Robert Phelps — N.Y. Times news editor let Watergate scoop pass
Robert Phelps had a distinguished career at the Boston Globe, shaping the modern paper, overseeing the coverage in major series that won Pulitzer Prizes, and serving as the newspaper’s executive editor for 11 years.
But he may be remembered as much for one story that he missed. In 1972, as news editor in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, he inadvertently let the Watergate scandal slip through his fingers, allowing it to become the Washington Post’s enviable scoop.
Mr. Phelps died Wednesday at 97 in Lincoln, Mass.. Thomas Mulvoy Jr., his friend and former Globe colleague, said the cause was complications of colorectal cancer.
Under Mr. Phelps’ leadership, the Globe won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1975 for its coverage of Boston’s tumultuous school desegregation dispute. He headed the Spotlight Team that won a Pulitzer in 1980 for local investigative reporting, for a series on abuses by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
“He played a highly significant role in the formation of the contemporary Boston Globe,” said Matthew Storin, one of his successors as executive editor.
Mr. Phelps revealed his part in the Watergate episode in 2009, in a memoir, “God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at the New York Times.”
He recalled in the book that on Aug. 16, 1972, a 31-year-old Times reporter, Robert Smith, carrying a notebook and a Dictaphone, rushed into Phelps’ Washington bureau office to deliver an account of a startling conversation he had just had over lunch at San Souci with L. Patrick Gray III, the new acting director of the FBI.
Smith had asked Gray about the break-in two months earlier at the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, and Gray, for the first time, implicated Donald Segretti, a covert Nixon campaign operative. He also intimated that the wrongdoing went further. As Smith wrote in 2009 in the American Journalism Review:
“‘The attorney general?’ I asked,” referring to John Mitchell, who had left the Justice Department to run the president’s re-election campaign. “He nodded.” “’The president?’ I asked.”
“He looked me in the eye without denial — or any comment. In other words, confirmation.”
In his memoir, Phelps wrote, “There we were, with leads from the acting director of the FBI that a man named Segretti, former attorney general Mitchell, and the White House, perhaps Nixon himself, were involved in Watergate, long before the Post’s revelations.”
He added: “We never developed Gray’s tips into publishable stories. Why we failed is a mystery to me.”
Mr. Phelps was about to take a month’s vacation in Alaska and would normally have passed the leak to another editor before leaving, he wrote. But he didn’t. He called the lapse his “dereliction.”
To make matters worse, Smith had quit the Times, effective the next day, to enroll in Yale Law School.
“I assumed the paper, for some reason, could not confirm it — even with Segretti’s name,” Smith wrote. “I watched in disappointment as the Washington Post began drubbing the Times on the Watergate saga.”
Smith recalled that another Times editor had asked him to return to work on the story that fall. “I thought it over for a couple of days, and decided not to,” he wrote.
He agreed, though, to phone Gray — but Gray did not return his call.
Years later, Smith wondered why Gray’s deputy, W. Mark Felt, had begun talking to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Post as the confidential source known as Deep Throat. (Felt publicly unmasked himself as Deep Throat in 2005 and died in 2008.)
“Maybe because Gray was going to be so hopelessly inept at media manipulation and covert disclosures that he wasn’t the man for the job?” Smith speculated. “And perhaps — having been inadvertently foiled at the Times — it was time to move on to someone trustworthy at the Post?”
Smith became a mediator in California and is writing a book about the episode, titled “Suppressed: A Correspondent’s Confessions.”
Though the Times was slow to compete with the Post in its Watergate coverage, it did rally to break subsequent stories, a point Mr. Phelps never tired of making.
He “never let go of his position on Watergate,” Mulvoy said — “that the Times never got due credit for some important findings and insights.”
Robert Howard Phelps was born July 19, 1919, in Erie, Pa., the son of Harry Phelps, a union leader, and the former Ruth Fox.
He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He married the former Elizabeth King, who died in 2003. He is survived by nieces and nephews.
Mr. Phelps began his journalism career at the Ambridge Daily Citizen in Pennsylvania in 1941 and later worked for United Press. After working as a correspondent on Navy combat ships in the Pacific during World War II, he joined the Providence Journal in Rhode Island in 1952 and the Times as a copy editor two years later.
He covered national politics in the early 1960s and was the news editor in Washington from 1965 to 1974, during the frenzied 1968 presidential campaign and the Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War.
He joined the Globe as an assistant managing editor for metropolitan coverage in 1974 and rose to managing editor before being named executive editor and later vice president of Affiliated Publications, the paper’s parent company.
After retiring in 1985, Mr. Phelps was the editor of Nieman Reports, published by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, which promotes and supports the highest standards of journalism. He never stopped writing.
A decade ago, he even drafted his own advance obituary. It began:
“Robert H. Phelps was a bleary-eyed 86-year-old retired newspaper editor who hobbled around a patch of grass in Lincoln, Mass., trying to raise a few apples, peaches, plums and blueberries. His wife Elizabeth, who died in 2003, said they would have starved if he had been a farmer.”
“There we were, with leads from the acting director of the FBI that a man named Segretti, former attorney general Mitchell, and the White House, perhaps Nixon himself, were involved in Watergate, long before the Post’s revelations.” Robert H. Phelps, writing in his memoir