17 April
1973), National Security Archives, Michael Dobbs collection, George
Washington Univ., Washington, D.C.; and interview by Daryl Gibson with
Jack Anderson (Bethesda, MD: 29 January 1994). See also Anderson and
Gibson, 259; Hume, 287.
35 Statement of chief judge John J. Sirica, Silbert Work File, Box #51, Watergate
Special Prosecutor Files, National Archives, College Park, MD.
36 Ibid.
37 Hume, 284.
38 Anderson and Gibson, 260.
39 Hume, 289.
40 Halberstam, 687, 690. At the staid New York Times, reporter Seymour
Hersh recalled, “That had never happened before. They’d never had grand
jury information filtered into the newspaper.” Senior Times editors initially
told Hersh that “We don’t run stories based on secondhand information
from a grand jury. We don’t trust grand juries. We don’t do it.” But the
journalistic rivalry on Watergate became so intense that the Times changed
its policy to compete with other media organizations. Times editors had
believed that writing “stories about the grand jury before a grand jury issued
a formal report…was crawling in the gutter,” Hersh remembered. But
“who crawled into the gutter first,” the reporter asked rhetorically, “we or
the [corrupt Nixon] White House?” Seymour Hersh interview with Lowell
Bergman, PBS Frontline (Jan. 8, 2007), www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/interviews/hersh.html
41 Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’s Men (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1974), 207-11, 223-25.
42 Halberstam, 637-40.
43 Nixon’s April 25 phone call to assistant attorney general Henry Petersen
was tape-recorded by the White House. Kutler, Abuse of Power, 328.
44 Assistant U.S. attorney Seymour Glanzer later said that the transcripts
were leaked by someone connected with the Hoover Reporting Company, a
government contractor that transcribed grand jury proceedings for the Jus-
26 • American Journalism —

tice Department. Glanzer stated that prosecutors received reports that the
company’s owner was “anti-Nixon.” But the company’s president, Doris
F. Hoover, vehemently denied responsibility for leaking the transcripts to
Anderson and told the FBI that once Anderson’s first column was published
she took all remaining transcripts home and burned them. Mrs. Hoover
put the blame on lax courthouse security, saying federal officials kept “the
grand jury room unlocked and unattended” with “copies of transcribed
grand jury testimony laying insecure on a table within the grand jury room.”
She also charged that prosecutors damaged her “reputation and livelihood”
by blaming her company for the leak. Decades later, Mrs. Hoover’s successor
said that her employees were “heavily Democratic” in their politics
but that Mrs. Hoover herself was a “right-wing, extremely partisan Republican”
who supported Nixon. Author’s Interview with Seymour Glanzer,
former Watergate prosecutor, Washington, D.C. (2 January 2001); author’s
interview with Paul Kuntzler, president, Miller Court Reporting, Inc. (28
September 2005); memo from FBI special agents Edward R. Leary, Daniel
C. Mahan and Robert E. Hill, WFO 139-166, “Doris Hoover” (27 April
1973), 4, National Security Archives, Michael Dobbs collection, George
Washington Univ., Washington, D.C.; letter from Doris F. Hoover, Hoover
Reporting Co., to Earl J. Silbert, principal assistant U.S. attorney 1-3 (23
April 1973), 1-3, Silbert Work File, Box 51, Watergate Special Prosecution
Force, National Archives, College Park, MD. The National Archives
initially redacted portions of this correspondence but eventually provided
an uncensored copy after an appeal by the author under the Freedom of
Information Act.
45 Author’s interview with Seymour Glanzer, Washington, D.C. (2 January
2001).
46 Two days after Anderson agreed to stop publishing the grand jury transcripts,
assistant attorney general Henry Petersen, who was personally leaking
grand jury secrets to Nixon, ordered his prosecutors to send him all
of the grand jury transcripts for his perusal. Lawrence Meyer, “Prosecutors
Accused of Leak,” Washington Post (25 April 1973), 1; and Lawrence
Meyer, “Petersen Asks for Secret Jury Data,” Washington Post (27 April
1973), A-7.
47 Assistant attorney general Henry Petersen repeatedly fielded phone calls
from the President inquiring about the progress of the Watergate investigation
at the same time that Nixon dangled a promotion—to FBI director—in
front of him. “I don’t ask you what goes on” in the grand jury, Nixon complained
(falsely) to Petersen, “but I can read it in Jack Anderson’s column.”
