The Original Watergate Stories

Table of Contents

- The Original Watergate Stories

- Copyright

- Foreword

- Part I

- The Post Investigates

- 5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here

- GOP Security Aide Among Five Arrested in Bugging Affair

- Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds

- Mitchell Controlled Secret GOP Fund

- FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats

- Nixon Wins Landslide Victory; Democrats Hold Senate, House; McGovern Admits Defeat; President Calls for Harmony

- Last Two Guilty in Watergate Plot: Jury Convicts Liddy, McCord in 90 Minutes; Ex-Aides of Nixon to Appeal

- 3 Top Nixon Aides, Kleindienst Out; President Accepts Full Responsibility; Richardson Will Conduct New Probe

- Part II

- The Government Acts

- Cox Is Chosen as Special Prosecutor Democrat Served Under Kennedy as Solicitor General

- The First Day of Watergate: Not Exactly High Drama

- Dean Alleges Next Knew of Cover-up Plan

- Break-In Memo Sent to Ehrlichman

- President Taped Talks, Phone Calls; Lawyer Ties Ehrlichman to Payments

- President Refuses to Turn Over Tapes; Ervin Committee, Cox Issue Subpoenas Action Sets Stage for Court Battle on Powers Issue

- Nixon Forces Firing of Cox; Richardson, Ruckelshaus Quit President Abolishes Prosecutor’s Office; FBI Seals Records

- Nixon Tells Editors, ‘I’m Not a Crook’

- Another Tape Found Faulty, Sirica Is Told Haldeman, Nixon Talk Is Involved

- Part III

- Nixon Resigns

- President Hands Over Transcripts Initial Reaction on Hill Divided Along Party Lines

- Court Orders Nixon to Yield Tapes; President Promises to Comply Fully Justices Reject Privilege Claim in 8-to-0 Ruling

- Nixon Resigns

- Part IV

- Deep Throat Revealed

- FBI’s No. 2 Was ‘Deep Throat’

- Watergate Timeline

- More from The Washington Post

The Original Watergate Stories

By The Washington Post

Foreword by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

Copyright

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004
New York, New York 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright © 2012 by The Washington Post

Cover designed by David Griffin

Cover image courtesy of HARRY NALTCHAYAN/TWP

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com.

First Diversion Books edition September 2012.

ISBN: 978-1-938120-58-9 (ebook)

Foreword

By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

As Sen. Sam Ervin completed his 20-year Senate career in 1974 and issued his final report as chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, he posed the question: “What was Watergate?”

Countless answers have been offered in the 40 years since June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars wearing business suits and rubber gloves was arrested at 2:30 a.m. at the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate office building. Four days afterward, the Nixon White House offered its answer: “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it was,” press secretary Ronald Ziegler scoffed, dismissing the incident as a “third-rate burglary.”

History proved that it was anything but. Two years later, Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign, his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice—the Watergate coverup—definitively established. Another answer has since persisted, often unchallenged: the notion that the coverup was worse than the crime. This idea minimizes the scale and reach of Nixon’s criminal actions.

Ervin’s answer to his own question hints at the magnitude of Watergate: “To destroy, insofar as the presidential election of 1972 was concerned, the integrity of the process by which the President of the United States is nominated and elected.” Yet Watergate was far more than that. At its most virulent, it Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.

Today, much more than when we first covered this story as young Washington Post reporters, an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of some 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies. Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents.

In the course of his 5½-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars—against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.

Long before the Watergate break-in, gumshoeing, burglary, wiretapping and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House. What was Watergate? It was Nixon’s five wars.

The war against the antiwar movement

Nixon’s first war was against the anti-Vietnam War movement. The president considered it subversive and thought it constrained his ability to prosecute the war in Southeast Asia on his terms. In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry”—that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”

Thomas Charles Huston, the White House aide who devised the plan, informed Nixon that it was illegal, but the president approved it regardless. It was not formally rescinded until FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected—not on principle, but because he considered those types of activities the FBI’s turf. Undeterred, Nixon remained fixated on such operations.

In a memorandum dated March 3, 1970, presidential aide Patrick Buchanan wrote to Nixon about what he called the “institutionalized power of the left concentrated in the foundations that succor the Democratic Party.” Of particular concern was the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank with liberal leanings.

On June 17, 1971—exactly one year before the Watergate break-in—Nixon met in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. At issue was a file about former president Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam.

“You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman said, according to the tape of the meeting.

“Yeah,” Kissinger said, “but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.” They wanted the complete story of Johnson’s actions.

“Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings,” Haldeman said.

“Bob,” Nixon said, “now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it. . . . I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

Nixon would not let the matter drop. Thirteen days later, according to another taped discussion with Haldeman and Kissinger, the president said: “Break in and take it out. You understand?”

The next morning, Nixon said: “Bob, get on the Brookings thing right away. I’ve got to get that safe cracked over there.” And later that morning, he persisted, “Who’s gonna break in the Brookings Institution?”

For reasons that have never been made clear, the break-in apparently was not carried out.

The war on the news media

Nixon’s second war was waged ceaselessly against the press, which was reporting more insistently on the faltering Vietnam War and the effectiveness of the antiwar movement. Although Hoover thought he had shut down the Huston Plan, it was in fact implemented by high-level Nixon deputies. A “Plumbers” unit and burglary team were set up under the direction of White House counsel John Ehrlichman and an assistant, Egil Krogh, and led by the operational chiefs of the future Watergate burglary, ex-CIA operative Howard Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. Hunt was hired as a consultant by Nixon political aide Charles Colson, whose take-no-prisoners sensibility matched the president’s.

An early assignment was to destroy the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg, who had provided the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War, to the news media in 1971. Publication of the documents in the New York Times, the Washington Post and eventually other newspapers had sent Nixon into rants and rages, recorded on his tapes, about Ellsberg, the antiwar movement, the press, Jews, the American left and liberals in Congress—all of whom he conflated. Though Ellsberg was already under indictment and charged with espionage, the team headed by Hunt and Liddy broke into the office of his psychiatrist, seeking information that might smear Ellsberg and undermine his credibility in the antiwar movement.

“You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman on June 29, 1971. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?”

He went on: “People don’t trust these Eastern establishment people. He’s Harvard. He’s a Jew. You know, and he’s an arrogant intellectual.”

Nixon’s anti-Semitic rages were well-known to those who worked most closely with him, including some aides who were Jewish. As we reported in our 1976 book, The Final Days, he would tell his deputies, including Kissinger, that “the Jewish cabal is out to get me.” In a July 3, 1971, conversation with Haldeman, he said: “The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a Garment [White House counsel Leonard Garment] and a Kissinger and, frankly, a Safire [presidential speechwriter William Safire], and, by God, they’re exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”

Ellsberg’s leak seemed to feed his prejudice and paranoia.

In response to suspected leaks to the press about Vietnam, Kissinger had ordered FBI wiretaps in 1969 on the telephones of 17 journalists and White House aides, without court approval. Many news stories based on the purported leaks questioned progress in the American war effort, further fueling the antiwar movement. In a tape from the Oval Office on Feb. 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.”

“The press is your enemy,” Nixon explained five days later in a meeting with Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape. “Enemies. Understand that? . . . Now, never act that way . . . give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”

The war against the Democrats

In Nixon’s third war, he took the weapons in place—the Plumbers, wiretapping and burglary—and deployed them against the Democrats challenging his reelection.

John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and confidante, met with Liddy at the Justice Department in early 1972, when Mitchell was attorney general. Liddy presented a $1 million plan for spying and sabotage during the upcoming presidential campaign, code-named “Gemstone.”

According to the Senate Watergate report and Liddy’s 1980 autobiography, he used multicolored charts prepared by the CIA to describe elements of the plan. Operation Diamond would neutralize antiwar protesters with mugging squads and kidnapping teams; Operation Coal would funnel cash to Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in an effort to sow racial and gender discord in the party; Operation Opal would use electronic surveillance against various targets, including the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; Operation Sapphire would station prostitutes on a yacht, wired for sound, off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention.

Mitchell rejected the plans and told Liddy to burn the charts. At a second meeting, less than three weeks later, Liddy presented a scaled-back, $500,000 version of the plan; Mitchell turned it down again. But soon after, Mitchell approved a $250,000 version, according to Jeb Magruder, the deputy campaign manager. It included intelligence-gathering on the Democrats through wiretaps and burglaries.

Under oath, Mitchell later denied approving the plan. He testified that he told Magruder: “We don’t need this. I’m tired of hearing it.” By his own account, he did not object on the grounds that the plan was illegal.

On Oct. 10, 1972, we wrote a story in The Post outlining the extensive sabotage and spying operations of the Nixon campaign and White House, particularly against Muskie, and stating that the Watergate burglary was not an isolated event. We also reported that Nixon’s appointment secretary, Dwight Chapin, had hired a young lawyer named Donald Segretti to disrupt and spy on the Democratic presidential candidates, and that 50 operatives were engaged in such activities. (The Senate Watergate committee later found more than 50 operatives, including 22 who were paid by Segretti.) Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney, paid Segretti more than $43,000 from leftover campaign funds for these activities. Throughout the operation, Segretti was contacted regularly by Howard Hunt.

The Senate investigation later provided more detail about the effectiveness of the covert efforts against Muskie, who in 1971 and early 1972 was considered by the White House to be the Democrat most capable of beating Nixon. The president’s campaign had paid Muskie’s chauffeur, a campaign volunteer named Elmer Wyatt, $1,000 a month to photograph internal memos, position papers, schedules and strategy documents, and deliver copies to Mitchell and Nixon’s campaign staff.

Other sabotage directed at Muskie included bogus news releases and allegations of sexual improprieties against other Democratic candidates—produced on counterfeit Muskie stationery. A favored dirty trick that caused havoc at campaign stops involved sweeping up the shoes that Muskie aides left in hotel hallways to be polished, and then depositing them in a dumpster.

Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, advised Nixon of the Chapin-Segretti sabotage plan in May 1971, according to one of the president’s tapes. In a memo to Haldeman and Mitchell dated April 12, 1972, Patrick Buchanan and another Nixon aide wrote: “Our primary objective, to prevent Senator Muskie from sweeping the early primaries, locking up the convention in April, and uniting the Democratic Party behind him for the fall, has been achieved.”

The tapes also reveal Nixon’s obsession with another Democrat: Sen. Edward Kennedy. One of Hunt’s earliest undertakings for the White House was to dig up dirt on Kennedy’s sex life, building on a 1969 auto accident at Chappaquiddick, Mass., that resulted in the death of a young Kennedy aide, Mary Jo Kopechne. Though Kennedy had vowed not to seek the presidency in 1972, he was certain to play a big role in the campaign and had not ruled out a 1976 run.

“I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon told Haldeman in April 1971. According to Haldeman’s 1994 book, The Haldeman Diaries, the president also wanted to have Kennedy photographed in compromising situations and leak the images to the press.

And when Kennedy received Secret Service protection as he campaigned for McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee, Nixon and Haldeman discussed a novel plan to keep him under surveillance: They would insert a retired Secret Service agent, Robert Newbrand, who had been part of Nixon’s protection detail when he was vice president, into the team protecting Kennedy.

“I’ll talk to Newbrand and tell him how to approach it,” Haldeman said, “because Newbrand will do anything that I tell him.”

“We just might get lucky and catch this son of a bitch and ruin him for ‘76,” replied the president, adding, “That’s going to be fun.”

On Sept. 8, 1971, Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to direct the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax returns of all the likely Democratic presidential candidates, as well as Kennedy. “Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon asked. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”

The war on justice

The arrest of the Watergate burglars set in motion Nixon’s fourth war, against the American system of justice. It was a war of lies and hush money, a conspiracy that became necessary to conceal the roles of top officials and to hide the president’s campaign of illegal espionage and political sabotage, including the covert operations that Mitchell described as “the White House horrors” during the Watergate hearings: the Huston Plan, the Plumbers, the Ellsberg break-in, Liddy’s Gemstone plan and the proposed break-in at Brookings.

In a June 23, 1972, tape recording, six days after the arrests at the Watergate, Haldeman warned Nixon that “on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back in the problem area, because the FBI is not under control . . . their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money.”

Haldeman said Mitchell had come up with a plan for the CIA to claim that national security secrets would be compromised if the FBI did not halt its Watergate investigation.

Nixon approved the scheme and ordered Haldeman to call in CIA Director Richard Helms and his deputy Vernon Walters. “Play it tough,” the president directed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.”

The contents of the tape were made public on Aug. 5, 1974. Five days later, Nixon resigned.

Another tape captured discussions in the Oval Office on Aug. 1, 1972, six weeks after the burglars’ arrest, and the day on which The Post published our first story showing that Nixon campaign funds had gone into the bank account of one of the burglars.

Nixon and Haldeman discussed paying off the burglars and their leaders to keep them from talking to federal investigators. “They have to be paid,” Nixon said. “That’s all there is to that.”

On March 21, 1973, in one of the most memorable Watergate exchanges caught on tape, Nixon met with his counsel, John W. Dean, who since the break-in had been tasked with coordinating the coverup.

“We’re being blackmailed” by Hunt and the burglars, Dean reported, and more people “are going to start perjuring themselves.”

“How much money do you need?” Nixon asked.

“I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” Dean replied.

“And you could get it in cash,” the president said. “I, I know where it could be gotten. I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done.”

Hunt was demanding $120,000 immediately. They discussed executive clemency for him and the burglars.

“I am not sure that you will ever be able to deliver on the clemency,” Dean said. “It may just be too hot.”

“You can’t do it till after the ‘74 election, that’s for sure,” Nixon declared.

Haldeman then entered the room, and Nixon led the search for ways “to take care of the jackasses who are in jail.”

They discussed a secret $350,000 stash of cash kept in the White House, the possibility of using priests to help hide payments to the burglars, “washing” the money though Las Vegas or New York bookmakers, and empaneling a new grand jury so everyone could plead the Fifth Amendment or claim memory failure. Finally, they decided to send Mitchell on an emergency fundraising mission.

The president praised Dean’s efforts. “You handled it just right. You contained it. Now after the election, we’ve got to have another plan.”

The war on history

Nixon’s final war, waged even to this day by some former aides and historical revisionists, aims to play down the significance of Watergate and present it as a blip on the president’s record. Nixon lived for 20 years after his resignation and worked tirelessly to minimize the scandal.

Though he had accepted a full pardon from President Gerald Ford, Nixon insisted that he had not participated in any crimes. In his 1977 television interviews with British journalist David Frost, he said that he had “let the American people down” but that he had not obstructed justice. “I didn’t think of it as a coverup. I didn’t intend a coverup. Let me say, if I intended the coverup, believe me, I would have done it.”

In his 1978 memoir “RN,” Nixon addressed his role in Watergate: “My actions and omissions, while regrettable and possibly indefensible, were not impeachable.” Twelve years later, in his book In the Arena, he decried a dozen “myths” about Watergate and claimed that he was innocent of many of the charges made against him. One myth, he said, was that he ordered the payment of hush money to Hunt and others. Yet, the March 21, 1973, tape shows that he ordered Dean to get the money 12 times.

Even now, there are old Nixon hands and defenders who dismiss the importance of Watergate or claim that key questions remain unanswered. This year, Thomas Mallon, director of the creative writing program at George Washington University, published a novel called Watergate, a sometimes witty and entirely fictional story featuring many of the real players. Frank Gannon, a former Nixon White House aide who now works for the Nixon Foundation, reviewed the book for the Wall Street Journal.

