Lawyer who missed Watergate scoop

Almost four decades after the Watergate scandal produced one of the great scoops of 20th-century journalism, two former New York Times journalists have admitted they missed the story which brought down President Richard Nixon.
 
If Robert Smith and Robert Phelps had followed up a crucial tip from the head of the FBI, the world might never have heard of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post journalists who went on to break the story. The Pulitzer Prizes and the royalties from the book and film of All the President's Men could have been Smith and Phelps's.
 
In an article in the New York Times, Smith has revealed that he received a tip-off at a private lunch on August 16, 1972 with Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI. It was two months after the break-in at the Watergate building, in which a group of men were caught attempting to bug the Democrats' election campaign headquarters.
 
Gray, who was also a good friend of the journalist, took Smith to lunch to mark his last day as a Washington correspondent for the New York Times before he left to become a lawyer. He told the journalist that Nixon's election campaign manager, the former attorney general, John Mitchell, was involved in a cover-up of the June 17 break-in.
 
Smith asked Gray how far up that went - could the cover-up go all the way to the president? "He just looked me in the eyes, I looked him in the eyes, and in my world of journalism, that was confirmation," Smith said. The "excited" journalist rushed back to the Times bureau and repeated his conversation to Phelps, then an editor.
 
Phelps took notes and recorded the conversation, but failed to follow up the story. Now 89, Phelps has confirmed Smith's account in his newly-published memoirs God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at The New York Times. He says he has "no idea" why nothing happened after the tip-off, though said it was "probably my fault". The following day Smith left for Yale Law School, never to return to journalism, and a week later Phelps went on a month-long holiday to Alaska.
 
Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, with the help of their informant 'Deep Throat', the story was to make history in the hands of Woodward and Bernstein.
 
Edward Gray, son of the late FBI chief, said his father saw himself as a mentor to Robert Smith and "may have let his hair down a little bit" in passing information to him. "But only because he didn't think he was a reporter any more."
 
Now a lawyer in San Francisco, Smith is philosophical about Woodward and Bernstein's success. "They completely deserve it. They are entirely entitled to the wonderful fruits of their excellent efforts," he said. ·