Petersen’s response: “Well, that’s right, and that’s terrible.” The President
also suggested to Petersen that “it’s very easy to change the court reporters.”
However, Petersen told Nixon that he was “reluctant” to polygraph
his underlings and the President backed down from that request. Kutler,
Abuse of Power, 328.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 John W. Crewdson, “Anderson Won’t Print More Jury Testimony,” New
— Spring 2007 • 27

York Times (26 April 1973), 34; and Lawrence Meyer, “Anderson to Give
Jury Transcripts to Sirica,” Washington Post (26 April 1973), A-25.
51 Interview by Daryl Gibson with Jack Anderson, Bethesda, MD (29 January
1994). Anderson was not the only reporter who got Watergate scoops
out of wastebaskets. Washington Post reporter John Hanrahan later obtained
sensitive prosecution memos the same way, according to an aide
to special prosecutor Archibald Cox: “Chagrined, Archie Cox telephoned
editor Ben Bradlee of the Post to ask for help. ‘If you ever tell anyone I
told you this, I’ll deny it,’ Bradlee said. ‘But Archie, you’ve got a trash
problem.’” Doyle, 69.
52 Anderson and his reporters “schmoozed and schmoozed” the source to
convince him that he had a moral duty to leak the documents, Whitten remembered,
“and this guy was so excited about the way [our] office operated
and believed the idealism about it that he finally began to cooperate for no
money….He started out looking for money and we got him around to feeling
what was really important and we never paid that guy a damn dime!”
Interview by Daryl Gibson with Les Whitten, Silver Spring, MD (30 Sept.
1994).
53 Anderson and Gibson, 257.
54 Author’s interview, former Anderson reporter Jack Cloherty, Washington,
DC (28 September 2005). See also author’s interview with Jack Anderson,
Bethesda, MD (April 7, 2000); interview by Daryl Gibson with Les
Whitten, Silver Spring, MD (30 September 1994); and interview by Daryl
Gibson with Jack Anderson, Bethesda, MD (29 January 1994).
55 Author’s interview with Seymour Glanzer, Washington, D.C. (2 January,
2001).
56 Interview by Daryl Gibson with Jack Anderson, Bethesda, MD (29 January
1994). Anderson said later that his chief worry was not jail but bankruptcy.
“Too many people in my office knew” who the source was, the
columnist recalled, “and I was greatly concerned that [the judges] could
put maybe half the staff” behind bars, making it impossible to put out the
daily column. This financial vulnerability led Anderson to issue a rule to his
reporters that “any confidential source that they had to protect, they should
keep to themselves. I didn’t want my whole staff being jailed.” One of Anderson’s
reporters who helped copy the grand jury transcripts later admitted
that he deliberately pressed his fingerprints on the transcripts because he
was “insanely jealous” that Anderson was “under investigation all the time
and getting all kinds of publicity….I wanted to go to jail bad. I was damned
determined that I was going to get caught,” too. Transcript of interview by
Daryl Gibson with Joseph Spear, Washington, D.C. (ND), Jack Anderson
papers, Gelman Library, George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C.
57 Interview by Daryl Gibson with Les Whitten, Silver Spring, MD (30 Sept.
1994). As it turned out, the reporters probably would not have gone to jail
for long. According Whitten, at a late night meeting in Anderson’s home,
the columnist told the source that if “we all go to jail, the column will be
finished. Well, this guy [the source] loved the column by that time. He
thought the column was the greatest thing that had ever come down to life.
28 • American Journalism —

And to my total astonishment, the guy stood up in Jack’s house and saluted
him, and said ‘at the jailhouse door, I will come forth.’ Now, this is a guy
who…believe me, he would have not only gone into jail but he would have
been professionally destroyed for his whole life….Tears actually came to
my eyes at the bravery of this guy who’d started out basically as somebody
trying to hustle stolen information for money who had finally gotten to
where he believed in the First Amendment” so much that he was willing to
go to jail. Whitten said the source became so enamored of the reporters that
he liked to hang around their office, despite his own job as a “professional.”