“What emerges from Watergate is an acute sense of how much we still don’t know about the events of June 17, 1972,” Gannon wrote. “Who ordered the break-in? . . . What was its real purpose? Was it purposely botched? How much was the CIA involved? . . . And how did a politician as tough and canny as Richard Nixon allow himself to be brought down by a ‘third rate burglary?’”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Of course, Gannon is correct in noting that there are some unanswered questions—but not the big ones. By focusing on the supposed paucity of details concerning the burglary of June 17, 1972, he would divert us from the larger story.

And about that story, there is no need to guess.

* * *

In the summer of 1974, it was neither the press nor the Democrats who rose up against Nixon, but the president’s own Republican Party.

On July 24, the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that Nixon would have to turn over the secret tapes demanded by the Watergate special prosecutor. Three of the president’s appointees to the court—Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Justice Harry Blackmun and Justice Lewis Powell—joined that opinion. The other Nixon appointee, Justice William Rehnquist, recused himself.

Three days later, six Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee joined the Democrats in voting to recommend Nixon’s impeachment by a vote of 27 to 11 for nine acts of obstruction of justice in the Watergate coverup.

By August, Nixon’s impending impeachment in the House was a certainty, and a group of Republicans led by Sen. Barry Goldwater banded together to declare his presidency over. “Too many lies, too many crimes,” Goldwater said.

On Aug. 7, the group visited Nixon at the White House.

How many votes would he have in a Senate trial? the president asked.

“I took kind of a nose count today,” Goldwater replied, “and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.”

The next day, Nixon went on national television and announced that he would resign.

* * *

In his last remarks about Watergate as a senator, 77-year-old Sam Ervin, a revered constitutionalist respected by both parties, posed a final question: “Why was Watergate?”

The president and his aides, Ervin answered, had “a lust for political power.” That lust, he explained, “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.”

Nixon had lost his moral authority as president. His secret tapes—and what they reveal—will probably be his most lasting legacy. On them, he is heard talking almost endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history and, above all, his grudges, animosities and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation.

The Watergate that we wrote about in The Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today. It was only a glimpse into something far worse. By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.

On the day he left, Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon gave an emotional farewell speech in the East Room to his staff, his friends and his Cabinet. His family stood with him. Near the end of his remarks, he waved his arm, as if to highlight the most important thing he had to say.

“Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

His hatred had brought about his downfall. Nixon apparently grasped this insight, but it was too late. He had already destroyed himself.

Part I

Bob Woodward (left) and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post newsroom. (Image by Ken Feil/The Washington Post)

The Post Investigates

“Five Held in Plot to Bug Democratic Offices Here,” said the headline at the bottom of page one in The Washington Post on Sunday, June 18, 1972. The story reported that a team of burglars had been arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington.

So began the chain of events that would convulse Washington for two years, lead to the first resignation of a U.S. president and change American politics forever.

The story intrigued two young reporters on The Post’s staff, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward who were called in to work on the story. As Woodward’s notes show, he learned from police sources that the men came from Miami, wore surgical gloves and carried thousands of dollars in cash. It was, said one source, “a professional type operation.”

The next day, Woodward and Bernstein joined up for the first of many revelatory stories. “GOP Security Aide Among Those Arrested,” reported that burglar James McCord was on the payroll of President Nixon’s reelection committee. The next day, Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman privately discussed how to get the CIA to tell the FBI to back off from the burglary investigation. Publicly, a White House spokesman said he would not comment on “a third rate burglary.”

Within a few weeks, Woodward and Bernstein reported that the grand jury investigating the burglary had sought testimony from two men who had worked in the Nixon White House, former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. Both men would ultimately be indicted for guiding the burglars, via walkie-talkies, from a hotel room opposite the Watergate building.

In Miami, Bernstein learned that a $25,000 check for Nixon’s reelection campaign had been deposited in the bank account of one of the burglars. The resulting story, “Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds” reported the check had been given to Maurice Stans, the former Secretary of Commerce who served as Nixon’s chief fundraiser. It was the first time The Post linked the burglary to Nixon campaign funds.

As the two reporters pursued the story, Woodward relied on Mark Felt, a high ranking official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as a confidential source. With access to FBI reports on the burglary investigation, Felt could confirm or deny what other sources were telling The Post reporters. He also could tell them what leads to pursue. Woodward agreed to keep his identity secret, referring to him in conversations with colleagues only as “Deep Throat.” His identity would not become public until 2005, 33 years later.

While Nixon cruised toward reelection in the fall of 1972, Woodward and Bernstein scored a string of scoops, reporting that:

• Attorney General John Mitchell controlled a secret fund that paid for a campaign to gather information on the Democrats.
• Nixon’s aides had run “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” on behalf of Nixon’s reelection effort.

But while other newspapers ignored the story and voters gave Nixon a huge majority in November 1972, the White House continued to denounce The Post’s coverage as biased and misleading. Post publisher Katharine Graham worried about the administration’s “unveiled threats and harassment.”

As Hunt asked the White House provide money for himself and his co-defendants, John Sirica, the tough-talking judge presiding over the trial of the burglars, took on the role of investigator, trying to force the defendants to disclose what they knew. Hunt and the other burglars pleaded guilty, while McCord and Liddy went to trial and were convicted.

As Hunt’s demands for “hush money” persisted, John Dean, a White House lawyer, privately told Nixon that there was “a cancer on the presidency.” When the FBI finally pierced the White House denials, senior officials faced prosecution for perjury and obstruction of justice. In April 1973, four of Nixon’s top aides lost their jobs, including chief of staff Haldeman, chief domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and Dean himself.

When Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler said previous White House criticisms of The Post were “inoperative,” Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting had been vindicated.

The stories:

5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here

By Alfred E. Lewis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 18, 1972

Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.

Three of the men were native-born Cubans and another was said to have trained Cuban exiles for guerrilla activity after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

They were surprised at gunpoint by three plain-clothes officers of the metropolitan police department in a sixth floor office at the plush Watergate, 2600 Virginia Ave., NW, where the Democratic National Committee occupies the entire floor.

There was no immediate explanation as to why the five suspects would want to bug the Democratic National Committee offices or whether or not they were working for any other individuals or organizations.

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee said records kept in those offices are “not of a sensitive variety” although there are “financial records and other such information.”

Police said two ceiling panels in the office of Dorothy V. Bush, secretary of the Democratic Party, had been removed.

Her office is adjacent to the office of Democratic National Chairman Lawrence F. O’Brien. Presumably, it would have been possible to slide a bugging device through the panels in that office to a place above the ceiling panels in O’Brien’s office.

All wearing rubber surgical gloves, the five suspects were captured inside a small office within the committee’s headquarters suite.

Police said the men had with them at least two sophisticated devices capable of picking up and transmitting all talk, including telephone conversations. In addition, police found lock-picks and door jimmies, almost $2,300 in cash, most of it in $100 bills with the serial numbers in sequence.

The men also had with them one walkie-talkie, a short wave receiver that could pick up police calls, 40 rolls of unexposed film, two 35 millimeter cameras and three pen-sized tear gas guns.

Near where they were captured were two open file drawers, and one national committee source conjectured that the men were preparing to photograph the contents.

In Court yesterday, one suspect said the men were “anti-Communists” and the others nodded agreement. The operation was described in court by prosecutor Earl J. Silbert as “professional” and “clandestine.” One of the Cuban natives, The Washington Post learned, is now a Miami locksmith.

Many of the burglary tools found at the Democratic National Committee offices appeared to be packaged in what police said were burglary kits.

The five men were identified as:

“Edward Martin, alias James W. McCord, of New York City and perhaps the Washington metropolitan area. Martin said in court yesterday that he retired from the CIA two years ago. He said he presently is employed as a “security consultant.”

“Frank Sturgis of 2515 NW 122d St., Miami. Prosecutors said that an FBI check on Sturgis showed that he had served in the Cuban Military army intelligence in 1958, recently traveled to Honduras in Central America, and presently is the agent for a Havana salvage agency. He has a home and family in Miami. Sturgis also was once charged with a gun violation in Miami, according to FBI records.

“Eugenio R. Martinez of 4044 North Meridian Ave., Miami. Prosecutors said that Martinez violated the immigration laws in 1958 by flying in a private plane to Cuba. He is a licensed real estate agent and a notary public in Florida.

“Virgilio R. Gonzales [Editor’s Note: Spelling was corrected in subsequent stories to Gonzalez] of 930 NW 23d Ave., Miami. In Miami yesterday, his wife told a Washington Post reporter that her husband works as a locksmith at the Missing Link Key Shop. Harry Collot, the shop owner, said that Gonzales was scheduled to work yesterday but didn’t show up. “He’s done it before, but it’s not a regular thing,” Collot said. He said he thought Gonzales came to America about the time Fidel Castro became well-known, and began working for Missing Links sometime in 1959. He described Gonzales as “pro-American and anti-Castro…he doesn’t rant or rave like some of them do.”

“Bernard L. Barker of 5229 NW 4th St., Miami. Douglas Caddy, one of the attorneys for the five men, told a reporter that shortly after 3 a.m. yesterday, he received a call from Barker’s wife. “She said that her husband told her to call me if he hadn’t called her by 3 a.m.: that it might mean he was in trouble.”

All were charged with felonious burglary and with possession of implements of crime. All but Martin were ordered held in $50,000 bail. Martin, who has ties in the area was held in $30,000 bail.

In court yesterday, prosecutors said Sturgis also used the alias Frank Fiorini — an assertion confirmed by Miami area police.

In 1959, the Federal Aviation Agency identified Fiorini as the pilot of a plane that dropped anti-Castro leaflets over Havana. Described in newspaper clippings as a “soldier of fortune,” Fiorini reportedly was head of the International anticommunist Brigade, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, that trained 23 Cuban exiles who in 1962 landed by boat in Cuba’s Matanzas Province and set up guerrilla operations.

(Fiorini reportedly is a native of Norfolk, Va., who fought with the Marines in the Pacific during World War II. An early supporter of the Cuban revolution, he reportedly fought with Castro and was named by the premier to be overseer as gambling operations in Havana before the casinos were shut down by the premier.)

The early morning arrests occurred about 40 minutes after a security guard at the Watergate noticed that a door connecting a stairwell with the hotel’s basement garage had been taped so it would not lock.

The guard, 24-year old Frank Wills, removed the tape, but when he passed by about 10 minutes later a new piece had been put on. Wills then called police.

Three officers from the tactical squad responded and entered the stairwell.

From the basement to the sixth floor, they found every door leading from the stairwell to a hallway of the building had been taped to prevent them from locking. At the sixth floor, where the stairwell door leads directly into the Democratic National Committee offices, they found the door had been jimmied.
Led by Sgt. Paul Leper, the tactical force team, which also included Officers John Barret and Carl Shollfer, began searching the suite, which includes 29 offices and where approximately 70 persons work.

When the officers entered an office occupied by a secretary to Stanley Griegg, deputy party chairman, one of the suspects jumped up from behind a desk, put his hands in the air and cried “don’t shoot,” police said.

According to police and a desk clerk at the Watergate, four of the suspects — all using fictitious names — rented two rooms, number 214 and 314 at the Watergate Hotel around noon on Friday. They were said to have dined together on lobster at the Watergate Restaurant on Friday night.

Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. Attorney’s office obtained warrants to search the hotel rooms rented by the suspects. They found another $4,200 in $100 bills of the same serial number sequence as the money taken from the suspects, more burglary tools and electronic bugging equipment stashed in six suitcases.

One of the bugging devices found at the scene of the Democratic National Committee offices was described as being about the size of a silver dollar and capable of being hidden underneath a telephone or a desk.

According to police the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices yesterday was the third incident there since May 28.

On that date, according to police, an attempt was made to unscrew a lock on the door between 11 p.m. and 8 a.m.

According to one police source, at least some of the suspects registered as guests at the Watergate Hotel on that date.

On June 7, police said, a safe at the Committee headquarters was reported broken into and $100 in cash and checks stolen. That break-in occurred about 9 p.m. but there was no door jimmied since the suite was unlocked and people were still working there.

Within hours after the arrests, the suite was sealed off and scores of metropolitan police officers directed by acting Chief Charles Wright. FBI agents and Secret Service men were assigned to the investigation.

Caddy, one of the attorneys for the five, said he met Barker a year ago over cocktails at the Army Navy Club in Washington. “We had a sympathetic conversation — that’s all I’ll say,” Caddy told a reporter.

Caddy said that he was probably the only attorney whom Barker knew in Washington.

Caddy, who says he is a corporate lawyer, attempted to stay in the background of yesterday’s 4 p.m. court hearing. He did not argue before Superior Court Judge James A. Belson himself but brought another attorney, Joseph A. Rafferty Jr., who has experience in criminal law, to do the arguing.

In that 30-minute arraignment, Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert, the No. 2 man in the chief prosecutor’s office, unsuccessfully urged the court to order the five men held without bond.

Silbert argued that the men had no community ties and would be likely to leave the country to avoid trial. He said they gave false names to the police after they were arrested and refused to cooperate.

“They were caught red-handed,” Silbert said. With such strong evidence against them, their apparent tendency to travel abroad and their access to large amounts of cash, the men should not be released, Silbert said.

Silbert called the men professionals with a “clandestine” purpose.

Rafferty said the five men didn’t have firearms and didn’t harm anyone, and should be released on bond.

In setting the bond at $50,000 for the Miami men and $30,000 for Martin,

Judge Belson also placed restrictions on their movements.

He required the four Miami men to stay in the Washington area and check in daily with the court, if released. Martin would have to check in weekly if released, Belson ruled.

Griegg, deputy party chairman, called it “obviously important” that some of the suspects come from the area around Miami and Miami Beach, where the Democratic National Convention will be held next month.

Contributing to this story were Washington Post Staff Writers Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Bart Barnes, Kirk Scharfenberg, Martin Weil, Claudia Lery, Abbott Combes, and Tim O’Brien.

GOP Security Aide Among Five Arrested in Bugging Affair

By Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, June 19, 1972

One of the five men arrested early Saturday in the attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters is the salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s reelection committee.

The suspect, former CIA employee James W. McCord Jr., 53, also holds a separate contract to provide security services to the Republican National Committee, GOP national chairman Bob Dole said yesterday.

Former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, head of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, said yesterday McCord was employed to help install that committee’s own security system.

In a statement issued in Los Angeles, Mitchell said McCord and the other four men arrested at Democratic headquarters Saturday “were not operating either in our behalf or with our consent” in the alleged bugging attempt.

Dole issued a similar statement, adding that “we deplore action of this kind in or out of politics.” An aide to Dole said he was unsure at this time exactly what security services McCord was hired to perform by the National Committee.

Police sources said last night that they were seeking a sixth man in connection with the attempted bugging. The sources would give no other details.

Other sources close to the investigation said yesterday that there still was no explanation as to why the five suspects might have attempted to bug Democratic headquarters in the Watergate at 2600 Virginia Ave., NW, or if they were working for other individuals or organizations.

“We’re baffled at this point . . . the mystery deepens,” a high Democratic party source said.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Lawrence F. O’Brien said the “bugging incident . . . raised the ugliest questions about the integrity of the political process that I have encountered in a quarter century.

