--------------------- [excerpt] --------------- After Bernstein had finished, he reached Sloan by phone and read him the draft. Sloan confirmed virtually the entire story.
Bernstein added a few details, including an account of Liddy's "bad apple" speech to his colleagues on the Monday after the break-in.
Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt, James McCord
Woodward and Bernstein took the draft to Rosenfeld. At 44, Rosenfeld had been a foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post. Brash and tough at times, he is extremely skillful at locating holes in stories written by his reporters.
Since the week following the Watergate break-in, Rosenfeld had been the hard-sell artist, persuading Bradlee and the other senior editors (after satisfying himself) that the reporters had touched every base in their stories. From the day in 1970 when he moved from the foreign desk to become metropolitan editor, Rosenfeld's mission had been to raise the local staff from its second-class citizenship at the Post.
Seizing on the potential of the Watergate story, he had fought for it to remain with the metropolitan staff and had won -- resisting attempts by the national editors to take over.
Rosenfeld runs the metropolitan staff, the Post's largest, like a football coach. He prods his players, letting them know that he has promised the front office results, pleading, yelling, cajoling, pacing, working his facial expressions for instant effects -- anger, satisfaction, concern.
He was born in pre-Nazi Berlin and came to New York City when he was ten. He made a successful effort to forget his German and speaks English without any trace of an accent. Rosenfeld went to work for the Herald Tribune after his graduation from Syracuse University and has always been an editor, never a reporter.
He was inclined to worry that too many reporters on the metropolitan staff were incompetent, and thought even the best reporters could be saved from self-destruction only by the skills of an editor.
His natural distrust of reporters was particularly acute on the Watergate story, where the risks were very great, and he was in the uncomfortable position of having to trust Bernstein and Woodward more than he had ever trusted any reporters.
Robert Redford as Bob Woodward; Jack Warden as Harry Rosenfeld in the movie version of All the President's Men
Aware that much of the story was out of his hands, he tried to exercise what control he could: he hovered around the reporters' typewriters as they wrote, passed them questions as they talked on the phone to sources, demanded to be briefed after they hung up or returned from a meeting.
Now, gulping down antacid tablets, Rosenfeld grilled Bernstein and Woodward to find out how solid this latest story was. He was reassured by Bernstein's conversation with the FBI agent. At least the FBI had the same allegations on paper. Rosenfeld always felt better when he knew that somewhere, no matter how inaccessible, there was a piece of paper that could support a story.
And it was a dangerous story. The Post was, in effect, making its own charges -- not only against the campaign officials, but also concerning the thoroughness of the FBI and grand-jury investigations. The charges were, in some ways, more serious than those handed down in the indictment, four days earlier.
His interrogation completed, Rosenfeld approved the story. Bernstein called CRP for its ritual comment. The notation "Insert Denial" was marked between paragraphs two and three -- right after the descriptions of Mardian and LaRue as the head housecleaners.
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All the President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. 1974. Simon & Schuster.
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...Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting --
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them,
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the doorknob broke)
When you asked me how I was doing,
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters, no --
Not unless you mail them from --
Desolation Row
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Final two stanzas of "Desolation Row," the last song on Highway 61 Revisited album by Bob Dylan
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