The only standard-brand visual “action” in the Watergate story had happened at the very beginning -- when the burglars were caught in the act by a squad of plain-clothes cops with drawn guns -- and that happened so fast that there was not even a still photographer on hand, much less a TV camera.

The network news moguls are not hungry for stories involving weeks of dreary investigation and minimum camera possibilities -- particularly at a time when almost every ranking TV correspondent in the country was assigned to one aspect or another of a presidential campaign that was still boiling feverishly when the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17th. The Miami conventions and the Eagleton fiasco kept the Watergate story backstage all that summer. Both the networks and the press had their “first teams” out on the campaign trail until long after the initial indictments -- Liddy, Hunt, McCord, et al. -- on September 15th. And by election day in November, the Watergate story seemed like old news. It was rarely if ever mentioned among the press people following the campaign. A burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters seemed relatively minor, compared to the action in Miami. It was a “local” (Washington) story, and the “local staff” was handling it. . . but I had no local staff, so I made the obvious choice.

Except on two occasions, and the first of these still haunts me. On the night of June 17th I spent most of the evening in the Watergate Hotel: From about eight o'clock until ten I was swimming laps in the indoor pool, and from 10:30 until a bit after 1:00 AM I was drinking tequila in the Watergate bar with Tom Quinn, a sports columnist for the now-defunct Washington Daily News.

Meanwhile, upstairs in room 214, Hunt and Liddy were already monitoring the break-in, by walkie-talkie, with ex-FBI agent Alfred Baldwin in his well-equipped spy-nest across Virginia Avenue in room 419 of the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge. Jim McCord had already taped the locks on two doors just underneath the bar in the Watergate garage, and it was probably just about the time that Quinn and I called for our last round of tequila that McCord and his team of Cubans moved into action -- and got busted less than an hour later.

All this was happening less than 100 yards from where we were sitting in the bar, sucking limes and salt with our Sauza Gold and muttering darkly about the fate of Duane Thomas and the pigs who run the National Football League.

Neither Bob Woodward nor Carl Bernstein from the Post were invited to McGovern's party that night -- which was fitting, because the guest list was limited to those who had lived through the day-to-day nightmare of the '72 campaign. . . People like Frank Mankiewicz, Miles Rubin, Rick Sterns, Gary Hart and even Newsweek correspondent Dick Stout, whose final dispatch on the doomed McGovern campaign very nearly got him thrown out of the Dakota Queen II at 30,000 feet over Lincoln, Nebraska, on the day before the election.