“No mere statement of innocence by Mr. Nixon’s campaign manager will dispel these questions.”

The Democratic presidential candidates were not available for comment yesterday.

O’Brien, in his statement, called on Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst to order an immediate, “searching professional investigation” of the entire matter by the FBI.

A spokesman for Kleindienst said yesterday. “The FBI is already investigating. . . . Their investigative report will be turned over to the criminal division for appropriate action.”

The White House did not comment.

McCord, 53, retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 1970 after 19 years of service and established his own “security consulting firm,” McCord Associates, at 414 Hungerford Drive, Rockville. He lives at 7 Winder Ct., Rockville.

McCord is an active Baptist and colonel in the Air Force Reserve, according to neighbors and friends.

In addition to McCord, the other four suspects, all Miami residents, have been identified as: Frank Sturgis (also known as Frank Florini), an American who served in Fidel Castro’s revolutionary army and later trained a guerrilla force of anti-Castro exiles; Eugenio R. Martinez, a real estate agent and notary public who is active in anti-Castro activities in Miami; Virgilio R. Gonzales, a locksmith; and Bernard L. Barker, a native of Havana said by exiles to have worked on and off for the CIA since the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

All five suspects gave the police false names after being arrested Saturday. McCord also told his attorney that his name is Edward Martin, the attorney said.

Sources in Miami said yesterday that at least one of the suspects — Sturgis — was attempting to organize Cubans in Miami to demonstrate at the Democratic National Convention there next month.

The five suspects, well-dressed, wearing rubber surgical gloves and unarmed, were arrested about 2:30 a.m. Saturday when they were surprised by Metropolitan police inside the 29-office suite of the Democratic headquarters on the sixth floor of the Watergate.

The suspects had extensive photographic equipment and some electronic surveillance instruments capable of intercepting both regular conversation and telephone communication.

Police also said that two ceiling panels near party chairman O’Brien’s office had been removed in such a way as to make it possible to slip in a bugging device.

McCord was being held in D.C. jail on $30,000 bond yesterday. The other four were being held there on $50,000 bond. All are charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other conversations.

McCord was hired as “security coordinator” of the Committee for the Re-election of the President on Jan. 1, according to Powell Moore, the Nixon committee’s director of press and information.

Moore said McCord’s contract called for a “take-home salary of $1,200 per month and that the ex-CIA employee was assigned an office in the committee’s headquarters at 1701 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.

Within the last one or two weeks, Moore said, McCord made a trip to Miami beach — where both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions will be held. The purpose of the trip, Moore said, was “to establish security at the hotel where the Nixon Committee will be staying.”

In addition to McCord’s monthly salary, he and his firm were paid a total of $2,836 by the Nixon Committee for the purchase and rental of television and other security equipment, according to Moore.

Moore said that he did not know exactly who on the committee staff hired McCord, adding that it “definitely wasn’t John Mitchell.” According to Moore, McCord has never worked in any previous Nixon election campaigns “because he didn’t leave the CIA until two years ago, so it would have been impossible.”

As of late yesterday, Moore said. McCord was still on the Re-Election Committee payroll.

In his statement from Los Angeles, former Attorney General Mitchell said he was “surprised and dismayed” at reports of McCord’s arrest.

“The person involved is the proprietor of a private security agency who was employed by our committee months ago to assist with the installation of our security system,” said Mitchell. “He has, as we understand it, a number of business clients and interests and we have no knowledge of these relationships.”

Referring to the alleged attempt to bug the opposition’s headquarters, Mitchell said: “There is no place in our campaign, or in the electoral process, for this type of activity and we will not permit it nor condone it.”

About two hours after Mitchell issued his statement, GOP National Chairman Dole said, “I understand that Jim McCord . . . is the owner of the firm with which the Republican National Committee contracts for security services . . . if our understanding of the facts is accurate, added Dole, “we will of course discontinue our relationship with the firm.”

Tom Wilck, deputy chairman of communications for the GOP National Committee, said late yesterday that Republican officials still were checking to find out when McCord was hired, how much he was paid and exactly what his responsibilities were.

McCord lives with his wife in a two-story $45,000 house in Rockville.

After being contacted by The Washington Post yesterday, Harlan A. Westrell, who said he was a friend of McCord’s, gave the following background on McCord:

He is from Texas, where he and his wife graduated from Baylor University. They have three children, a son who is in his third year at the Air Force Academy, and two daughters.

The McCords have been active in the First Baptist Church of Washington. Other neighbors said that McCord is a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, and also has taught courses in security at Montgomery Community College. This could not be confirmed yesterday.

McCord’s previous employment by the CIA was confirmed by the intelligence agency, but a spokesman there said further data about McCord was not available yesterday.

In Miami, Washington Post Staff Writer Kirk Schartenberg reported that two of the other suspects — Sturgis and Barker — are well known among Cuban exiles there. Both are known to have had extensive contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency, exile sources reported, and Barker was closely associated with Frank Bender, the CIA operative who recruited many members of Brigade 2506, the Bay of Pigs invasion force.

Barker, 55, and Sturgis, 37, reportedly showed up uninvited at a Cuban exile meeting in May and claimed to represent an anticommunist organization of refugees from “captive nations.” The purpose of the meeting, at which both men reportedly spoke, was to plan a Miami demonstration in support of President Nixon’s decision to mine the harbor of Haiphong.

Barker, a native of Havana who lived both in the U.S. and Cuba during his youth, is a U.S. Army veteran who was imprisoned in a German POW camp during the World War II. He later served in the Cuban Buro de Investigationes — secret police — under Fidel Castro and fled to Miami in 1959. He reportedly was one of the principal leaders of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the exile organization established with CIA help to organize the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Sturgis, an American soldier of fortune who joined Castro in the hills of Oriente Province in 1958, left Cuba in 1959 with his close friend, Pedro Diaz Lanz, then chief of the Cuban air force. Diaz Lanz, once active in Cuban exile activities in Miami, more recently has been reported involved in such right-wing movements as the John Birch Society and the Rev. Billy James Hargis’ Christian Crusade.

Sturgis, more commonly known as Frank Florini, lost his American citizenship in 1960 for serving in a foreign military force — Castro’s army — but, with the aid of then-Florida Sen. George Smathers, regained it.

Contributing to this story were Washington Post Staff Writers E.J. Bachinski, Bill Gold, Claudia Levy, Kirk Scharfenberg, J.Y. Smith and Martin Weil.

Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds

By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 1, 1972

A $25,000 cashier’s check, apparently earmarked for President Nixon’s re-election campaign, was deposited in April in a bank account of one of the five men arrested in the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters here June l7.

The check was made out by a Florida bank to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, the President’s campaign finance chairman for the Midwest. Dahlberg said last night that in early April he turned the check over to “the treasurer of the Committee (for the Re-election of the President) or to Maurice Stans himself.”

Stans, formerly secretary of Commerce under Mr. Nixon, is now the finance chief of the President’s re-election effort.

Dahlberg said he didn’t have “the vaguest idea” how the check got into the bank account of the real estate firm owned by Bernard L. Barker, one of the break-in suspects. Stans could not be reached for comment.

Reached by telephone at his home in a Minneapolis suburb, Dahlberg explained the existence of the check this way: “In the process of fund-raising I had accumulated some cash…so I recall making a cash deposit while I was in Florida and getting a cashier’s check made out to myself. I didn’t want to carry all that cash into Washington.”

A photostatic copy of the front of the check was examined by a Washington Post reporter yesterday. It was made out by the First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Fla., to Dahlberg.

Thomas Monohan, the assistant vice president of the Boca Raton bank, who signed the check authorization, said the FBI had questioned him about it three weeks ago.

According to court testimony by government prosecutors, Barker’s bank account in which the $25,000 was deposited was the same account from which Barker later withdrew a large number of hundred-dollar bills. About 53 of these $l00 bills were found on the five men after they were arrested at the Watergate.

Dahlberg has contributed $7,000 to the GOP since l968, records show, and in l970 he was finance chairman for Clark MacGregor when MacGregor ran unsuccessfully against Hubert H. Humphrey for a U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota.

MacGregor, who replaced John N. Mitchell as Mr. Nixon’s campaign chief on July l, could offer no explanation as to how the $25,000 got from the campaign finance committee to Barker’s account.

He told a Post reporter last night: “I know nothing about it…these events took place before I came aboard. Mitchell and Stans would presumably know.”
MacGregor said he would attempt this morning to determine what happened.

Powell Moore, director of press relations for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, told a reporter that Stans was unavailable for comment last night. Mitchell also could not be reached for comment.

In a related development, records made available to The Post yesterday show that another $89,000 in four separate checks was deposited during May in Barker’s Miami bank account by a well-known Mexican lawyer.

The deposits were made in the form of checks made out to the lawyer, Manual Ogarrio Daguerre, 68, by the Banco Internacional of Mexico City.

Ogarrio could not be reached for comment and there was no immediate explanation as to why the $89,000 was transferred to Barker’s account.

This makes a total of $114,000 deposited in Barker’s account in the Republic National Bank of Miami, all on April 20.

The same amount — $114,000 — was withdrawn on three separate dates, April 24, May 2 and May 8.

Since the arrest of the suspects at 2:30 a.m. inside the sixth floor suite of the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate, Democrats have tried to lay the incident at the doorstep of the White House or at least to the Nixon re-election committee.

One day after the arrests, it was learned that one of the suspects, James W. McCord Jr., a former FBI and CIA agent, was the security chief to the Nixon committee and a security consultant to the Republican National Committee. McCord, now free on bond, was fired from both posts.

The next day it was revealed that a mysterious White House consultant, E. Howard Hunt Jr., was known by at least two of the suspects. Hunt immediately dropped from sight and became involved in an extended court battle to avoid testimony before the federal grand jury investigating the case.

Ten days ago it was revealed that a Nixon re-election committee official was fired because he had refused to answer questions about the incident by the FBI. The official, G. Gordon Liddy, was serving as financial counsel to the Nixon committee when he was dismissed on June 28.

In the midst of this, former Democratic National Chairman Lawrence F. O’Brien filed a $l million civil suit against the Nixon committee and the five suspects charging that the break-in and alleged attempted bugging violated the constitutional rights of all Democrats.

O’Brien charged that there is “a developing clear line to the White House” and emphasized what he called the “potential involvement” of special counsel to the President, Charles Colson.

Colson had recommended that the White House hire Hunt, also a former CIA agent and prolific novelist, as a consultant.

While he was Nixon campaign chief, Mitchell repeatedly and categorically denied any involvement or knowledge of the break-in incident.

When first contacted last night about the $25,000 check, Dahlberg said that he didn’t “have the vaguest idea about it . . . I turn all my money over to the (Nixon) committee.”

Asked if he had been contacted by the FBI and questioned about the check, Dahlberg said: “I’m a proper citizen. What I do is proper.”

Dahlberg later called a reporter back and said he first denied any knowledge of the $25,000 check because he was not sure the caller was really a reporter for The Washington Post.

He said that he had just gone through an ordeal because his “dear friend and neighbor,” Virginia Piper, had been kidnapped and held for two days.

Mrs. Piper’s husband reportedly paid $l million ransom last week to recover his wife in the highest payment to kidnapers in U.S. history.

Dahlberg, 54, was President Nixon’s Minnesota finance chairman in l968. The decision to appoint him to that post was announced by then-Rep. MacGregor and Stans.

In l970, Mr. Nixon appointed Dahlberg, who has a distinguished war record, to the board of visitors at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

A native of St. Paul, Minn., Dahlberg has apparently made his money through Dahlberg Electronics, Inc., a suburban Minneapolis firm that sells miniature hearing aids.

In l959, the company was sold to Motorola, and Dahlberg continued to operate it. In l964, he repurchased it.

In l966, the company established a subsidiary to distribute hearing aids in Latin America. The subsidiary had offices in Mexico City. Three years later, Dahlberg Electronics was named the exclusive United States and Mexican distributor for an acoustical medical device manufactured in Denmark.

Active in Minneapolis affairs, Dahlberg is a director of the National City Bank & Trust Co. of Fort Lauderdale. In l969, he was named Minneapolis’ “Swede of the Year.”

Mitchell Controlled Secret GOP Fund

By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 29, 1972

John N. Mitchell, while serving as U.S. Attorney General, personally controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to gather information about the Democrats, according to sources involved in the Watergate investigation.

Beginning in the spring of 1971, almost a year before he left the Justice Department to become President Nixon’s campaign manager on March 1, Mitchell personally approved withdrawals from the fund, several reliable sources have told The Washington Post.

Those sources have provided almost identical, detailed accounts of Mitchell’s role as comptroller of the secret intelligence fund and its fluctuating $350,000-$700,000 balance.

Four persons other than Mitchell were later authorized to approve payments from the secret fund, the sources said.

Two of them were identified as former Secretary of Commerce Maurice H. Stans, now finance chairman of the President’s campaign, and Jeb Stuart Magruder, manager of the Nixon campaign before Mitchell took over and now a deputy director of the campaign. The other two, according to the sources, are a high White House official now involved in the campaign and a campaign aide outside of Washington.

The sources of The Post’s information on the secret fund and its relationship to Mitchell and other campaign officials include law enforcement officers and persons on the staff of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

Last night, Mitchell was reached by telephone in New York and read the beginning of The Post’s story. He said: “All that crap, you’re putting it in the paper? It’s all been denied. Jesus. Katie Graham [Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post] is gonna get caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ. That’s the most sickening thing I’ve ever heard.”

Told that the Committee for the Re-election of the President had issued a statement about the story, Mitchell interjected: “Did the committee tell you to go ahead and publish that story? You fellows got a great ball game going. As soon as you’re through paying Williams (Edward Bennett Williams, whose law firm represents the Democratic Party, as well as The Washington Post), we’re going to do a story on all of you.” Mitchell then hung up the phone.

Asked to comment on the Post report, a spokesman for President Nixon’s re-election committee, Powell Moore, said, “I think your sources are bad; they’re providing misinformation. We’re not going to comment beyond that.”

Asked if the committee was therefore denying the contents of the story, Moore responded: “We’re just not going to comment.”

Later, Moore issued a formal statement that read: “There is absolutely no truth to the charges in the Post story. Neither Mr. Mitchell nor Mr. Stans has any knowledge of any disbursement from an alleged fund as described by the Post and neither of them controlled any committee expenditures while serving as government officials.”

Asked to discuss specific allegations in the story, Moore declined, saying: “The statement speaks for itself.”

According to The Post’s sources, the federal grand jury that investigated the alleged bugging of the Democrats’ Watergate headquarters did not establish that the intelligence-gathering fund directly financed the illegal eavesdropping.
Investigators have been told that the only record of the secret fund — a single sheet of lined ledger paper, listing the names of about 15 persons who received payments and how much each received — was destroyed by Nixon campaign officials after the June 17 break-in at the Watergate.

It has been established, however, that G. Gordon Liddy, the former Nixon finance committee counsel who was one of the seven men indicted in the Watergate case, withdrew well in excess of $50,000 in cash from the fund, the sources said.

Some of the still-unrevealed intelligence activities for which the secret fund was used were described by one federal source as potentially “very embarrassing” to the Nixon campaign if publicly disclosed. Other sources said they expect these activities to be revealed during the trial of the seven men indicted in the Watergate case.

