Media Coverage and a Federal Grand Jury

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 —