The leaks I received during Watergate taught me they're worth the risk
By James Squires March 23 at 1:21 PM
James Squires was editor of the Chicago Tribune from 1981 to 1989.
President Trump’s angry railing against leaks calls to mind my experience as a newly hired national political correspondent in the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune in 1972. The Tribune was a powerful Republican voice of Midwest conservatism and a staunch Nixon backer, and I was the paper’s lone Watergate reporter, trailing in the wake of The Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Whenever cornered, President Richard Nixon invariably excused the existence of the burglary team that The Post had traced to the White House by contending that these “plumbers” were not out to wiretap the Democratic National Committee but were on a mission to investigate leaks concerning a matter of national security so grave and highly classified it could not even be discussed in public.
If there was one big story that The Post was yet to break, it was the nature of this mysterious national security matter. So in partnership with another lone-wolf Watergate reporter, Dan Thomasson, Washington bureau chief of Scripps Howard, I began to chase it. We were two among many.
Just before Christmas 1973, I received a leak.
In secret testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee, White House Counsel John Dean had submitted a written document so explosive it had been shared with only the committee’s chairman, Sam Ervin (D-N.C.), and vice chairman, Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), before being locked in the safe of the Atomic Energy Committee.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-leaks-i-received-during-watergate-taught-me-theyre-worth-the-risk/2017/03/23/ccd833d8-0e66-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html?utm_term=.f3e9156ed534&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1
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