All the President's Men Read Free Page B

the worst assignment at the paper. The hours are bad—from about 6:30 P.M . to 2:30 A.M . But Bachinski—tall, goateed and quiet—seemed to like his job, or at least he seemed to like the cops. He had come to know many of them quite well, saw a few socially and moved easily on his nightly rounds through the various squads at police headquarters: homicide, vice (grandly called the Morals Division), traffic, intelligence, sex, fraud, robbery—the catalogue of city life as viewed by the policeman.
    Bachinski had something from one of his police sources. Two address books, belonging to two of the Miami men arrested inside the Watergate, contained the name and phone number of a Howard E. Hunt, with the small notations “W. House” and “W.H.” Woodward sat down in a hard chair by his phone and checked the telephone directory. He found a listing for E. Howard Hunt, Jr., in Potomac, Maryland, the affluent horse-country suburb in Montgomery County. No answer.
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    At the office next morning, Woodward made a list of the leads. One of McCord’s neighbors had said that he had seen McCord in an AirForce officer’s uniform, and another had said that McCord was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve. Half a dozen calls to the Pentagon later, a personnel officer told him that James McCord was a lieutenant colonel in a special Washington-based reserve unit attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness. The officer read him the unit roster, which contained only 15 names. Woodward started calling. On the fourth try, Philip Jones, an enlisted man, mentioned casually that the unit’s assignment was to draw up lists of radicals and to help develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war.
    Woodward placed a call to a James Grimm, whose name and Miami telephone number Bachinski had said was in the address book of Eugenio Martinez. Mr. Grimm identified himself as a housing officer for the University of Miami, and said that Martinez had contacted him about two weeks earlier to ask if the university could find accommodations for about 3000 Young Republicans during the GOP national convention in August. Woodward called CRP, the Republican National Committee headquarters and several party officials who were working on convention planning in Washington and Miami. All said they had never heard of Martinez or of plans to use the university for housing Young Republicans.
    But the first priority on that Monday was Hunt. The Miami suspects’ belongings were listed in a confidential police inventory that Bachinski had obtained. There were “two pieces of yellow-lined paper, one addressed to ‘Dear Friend Mr. Howard,’ and another to ‘Dear Mr. H.H.,’ ” and an unmailed envelope containing Hunt’s personal check for $6.36 made out to the Lakewood Country Club in Rockville, along with a bill for the same amount.
    Woodward called an old friend and sometimes source who worked for the federal government and did not like to be called at his office. His friend said hurriedly that the break-in case was going to “heat up,” but he couldn’t explain and hung up.
    It was approaching 3:00 P.M ., the hour when the Post’s editors list in a “news budget” the stories they expect for the next day’s paper. Woodward, who had been assigned to write Tuesday’s Watergate story, picked up the telephone and dialed 456-1414—the White House. He asked for Howard Hunt. The switchboard operator rang an extension. There was no answer. Woodward was about to hang up when the operatorcame back on the line. “There is one other place he might be,” she said. “In Mr. Colson’s office.”
    “Mr. Hunt is not here now,” Colson’s secretary told Woodward, and gave him the number of a Washington public-relations firm, Robert R. Mullen and Company, where she said Hunt worked as a writer.
    Woodward walked across to the national desk at the east end of the newsroom and asked one of the