Mitchell served as the President’s campaign manager for three months and resigned on July 1, citing an ultimatum from his wife that he leave politics.

The former attorney general has repeatedly denied that his resignation was related in any way to the Watergate bugging or that he had any knowledge of it.

When asked whether it would be illegal for an incumbent attorney general to control disbursements from a political campaign fund, one federal attorney involved in the Watergate case said yesterday: “I don’t know. There’s a question.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department said there is no law prohibiting the political activity of a member of the President’s cabinet.

Last month, the existence of the secret fund was cited as a “possible and apparent” violation of a new, stricter campaign finance disclosure law in a report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

The GAO said the fund contained $350,000 as of May 25 and was possibly illegal, because receipts and expenditures were not publicly reported for a six-week period after the new disclosure law took effect on April 7.

The fund, which was kept in a safe in Stans’ office, primarily consisted of cash contributions made to the Nixon campaign over an 18-month period, according to sources.

Although the only record of the fund was destroyed, it is known that investigators were able to reconstruct at least a partial list of recipients.

In addition to Liddy, those who received payments included Magruder, who withdrew about $25,000 from the fund; Herbert L. Porter, scheduling director of the Nixon committee, who received at least $50,000; several White House officials and thus-far unidentified persons who were not on the regular Nixon campaign or White House payroll.

Magruder has denied he received any money from the fund, and Porter has not commented.

At its inception, the secret intelligence fund was wholly controlled by Mitchell, the sources said, with the other four officials gaining authority to approve disbursements later on.

According to The Post’s sources, the primary purpose of the secret fund was to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats. It could not be determined yesterday exactly what individual projects were funded by the secret account.

FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats

By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 10, 1972

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files, were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential contenders and — since 1971 — represented a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.

During their Watergate investigation, federal agents established that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nixon campaign contributions had been set aside to pay for an extensive undercover campaign aimed at discrediting individual Democratic presidential candidates and disrupting their campaigns.

“Intelligence work” is normal during a campaign and is said to be carried out by both political parties. But federal investigators said what they uncovered being done by the Nixon forces is unprecedented in scope and intensity.

They said it included:

Following members of Democratic candidates’ families and assembling dossiers on their personal lives; forging letters and distributing them under the candidates’ letterheads; leaking false and manufactured items to the press; throwing campaign schedules into disarray; seizing confidential campaign files; and investigating the lives of dozens of Democratic campaign workers.

In addition, investigators said the activities included planting provocateurs in the ranks of organizations expected to demonstrate at the Republican and Democratic conventions; and investigating potential donors to the Nixon campaign before their contributions were solicited.

Informed of the general contents of this article, The White House referred all comment to The Committee for the Re-election of the President. A spokesman there said, “The Post story is not only fiction but a collection of absurdities.” Asked to discuss the specific points raised in the story, the spokesman, DeVan L. Shumway, refused on grounds that “the entire matter is in the hands of the authorities.”

Law enforcement sources said that probably the best example of the sabotage was the fabrication by a White House aide — of a celebrated letter to the editor alleging that Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) condoned a racial slur on Americans of French-Canadian descent as “Canucks.”

The letter was published in the Manchester Union Leader Feb 24, less than two weeks before the New Hampshire primary. It in part triggered Muskie’s politically damaging “crying speech” in front of the newspaper’s office.

Washington Post staff writer Marilyn Berger reported that Ken W. Clawson, deputy director of White House communications, told her in a conversation on September 25th that, “I wrote the letter.”

Interviewed again yesterday, Clawson denied that he had claimed authorship of the “Canuck” letter, saying the reporter must have misunderstood him. “I know nothing about it,” Clawson said.

William Loeb, publisher of the Manchester paper, said yesterday that although the person who signed the letter — a Paul Morrison of Deerfield Beach, Fla. — has never been located, “I am convinced that it is authentic.”

However, Loeb said he is investigating the possibility that the letter is a fabrication because of another letter he received about two weeks ago. The recent letter, Loeb said, maintains that another person was paid $1,000 to assist with the “Canuck” hoax.

B. J. McQuaid, Editor-in-Chief of the Union-Leader, said earlier this year that Clawson had been “useful” to the paper in connection with the “Canuck” letter. Though McQuaid did not elaborate, he too said that he believed the original letter was authentic.

Clawson, a former Washington Post reporter, said yesterday that he met McQuaid only briefly during the New Hampshire primary while lunching in the state with editors of the newspaper.

He denied that he provided any assistance with the letter. Clawson said the first time he heard of the “Canuck” letter was when “I saw it on television” following the Muskie speech.

Immediately following his “crying speech,” Muskie’s standing in the New Hampshire primary polls began to slip and he finished with only 48 percent of the Democratic primary vote — far short of his expectations.

Three attorneys have told The Washington Post that, as early as mid-1971, they were asked to work as agents provocateurs on behalf of the Nixon campaign. They said they were asked to undermine the primary campaigns of Democratic candidates by a man who has been identified in FBI reports as an operative of the Nixon re-election organization.

All three lawyers, including one who is an assistant attorney general of Tennessee, said they turned down the offers, which purportedly included the promise of “big jobs” in Washington after President Nixon’s re-election. They said the overtures were made by Donald H. Segretti, 31, a former Treasury Department lawyer who lives in Marina Del Ray, Calif.

Segretti denied making the offers and refused to answer a reporter’s questions.

One federal investigative official said that Segretti played the role of “just a small fish in a big pond.” According to FBI reports, at least 50 undercover Nixon operatives traveled throughout the country trying to disrupt and spy on Democratic campaigns.

Both at the White House and within the President’s re-election committee, the intelligence-sabotage operation was commonly called the “offensive security” program of the Nixon forces, according to investigators.

Perhaps the most significant finding of the whole Watergate investigation, the investigators say, was that numerous specific acts of political sabotage and spying were all traced to this “offensive security,” which was conceived and directed in the White House and by President Nixon’s re-election committee.

The investigators said that a major purpose of the sub rosa activities was to create so much confusion, suspicion and dissension that the Democrats would be incapable of uniting after choosing a presidential nominee.

The FBI’s investigation of the Watergate established that virtually all the acts against the Democrats were financed by a secret, fluctuating $350,000 -$700,000 campaign fund that was controlled by former Attorney General John N. Mitchell while he headed the Justice Department. Later, when he served as President Nixon’s campaign manager, Mitchell shared control of the fund with others. The money was kept in a safe in the office of the President’s chief fundraiser, former Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans.

According to sources close to the Watergate investigation, much of the FBI’s information is expected to be revealed at the trial of the seven men indicted on charges of conspiring to eavesdrop on Democratic headquarters at the Watergate.

“There is some very powerful information,” said one federal official, “especially if it becomes known before Nov. 7.”

A glimpse of the Nixon campaign’s spying and disruptions are to be found in the activities of Segretti. According to investigators, Segretti’s work was financed through middlemen by the $350,000-$700,000 fund.

Asked by The Washington Post to discuss Segretti, three FBI and Justice Department officials involved in the Watergate probe refused. At the mention of Segretti’s name, each said — in the words of one — “That’s part of the Watergate investigation.” One of the officials, however, became angry at the mention of Segretti’s name and characterized his activities as “indescribable.”

Segretti, visited in his West Coast apartment last week by Washington Post special correspondent Robert Meyers, repeatedly answered questions by saying, “I don’t know.” “I don’t have to answer that.” And “No comment.” After 15 minutes, he said: “This is material for a good novel, it’s ridiculous,” and chased the reporter outside when he attempted to take a picture.

According to the three attorneys interviewed by The Post, Segretti attempted to hire them in 1971 as undercover agents working on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election. All three said they first met Segretti in 1968, when they served together in Vietnam as captains in the Army Judge Advocate General Corps.

One of the lawyers, Alex B. Shipley, a Democrat who is now assistant attorney general of Tennessee, said Segretti told him, “Money would be no problem, but the people we would be working for wanted results for the cash that would be spent.”

Shipley, 30 added: “He [Segretti] also told me that we would be taken care of after Nixon’s re-election, that I would get a good job in the government.”

According to Shipley, Segretti said that the undercover work would require false identification papers under an assumed name; that Shipley recruit five more persons, preferably lawyers, for the job; that they would attempt to disrupt the schedules of Democratic candidates and obtain information from their campaign organizations; that Shipley would not reveal to Segretti the names of the men he would hire; and that Segretti could never reveal to Shipley specifically who was supplying the money for the operation.

Shipley recalled in a telephone interview: “I said, ‘How in hell are we going to be taken care of if no one knows what we’re doing?’ and Segretti said: ‘Nixon knows that something is being done. It’s a typical deal.’ Segretti said, ‘Don’t-tell-me-anything-and-I-won’t-know.’”

Segretti’s first approach, said Shipley, came on June 27, 1971. “He called me before then and told me he would be in Washington and he came to a dinner party at my apartment at South Four Towers (4600 S. Four Mile Run Drive, Arlington) the night before,” said Shipley. “Nothing was said about it then. The next morning I met him for breakfast and drove him to the airport — Dulles.”

According to Shipley, he picked Segretti up that morning, a Sunday, at the Georgetown Inn, where — hotel records show — a Donald H. Segretti stayed in room 402 on June 25, and June 26,1971 (total bill $54.75, including $2.25 in telephone calls). In addition, travel records obtained by The Washington Post show that Segretti bought a Washington-San Francisco-Monterey (Calif.) airline ticket on June 27 (departure Dulles).

On the way to Dulles, said Shipley, Segretti “first mentioned the deal. He asked would I be interested because I was getting out of the Army. We were both setting out shortly…and didn’t have anything lined up. He mentioned on the way to Dulles that we would do a little political espionage.”

Shipley continued: “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He (Segretti) said: ‘For instance, we’ll go to a Kennedy rally and find an ardent Kennedy worker. Then you say that you’re a Kennedy man too but you’re working behind the scenes; you get them to help you. You send them to work for Muskie, stuffing envelopes or whatever, and you get them to pass you the information. They’ll think that they are helping Kennedy against Muskie. But actually you’re using the information for something else.

“It was very strange,” Shipley recalled. “Three quarters of the way to the airport I said, ‘Well, who will we be working for?’ He said, ‘Nixon’ and I was really taken aback, because all the actions he had talked about would have taken place in the Democratic primaries. He (Segretti) said the main purpose was that the Democrats have an ability to get back together after a knockdown, drag-out campaign. What we want to do is wreak enough havoc so they can’t.”
Shipley said he told Segretti, “Well, it sounds interesting; let me think about it.”

In addition to Shipley, Roger Lee Nixt of Dennison, Iowa, and Kenneth Griffiths of Atlanta, Ga., said they turned down similar offers from Segretti, with whom they served in Vietnam. Both declined to discuss the offers in detail, but they acknowledged that Segretti had told them they would be engaged in sub rosa activities — similar to those described by Shipley — to aid President Nixon’s re-election.

Still another lawyer who served with Segretti in Vietnam, Peter Dixon of San Francisco, also said Segretti made him an offer. However, Dixon said he told Segretti, “No thanks,” before any details of the job were revealed. I said, “Gee, I’m not interested in political matters, and I’m not a Republican anyway,” said Dixon.

The most detailed account of Segretti’s activities was given by Shipley, who said he wrote a memorandum to himself about the episode, “because it all seemed so strange.”

At one point during the four-month period when Segretti was trying to recruit him, said Shipley, he approached a friend who worked for Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.) and was advised to try and “string him (Segretti) out to see what he’s up to.” Although “I don’t like these type of shenanigans,” Shipley said, he never subsequently contacted anyone else about the matter and said he has not been questioned by the FBI about Segretti.

During a meeting on July 25, said Shipley, Segretti “didn’t go into much detail because it was mostly ‘Are you with me or not?’” When he asked Segretti exactly what would be expected of him, in participating in clandestine activities, Shipley said he was told:

“‘Enlist people, be imaginative’ One thing he stressed was asking lawyers because he didn’t want to do anything illegal. It wasn’t represented as a strictly strong-arm operation. He stressed what fun we could have. As an example, he gave this situation:

“‘When a rally is scheduled at 7 p.m. at a local coliseum by a particular candidate, you call up and represent to the manager that you’re the field manager for this candidate and you have some information that some rowdies, some hippies or what-have-you are going to cause trouble. So you ask him to move the rally up to 9 o’clock — thereby insuring that the place would be padlocked when the candidate showed up at 7.’”

Shipley said he was asked by Segretti to fly to Atlanta to enlist their Army colleague, Kenneth Griffiths, in the project, but that he never made the trip. However, when visiting Griffiths last Christmas, said Shipley, “Griffiths mentioned to me that Segretti had been in contact with him and that Griffith had expressed absolutely no interest at all.”

The last time he heard from Segretti, said Shipley, was on Oct 23.1971, when “he called from California and asked me to check into Muskie’s operation in Tennessee…I just never did anything about it”

“At one time during these conjectural discussions,” Shipley continued, “Segretti said it might be good to get a false ID to travel under, that it would be harder for anyone to catch up with us. He mentioned he might use the pseudonym Bill Mooney for himself…

“Segretti said he wanted to cover the country,” Shipley continued, “that he would be more or less the head coordinator for the country. But some of the things he proposed to do didn’t seem that damaging, like getting a post office box in the name of the Massachusetts Safe Driving Committee and awarding a medal to Teddy Kennedy — with announcements sent to the press.”

“The one important thing that struck me was that he seemed to be well-financed,” Shipley said. “He was always flying across the country. When he came to Washington in June he said he had an appointment at the Treasury Department and that the Treasury Department was picking up the tab on this — his plane and hotel bill.”

Segretti later told him, Shipley said that “it wasn’t the Treasury Department that had paid the bill, it was the Nixon people. He said, ‘Don’t ask me any names.’”

(According to travel records, Segretti criss-crossed the country at least half of 1971. Stops included Miami, Houston, Manchester, N.H., Knoxville, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Portland, Ore., Albuquerque, Tucson, San Francisco, Monterey and several other California cities.)

(Federal investigators identified the following jurisdictions as the locations of the most concentrated Nixon undercover activity: Illinois, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, California, Texas, Florida, and Washington, D.C.)

Segretti told him one other major element about his covert work, said Shipley: “He intended to go into a law firm near Los Angeles by the name of Young and Segretti — he said it was a cover, that he would be doing only political work.”

According to the California Bar Association, Segretti’s law office is at 14013 West Captain’s Row, Marina Del Rey, California.

There in an apartment surrounded by comfortable furniture, piles of photograph records, tomato plants, a stereo receiver, a tape deck and a l0-speed bike, Segretti was found last week by Post special correspondent Myers.

Questioned whether he knew Alex Shipley, Roger Lee Nixt, Kenneth Griffiths, or Peter Dixon, Segretti asked, “Why?” Informed that they had said Segretti attempted to recruit them for undercover political work, he replied “I don’t believe it.” Then he declined to answer a series of questions except to say either, “I don’t know,” “No comment,” or some similar response.

At one point, Segretti said: “This is all ridiculous and I don’t know anything about this.” At another point he said: “The Treasury Department never paid my way to Washington or anywhere else.” Biographical details about Segretti, who stands about 5 feet 8 and weighs about 150 pounds, are minimal.

From Army colleagues and classmates at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California in Berkeley, it is known that he was raised on the West Coast.

