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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Only then did he realize his mistake. It wasn't a sign-in sheet. It was a package log. Hughes remembered package logs from one of his old apartment buildings. The front desk took delivery of all packages. Residents picked up their packages at the desk and signed for them in the log.
"[Expletive deleted,]" Hughes thought. He did not have to sign in at all. No one had to sign in here. There was no visitor sign-in sheet. Hughes could have walked right by the desk and been on his merry way, like Deep Throat.
Too late.
"Where are you going?" asked the man behind the desk.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Hughes gave the man behind the desk Woodward's old apartment number.
"Do you have a key?" the man asked.
Deep Throat could have had a copy of Woodward's key. He could have walked right in the front door and right to Woodward's apartment. Hughes was not so lucky.
All these thoughts were racing through Hughes's head, but all he said was, "No."
"Why don't you go back outside and phone the apartment?" The man gestured toward the locked door through which Hughes had entered so easily seconds before. On the outside was a security phone. Visitors were supposed to call and have residents buzz them in. It didn't look like fun.
"I don't actually know the person who lives in the apartment," Hughes confessed. The truth poured out of him. "I'm a historian with the University of Virginia," Hughes said, presenting his business card. He explained, in somewhat more detail than was absolutely necessary, that he was attempting to duplicate the activities of Deep Throat.
The man behind the desk explained, with admirable patience, that many years had passed since Watergate. Woodward no longer lived there. "People move in, people move out," he said. Hughes could not just go knocking on people's doors now.
"I'm not going to knock on the door," Hughes said. "I'm just going to walk in the hallway outside [the apartment] and see if I can drop a newspaper off."
"OK."
Hughes started for the elevator. Halfway there, he turned around.
"If I hadn't stopped at the desk," Hughes asked, "would you have stopped me?"
"Go walk up and down the hallway," the man said. "Just don't knock on any doors."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Hughes waited for the elevator doors to close before laughing.
He was alone in the elevator, but asked out loud, "Well, now, how hard was that?"
By the time the elevator opened onto Woodward's floor, Hughes had composed himself. He passed two residents on their way out. Neither seemed surprised or alarmed at the sight of the man in the suit carrying the Times.
Then something happened that Hughes had not expected: He found the right hallway on the first try. Within seconds, he arrived at Woodward's ex-door.
Hughes looked around. The hallway was empty. He plopped the newspaper on the floor.
Next, Hughes plopped himself on the floor and wrote a note to the apartment's residents. He wanted them to understand that they were part of history, not Times home delivery.
At 6:55 a.m., Hughes stood up and stretched a bit. No one had seen him approach the apartment. No one had seen him make the drop. No one had seen him sitting on the floor.
Hughes thought he had demonstrated that Deep Throat's system for contacting Woodward, as detailed in "All the President's Men," was viable. Straightforward. Really, really easy.
His quest, however, was but half-complete. He headed for the stairs.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Hughes needed to find the courtyard below Woodward's balcony. Maybe the nice man at the front desk could help.
Problem: Hughes didn't remember what floor the man was on. Washington buildings often have more than one ground floor, odd as that sounds. The place is quite slopey. Landlords get around the problem by marking one ground floor "1" and another ground floor "G." Hughes once lived in an extreme example that had a front entrance on the third floor and a back entrance in the basement.
Heading down the stairs, Hughes spotted a floor marked "T," which rhymes with "G." He'd never seen one of those. Hughes tried it. Floor T lacked the nice man, but did have an entrance to the courtyard.
Technically, it was locked, but only from the outside. Hughes was on the inside, so he walked right through, taking care to prop the door open with an empty flowerpot that residents clearly kept handy for that purpose.
This courtyard was where Deep Throat had to go to see whether Woodward had pushed his red-flag-on-a-stick-stuck-in-a-flowerpot to the edge of his balcony, Woodward's signal for a meeting.
Adrian Havill, author of "Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein," claimed to have found "discrepancies between Bob's account in 'All the President's Men' and what was physically possible."
Author's note: Havill is a different kind of writer from Obst. Obst is laughably bad. Havill is tediously bad. Before tackling the next passages, the reader may require a short nap or a tall coffee.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Hughes stepped out into the courtyard, mentally reviewed the placement of Woodward's apartment on the sixth floor, located the corresponding apartment on the courtyard level, and counted up from there, T-1-2-3-4-5-6.
