Who The Hell Is Ken Dahlberg?

WarrenBarkerProbablyHadAFileOnTheCanuckLetter

TooVille

In June of 1972 H.R. Haldeman had a conversation with then president Richard M. Nixon and told him that a $25,000 cheque made out to a midwestern Republican party bagman named Kenneth H. Dahlberg had been given to one of the Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker,  by the finance chairman of the Committee to Re-elect the President (the infamous 'CREEP').

We know exactly what was said by both Haldeman and Nixon because it turned up on the so-called 'smoking gun' tape that also included the hatching of the Whitehouse-led conspiracy to halt the FBI's investigation of the Watergate case.

A little later, in July of 1972, Carl Bernstein found out about the cheque from a prosecutor in Miami, Florida but neither he nor Bob Woodward, like Nixon before them, had any idea who the good Mr. Dahlberg was or where they could reach him.

Which meant, of course, that in a pre-Googleplex world, that's when the real work began:

...Woodward asked a Post librarian to see if there was anything on Mr. Dahlberg in the paper’s files. The librarian found a picture of Mr. Dahlberg with (Senator Hubert) Humphrey. Humphrey was from Minnesota. On a hunch, Woodward called information in Minneapolis and got a number for a Kenneth H. Dahlberg. Mr. Dahlberg answered the phone, acknowledged the $25,000 check and, saying, “I know I shouldn’t tell you this,’’ according to the Woodward-Bernstein book, proceeded to reveal that he had given the check to (CREEP finance chair Maurice) Stans...

This is all dramatized to great, if slightly embellished, effect in the movie 'All The President's Men' the result of which is the conversation, in which Mr. Dahlberg is the only major player in the Watergate saga who tells the truth from the very start, shown in the video clip at the top of the post.

Now.

I remember when searching for something meant that you actually had to do some actual searching. Heckfire, as an undergraduate it once took me two days of rummaging through library stacks and squinting at microfiche films to find this as the counterpoint to that damnable motorcycle outlaw book by Hunter Thompson, when I should have been instead learning about how ribosomes translate mRNA into protein.

But I digress.

Because what I really wanted to tell you about is how real news people dealt with all of this when they had to be really fast in the days before the interwebz.

And, apparently, one of the best at this game locally was a guy named Warren Barker (no relation to the infamous Watergate burglar - ha!).

Mr. Barker, who ran the then locally-owned CKNW newsroom with iron fists clenched in velvet gloves from 1959 to 1991, died recently and Rod Mickleburgh has written a great tribute to him over at his blog.

Here's the part about Mr. Barker's infamous 'files':

...Barker might have stepped out of a radio version of The Front Page. Pounding the keys on an old typewriter (reporters learned to recognize angry memos by the keys cutting right through the paper), phone receiver cradled on his shoulder, a cheap Old Port cigarillo in his mouth, surrounded by files, he set the city’s news agenda every morning. His only concession to sartorial resplendence was a loosely-knotted tie he hung on the door handle. He would slip it on, whenever he had to meet the station’s “suits”.

Few realized CKNW managed all this with just a small fleet of reporters — two on days, one on nights, plus the incomparable George Garrett. And it was out in New Westminster, far from the pulse of Vancouver. But Barker had a system. It involved endless phone checks (“Anything new?”), cubbyhole newsrooms at city hall and the cop shop, tips from carefully cultivated sources, and the pièce de resistance, a filing system like no other.

In the words of Cameron Bell, who went on from his Barker tutelage to revolutionize local TV news at BC-TV: “In an era before computers, in a newsroom the size of a sedan, Barker would carefully construct ongoing files for ongoing stories. They’d be put away in files for instant recall. Barker could retrieve information faster than the most computerized databases today.”

Garrett, who spent nearly 20 years working under Barker, said his boss kept files on everything. Fire deaths, traffic deaths, court cases, labour stories, status of the Mission River Gauge that measured the annual Fraser River freshet…In fact, just about every story reported on ‘NW found its way into Barker’s extraordinary filing system, in chronological order. “And all before computers,” marvelled Garrett...

Imagine that!

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In the movie the embellished bit is the part where Redford as Woodward searches through old phone books stored in the celluloid version of the Washington Post newsroom to find Dahlberg's phone number...Most interestingly, the film's props dept used a version of the Minneapolis phone book that came out a few months after the call was actually made...Which, apropos of absolutely nothing at all, is a fact nugget I would never have found if I had not been trolling the outer edges of the Googleplex earlier this morning...

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