Media Coverage and a Federal Grand Jury

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 —