In the midst of Anderson’s legal confrontation, Anderson said, “TV and
radio crews were camped in my reception room one afternoon, waiting for
the latest developments, when the source himself unexpectedly walked in
the door. Oblivious to the reason for all the excitement, he threaded his way
through the throng to Les’s office for a casual chat. ‘What’s everybody here
for?’ he asked Les. Les bolted from his desk, grabbed the man by the arm,
and steered him out the back way. ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls,’ Les
whispered. ‘It tolls for thee.’” Ibid.; and Anderson and Gibson, 260-1.
58 Kutler, Abuse of Power, 328.
59 Author’s interview with Seymour Glanzer, Washington, D.C. (2 January
2001). Glanzer’s gentle approach stemmed in part from his belief that
Washington’s liberal federal appeals court likely would have reversed any
move by prosecutors to cite Anderson for contempt anyway, “in fifteen
minutes,” as Glanzer put it. Glanzer’s attitude toward Anderson was undoubtedly
softened by the columnist’s public statement that he did not get
the grand jury transcripts from the U.S. attorney’s office, thereby clearing
Glanzer and his colleagues of suspicion. After the Watergate scandal was
over, the two men became friends and socialized. Ibid.
60 Hume, 292.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 408 U.S. 665 (1972).
65 Hume, 293-5. Hume was not present in the meeting but based his account
on contemporaneous descriptions from the columnist and his attorneys, who
also corroborated it to the author. Author’s interview with Jack Anderson,
Bethesda, MD (7 April 2000); author’s interview with Betty Southard Murphy,
Washington, D.C. (4 May 2000). See also Brit Hume, “The Anderson
Transcripts,” MORE (July 1974), 6-7, 21.
66 Hume, 293-5. Emphasis in original. The day before, Anderson invited
reporters to come to his office and examine his copy of the grand jury transcripts;
but he did not allow reporters to make their own copy. Glanzer
later said he had no memory of Anderson’s criticism during the meeting but
Anderson was quoted making similar comments to the press immediately
afterwards, and he and his attorneys have consistently repeated the same
description of the exchange ever since. John Hanrahan, “Jury Told of ‘Bug’
Shield for Mitchell, Washington Post (25 April 1973), A1+; Timothy Mark
Chambless, “Muckraker at Work,” 316; interview by Timothy Mark Chamb-
— Spring 2007 • 29

less with Jack Anderson, Bethesda, MD (15 March 1986); and author’s interview
with Seymour Glanzer (Washington, DC: 2 January 2001).
67 Hume, 293-5. In later years, the columnist added one key detail that did
not appear in Hume’s account: Anderson’s purported threat to prosecutors.
According to the columnist’s autobiography published more than twentyfive
years later, Anderson told the prosecutors: “You can inform the judges
that I will not identify my source and that jailing me would serve no purpose
except to punish me. But if you punish me, then I will punish you.
Every day I’m in jail I will write a story about this. You may win on your
battlefield, but the press is my battlefield and I’ll win there. Which is the
more powerful? We’ll find out. We’ll see who can last longer.” Did Hume
omit the threat on behalf of his former boss? Or did Anderson embellish his
toughness in later years? In 1986, Anderson called Hume’s reconstruction
“the most accurate account of what was actually said at the meeting” although
he “didn’t get it in its entirety and had missed a couple of important
things.” In 1994, Anderson acknowledged that “I do remember, I’m sure,
a more heroic version of our conversation than actually occurred, but one
that I could take a lie detector test on.” Anderson attorney Betty Southard
Murphy remembered a different kind of threat in which Anderson told prosecutors,
“go ahead and arrest me and I’ll expose the jail system.” According
to prosecutor Glanzer, Anderson “never said he would retaliate or mistreat
us. He was always very warm to us [in the meeting]. He never felt we were
threatening him, we never felt he was threatening us.” Glanzer said the
strongest language Anderson used was to point out that “[y]ou will make
me a hero if you throw me in jail for contempt. I’ll welcome it.” Jack Anderson
interview with author (Bethesda, MD: 7 April 2000); Betty Murphy
interview with author (Washington, DC: 4 May 2000); author’s interview
with Seymour Glanzer (Washington, DC: 2 January 2001); Jack Anderson
interview with Daryl Gibson (29 January 1994); Timothy Mark Chambless,
“Muckraker at Work,” 317, 329; and Anderson and Gibson, 262.
