OPINION | D. H. RIDGWAY: Watergate memory flood


Recently catching the last couple of episodes of Gaslit, the eight-part Julia Roberts docudrama on Flix about Martha Mitchell and Watergate, triggered a flood of memories.

At the time, the roster of names of those involved -- Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Dean, Krogh and Mitchell -- seemed to grow each day.

There was the mysterious "Deep Throat," whose ID was not revealed until decades later, near the end of his life; and Alexander Butterfield, the surprise linchpin whose testimony launched a major shift, and raised the role of Rose Mary Woods; not to mention the chaos of the Saturday Night Massacre; "Mo" Dean, a dedicated wife; the jowly Senator Sam; and a loose cannon named Liddy.

These are not memories drawn merely from Gaslit, nor from just books or movies, but from personal involvement via daily reams of news wires and Woodstein bylines.

The Pine Bluff Commercial was a two-edition afternoon daily at the time, with single morning editions Saturdays and Sundays. A lone shift put out the weekday papers, with a split shift Fridays to handle that day and part of the large Sunday edition. The afternoon/night shift did the Saturday paper, then came back a day later to finish Sunday's. The four divisions were ads, news, sports, women's news, plus Greenberg (editorial).

As an editor on the rim of the horseshoe-shaped copy desk, I moved to the slot (news editor) for the nightowl work, and was in that position one Friday afternoon when Ed Freeman, co-owner of the paper, stopped by before leaving to ask how I was going to play a particular story for the next day.

A handful of men had been discovered inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at something called the Watergate office-apartment building complex in Washington, D.C. Not knowing if it were just a minor bungled burglary in a very important place, or something more, I told Ed I bannered it atop Page 2. He nodded assent and went on.

The next day, the story moved out front, and stayed there until well after POTUS quit.

Being there at the beginning, I took great interest in the day-to-day developments, so much so that the regular slot man, John H. Henry, would gather the overnight wire stories, updates and corrections and hand them all to me, telling me how many column inches he'd allotted to that day's installment. He'd also give me a headline size, which was hand counted by letter.

Soon, we began to confer on which development seemed more important, and he'd ask how much room I'd need, while the other two rim workers filled the remaining pages.

This all was pre-computer. Our "internet" was the wire services: The Associated Press (whose teletype used regular typewriter keys, printing from a box of off-white fan-fold paper, about six inches wide) and the Times-Post News Service (using a dot-matrix printer on a roll of yellow paper, about 10 inches wide). Those machines ran 24/7, and their output was duly separated (torn against a ruler) and collated at the start of each day, and checked during each shift.

Editing in those days involved reading each article, correction and update, then taking those parts to be joined and gluing them in sequence (paste pots sat beside ashtrays; one filling as the other emptied).

The resulting edited chain (wide here, narrow there) went through a sliding glass window into the proof room, where typists shifted the lot onto tape to be fed to the backshop's Linotype machines, which took the tape and spat individual metal slugs of type into a galley tray.

The galleys were printed on a hand press and those sheets fed back to the proof room to check. Corrected galleys then went into a page form, a proof of which was taken to the copy desk to recheck. Errors in the final paper were few.

When Martha Mitchell entered the scene, as wife of the attorney general, the story took a new turn. This was an actual home-town girl popping up right in the thick of it. The search was on for relatives, friends and classmates. Neighbors were easy, as her childhood home was right down the street from the newspaper's offices! (It later became a museum.)

Day by day, it seemed, the story grew, as did the dark cloud over the White House. Nixon parted it when he ended the Vietnam War and brought home POWs, which helped him win a second term, but then the storm clouds gathered anew and grew darker, the implications more grave. For other reasons, Spiro T. quit.

Sometimes there were lighter moments:

-- A note posted on the office bulletin board, harking back to the days of Save the Chicago 7, pleaded: "Save the Watergate 300." A wit (moi) later added, "but impeach the 301th." Not long after, that note hit the round file.

-- The radio carried a novelty 45 from an obscure quartet about the White House being "caught in between ... Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean" (with "Dean" singing bass).

The AP machine held a small bell, which was used to announce: Big News Here!

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! It sounded when Attorney General Elliott Richardson was ordered to fire Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Richardson declined, and promptly resigned.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! The task fell to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ruckelshaus responded in similar manner, and quit.

My mentor, Connie Elkins, said she hadn't heard that many bells since JFK went to Dallas. Sensing a growing pattern, she wondered aloud if the White House had a dog catcher (traditionally, the low man in municipal government).

Then -- Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! -- Solicitor General Robert Bork rose from obscurity to play executioner.

The Saturday Night Massacre had finally come to an end.

Even Watergate editors need an occasional break, which I did. While on vacation, I tuned in one night to watch what was promoted as a major presidential address. It was; his last.

Vacation be damned; I was back on the desk the next morning.

Even under Ford, the only president never elected to a national office, Watergate trudged on, with smaller targets.

Then, a little over a year later, our local connection died. Martha Mitchell was back in the news, this time returning to home soil for the last time. The press was not allowed in the church for the ceremony, or later graveside, but there was still coverage aplenty.

Our shutterbug, Paul DeWitt, got a shot of the flower-covered grave, which ran on Page 1. A large, garish double-easel arrangement in red [or blue?] bore white chrysanthemums boldly spelling: MARTHA WAS RIGHT.

None of the three local florists took credit for that arrangement, or knew who made it. Today, the family would have likely ordered it removed before the service, but by the mores of those days, that just wasn't done. Somebody had gone to great trouble and expense to have it there, so it stayed.

(Therein lies one final yet-unsolved mystery: who bought it, who made it, who brung it? A Time magazine article attributes it to "a California admiral" but adds nothing more.)

The town depicted in Gaslit only faintly resembles Pine Bluff back then, aiming more for the period rather than the actual city. Still, an oversized replica of that arrangement -- with the words MARTHA WAS RIGHT -- served as the backdrop over which the end credits rolled, a fitting reminder that, yes, she was.

D. H. Ridgway of Pine Bluff is a former news editor at The Commercial.


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