"Chuck, why do you figure Liddy bugged the DNC instead of the Democratic candidates? It doesn't make much sense. I sat in Mitchell's office when Liddy gave us his show, and he only mentioned Larry O'Brien in passing as a target. I confess that Magruder once told me you were pushing for information on O'Brien because of the ITT case, and I..."

"Magruder's full of shit," Chuck interrupted. "That bastard tests my Christian patience to the breaking point. I have to say special prayers to temper my feelings about that asshole. I'd like to hear him say that to my face."

"Why don't we ask Jeb to come over?" I suggested. "And I'll ask him why the hell Liddy went after O'Brien. What do you think?"

"I think it's a capital idea," Chuck replied.... I went down to Jeb's room....

"Jeb, (Dean asked) we've been trying to put some pieces together about why we're here," I began, "and one of the questions we can't answer is why Larry O'Brien was targeted. I guess you and Mitchell agreed to that in Florida. But why O'Brien?"

Jeb froze. His pallid face flushed crimson. He tried to find words, but only stuttered. The question had more than caught him off guard. It had overwhelmed him. "Why do you want to know?" he asked haltingly.

"Just curiosity," Chuck said.

"Well, it just seemed like a good idea," Jeb said evasively.

"Well then, why was Spencer Oliver's phone bugged?" Chuck pressed....

Jeb looked at me. Then at Colson. "Why? Who wants to know?" he asked as his confusion turned to suspicion and headed toward anger. "I don't think we ought to talk about that stuff," he said sharply. Jeb turned on his heel and walked out, leaving Chuck and me staring at each other in dismay.

The first Washington Post reporter to explicitly identify the Mullen Company as a CIA cover, however, was neither Woodward nor Bernstein but the late Laurence Stern. In a July 2, 1974, article about Senator Baker's dissent to the Ervin committee's Final Report, Stern acknowledged the Mullen Company's CIA involvement, and made reference to the memoranda written by the CIA's Martin Lukoskie and Eric Eisenstadt. Nowhere in Stern's brief article, however, is Woodward mentioned, and neither he nor the Post's executive editor, Benjamin Bradlee, was asked to comment about the CIA's suggestion that its agent had manipulated the Post's reportage and planted stories in the press. Obviously, the Post was frightened of the subject.

Even so, Robert F. Bennett must have been a valuable source. Aside from his connections to the intelligence agency, he was the employer of both Howard Hunt and Spencer Oliver, Sr. He had lobbied the White House on behalf of Hunt's consultancy there, and working with Liddy, he had helped to establish a battery of dummy committed Liddy in the wake of the Watergate arrests; as the Lukoskie memo makes clear, he continued to share confidences with Hunt and others who were privy to the operation's secret details (Bennett, for example, knew when others did not that the DNC had been broken into during May). All in all, Bennett's record is astonishing for someone who figures only peripherally in the Post's reports and the Senate's investigation.

The received version of that scandal, the version propounded over and over again in the courts, the Congress and the press, tells us that it was Spencer Oliver's telephone that James McCord bugged. As to why Oliver was allegedly singled out, the record is anything but clear. Reporters have speculated that it had to do with the fact that Oliver's father was an employee of the Robert R. Mullen Company and a rival of Howard Hunt's. But that was just speculation, as, indeed, was Oliver's own theory: that he was singled out because of his frequent contact with Democratic state leaders. As for the burglars themselves, they are by turns mum and self-contradictory on the subject of Spencer Oliver and his telephone.

In reality, what made Oliver's DNC telephone uniquely sensitive was its relationship to a complex of prostitution activities located in the nearby Columbia Plaza Apartments. These are a group of luxury residential buildings that form a line-of-sight triangle with the Howard Johnson's motel and the Watergate office building, each of which is within a short walk from the others and each of which would play an important part in the bugging activities that would soon send McCord and his colleagues to jail. The prostitutes working at the Columbia Plaza were many. They included "a lush blonde" (this is Bailley's description) whom we may call Tess. There were at least two madams, Lil Lori and Helen Henderson, who used the apartments at the Columbia Plaza and, farther away, the Woodner Hotel.' One of the apartments used for assignations was in the Columbia Plaza building at 2440 Virginia Avenue, directly behind the apartment in which Tess resided. Like Tess's rendezvous, the one rented by Lori faced the Watergate and, because it was in a taller building, was also in line of sight with the Howard Johnson's motel.

Besides their location at the Columbia Plaza Apartments, the prostitutes had at least two things in common. The first was the homogeneity of their clients. With few exceptions, they were professional men-lobbyists, lawyers, stockbrokers, physicians, congressional aides and real estate developers. They were among the movers and shakers of the capital, and included at least one U.S. senator, an astronaut, a Saudi prince, a clutch of U.S. and KCIA intelligence agents and a host of prominent Democrats.

Though knocked from contention in the early primaries, Muskie still had a bloc of delegates in early June as did former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Scores of other delegates were uncommitted or tied to favorite sons. Oliver hoped that his personal favorite, Duke University President Terry Sanford, might emerge from a deadlocked convention as a unity candidate.

"Muskie had some votes though he had been finished off early," Oliver said. "Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson had a lot of votes. Terry had nearly 100 votes scattered over 22 states and including some influential delegates. McGovern was having a hard time getting a majority. The state chairmen wanted to know whether or not, if he won the California primary, he would have the nomination wrapped up or whether there was still a chance he could be stopped."