68 Interview by Daryl Gibson with Jack Anderson, Bethesda, MD (29 January
1994). Had he not already milked the transcripts dry, Anderson later
said with a chuckle, “I would have prolonged the negotiations” with prosecutors.
The columnist said he buried an extra copy of the transcripts under
the lawn in his backyard just in case he found “a compelling reason” to
publish from them in the future. “Nobody knows that I did that,” Anderson
added. Ibid.
69 John M. Crewdson, “Anderson Won’t Print More Jury Testimony,” New
York Times (26 April 1973), 34. Anderson reserved the “unlikely” possibility
that he might return to publishing the transcripts if he felt it was
warranted: “I can’t ever say in advance what I will do.” Sniffed prosecutor
Earl Silbert: “He hasn’t obligated himself to do anything. It isn’t like a
contract.” Ibid.
70 Lawrence Meyer, “Anderson to Give Jury Transcripts to Sirica,” Washington
Post (26 April 1973), A-25.
71 United Feature Syndicate release, “Statement by Jack Anderson,” (25
April 1973), Anderson papers, Gelman Library, George Washington Univ.,
30 • American Journalism —

Washington, D.C. In his memoirs, Anderson credited Judge John Sirica
with putting together the “diplomatic” compromise the day after Anderson
met with prosecutors. However, it was just minutes after meeting with
prosecutors that Anderson announced he would turn over the transcripts to
Sirica, suggesting the deal had been worked out in that meeting. Hume described
an “informal agreement” worked out then in which Anderson would
return the transcripts “to the court. In exchange, the prosecutors agreed that
they would call Jack before the grand jury [to identify his source] only as
a last resort.” Hume took credit for suggesting this very compromise to
Anderson’s lawyers several days earlier. Anderson and Gibson, 262; Hume,
291.
72 Hume, 259-61. According to the Sacramento Bee, Anderson “has done
this nation a valuable service…. It is good for this country to have gadflies
like Anderson in Washington. In the long run, his unstinting devotion to the
people’s right to know may serve to keep government officials more honest
than they might be otherwise.” Years later, prosecutor Seymour Glanzer
called Anderson’s decision to stop publishing the transcripts “heroic.” A
dissenting opinion was offered by the Los Angeles Times, which denounced
the columnist’s “unnecessary and self-serving exploit. It called attention
to Anderson, but it is hard to see how it did anything to advance efforts
at untangling this far-reaching scandal. More than anything else, it was a
case of Anderson bragging in public about his ability to get hold of a supposedly
secret transcript.” Sacramento Bee (27 April 1973), editorial, cited
in Edward W. Knappman, Watergate and the White House, 172; author’s
interview with Seymour Glanzer (Washington, DC: 2 January 2001); and
Los Angeles Times (25 April 1973), editorial page.
73 Anderson and Gibson, 259.
74 Kutler, Abuse of Power, 326-63. In just two weeks during late April,
Nixon held more than a dozen conversations in which he questioned Attorney
General Kleindienst and his deputy Henry Petersen about the Watergate
grand jury investigation. The President alternately flattered his prosecutors,
pumped them for information, falsely asserted his innocence, and suggested
prosecutorial strategy, exploiting his underlings to find out what the grand
jury had learned about his own criminal behavior—even as he complained
about “these damn grand jury leaks” from Jack Anderson. Ibid.
75 Kutler, Wars of Watergate, 262.
76 Ibid., 290-1, 320.
77 The columnist himself implicitly acknowledged this at the time he announced
that he would stop publishing any more transcripts; although six
months earlier the grand jury investigation had been “less than full,” Anderson
declared, “I’ve read the transcripts, and I don’t see that now.” Jack
Anderson interview with Daryl Gibson (29 January 1994).
78 Nixon “had counted on the secrecy of the grand jury to allow him to
choose what to make public and what to keep hidden,” Anderson observed.
“He was holding the Senate at bay, meanwhile, by warning senators not to
interfere with the grand jury probe.” Later, after getting to know the Watergate
prosecutors, Anderson concluded that they “would probably not have
— Spring 2007 • 31

obeyed [Nixon’s] edict if he had ordered them to cover up. They probably
would have gone public before they would have done that.” The President
believed otherwise, Anderson said, because “in Nixon’s mind, he controlled
the attorney general and the attorney general controlled the prosecutors.”