After receiving his law degree, he served as a Treasury Department attorney in Washington for less than a year, according to friends , and then entered the Army as an officer in the Army Judge Advocate General Corps.

A Treasury Department spokesman confirmed that Segretti, in 1966 and 1967, worked as an attorney in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency here.

About a year of Segretti’s Army service, friends said, was spent in Vietnam, with American Division headquarters in Chulai and U.S. Army Vietnam headquarters at Longbinh.

Nixon Wins Landslide Victory; Democrats Hold Senate, House; McGovern Admits Defeat; President Calls for Harmony

By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 8, 1972

Richard Milhous Nixon yesterday won re-election as President of the United States in a landslide victory rivaling the greatest of American political history.

Victorious in at least 47 states but facing continued Democratic domination of both the House and Senate, the 50 year-old Chief Executive told the nation his “huge landslide margin means nothing” unless “all of us can work together to achieve our common goals of. . . peace for all nations. . . and that new progress and prosperity that all Americans deserve.”

The President spoke from the White House Oval Office just before midnight, after receiving a telegram of concession and congratulation from defeated Democratic nominee George McGovern.

The South Dakota senator, though buried in an electoral defeat of historic dimensions, refused to concede that his platform of immediate peace in Vietnam and populist reform at home had been repudiated along with his candidacy.

Referring to the Nixon stands he had condemned in his long struggle for the presidency, McGovern said from Sioux Falls: “We do not rally to the support of policies we deplore. We love this country and we will continue to beckon it to a higher standard.”

Yesterday, however, only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia followed McGovern’s standard. With the outcome in Minnesota and Alaska still in doubt, Mr. Nixon was in a position to match or exceed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s modern record of carrying all but two states in 1936.

With 74% of the nation’s precincts reporting, the vote was:

ELECTORAL VOTE / POPULAR VOTE
Nixon: 508 / 35,564,006
McGovern: 17 / 21,544,216

Both winner and loser referred to the Vietnam war issue that dominated all others in their disjointed campaign.

Mr. Nixon said that “we are moving swiftly” toward “peace with honor, the kind of peace that will last.” A Vietnam settlement, he said, could launch “the greatest generation of peace, true peace, for the whole world that man has ever known.”

McGovern told his supporters and a national television audience he would not “shed any tears tonight” because he was convinced “we have pushed this country in the direction of peace.”

Looking back at the 22-month campaign, in which he was the underdog at every stage, the 50-year-old South Dakotan said: “If we pushed the day of peace just one day closer, then every day of bone-crushing effort was worth the sacrifice.”

In conventional political measurements, however, McGovern was destined to go into the history books as one of the all-time great losers — ranking with Barry Goldwater, Alf Landon, Herbert Hoover and Horace Greeley.

In his fifth national campaign, Mr. Nixon got from the voters what he asked — “a new majority.” He toppled traditional Democratic Strongholds in the North and made the Solid South solidly Republican.

While Mr. Nixon won the strongest victory imaginable in an election that posed what he called “the clearest choice in this century,” the certainty of continued Democratic control of Congress underlined Republican National Chairman Bob Dole’s comment that “this is a personal triumph for Mr. Nixon — and not a party triumph.”

The President rolled up huge margins in many states. The contrast to his razor-thin victory in 1968 could not have been more dramatic.

He carried all five states that went for Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace on the third-party ticket in 1968, as polling-place interviews indicated three-quarters of the former Wallace backers moved behind the Nixon candidacy.

McGovern had clear victories only in the District of Columbia and Massachusetts, as such former Democratic strongholds as Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Michigan and Texas fell into the Nixon column.

Mr. Nixon had carried none of those states in either of his previous tries for the presidency in 1960 and 1968. This time he got them all — as well as Arkansas, which had not gone Republican since 1868.

Vice President Agnew did most of the Republican campaigning in Wallace country, and in an appearance at a Republican victory celebration at the Shoreham Hotel. Mr. Nixon paid tribute to his running-mate as an outstanding campaigner, who ‘never lost his cool’ and who proved he could “take it and dish it out.”

Wallace, whose own try for the Democratic nomination was halted by a would-be assassin’s bullets, commented that the returns were “an indication that the people of this country are moving to the position that we thought ought to be the position.”

The Alabama governor said he would work “to get the Democratic Party back to being the party of the average citizen.”

Harry S. Dent Jr., a White House aide identified with the strategy for attracting the Wallace vote, said “the Southern strategy is working — in fact, it’s working all over the country.”

The Nixon coattails helped the Republicans pick up Senate seats in Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma and New Mexico, but those gains were offset by Republican losses in Kentucky, Iowa, Maine and South Dakota.

The coattails were also important in seven House contests won by Republicans. They also played a part in holding such embattled positions as the Indiana governorship.

But in an election marked by the record ticket-splitting, the outstanding characteristic was the durability of House incumbents. Of the first 286 House races decided, only seven saw the defeat of incumbents seeking re-election and only 12 marked a clear shift of party control of the district.

There was some swapping of seats among the governors — who have increasingly become a target of voters’ wrath in recent years.

Democrats took over Republican-held governorships in Delaware and Vermont, while Republican Christopher (Kit) Bond, 33, became the first GOP executive in Missouri since 1940. Several other major races — including those in Illinois, North Carolina, Texas and Washington — where still undecided.

In the most-publicized gubernatorial battle, Gov. Arch A. Moore Jr. (R) of West Virginia derailed the political ambitions of Secretary of State John D. Rockefeller IV (D) with a close but clear victory.

Whatever the spotty character of the Nixon coattails, the muscle of his personal victory was impressive.

The Nixon coattails helped the Republicans pick up Senate seats in Virginia, North Carolina and New Mexico, but those gains were more than offset by Republican losses in Kentucky, Iowa, Maine and South Dakota.

Analyses from NBC and CBS computers indicated that Cleveland went to the President by 50,000 votes and that Mr. Nixon was splitting even with McGovern in such other traditional Democratic strongholds as Chicago and Philadelphia.

The network analyses showed Mr. Nixon won a majority of the votes from Catholics, blue-collar workers, union members and Italo-Americans, all of whom had been Democratic in 1968. About three-quarters of the 1968 Wallace supporters backed the President.

The network polling also indicated that first-time voters — a main target for McGovern — split their votes about evenly and that the President scored gains among both Jews and blacks, though they remained predominately Democratic.
Former Secretary of the Treasury John B. Connally, who headed the Democrats for Nixon organization, said the outcome “reflects the great confidence of the American people in the President . . . Senator McGovern . . really misjudged the American people. He is outside the mainstream of his party.”

On the other hand, Democratic vice president candidate Sargent Shriver told party workers at the Washington Hilton, “You are the vanguard of the future.”

Voting reports through the day were as mixed as the weather — fair through much of the country but rainy in parts of the Midwest. Officials reported heavy turnouts in some cities, below average in others.

Advance indications were that between 80 million and 85 million would vote in this, the first election in American history where 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds were eligible to vote.

The census Bureau estimated that about 108 million of the 140 million Americans of voting age were registered or otherwise qualified to vote.

Mr. Nixon and his wife were up early in the morning to cast their ballots in a San Clemente, Calif., schoolhouse near the Western White House. The President spent more than five minutes in the voting booth — apparently struggling like any other voter with the two-foot-long California ballot that contained referenda on issues from legalizing marijuana to reimposing the death penalty.

The First Family flew back across the country to the White House for a dinner with their two daughters and sons-in-law.

McGovern chose to go back to South Dakota to receive the returns that would mark the success or failure of his 22-month quest for the presidency.

The 50-year-old senator, who started the longest campaign of this century in January, 1971, voted in his boyhood town of Mitchell.

Accompanied by his wife, Eleanor, and four of their five children, McGovern cast what he said was a straight Democratic ballot in the classroom wing of a Congregational Church.

Mindful, perhaps, of the national polls predicting he would be defeated by landslide proportions, the Democratic nominee asked bystanders to “say a little prayer for me.”

While McGovern awaited the outcome in Sioux Falls, an atmosphere of total confidence wrapped the White House.

Early in the evening, Communications Director Herbert G. Klein predicted Mr. Nixon would carry at least 48 states.

The election — presumably the last in which Mr. Nixon would appear on the ballot — marked the end of a long generation in American politics.

In came 26 years after his first victory — an upset House win over Democrat Jerry Voorhis — and 20 years after his election as Vice President on the Republican ticket headed by Dwight D. Eisenhower. It also came ten years to the day after the “last press conference” following his losing bid for the California governorship in 1962, a press conference in which he told newsmen, “You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around.”

The election ended a campaign that began last winter with the largest field of candidates in recent history and dwindled to one of the most desultory contests.

No less than 11 Democrats were running active campaigns when the primary season began in New Hampshire and Florida last March. In addition, two Republican congressmen challenged Mr. Nixon from the opposite wings of his party.

The President ignored his intra-party critics — liberal Rep. Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey of California and conservative Rep. John M. Ashbrook of Ohio — and their challenges melted in the glow of Mr. Nixon’s successful Peking and Moscow summitry.

Meantime, the Democrats were beating each other with regularity, while the field of presidential aspirants dwindled slowly.

It was not until the fourth primary in Wisconsin in April that McGovern managed to come out on top. Two of the first three contests — in New Hampshire and Illinois — went to the pre-primary favorite for the nomination. Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine. But Muskie’s unimpressive margin over McGovern in New Hampshire and his fourth-place finish in Florida (won by Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace) severely dimmed his luster.

With such lightly regarded contenders as Sen. Vance Hartke of Indiana, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, ex-Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota and New York Mayor John V. Lindsay sidelined by the end of the Wisconsin primary, it became essentially a four-man struggle among McGovern, Muskie, Wallace and Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, the 1968 Democratic nominee.

A double loss on April 25 — to McGovern in Massachusetts and to Humphrey in Pennsylvania — finished Muskie, as far as active participation in the primaries was concerned.

Wallace continued to run a strong race, despite lack of formal organization, exploiting the current of public protest with the slogan, “Send Them a Message.” After his Florida win, he came north and finished second to McGovern in Wisconsin, won North Carolina and Tennessee and scored his most impressive victories on May 16 by capturing both Maryland and Michigan.

The previous day, however, Wallace was cut down by a would-be assassin while campaigning in Laurel, Md. The bullets fired by Arthur Bremer ended Wallace’s campaigning for the year and left him a cripple in a wheelchair.

McGovern and Humphrey fought a series of inconclusive battles — Humphrey winning in Ohio, McGovern in Nebraska — an then in the crucial winner-take-all showdown in California on June 6, McGovern won by a margin of 175,000 votes out of more than 3 million cast.

The California victory was a costly one for McGovern, however.

Already a subject of some suspicion among party regulars because his support came primarily from students, peace movement activists and other “amateurs,” he was put on the defensive by Humphrey on two issues that were to haunt the rest of his campaign.

McGovern had proposed in #31 billion reduction in the defense budget, which Humphrey said would “cut into the very muscle of our defense.” He also had proposed a $1,000-per-person income grant to all Americans as a substitute for the existing welfare system — a plan which Humphrey denounced as a “compounded mess” and whose cost, McGovern was forced to admit in debate, he could nor accurately estimate.

Although McGovern completed a sweep of the late primaries in New Mexico, South Dakota, New Jersey and New York, he was on the defensive from the time of those California debates with Humphrey.

Strongly pressured by George Meany and other union leaders who opposed McGovern’s nomination, Humphrey sanctioned a challenge to the California winner-take-all rule that awarded McGovern all 271 delegates for his plurality victory.

A coalition of Humphrey-Muskie-Wallace backers on the convention Credentials Committee voted to strip McGovern of 151 of his California votes, putting his nomination in jeopardy, but after a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court, the issue was left to the convention itself to decide. On the opening night of the Miami Beach meeting, the McGovern forces — aided by a series of parliamentary rulings by party chairman Lawrence F. O’Brien — prevailed by a 380-vote margin and his nomination was thereby assured.

The convention, however, was marked by a series of rebuffs to the “regular” Democratic elements that had opposed McGovern’s nomination, symbolized by a vote to unseat Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, most powerful of the surviving big-city bosses, in favor of an insurgent group.

What came to be seen as the crucial decision of the convention was made by McGovern on the afternoon after he had won the nomination by a one-sided margin over Wallace and Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington, who inherited the labor-Southern-“regular” support after Muskie and Humphrey withdrew from the race.

McGovern repeatedly pressed Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts to be his running mate and when Kennedy gave his final refusal, just an hour before the deadline, the new nominee turned to Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri, a little-known freshman senator whose chief asset was that he was a border-state Roman Catholic acceptable to party elements that had opposed McGovern’s nomination.

Ten days later, on July 25, McGovern and Eagleton jointly disclosed that — unknown to the public and to McGovern at the time of selection — the Missourian had been hospitalized three times between 1960 and 1966 for what Eagleton called “nervous exhaustion and fatigue.”

Eagleton said the therapy had included shock treatment. McGovern said the disclosure in no way affected Eagleton’s status, volunteering in a comment that was to echo from then to election day that he stood behind his choice of Eagleton “1,000 per cent.”

Within 72 hours, while Eagleton was proceeding to campaign as if nothing happened, there was a crisis in the McGovern camp. Newspaper editorials and leading Democrats were questioning whether Eagleton — on the basis of his medical history and his efforts to conceal his condition — was fit for a job that put him in line of succession to the presidency. After a series of uncomfortable days in which McGovern himself and his top aides plated stories with newsmen suggesting that Eagleton should “voluntarily” resign from the ticket, the two men met again on July 31 and announced they had “jointly agreed that the best course is for Sen. Eagleton to step aside.”

In the following days, McGovern offered the nomination to Kennedy, Humphrey, Muskie and several other Democratic senators- — all of whom publicly refused — before picking Sargent Shriver, the former Peace Corps and anti-poverty director who had never run for public office.

By this time, with a month of campaign time squandered and the problems of reunifying his divided party incomparably increased, McGovern was facing an obviously uphill struggle against the incumbent President. His deficit in the public opinion polls increased from 10 points in May — just before Humphrey began his assault in the California primary campaign — to 34 points by the end of the Eagleton-Shriver affair in August.

Meantime, Mr. Nixon was doing nothing to disturb political trends that appeared to be moving in his direction.

Last Two Guilty in Watergate Plot: Jury Convicts Liddy, McCord in 90 Minutes; Ex-Aides of Nixon to Appeal

By Lawrence Meyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 31, 1973

Two former officials of President Nixon’s re-election committee, G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord, Jr. were convicted yesterday of conspiracy, burglary and bugging the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters.

After 16 days of trial spanning 60 witnesses and more than 100 pieces of evidence, the jury found them guilty of all charges against them in just under 90 minutes.

Chief U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica ordered Liddy, who was also a former White House aide, FBI agent and prosecutor, and McCord, a veteran of the CIA and FBI, jailed without bond. Sirica said he would hold a hearing on bail after defense lawyers file formal written motions.

Lawyers for both Liddy and McCord, said they would appeal the convictions, with McCords’s layer attacking the conduct of Judge Sirica during the trial.

Five other men who were indicted with Liddy and McCord, including former White House aide and CIA Agent E. Howard Hunt, Jr. pleaded guilty early in the trial to all charges against them.

