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.

This was the crowd that had gathered that night in July to celebrate his last victory before the Great Disaster -- the slide that began with Eagleton and ended, incredibly, with “Watergate.” The events of the past six months had so badly jangled the nerves of the invited guests -- the staffers and journalists who had been with McGovern from New Hampshire all the way to Sioux Falls on election day -- that nobody really wanted to go to the party, for fear that it might be a funeral and a serious bummer.

By the end of the evening, when the two dozen bitter-enders had forced McGovern to break out his own private stock -- ignoring the departure of the caterers and the dousing of the patio lights -- the bulk of the conversation was focused on which one or ones of the Secret Service men assigned to protect McGovern had been reporting daily to Jeb Magruder at CREEP, and which one of the ten or 12 journalists with access to the innards of George's strategy had been on CREEP'S payroll at $1500 a month. This journalist -- still publicly unknown and undenounced -- was referred to in White House memos as “Chapman's Friend,” a mysterious designation that puzzled the whole Washington press corps until one of the President's beleaguered ex-aides explained privately that “Chapman” is a name Nixon used, from time to time, in the good old days when he was able to travel around obscure Holiday Inns under phony names. . .