In 1972, Dahlberg was named Midwest finance chairman for the Committee to Re-elect the President, an organization that has gone down in history as CREEP.
Dahlberg admired Nixon but “never worshiped him,” he says. Of politicians he says, “I knew these guys, and they don’t know any more than you and I know.”
Fundraising was frenetic in early 1972. In April, a new campaign finance law was to take effect, requiring increased disclosure of contributions. Donors desiring anonymity rushed to contribute before then.
One of these was agribusiness tycoon Dwayne Andreas, a longtime supporter of Democrat Humphrey. Unhappy with the liberal turn the Democratic Party was taking in 1972, Andreas confidentially gave Dahlberg twenty-five thousand dollars for the Nixon war chest. Dahlberg converted the currency into a cashier’s check and gave it to former commerce secretary Maurice Stans, then Nixon’s national finance chairman. It was all perfectly legal.
When news broke in June about the strange break-in at the Watergate, Dahlberg had no idea his life was about to change.
Woodstein Calling
“Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?” Richard Nixon growls in one of the infamous White House tapes that helped expose the president’s wrongdoing.
Nixon had met Dahlberg, who still has his Nixon-era White House pass. But in the stress of the moment, he’d apparently forgotten him.
No one understood better than Nixon that the discovery of a CREEP fundraiser’s check in a Watergate burglar’s account exposed a trail that could lead all the way to impeachment.
Dahlberg knew nothing of the White House skulduggery, but its unraveling began with his check. Toward the end of July 1972, he received a surprise phone call at home from “Bernstein or Woodward or Woodstein, whoever it was.”
It was Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who together with partner Carl Bernstein uncovered most of the early Watergate revelations. The pivotal call to Dahlberg figures prominently in Woodward and Bernstein’s book, All the President’s Men, and in the movie based upon it.
In the film, Dahlberg’s disembodied voice tells Woodward he can’t talk because his neighbor has just been kidnapped. Countless filmgoers doubtless have thought this a rather creative evasion. But many Minnesotans know Dahlberg was referring to the notorious 1972 kidnapping of socialite Virginia Piper, who was ransomed for one million dollars.