Liddy, 42, had maintained a calm, generally smiling exterior throughout the trial. He stood impassive, with is arms folded as deputy court clerk LeCount Patterson read the jury’s verdict, repeating six times “guilty” for all eight counts against him.

McCord, 53, also showed no emotion as Patterson read the word “guilty” for all eight counts against him.

Liddy, former finance counsel for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, could receive a maximum sentence of 35 years. McCord, former security director for the committee, could receive a maximum sentence of 45 years. Sirica set no day for sentencing.

Before being jailed by deputy U.S. marshals, Liddy embraced his lawyer, Peter L. Maroulis, patted him on the back, and in a gesture that became his trademark in the trail, gave one final wave to the spectators and press before he was led away.

Principal Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl J. Silbert said, after the verdict was returned, that it was “fair and just.”

In his final statement to the jury, Silbert told the eight women and four men that “when people cannot get together for political purposes without fear that their premises will be burglarized, their conversations bugged, their phones tapped…you breed distrust, you breed suspicion, you lost confidence, faith and credibility.”

Silbert asked the jury to “bring in a verdict that will help restore the faith in the democratic system that has been so damaged by the conduct of these two defendants and their coconspirators.”

Despite repeated attempts by Judge Sirica to find out if anyone else besides the seven defendants was involved in the conspiracy, testimony in the trial was largely confined by the prosecution to proving its case against Liddy and McCord, with occasional mention made of the five who had pleaded guilty. The jury, which was sequestered throughout the trial, was never told of the guilty pleas.

When Hunt pleaded guilty Jan 11, Sirica questioned him in an attempt to find out if anyone besides the persons indicted was involved in the conspiracy.

Hunt’s lawyer, William O. Bittman, blocked Sirica’s questions, saying the prosecution had told him it intended to call Hunt and any other defendant who was convicted to testify before the grand jury.

An apparent purpose of renewed grand jury testimony would be to probed the involvement of others in the bugging. Asked yesterday what steps he now intended to take, Silbert said, “I don’t think I’ll comment on anything further.”

According to testimony in the trial, Liddy was given about $332,000 in campaign funds purportedly to carry out a number of intelligence-gathering assignments given him by deputy campaign direction Jeb Stuart Magruder.

The prosecution said it could account for only about $50,000 of this money, and that it was used to finance the spying operation against the Democratic Party.

In his argument to the jury, Silbert called Liddy the “mastermind, the boss, the money-man” of the operation.

Maroulis, defending Liddy, attempted to put the blame on Hunt, who Maroulis said was Liddy’s trusted friend. “From the evidence here, it can well be inferred that Mr. Liddy got hut by that trust,” Maroulis said.

McCord’s lawyer, Gerald Alch, told the jury that McCord “is the type of man who is loyal to his country and who does what he thinks is right.” At one point, Judge Sirica interrupted and told Alch he was only giving his “personal opinion.”

Alch criticized Sirica during a recess, saying the Judge “did not limit himself to acting as a judge-he has become in addition, a prosecutor and an investigator … Not only does he indicate that the defendants are guilty, but that a lot of other people are guilty. The whole courtroom is permeated with a prejudicial atmosphere.”

Alch said that “in 15 years of practicing law” he had not been previously interrupted by a judge while giving his final argument.

McCord and Liddy were each convicted of the following counts:

“Conspiring to burglarize, wiretap and electronically eavesdrop on the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters. (Maximum penalty-five years’ Imprisonment and a $10,000 fine.)

“Burglarizing the Democratic headquarters with the intent to steal the property of another. (Maximum penalty-15 years imprisonment.)

“Buglarizing the Democratic headquarters with the intent to unlawfully wiretap and eavesdrop. (Maximum penalty-15 years.)

“Endeavoring to eavesdrop illegally. (Maximum penalty-five years’ imprisonment and a $10,000 fine.)

In addition, McCord was convicted of two additional counts:

“Possession of a device primarily useful for the surreptitious interception or oral communications. (Maximum penalty-five years’ imprisonment and a $10,000 fine).

“Possession of a device primarily useful for the surreptitious interception of wire communications. (Maximum penalty-five years’ imprisonment and a $10,000 fine).

Although the total number of years Liddy could be sentenced to adds up to 50 and McCord’s total sentence adds up to 60 years, neither, according to legal sources, can receive consecutive sentences for both burglary counts.

As a result, Liddy’s maximum sentence could be 35 years and a $40,000 fine and McCord’s maximum could be 45 years and $60,000 fine.

In addition to Liddy, McCord and Hunt, four men from Miami were named in the indictment — Bernard L. Barker, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio R. Gonzalez and Eugenio R. Martinez.

All four pleaded guilty Jan. 15 to the seven counts with which they were charged.

They face maximum sentences of 40 years in jail and fines of $50,000. The four men were arrested, with McCord, by Washington police in the Democratic Party headquarters at 2:30 a.m. on June 17. The arrests marked the beginning of the Watergate affair.

These five men, dressed in business suits and wearing rubber surgical gloves, had electronic bugging equipment and sophisticated cameras in film. In their possession or their rooms they had $5,300 in $100 bills.

The story unfolded slowly. The day after the arrests, it was learned that one of the five men was the security coordinator for the President’s re-election committee. That was McCord, one of the two defendants left in the Watergate trial yesterday.

Two days after the break-in White House consultant Hunt was linked to the five suspects. Hunt pleaded guilty to all counts in the opening days of the trial.

Near the end of July, it was learned that the finance counsel to the Nixon Re-election Committee was fired because he refused to answer FBI questions about the Watergate bugging and break-in. The counsel was Liddy, a former Treasury and White House aide who was the other defendant to remain in the trial.

On Aug. 1, The Washington Post reported that a $25,000 cashier’s check intended as a contribution tot he Nixon re-election effort has been deposited in the Miami bank account of one of the Watergate suspects. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, ordered an immediate audit of the Nixon campaign finances.

The audit report concluded that former Commerce Secretary Maurice H. Stans, the chief Nixon fund-raiser, has a possible illegal cash fund of $350,000 in his office safe.

The $25,000 from the cashier’s check and another $89,000 from four Mexican checks passed through that fund, the GAO concluded.

Last Friday, the Finance Committee to Re-elect the President pleaded no contest in U.S. District Court to eight violations of the campaign finances law. The complaint charged, among other things, that finance committee officials filed to keep adequate records of payments to Liddy. The committee was fined $8,000.

In September, reports surfaced that a former FBI agent and self-described participant in the bugging had become a government witness in the case. He was Alfred C. Baldwin III, who later was to testify that he monitored wire-tapped conversations for three weeks from a listening post in the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge across the street from the Watergate.

On Sept. 15, the federal indictment against the seven original defendants was returned.

The next day, The Post reported that the $350,000 cash fund kept in the Stans safe was used, in part, as an intelligent - gathering fund. On Sept. 29, The Post reported that sources close to the Watergate investigation said that former Attorney General John N. Mitchell controlled disbursements from the intelligence found or so-called “secret fund.”

On Oct. 10, The Post reported that the FBI had concluded that the Watergate bugging was just one incident in a campaign of political sabotage directed by the White House and the Nixon committee.

The story identified Donald H. Segretti, a young California lawyer, as a paid political spy who traveled around the country recruiting others and disrupting the campaigns of Democratic presidential contenders.

Five days later, the President’s appointments secretary, Dwight L. Chapin, was identified as a person who hire Segretti and received reports from him. Segretti’s other contact was Watergate defendant Hunt. Segretti received about $35,000 in pay for the disruptive activities from Herbert W. Kalmbach, the President’s personal attorney, according to federal investigators.

This Monday it was announced that Chapin was resigning his White House job. Segretti was not called as a witness in the trial.

3 Top Nixon Aides, Kleindienst Out; President Accepts Full Responsibility; Richardson Will Conduct New Probe

By Laurence Stern and Haynes Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 1, 1973

President Nixon, after accepting the resignations of four of his closest aides, told the American people last night that he accepted full responsibility for the actions of his subordinates in the Watergate scandal.

“There can be no whitewash at the White House,” Mr. Nixon declared in a special television address to the nation. He pledged to take steps to purge the American political system of the kind of abuses that emerged in the Watergate affair.

The President took his case to the country some 10 hours after announcing that he had accepted the resignations of his chief White House advisers, H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, along with Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst.

He also announced that he had fired his counsel, John W. Dean III, who was by the ironies of the political process a casualty of the very scandal the President had charged him to investigate.

The dramatic news of the dismantling of the White House command staff that served Mr. Nixon through his first four years in the presidency was the most devastating impact that the Watergate scandal has yet made on the administration.

The President immediately set into motion a major reshuffling of top administration personnel to fill the slots of the Watergate causalities. Defense Secretary Elliott L. Richardson was appointed to replace Kleindienst and to take over responsibility for “uncovering the whole truth” about the Watergate scandal.

He said last night that he was giving Richardson “absolute authority” in handling the Watergate investigation — including the authority to appoint a special prosecutor to supervise the government’s case.

As temporary successor to Dean, the President chose his special consultant, Leonard Garment. Mr. Nixon said Garment “will represent the White House in all matters relating to the Watergate investigation and will report directly to me.”

Last night Gordon Strachan, whose name has been linked to the Watergate case, resigned as general counsel to the United States Information Agency. The USIA said the former aide to Haldeman resigned “after learning that persons with whom he had worked closely at the White House had submitted their resignations. . .”

The immediate reaction to yesterday’s White House announcement was a mixture of relief, especially among congressional Republicans, at the prospect of internal housecleaning. But there was also some dismay at the President’s failure to appoint a special prosecutor for the Watergate inquiry.

Senate Republican Leader High Scott (Pa.), in a characteristic flourish of rhetoric, proclaimed that “a lack of grace in power has led to a fall from grace. This rotten vine of Watergate has produced poisonous fruit, and all nourished by it should be cast out of the Garden of Eden.”

House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (R-Mich.) called the resignations “a necessary first step by the White House in clearing the air on the Watergate affair . . . I have the greatest confidence in the President and I am absolutely positive he had nothing to with this mess.”

The nation’s Democratic Governors, meeting in Huron, Ohio, voted unanimously to demand that the Watergate investigation be turned over to an impartial prosecutor outside the administration.

Rep. John Moss (D-Cal.) raised the issue of possible impeachment action in the aftermath of yesterday’s developments. He said he would ask that a special committee of the House be appointed to inquire into the possibility of presidential involvement in the Watergate scandal.

“I am not saying we should move to impeach. I am merely saying we should be prepared. The House has the responsibility to set up the machinery so that if there is a move to impeach we should be ready.” He added that “before we even suggest impeachment, we must have the most uncontroverted evidence.”

The President announced that he will meet with the Democratic and Republican leadership of Congress this morning at the White House, presumably in an effort to begin to repair his ragged relationships with Capitol Hill.

Mr. Nixon used warm words of praise for Kleindienst, Haldeman and Ehrlichman in announcing their departures.

He said Kleindienst’s decision to leave because of close ties to individuals implicated in the Watergate inquiry was “in accordance with the highest standards of public service and legal ethics.” The individuals to whom Kleindienst alluded presumably included former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, who was in charge of Mr. Nixon’s re-election campaign at the time of the Watergate bugging incident.

The President spoke of Haldeman and Ehrlichman as “two of my closest friends and most trusted assistants in the White House.”

Mr. Nixon stressed that “neither the submission nor the acceptance of their resignations at this time should be seen by anyone as evidence of any wrongdoing by either one. Such an assumption would be both unfair and unfounded.”

By contrast the firing of Dean was revealed in one coolly phrased sentence. “Finally, I have today requested and accepted the resignation of John W. Dean III from his position on the White House staff as counsel.”

Dean served notice on April 19 that he would not become a scapegoat for the Watergate scandal. Word was also passed by associates of Dean that he was ready to implicate Ehrlichman and Haldeman in the case.

Besides the resignations announced yesterday, at least five other high administration or campaign officials have quit in the wake of revelations about the Watergate: Mitchell, presidential appointments secretary Dwight Chapin, special counsel to the president Charles W. Colson, deputy campaign director Jeb Stuart Magruder and acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III.

The massive shake-up of the White House command and the ensuing personnel reshuffling threw the administration into a state of disarray if not temporary immobility.

It threatens the federal government’s largest single enterprise, the pentagon, with a state of leaderlessness with Richardson’s new assignment. In the White House, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had been the twin pillars of a management system in which they had been regarded as indispensable to the President. Haldeman, particularly, was the ultimate traffic controller and organizer of the flow of presidential business.

In the Justice Department the departure of Kleindienst came fresh upon the heels of the political melodrama of the decline and fall of acting FBI Director Gray, an episode that had already seriously demoralized the Bureau and the Department of which it is a part.

Nor was there any assurance that the events of yesterday would turn off the fearsome faucet of Watergate revelations. Ahead are the prospect of indictments, criminal trials, heavily publicized Senate hearings and the ever haunting question of presidential involvement. Watergate’s political liabilities are still incalculable, with the polls registering the most precipitous drop of the President’s popularity in his entire tenure.

When news of the White House shake-up reached the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, during an appearance by Secretary of State William P. Rogers, Sen. Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.) said he was “very deeply disturbed” by reports that “the Watergate scandal has immobilized the government processes of the United States.”

Rogers replied that from the standpoint of foreign affairs, “nothing has happened that has bogged down or anything of the kind. I can assure you and the American people that the government is functioning effectively in the foreign affairs area . . .”

But Rogers, for many years a political intimate of the President, said he had discussed with Mr. Nixon the need for “corrective action” in the political system — particularly “campaign contributions and appointments . . . I talked to the President about it and he agrees. It is an evil that effects any particular administration; it is a fact of life.”

In yesterday’s statement, the President said Richardson’s charter as new Attorney General will include recommending changes in the law “to prevent future campaign abuses of the sort recently uncovered.” The abuses to which he referred were secret election funds for the 1972 campaign amounting by some estimates to more $2 million. A secret election fund was also the central issue in Mr. Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” speech.

The news of the Watergate shake-up was conveyed to reporters at a morning briefing by White House press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler. After Ziegler’s seven-minute announcement the newsmen raced for phones in a scene of pandemonium. No one bothered with questions.

Ziegler said that the President left for Camp David intending to spend the weekend in solitude. As events developed in the Watergate case he was visited by Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kleindienst, Secretary of State Rogers, Ziegler and a speechwriter, Ray Price.

Haldeman and Ehrlichman, in their letters of resignation, both pledged to cooperate fully with the Justice Department investigation and will meet this week with U.S. attorneys and with the Senate Select Committee investigating the Watergate affair.

“I fully agree with the importance of a complete investigation by the appropriate authorities . . .” wrote Haldeman, “but am deeply concerned that, in the process, it has become virtually impossible under these circumstances for me to carry on my regular responsibilities.”

Ehrlichman wrote: “I have confidence in the ultimate prevalence of truth; I intend to do what I can to speed truth’s discovery.”

The drumbeat of disclosures, growing more serious and sensational on virtually a daily basis since Mr. Nixon announced two weeks ago that there were “major developments” in the case, has lifted Watergate into a national scandal of historic proportions. It is an affair that is now being compared to such scandals as Teapot Dome in the 1920s and the Grant scandals of a century ago.

Watergate did not burst so suddenly and dramatically on the national scene. Indeed, for months it was widely discounted officially — and ignored publicly — as a clumsy, bungled “caper.”

