A top FBI official told a Timesman about the events swirling behind what came to be known as the Watergate scandal well before the Washington Post got into the act. And he told an editor ... and the whole thing went nowhere.
And as a result, the Washington Post sailed off into journalistic history.
The Watergate break-in eventually forced a presidential resignation and turned two Washington Post reporters into pop-culture heroes. But almost 37 years after the break-in, two former New York Times journalists have stepped forward to say that The Times had the scandal nearly in its grasp before The Post did — and let it slip.
Robert M. Smith, a former Times reporter, says that two months after the burglary, over lunch at a Washington restaurant, the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, L. Patrick Gray, disclosed explosive aspects of the case, including the culpability of the former attorney general, John Mitchell, and hinted at White House involvement.
Mr. Smith rushed back to The Times’s bureau in Washington to repeat the story to Robert H. Phelps, an editor there, who took notes and tape-recorded the conversation, according to both men. But then Mr. Smith had to hand off the story — he had quit The Times and was leaving town the next day to attend Yale Law School.
Mr. Smith kept the events to himself for more than three decades, but decided to go public after learning that Mr. Phelps planned to include it in his memoir.
In the days after that 1972 lunch, the Times bureau was consumed by the Republican convention, and then Mr. Phelps left on a monthlong trip to Alaska.
So what happened to the tip, the notes, the tape? Were they pursued to no effect? Simply forgotten?
“I have no idea,” said Mr. Phelps, now 89, who describes the episode in a memoir, “God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at The New York Times” (Syracuse University Press), published last month.
Former colleagues he interviewed said they never knew of the material, he said, leading him to guess that the fact that it came to nothing “was probably my fault.”
If his and Mr. Smith’s accounts are correct, The Times missed a chance to get the jump on the greatest story in a generation.