Yours in Truth by Jeff Himmelman

Author:Jeff Himmelman [Himmelman, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60364-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

“For the first time, really, I felt in my guts that we were going to win,” Ben wrote later of the moment that McCord’s letter became public. “And winning would mean all the truth. Every bit. I had no idea still how it would all come out, but I no longer believed Watergate would end in a tie.”

McCord’s letter marks the end of the Post’s singular contribution to the unraveling of the Watergate scandal. Since Sy Hersh’s January scoop about payments to the burglars, the Times had gotten into the game in a more major way, but with the revelations in Gray’s testimony and McCord’s letter, Watergate became an unabating national story for the following year and a half. Television crews staked out the houses of high presidential aides; there were reporters everywhere. Though things still happened in the shadows, and Woodstein were often quite good at penetrating those shadows to reveal bits and pieces here and there, the tectonics of governmental inquiry took over. At the end of March, McCord testified under oath to the Senate Watergate Committee that John Mitchell had personally approved plans to bug the Democrats’ headquarters. Woodstein were able to report that closed-door testimony the day after it happened, in a splashy front page story, but it was the testimony, not the reporting, that mattered now.

In mid-April of 1973, as the daily drumbeat of revelations suggested that the president’s men were going to take a woeful beating, the Pulitzer Prize board met in New York City to determine the winners of the prize for 1972. Prizewinners are determined by different juries for each category, but the board has the power to ratify, overrule, or suspend any of those decisions.

Ben had been on the Pulitzer board since 1969. When he arrived in New York, he was happy to discover that Post reporters had won three Pulitzers for 1972: David Broder, for his political column; Bob Kaiser and Dan Morgan, for foreign reporting; and Bill Claiborne, for “local spot news,” a single story written on deadline. But no Woodward, no Bernstein. And the Post itself had been shut out from the public service category, for which entire newspapers could be nominated.

When the jurors had voted, McCord’s letter still hadn’t come out, and the Post’s reporting hadn’t been fully vindicated yet. The public service jury had been headed by a man named Arthur Deck, whom Ben describes as “the great sort of newspaper establishment ASNE1 hack.” Deck was based in Salt Lake City, and Ben figured he didn’t understand Watergate and likely didn’t care about it. “Probably pro-Nixon, certainly pro-Mormon, just was out of it,” Ben says. But now, mid-April, the Post’s contribution couldn’t be denied. As Ben’s version of events goes, Scotty Reston of the Times and Newbold Noyes of The Washington Star told Ben, right when he arrived at the meeting, that the board should use its power to overrule the public service jury and give the award to the Post instead.

“I was thrilled,” he says, “and so naïve that I didn’t see that they would punish me for that.

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