"The best way to find out was through the state chairmen because in those days not all primaries were binding and not all delegates were bound," Oliver said. "Don Fowler, the state chairman in South Carolina, took the lead in trying to use the state chairmen's network to get an accurate assessment. Most of the information was gathered by me and Margaret Bethea, a member of Fowler's staff. We called every state chairman or party executive director to find out where their uncommitted delegates would go. We were doing a real hard count. We knew better than anybody else how many delegates could be influenced, who were really anti-McGovern. We had the best count in the country and it was all coordinated through my telephone."

So, while Nixon's political espionage team listened in, Oliver and his little team canvassed state party leaders to figure out how the Democratic delegates planned to vote. "We determined on that phone that McGovern could still be stopped even if he won the California primary," Oliver said. "It would be very close whether he could ever get a majority."

After McGovern did win the California primary, the stop-McGovern battle focused on Texas and its Democratic convention, scheduled for June 13. "The one place he could be stopped was at the Texas State Democratic Convention," Oliver said.

A Texan himself, Oliver knew the Democratic Party there to be a bitterly divided organization, with many conservative Democrats sympathetic to Nixon and hostile to McGovern and his anti-Vietnam War positions. One of the best known Texas Democrats, former Governor John Connally, had joined the Nixon administration in 1970 as Treasury Secretary and was helping the Nixon campaign in 1972. Many other Texas Democrats were loyal to former President Lyndon Johnson who had battled anti-war activists before deciding against a reelection bid in 1968.

"There had been a major fight in Texas between the Left and the Right, between the liberals and the conservatives," Oliver said. "They hated each other. It was one of these lifetime things." Between the strength of the conservative Democratic machine and the history of hardball Texas politics, the Texas convention looked to Oliver like the perfect place to push through a solid anti-McGovern slate, even though nearly one-third of the state delegates listed McGovern as their first choice. Since there was no requirement for proportional representation, whoever controlled a majority at the state convention could take all the presidential delegates or divide them up among other candidates, Oliver said.

At Sanford's suggestion, Oliver decided to fly to Texas. When he reached the Texas convention in San Antonio, Oliver said he was stunned by what he found. The Johnson-Connally wing of the party appeared uncharacteristically generous to the McGovern campaign. Also arriving from Washington was one of Connally's Democratic proteges, the party's national treasurer Bob Strauss.

"I'm in the hotel and I'm standing in the lobby the day before the convention," Oliver said. "The elevator opens and there's Bob Strauss. I was really surprised to see him and he makes a bee-line straight for me. He says, 'Spencer, how you doing?' I say, 'Bob, what are you doing here?' He says, 'I'm a Texan, you're a Texan. Here we are. Who would miss one of these state conventions? Maybe we ought to have lunch.' He was never that friendly to me before."

Oliver was curious about Strauss's sudden appearance because Strauss had never been a major figure in Texas Democratic politics. "He was a Connally guy and had no background in politics except his personal ties to Connally," Oliver said. "He hadn't been active in state politics except as Connally's fund-raiser. He wasn't a delegate to the state convention." Plus, Strauss's chief mentor, Connally, was a member of Nixon's Cabinet and was planning to head up Democrats for Nixon in the fall campaign.

Known as a smooth-talking lawyer, Strauss had made his first major foray into politics as a principal fund-raiser for Connally's first gubernatorial race in 1962. Connally then put Strauss on the Democratic National Committee in 1968. Two years later, Connally agreed to join the Nixon administration. "I wouldn't say that Connally and Strauss are close," one critic famously told The New York Times, "but when Connally eats watermelon, Strauss spits seeds.

Other Connally guys held other key positions at the state convention, including state chairman Will Davis. So, presumably the liberal, anti-war McGovern would have looked to be in a tight spot, opposed not only by Davis but also by much of the conservative state Democratic leadership and organized labor. "It was clear that 70 percent of the delegates were anti-McGovern, so they very easily could have coalesced, struck a deal and blocked McGovern," Oliver said. "That probably would have blocked him from the nomination."

Oliver told some political allies at the convention, including party activists R.C. "Bob" Slagle III and Dwayne Holman, about the plan that had been hatched in Washington to shut McGovern out of Texas delegates. "They thought it might work and agreed to promote it with the state Democratic leadership," Oliver said. 'Bob went to lay out this plan to stop McGovern and I waited for him. (After he emerged from the meeting,) we went around the corner, and he said, `It's not going to work.' He said, 'Will Davis thinks we ought to give McGovern his share of the delegates.' I said, `What? Will Davis, John Connally's guy? Does he know that this will give McGovern the nomination?' He [Davis] said, 'We shouldn't have a big fight. We should all agree that everyone gets the percentage they had in the preference. We'll just let it go."'

Oliver said, "That was the most astonishing thing I had heard in all my years of Texas politics. There's never been any quarter given or any asked in this sort of thing. Seventy percent of the delegates were against McGovern. Why did those die-hard conservatives and organized labor want to give him 30 percent of the votes? I was stunned."

News articles at the time described a convention dominated by an unusual alliance between Democrats loyal to liberal George McGovern and others backing populist George Wallace, though the alliance nearly fell apart when Wallace delegates took to the floor with Confederate flags. After a 17hour final session, the convention gave 42 national delegates to Wallace and 34 to McGovern, with Hubert Humphrey getting 21 and 33 listed as uncommitted. According to The New York Times, the Texas results put McGovern about two-thirds of the way toward 1,509 needed for a first-round nomination.