By coincidence, the current occupant of Woodward's apartment had placed against the balcony railing a flowerpot. It did not contain a Woodward-like red flag, but a tall green plant that Hughes' beloved and knowledgeable wife might have been able to name. The flowerpot was clearly visible through the balcony railing. So was that plant's long thin stalk. Its leaves projected above the railing. Hughes thought that spotting a red flag would have been a little easier.
In "Deep Truth," Havill wrote that Woodward's balcony was not visible from an alleyway that in 1972 connected this courtyard to the street. "In order to have a chance of spotting a flowerpot," Havill wrote, "one would have to walk far into the courtyard and crane one's head sharply up to see the sixth floor."
No. One did not have to walk "far into the courtyard." One did not even have to walk halfway into the courtyard. One needed to take a few steps into the courtyard. (Hughes would not have used the word "far" in connection with a yard this small.)
And what was this about "a chance of spotting a flowerpot"? From most vantage points on the yard, the only thing between Deep Throat and the red flag would be air. The chance of a mobile, sighted adult spotting the flowerpot was approximately 100 percent.
Hughes supposed that one man's "crane one's head sharply" was another man's "look up," but Havill made this sound a lot harder than it actually was.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Havill continued: "The flowerpot would then have had to be pulled against the rear and all the way to one side, up against the metal railing." Well, how hard is it to move a flowerpot? Besides, Woodward wrote that he DID move the flowerpot when he wanted to see Deep Throat. "Otherwise, it couldn't have been seen on the balcony from any angle inside the courtyard." This is neither relevant nor true -- irrelevant because the flag only had to be visible when Woodward pushed it to the edge to request a meeting, untrue because a flowerpot placed at most points along the balcony railing would be visible from most points on the courtyard.
Looking around the courtyard, Hughes thought it would be harder to find a place where Deep Throat could not see the red flag.
Havill speculated that "anyone staring up to an apartment and daily lurking around in the enclosure would have been observed and likely reported after more than one visit."
No one noticed Hughes. No one was on any of the balconies. It was shortly before 7 a.m. on a workday -- not prime balcony time. And Hughes had spent more time in the courtyard than Deep Throat would have, since Hughes (1) had never been there before and (2) had to figure out which apartment was Woodward's. And what's with the "lurking," anyway, like this was some time-intensive task? Hughes had spotted the flowerpot on the balcony in less than a minute after he arrived. Deep Throat would have had it even easier, since he actually knew where he was going.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Havill wrote in 1993 that to get into the courtyard, one had to get through two locked doors and go "within view of the reception desk. The building was heavily secured." In 2002, one still had to go through two locked doors and pass the reception desk, but Hughes would not have described the building as "heavily secured."
Havill next produced two sentences so masterfully misleading that they should be studied in journalism schools from this day forward: "But there was another way to view Bob's apartment in 1972, and that was by entering from the alley, walking fifty-six steps and then looking up. This was an even steeper angle, yet was more accessible. It was much harder to see anything on Bob's balcony floor from that angle, and again a daily intruder would have been on display to eighty apartments."
The unsuspecting reader might conclude that this was the only other way to see the balcony. Not so. Note that Havill merely writes that it's "another way."
Hughes imagined that one could take 56 steps, or 88 steps, or 2052 steps, or however many one wanted, as long as one was careful to end up in one of the few places in the courtyard where it was not easy to see the balcony. Why would one, though? What would one's motive be? Might one be trying to make Deep Throat's task sound harder than it was? Might one be trying to sell books to people who like to see the famous taken down a peg, who hate the media, or who have wanted to see Woodward and Bernstein roughed up since Nixon was forced to resign?
Hughes thought he could improve on Havill ... But there was another way to view Woodward's apartment in 1972, and that was by entering the courtyard on one's hands, proceeding 17.7 feet southeastward, executing a double flip, turning away from the balcony, bending over and looking at the flowerpot upside-down with one's head between one's legs. This would be an even steeper angle ...
Yes, Hughes thought, this was "another way" to do it. A ridiculous way.
Deep Throat could just take a few steps into the courtyard, spot the balcony easily, see in an instant whether the flower pot with the red flag was in the right spot, and leave. The whole thing would take less than a minute.
