Free All the President's Men by Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein

were met at the door by a uniformed guard, cleared for access by press or security staffs, escorted to their appointments and led back out. The committee’s telephone roster of campaign officials—a single sheet of paper with more than 100 names—was considered a classified document. A Washington Post researcher who obtained a copy from a friend at the committee was told, “You realize, I’ll lose my job if they find out.”
    The managers of the committee’s various divisions, the second echelon generally unknown to press and public alike, were conspicuous on the roster because they had private secretaries listed below their names. Because the floor numbers were listed next to the names and phone extensions of committee personnel, it was possible to calculate roughly who worked in proximity to whom. And by transposing telephone extensions from the roster and listing them in sequence, it was even possible to determine who worked for whom.
    Studying the roster became a devotional exercise not unlike reading tea leaves. None of the key people would talk when reached by telephone, Divining names from the list, Bernstein and Woodward, in mid-August, began visiting CRP people at their homes in the evenings. The first-edition deadline was 7:45 P.M ., and each night they would set out soon afterward, sometimes separately, sometimes together in Woodward’s 1970 Karmann Ghia. When traveling alone, Bernstein used a company car or rode his bicycle.
    The first person on whose door Bernstein knocked pleaded with him to leave “before they see you.” The employee was literally trembling. “Please leave me alone. I know you’re only trying to do your job, but you don’t realize the pressure we’re under.” Bernstein tried to get a conversation going, but was told, “I hope you understand I’m not being rude; please go,” as the door closed. Another said, “I want to help,” and burst into tears. “God, it’s all so awful,” she said, as the reporter was shown to the door.
    The nighttime visits were fishing expeditions. There was, however, one constant lead that was pursued on all the visits: It concerned Sally Harmony, Gordon Liddy’s secretary at CRP. Mrs. Harmony had apparently not told everything she knew to the FBI and the grand jury. Bernstein had first heard this in late August from a reporter on another newspaper. He had jotted down the tip on the back of a telephone message slip and filed it away in the mountain of papers, trash, books and cups of stale coffee that covered his desk. “ . . . lied to protect Jeb Magruder  . . . dep. campaign mgr.,” he had written.
    A Justice Department attorney had confirmed that the Watergate prosecutors were suspicious of Mrs. Harmony’s testimony, but said they lacked evidence to charge her with perjury. Her lack of candor seemed common knowledge at campaign headquarters. But either no one knew or no one was willing to say what she had lied about, beyond vague references to “protecting others.” Gradually, a pattern started to emerge about the bugging affair from the fragments of information they picked up on their nighttime visits. Several committee employees spoke of wholesale destruction of records that took place in the days immediately after the Watergate break-in, although they said they had heard it secondhand and knew no specifics.
    Persons in critical positions who might know details of the bugging operation, particularly secretaries, seemed not to have been interviewed by the FBI. The FBI had conducted all interviews of campaign personnel at the committee’s headquarters, instead of at employees’ homes, where they might feel more free to speak out; the interviews were always held in the presence of a lawyer for the committee, or Robert C. Mardian, the political coordinator of the committee and former Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division. A few persons said Mardian and others hadtold them not to