I didn't bookmark any of those searches. I honestly thought it did though. That is what made me think of Byrd. I will back track on a few searches when I get a free browser. I have so many opened right now, I'm not sure what screen I'm in ^-^
LOL! :-)
I see Byrd was majority whip back then, so it seems possible he would've known Woodward in that capacity:
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
In 1971, Byrd entered a race against Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy for the position of Senate majority whip, and won.
The first cracks of thunder came three weeks after Helms flew to Iran, during the long-postponed confirmation hearings of Acting FBI Director Gray. The Senate Judiciary Committee had previously been busy with antitrust hearings against ITT, and Gray had been out for most of November, convalescing from abdominal surgery, and Nixon had wanted to evaluate Gray's performance. But in late February 1973, Nixon finally had sent Gray's name to the Hill. That was a strange decision indeed, inasmuch as Gray was certain to be grilled about the FBI's Watergate work. Ehrlichman and others had therefore strongly opposed Gray's nomination, but Nixon had gone ahead -- perhaps because Gray had been a Nixon loyalist since 1960, and had only been trying to look out for the President by ratting on Dean and Ehrlichman in July; perhaps because Nixon feared Gray might expose the Watergate coverup if unceremoniously dismissed for his loyal service. In any case, the hearings were a total disaster.
They began on February 28, with Gray insisting that the FBI had conducted "a full- court press" on Watergate. He then volunteered, without being asked, that he had routinely furnished Watergate investigation summaries to the White House. That unleashed angry badgering from Senators such as Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who believed that Gray had been, wittingly or not, abetting a White House coverup. To appease them, Gray said they could review all the FBI Watergate files it wished, but in that he was promptly overruled by the White House. By early April, Senators had so many questions about how Gray had conducted himself as Acting Director, and whether his Watergate investigation had been independent of the White House, that his prospects seemed weak. Gray himself was meanwhile beginning to have some questions about the President he had been trying to serve, and in early April, he withdrew his name from nomination. "In the service of my country, I withstood hours and hours of depth charging, shelling, bombing," Gray later reflected, "but I never expected to run into a Watergate in the service of the President of the United States, and I ran into a buzzsaw, obviously."