Id; and Anderson and Gibson, 259.
79 Nixon invoked “executive privilege” to block his aides from testifying to
the Senate Watergate committee but announced that he was abandoning that
strategy the day after Anderson first began publishing the grand jury transcripts.
The columnist linked the two events based on a high-level White
House source who allegedly overheard the President say, “God damn it,
Anderson’s got the story anyhow, we may as well let them testify.” However,
Nixon’s about-face was just one of several concessions in April that the
President reluctantly made as a result of the growing furor over Watergate.
This furor was precipitated not by Anderson’s columns but by the accelerating
grand jury probe as it zeroed in on Nixon himself. Even Anderson
reporter Brit Hume attributed the President’s reversal not to Anderson but to
Senate Republicans, who had been pressuring Nixon to abandon his executive
privilege defense for some time. Prosecutor Seymour Glanzer, despite
his friendship with the columnist, said he “wouldn’t attach much importance”
to Anderson’s “speculation” that his disclosure of the grand jury
transcripts caused Nixon’s reversal on executive privilege. Hume feared
that Anderson’s bragging might have a legal cost: “the more he took credit
for turning Nixon around on Watergate, the more he was taking bows for an
achievement that Judge Sirica probably felt was his own….Since [Sirica]
had taken such an aggressive position in trying to get to the bottom of the
case, he could hardly stint at this point in acting to protect the integrity of
the grand jury process.” Anderson, however, said that he later “got the word
from people close to Sirica that he admired and respected what I was doing
[on Watergate], thought I was on the right track” and “wasn’t all that upset”
with Anderson’s publication of the transcripts, although “the sanctity of the
grand jury was something he as a judge felt that he had to protect.” Hume,
288-90; Timothy Mark Chambless, “Muckraker at Work,” 315, 325; and
Daryl Gibson interview, Jack Anderson, Bethesda, MD (Jan. 29, 1994).
80 Dygart, 97-8; Chambless, 325-7. Although Anderson acknowledged that
Dean “played a bigger role” in exposing Watergate, Anderson added that
Dean “was doing his testifying before the grand jury, and it still might have
been contained” were it not for Anderson’s publication of the transcripts.
“I can always say that my column played a key role in getting the Watergate
story on the public record for the first time,” Anderson argued. “The
first sworn testimony appeared in my column, and that opened the gates for
all the other sworn testimony. And I can legitimately take credit for having
laid out the Watergate story on the public record.” At another point,
however, Anderson backtracked somewhat: “I don’t think I made that big
a difference, but the argument can be made that my columns did make a
difference.” Interview by Timothy Mark Chambless with Jack Anderson,
Bethesda, MD (15 March 1986).
81 Author’s interview, Betty Southard Murphy, Washington, D.C. (4 May
32 • American Journalism —

2000).
82 Timothy Robinson, “Watergate Jury Leak Probe Fails, Washington Post
(25 January 1974), A-13. Sirica’s statement, issued on behalf of all fifteen
federal judges, said that the Court had tightened security measures by purchasing
new vaults for storing sensitive documents and hiring a new stenography
company that would prepare transcripts only inside the courthouse.
“Judges Call on Burger to Draft Law Against Grand Jury Leaks,” New York
Times (26 January, 1974).
83 FBI memo, Miss Ruth E. Gibson (ND), 2., National Security Archives,
Michael Dobbs collection, George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C.
84 Although he was then the most famous investigative reporter in the U.S.,
one author wrote, “Anderson managed to miss the biggest story of all, the
Watergate conspiracy” because he “didn’t grasp the potential” magnitude of
the scandal, failed “to recognize the true significance of the break-in [and]
lost interest in the Watergate story.” Dygart, 97, 98.
85 The New York Times decision to publish Watergate grand jury leaks
proved to be “a sea change,” said reporter Seymour Hersh, and permanently
altered the newspaper’s policy on covering secret judicial proceedings. For
the most recent high-profile clash between prosecutors and the press over
grand jury secrecy, see Bob Egelko and John Koopman, “Lawyer Enters
Guilty Plea as BALCO Leaker,” San Francisco Chronicle (Feb. 16, 2007),
1. Seymour Hersh interview with Lowell Bergman, PBS Frontline (Jan. 8,
2007), www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/interviews/hersh.html.
— Spring 2007 • 33