Media Coverage and a Federal Grand Jury

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 —