The case came to light last June 17, a Saturday. A security guard by the name of Frank Wills noticed a latch of a basement door taped open at the Watergate complex of apartments and offices. He removed the tape and continued his rounds. Later he discovered the tape and been replaced. He called the Metropolitan police.

New morning’s Washington Post reported the news of the break-in.

Five men, including one who said he had been a Central Intelligence Agency employee, were surprised at gunpoint about 2:30 a.m. by police in a sixth floor suite occupied by the Democratic National Committee. When arrested, the suspects were all wearing rubber surgical gloves. Sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices and burglary equipment were confiscated.

Police also seized $2,300 in cash. Most of the money was in $100 bills with the serial numbers in sequence. As the months passed and the story unfolded, the use of $100 bills became a characteristic of the Watergate affair.

The suspects, it developed, were engaged in an elaborate plot to bug the Democratic Party headquarters. Adding to the bizarre nature of the case was the composition of that original group of five men.

Some of them came out of a background of anti-Castro activities with a vaguely and ill-defined association with the CIA in the days of the Bay of Pigs invasion of April, 1961. Three of the men were born in Cuba. A fourth was said to have trained Cuban exiles for guerrilla activity after the Bay of Pigs.

The fifth booked as “Edward Martin, alias James W. McCord” of New York City and perhaps the Washington metropolitan area, said he had retired from the CIA in 1970. He gave his present occupation as a “security consultant.”

Nine months later, after the trial and conviction of the original Watergate conspirators, it was McCord who precipitated a new round of accusations culminating in yesterday’s resignations. McCord stated publicly that “political pressure” had been applied to the Watergate defendants to plead guilty and remain silent, that government witnesses had committed perjury and that others were involved in the conspiracy.

But for months after the original break-in and arrests the Watergate case seemed consigned to an incident without major national significance.

Except for that first Sunday in June when the Watergate operation surfaced, it did not dominate the news. It was overshadowed in the days ahead by news of combat operations in Vietnam, of the U.S. pulling out its last land forces, and of the approaching national political conventions and subsequent presidential election.

Most citizens did not respond to Watergate. Neither did important elements of the American press. Both seemed to accept the words of leading officials in the Nixon administration that Watergate, whatever else it was, had no connection with the White House or the Nixon re-election campaign apparatus.

The statements were unequivocal. Mitchell, who had left his post as attorney general to head the Committee for the Re-election of the President immediately set the tone for the denials that followed.

Those arrested at the Watergate, Mitchell said, “were not operating either in our behalf or with our consent.” As far as McCord was concerned, Mitchell said: “The person involved is the proprietor of a private security agency who was employed by our committee months ago to assist with the installation of our security system. He has, as we understand it, a number of business clients and interests and we have no knowledge of these relationships.”

On behalf of the President, press secretary Ziegler said then that he would not comment on a “third-rate burglary attempt.” He added that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.”

Six days after the break-in President Nixon made his first comment on the case. He said that Ziegler and Mitchell had “stated my position, and have also stated the facts accurately.” He added:

“This kind of activity, as Mr. Ziegler has indicated, has no place whatever in our electoral process, or in our governmental process.”

But gradually pieces of the Watergate story began to surface. White House connections, although tenuous, were established as the names of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy became associated with high-ranking officials.

It is a matter of history that The Washington Post, and particularly two young reporters on its metropolitan staff, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, provided much of the material that made Watergate a name known around the world.

It was their reporting of such things as an elaborate campaign of espionage and sabotage directed by prominent associates of the President, of the relationship between such people as Donald Segretti with White House appointments secretary Dwight Chapin, of the existence of secret cash funds used to finance the sabotage-espionage operations, and of the links between ranking officials with the undercover work lead, eventually, to an unraveling of the case.

It is also a matter of history that The Post and its reporters became the principal objects of attack by the administration.

“The Post has maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate — a charge The Post knows — and a half dozen investigations have found — to be false,” said Clark MacGregor, chairman of the Nixon re-election committee, last Oct. 16.

That same day Ziegler said:

“I will not dignify with comment stories based on hearsay, character assassination, innuendo or guilt by association . . . The President is concerned about the technique being applied by the opposition in the stories themselves . . . The opposition has been making charges which have not been substantiated.”

Nine days later Ziegler termed the reports “a blatant effort at character assassination that I do not think has been witnessed in the political process in some time.”

In November, after the election, the official denials continued.

“The charge of subverting the whole political process, that is a fantasy, a work of fiction rivaling only Gone With the Wind in circulation and Portnoy’s Complaint for indecency,” said Charles W. Colson, a key White House aide.

In a vitriolic comment issued at the peak of the presidential campaign, Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.), then chairman of the Republican National Committee, attacked what he called “political garbage” printed about the Watergate.” . . . The Washington Post is conducting itself by journalistic standards that would cause mass resignations on principle from the Quicksilver Times, a local underground newspaper.”

Within six months Dole was calling publicly for the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman and saying “the credibility of the administration is zilch, zero.”

Mr. Nixon himself had already expressed his own strong conviction that “no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” He made that statement at a White House press conference last Aug 29.

At that time, he praised the work of his White House counsel, Dean, in investigating the Watergate case.

“The other point I should make,” he said, “is that these investigations, the investigation by the GAO, the investigation by the FBI, by the Department of Justice, have, at my direction, had the total cooperation of the — not only the White House — but also of all agencies of the Government.

“In addition to that, within our own staff, under my direction, Counsel to the President, Mr. Dean, has conducted a complete investigation of all leads which might involve any present members of the White House staff.”

It was then that Mr. Nixon said, “I can state categorically that his investigation indicates no one either in the White House or the administration was involved.”

In his press conference that summer day, Mr. Nixon dealt at length with his hopes for the future. He spoke of winning the election and building a “new majority,” and of his desire to receive “a positive mandate.”

The President then spelled out his goals for his next four years. In doing so he returned to the theme that had helped him win in 1968 — of a need to bring the country together.

“Four years ago the country was torn apart, torn apart physically and torn apart inside. It has changed very subtly, but very definitely. What we need in this country is a new sense of mission, a new sense of confidence, a new sense of purpose as to where we are going.”

On Nov. 7, Mr. Nixon won his great victory and by the time of his second inauguration on Jan. 20 it seemed that America was on the verge of a new era of peace abroad and reconciliation at home. He moved swiftly to implement his new goals, scrapped economic controls he had imposed earlier, hailed the return of America’s prisoners of war from Vietnam, and set out to fashion the new majority that would place his imprimatur on the year to come.

Now, only three months later, Watergate, the scandal that would not die, has overtaken him and his administration. And Richard Milhous Nixon, who has expressed so many times the personal problems of dealing with crises, is confronted with one of a magnitude that faced his presidential predecessors Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding and, more recently and in a different context, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Part II

Washington, DC – Archibald Cox (center) is sworn in as Special Watergate Prosecutor by Judge Charles Fahy (left) of the District of Columbia Circuit Court, during a ceremony at the Justice Department May 25, 1973. Looking on is Attorney General Elliot Richardson (right) who took his oath earlier at the White House. (Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS)

The Government Acts

By the summer of 1973, the Watergate affair was a full-blown national scandal and the subject of two official investigations, one led by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, the other by North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee.

Cox, a liberal Harvard Law School professor with a crew cut, had served as Solicitor General in the Kennedy administration. He was appointed by Nixon’s new Attorney General Elliot Richardson to investigate the burglary and all other offenses involving the White House or Nixon’s reelection campaign.

Ervin, a conservative Democrat best known for his interest in constitutional law, was chosen by Senate leaders to chair a seven-member investigatory committee. As the Senate Watergate Committee’s nationally-televised hearings captured national interest, Ervin’s folksy but tenacious grilling of sometimes reluctant witnesses transformed him a household name.

The scandal had spread beyond the original burglary. In April 1973, it was revealed that Watergate burglars, Hunt and Liddy, had broken into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who gave the top-secret Pentagon papers to the New York Times. Seeking information to discredit Ellsberg, they found nothing and left undetected. In May, a Senator revealed that a young Nixon staffer named Tom Huston had developed a proposal for a domestic espionage office to monitor and harass the opponents of the president. The plan, never implemented, disclosed a “Gestapo mentality,” said Sam Ervin.

John Dean was the first White House aide to break with the Nixon White House. “Dean Alleges Nixon Knew of Cover-up Plan,” Woodward and Bernstein reported on the eve of his testimony. On the stand, Dean disclosed that he had told Nixon that the coverup was “a cancer on the presidency.”

But the most sensational revelation came in July 1973, when White House aide Alexander Butterfield told the committee that Nixon had a secret taping system that recorded his phone calls and conversations in the Oval Office. When Nixon refused to release the tapes, Ervin and Cox issued subpoenas. The White House refused to comply, citing “executive privilege,” the doctrine that the president, as chief executive, is entitled to candid and confidential advice from aides.

“Thus the stage was set for a great constitutional struggle between a President determined not to give up executive documents and materials and a Senate committee and a federal prosecutor who are determined to get them,” said The Post on July 24, 1973. “The ultimate arbitration, it was believed, would have to be made by the Supreme Court.”

After protracted negotiations, the White House agreed to provide written summaries of the taped conversations to the Senate and the special prosecutor. Ervin accepted the deal but Cox rejected it. On Saturday, Oct. 20, Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order, as did his top deputy Williams Ruckleshaus. Solicitor General Robert Bork became the acting attorney general and he dismissed Cox. The special prosecutor’s office was abolished.

The firings, dubbed “the Saturday Night Massacre,” ignited a firestorm in Washington. Amid calls for impeachment, Nixon was forced to appoint a new special prosecutor, a prominent Texas lawyer named Leon Jaworski who had been a confidante of President Lyndon Johnson. Nixon’s credibility suffered another blow on November 20, when his lawyers informed a federal judge that one of the key tapes sought by investigators contained 18-minute erasure that White House officials had trouble explaining. When Nixon declared at a press conference: “I am not a crook,” more than a few Americans found his denial unconvincing.

On Dec. 31, 1973 Jaworski issued a report saying that besides the original seven burglars, 12 other persons had pleaded guilty to Watergate-related offenses and criminal proceedings against four more individual were in progress. Nixon rejected accusations of wrongdoing and insisted he would stay in office.

The Post stories from late spring 1973 through the end of the year:

Cox Is Chosen as Special Prosecutor Democrat Served Under Kennedy as Solicitor General

By George Lardner, Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 19, 1973

Former Solicitor General Archibald Cox, 61, agreed yesterday to serve as the Justice Department’s special prosecutor in the Watergate scandals.

Attorney General-designate Elliot L. Richardson told a press conference that he would name Cox to the proposed $38,000 a-year post if the Senator approved Richardson’s own nomination.

A Democrat, Cox was a member of the late John Kennedy’s brain trust in the 1960 presidential campaign against then Vice president Nixon. He served as Solicitor General, the third ranking post in the Justice Department, from 1961 to 1965 when he joined the faculty at Harvard Law School.

At a separate news conference in Cambridge, Cox said any implication of President Nixon would be reported.

“This is a take of tremendous importance,” he said. “Somehow, we must restore confidence, honor and integrity in government.”

Besides last June’s break-in at Democratic National Headquarters, the investigation will cover all alleged offenses rising out of the 1972 presidential campaign and any other allegations involving President Nixon, his White House employees or appointees.

Speaking at the Pentagon, Richardson, who is still Secretary of Defense, said he was confident that Cox’s appointment would help counter any public suspicions that the White House might try to influence the investigation.

“There wasn’t going to be any influence from the White House anyway,” Richardson declared.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has not been entirely convinced of that, set a hearing for Monday to question both men on how much of a free hand Cox will actually have.

Richardson said the former Solicitor General found Richardson’s proposed guidelines completely acceptable, “word for word.”

Senate Democrats dissatisfied with the charter are still expected to press for a change in one key provision that subordinates the prosecutor’s independence to “the Attorney General’s statutory accountability for all matters, falling with the Department of Justice.”

Richardson indicated that he has no intention of yielding on that point. But he did say he plans one major change in guidelines, suggested by several senators, to exempt the prosecutors from any duty of keeping the Attorney General informed of the progress of the investigation.”

Cox’s selection ended a sometimes frantic search by Richardson that lasted more than two weeks.

His first choice, Federal judge Harold Tyler, Jr. of New York City, turned down the job Monday citing his reluctance to step down from the bench, particularly when the ground rules for the prosecutor’s post had not yet been settled.

Another of the four “finalists” for the job, former Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher, took himself out of the running Wednesday, saying that he saw no “reasonable probability” of securing “the requisite independence.”

The withdrawals served to reinforce doubts about the independence Richardson said the prosecutor would have. They also raised questions abut Richardson’s own prospects for Senate confirmation.

Richardson offered the job to Cox Wednesday evening in a phone call to the West Coast where Cox was giving a University of California lecture.

An expert primarily in labor and constitutional law, Cox had been considered earlier and passed over. Richardson said, because of a relative lack of experience in trial work and criminal prosecutions.

As a consequence, Richardson said, Cox’s chief deputy, to be named as soon as possible will be “a lawyer with extensive experience in litigation.”

Cox served for three months last year as counsel to a special Massachusetts legislative committee investigating charges of judicial impropriety against two state Superior Court judges, Edward J. DeSaulnier Jr. and Vincent Brogna.

The two judges had been implicated in a 1962 stock-swindle case involving Michael Raymond of New York, who first aired his allegations in 1971 in testimony here before the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee headed by Sen. John L. McClellan (D-Ark).

In January of 1972, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered Judge DeSaulner’s disbarment as a lawyer (he subsequently resigned from the bench) and censured Judge Brogna. The court then referred the case to the legislature, which alone in Massachusetts can initiate the removal of judges.

The legislative committee, on the basis of Cox’s investigation, issued a report on April 11, 1972, that urged no further action against Judge Brogna and found the case against Judge DeSaulnier “moot” because he had resigned. The findings stirred some controversy since the committee held no public hearings and Cox did not interview either judge. He declined to say whether he had interviewed Raymond. Judge Brogna remains on the bench.

Cox agreed to serve as special Watergate prosecutor in a phone call to Richardson around 1:45 p.m. yesterday. After notifying key senators, Richardson, anxious not to prolong the guessing over his selection, announced his choice at a 3:30 p.m. press conference while the FBI was still updating its last background check.

The Attorney General-designate hailed Cox as “one of the finest solicitors general in recent history … and a lawyer of courage, independence and integrity.”

Of the two other “finalists” that he passed over, Richardson said that one, retired New York appellate court judge David Peck, 71, not a Wall Street lawyer, decided he could not take the job because of “urgent commitments to clients of long standing.” Of the other, Colorado Supreme Court Justice William Erickson, 49, Richardson said only that he had not been offered the post.

A one time student of Cox in labor law at Harvard Law School, Richardson said that “anyone who knows him knows he’ll do it right without regard to school ties or, any other association. We’ve never been close friends.”

Asked whether the nominees were related in any way to Edward Finch Cox, President Nixon’s sons-in-law, Richardson started to say no, did a double take and confessed amid a round of laughter.

“I didn’t ask him, come to think of it.”

The two are not related.

At his press conference in Cambridge, Cox said the investigation might take a year, 18 months or longer. He pointed out that the Teapot Dome inquiry started in the Coolidge Administration took six years.

He said he was satisfied that Richardson’s guidelines would “permit sufficient independence to do the job right. And whatever else I shall be, I shall be independent.”

The First Day of Watergate: Not Exactly High Drama

By Jules Witcover
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 18, 1973

If you like to watch grass grow, you would have loved the opening yesterday of the Senate select committee’s hearings on the Watergate and related campaign misdeeds.

Unhurried in the presence of network television cameras or the certain knowledge that America was missing its soap operas, Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.) and his six Senate colleagues spent the first day resolutely making a single point.

That point, persuasively drummed and droned home in five hours of mostly colorless and snail’s-pace testimony from four secondary witnesses, is that the investigation doesn’t intend to sacrifice thoroughness — or, when necessary, even boredom — for sensationalism, just to hold the TV audience.

The old Senate Caucus Room, which has heard about skullduggery as far back as Teapot Dome 50 years ago, was decked out in its brightest TV lights and an anticipatory overflow crowd when Ervin gaveled the hearing to order at one minute after 10 a.m.

The first spectators had arrived outside the old Senate Office Building nearly five hours earlier and were now seated or standing at the rear of the chamber. The first two arrivals, Tom Ling, 24, and Spencer Turnipseed, 25, students at Wesley Seminary, fell asleep, lost their places in line, but got in anyway.

Ling and Turnipseed both said they were there to hear more evidence than what they had read about Watergate, and most others around them agreed.

Some talked loftily about wanting “to see the system work,” but Ronald Coleman, a 27-year-old recent graduate of Catholic University and blind, said: “We’ve all got a little sadistic streak in us — like stopping on the highway to watch an accident.”

But there was little in this first day of the Watergate hearings to please the sadistic, except perhaps the sight of hundreds sitting stolidly through yawn-inspiring recountings or oft-told tales of how the whole business began.

Samuel Dash, the Georgetown University law professor who is chief counsel, led the witnesses methodically through their stories, with the minority counsel, Fred Thompson, taking over, and then the senators.

To make the record, they asked many obvious questions for which answers long have been public knowledge, and as they did, you could almost hear television channels being switched from Maine to California. At the outset, Ervin pledged “full and open public testimoney,” and that was what he started serving up yesterday.

The first witness, Robert C. Odle Jr., 29, described himself as director of administration for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, which in the Nixon administration means he was the office manager.

Odle, baby-faced, with an accountant’s manner and a dull gray-striped suit he will still look right in when he’s 60, came more in sorrow than in anger or repentence.

He opened with a little speech about “a million volunteers across the country” and most of the 400 in the re-election committee headquarters who had nothing to do with Watergate, including himself.

He praised President Nixon, who he said “ultimately will be regarded as one of the greatest Presidents the country has ever known,” and then he proceeded to illustrate, perhaps unwittingly, how things could go wrong at the Committee for the Re-election of the President in spite of such dedication and majority honesty.

The re-election committee, he made clear, was a place where they watched the small print with a magnifying glass but sometimes didn’t know when a truck was running over them.

And when he first heard that James W. McCord, the campaign committee’s security chief, had been arrested in the Watergate break-in, at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, his first concern was that he’d have to find a replacement.

He suddenly realized that as “director of administration” he was now responsible for security at the Committee for the Re-election of the President, and there was always the danger of “retaliation.”

In a telephone conversation with the deputy campaign director, Jeb S. Magruder, who was in California, Odle said: “My God, I’ve got to find a new guy.” And Magruder replied: “You sure do.”

That same day — June 17, 1972 — when G. Gordon Liddy came by and asked him where a paper-shredding machine could be found and how it worked. Odle said he told him, and when he saw Liddy later carrying a big pile of papers to the shredding room, “it didn’t seem very unusual at that time.” He never shredded one document himself, Odle said flatly.

And then there was the question from Sen. Joseph M. Montoya (D-N.M.) about how McCord was paid. McCord was on the regular payroll, and Odle said he didn’t know anything about cash payments to him.

“The way the system was set up,” Odle said, “those things [payments to staff members] would go through me.” Apparently it never dawned on him that the way the system was set up, some payments went through him, and others didn’t.

Odle was also at his believing, trusting best when asked about a file given to him by another re-election committee aide to take home for safekeeping the weekend of the Watergate break-in. He never asked what was in the file and never looked, he testified. It turned out, the line of questioning indicated, that it was the file on the committee’s clandestine operations.

Odle hardly qualified as a star witness, but it was that kind of day. The other three witnesses were there to make record, and they did, methodically.

Bruce Kehrli, who was a lieutenant to deposed presidential chief of staff H. R. (Bob) Haldeman and now assists his successor, Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., efficiently outlined who did what on the White House staff. Then came two of the police officers who made the Watergate arrests, Sgt. Paul W. Leeper and Officer John Barrett — Leeper crew-cutted with an incongruent Fu Manchu beard and mustache, Barrett long-haired and heavily bearded.

Leeper stood before charts and a floor plan of the Democratic National Committee and told how his police team “responded” from one room to another until Barrett came upon the culprits and started the Watergate scandal on its way.

Those who had waited hours to get into the Caucus Room, as well as those who stayed home from work to watch on television or lingered in front of the office set, didn’t have anything to gasp at, and little to laugh about. But those in the hearing room sat attentively throughout.

When Odle said of McCord at the outset that “his job was office security,” and when he said finance committee chairman Maurice H. Stans in budget meetings “certainly kept an eye on where the money went,” there were ripples of laughter. But the spectators took the hearing as Ervin and Co. served it up — as serious, if initially tedious business.

In the face of the network TV cameras, and presumably an audience of millions for the first day, the seven senators did very little showboating, mugging or playing to the cameras.

Ervin, looking for all the world like a big, courtly br’er rabbit, his eyebrows working up and down as he talked, presided benignly and deferentially, and none of his colleagues tried to run away with it, as has happened often in televised hearings.

But yesterday was just the first step down a long road that should run well into the summer. Today, with McCord expected to testify, there may be more sparks, and more elbowing by the interrogators to get at him. And the chances are that much of America, sore about pre-empted soap operas or not, will again be watching.

Dean Alleges Next Knew of Cover-up Plan

By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 3, 1973

Former presidential counsel John W. Dean III has told Senate investigators and federal prosecutors that the discussed aspects of the Watergate cover-up with President Nixon or in Mr. Nixon’s presence on at least 35 occasions between January and April of this year, according to reliable sources.

Dean plans to testify under oath at the Senate’s Watergate hearings, regardless of whether he is granted full immunity from prosecution, and he will allege that President Nixon was deeply involved in the cover-up, the sources said.

Dean has told investigators that Mr. Nixon had prior knowledge of payments used to buy the silence of the Watergate conspirators and of offers of executive clemency extended in his name, the sources said.

Dean has little or no documentary evidence to support his charges against the President and most of his allegations are based on his own recollection of purported conversations with Mr. Nixon, the sources said.

Dean, the sources reported, claims that Mr. Nixon’s former principal deputies, H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, were also present at many meetings in which the cover-up was discussed in the presence of the President.
Dean’s statements to investigators have the effect of pitting him along against the President and Haldeman and Ehrlichman, all of whom denied involvement in the Watergate bugging or any subsequent cover-up.

The White House, as well as Haldeman and Ehrlichman, have pictured Dean as the principal figure in the Watergate cover-up. Justice Department sources say there is ample evidence to indict Dean in the case and that the former presidential counsel appears to have been more than just a reluctant participant in the Watergate cover-up.

In contrast, Dean and his associates have pictured the former counsel as a loyal White House aide who was only following orders in the Watergate, cover-up and who, as time went on, agonized over what Watergate was doing to Mr. Nixon.

Dean is still seeking full immunity from prosecution, seeking to stay out of jail and hoping to keep his law license. But Senate and Justice Department sources said Dean’s charges against the President are unrelated to the question of whether he is granted such immunity and thus are not necessary self-serving.

One of the strongest charges against Mr. Nixon that Dean has made to investigators refers to a meeting Dean said he had with Mr. Nixon shortly before the sentencing of the seven Watergate defendants March 23, Dean said that Mr. Nixon asked him how much the defendants would have to be paid to insure their continued silence, in addition to $460,000 that had already been paid, the sources said.

Dean, the sources reported, maintains that he told Mr. Nixon the additional cost would be about $1 million, and Dean also claims the President replied there would be no problem in paying that amount.

On March 26, Mr. Nixon telephoned Dean from Key Biscayne in a widely publicized call in which the President has been quoted as expressing his continued confidence in Dean telling him: “You’re still my counsel.” Dean has told investigators that in this call the President also said he had been “kidding” when he reportedly asked Dean how much it would cost to buy the Watergate conspirators’ continued silence.

By the time of the March 26 phone call, investigators said, Dean had made it clear to Mr. Nixon that he intended to cooperate with the Watergate prosecutors. Dean, according to investigators, felt that Mr. Nixon was attempting in the phone call to retract a statement that could later prove damaging to the President.

In a later conversation, Dean told investigators, Mr. Nixon attempted to force him to sign a letter of resignation that amounted to a confession that Dean had directed the Watergate cover-up without the knowledge of the President, Haldeman or Ehrlichman.

When Dean refused to sign, the former counsel told investigators, Mr. Nixon warned him “in the strongest terms” never to reveal the covert activities and plans of the Nixon administration, the sources reported.

Dean has also told investigators and prosecutors that Mr. Nixon, acting with knowledge that a cover-up was occurring, wrote out orders last year relating to Watergate developments in the margins of daily news summaries prepared the White house staff. The handwritten orders effectively directed Haldeman, who was then the White House chief of staff, to counterattack the press in regard to the matters mentioned in the news summaries; the sources said Dean told investigators.

Dean told investigators that, until Jan. 1 of this year, he usually reported directly to Haldeman and Ehrlichman on action he undertook in the Watergate cover-up, the sources reported.

After Jan. 1, however, Mr. Nixon began calling Dean personally to find out the status of the cover-up and frequently summoned him to the presidential office to discuss aspects of the case, the sources said Dean told investigators.
In some of those purported meetings and other conversations, Dean has told prosecutors and Senate investigators, the President gave him direct orders to carry out aspects of the cover-up, the sources said.

According to the sources, Dean has met secretly with the Watergate prosecutors on eight occasions and twice with Samuel Dash, the chief counsel of the Senate’s Watergate investigating committee.

Senate and Justice Department sources reported that although initially skeptical of Dean’s version of events, Dash and the prosecutors now take the former presidential counsel’s account seriously.

According to Senate and Justice Department sources, Dean has said that he met with the President only about 10 times from July, 1970 to January, 1973 in contrast to about 35 this year. Dean has told the investigators and prosecutors that he believes the President increased the number of meetings this year to establish a clear-cut attorney client relationship that Mr. Nixon could use insist that Dean not testify about the conversations.

One source with first hand knowledge of Dean’s statements to investigators said that “there were about 35 meetings with the President during which Dean says the cover-up was discussed. It might have been 33 or 39, but 35 is the best approximation.”

Haldeman and Ehrlichman were present at many of those meetings, the sources quoted Dean as saying, and the main portion of several conversations was between Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Dean with the President just listening.

Most of the 35 conversations took place in the President’s office, though some were telephone conversations between the President and Dean, according to the sources’ account of Dean’s version of events.

Dean, who was fired as presidential counsel on April 30, attempted unsuccessfully to get some of his files and records from the White House, especially “chronologies” that he dictated at the end of each day summarizing his activity, according to the sources.

The sources said that Dean was to visit the Executive Office Building yesterday to review some of his papers. Associates of Dean said that Dean was skeptical about what records might still be in existence.

According to the sources, the “chronologies” would allow Dean to more accurately reconstruct the alleged discussions about the cover-up. The sources said Dean told investigators that the chronologies relate only to orders from Haldeman and Ehrlichman about the cover-up and do not specifically discuss the President’s alleged role.

Dean, the sources said, told investigators he never mentioned discussions with the President in the chronologies because of the danger of committing such matters to paper.

Four White House sources told The Washington Post last week that Mr. Nixon and his closes aides regard possible charges by Dean as the biggest obstacle the President will have to overcome if he is to demonstrate his innocence in the Watergate cover-up.

Two of the sources said Dean has told them before he left the White House on April 30 that the President was involved in the cover-up. They declined to discuss the specific allegations Dean made to them, but characterized them as a “circumstantial case” against the President, unsupported by any documentary evidence known to be in Dean’s possession.

There is agreement among The Post’s sources in the White House, Justice Department and Senate that Dean has been the dominant factor in the White House response to Watergate developments in the last two months.

Dean’s decision to break ranks at the White House and tell his story to the prosecutors, beginning on April 6, directly led to President Nixon’s decision to fire Dean and reluctantly ask for the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the sources said.

President Nixon’s three recent statements on Watergate — on April 17, announcing “major developments” in the case; on April 30, announcing the Haldeman and Ehrlichman resignations and denying his own involvement; and a 4,000-word defense of his own actions, issued on May 22 — all appear to be abased on staying one step ahead of Dean, the sources said.

In citing national security grounds as the reasons he ordered creation of a special investigations unit in the White House, Mr. Nixon on May 22 spoke of plans for covert activities that were spelled out in the top secret documents that Dean removed from the White House.

“There would have been no presidential statement (on May 22) if Dean had not walked off with those documents — period, no statement,” one White House source said last week.

Initially, Justice Department and Senate sources reported, the Watergate prosecutors and Senate investigators were skeptical of Dean’s versions of events and believed his statements might have been motivated by a self-serving attempt to obtain immunity from prosecution.

However, “everything we have gotten from Dean that we were able to check out has turned out to be accurate,” one Justice Department source said. Senate sources commented in the same vein, and, as one example, said that Dean was the source of information that L. Patrick Gray III, the former acting director of the FBI, had destroyed items taken from the safe of Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt Jr.

The disclosure of the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist was directly attributable to information supplied to the Watergate prosecutors by Dean during an April 14 meeting, Justice Department sources said.

The next day, the sources reported, President Nixon was informed by justice Department officials that Dean was cooperating with investigators, and on April 17, Mr. Nixon made his statement about “major developments” in the case.

In that statement, the President attributed those developments to his own investigation of the case, which he said began on March 21. Mr. Nixon announced that he had asked the Justice Department to deny immunity from prosecution to any high administration officials found to be involved in the bugging or cover-up.

Senate investigators and sources close to the Watergate prosecutors say they now feel it is possible that Mr. Nixon’s position on immunity represented an attempt to keep Dean from testifying before either the Senate or grand jury about his knowledge of the Watergate case.

Although Dean recently said he would not testify fully before either body without first being granted full immunity, he has since decided to tell his story regardless of whether such immunity is forthcoming, sources close to Dean, and in the Senate said this weekend.

According to Dean’s version of events, he sought a meeting with President Nixon on March 20 and, on the following day, reviewed with Mr. Nixon details of the bugging and subsequent cover-up, the sources reported. They said Dean believed at the time that Mr. Nixon was unaware of some details relating to the case.

At the meeting, Dean contends, he told Mr. Nixon that, “to save the presidency” it would be necessary for Haldeman, Ehrlichman and himself (Dean) to fully disclose their involvement in the Watergate affair to federal prosecutors.

“After seeing the President, Dean was feeling high because he finally thought they were going to do the right thing,” one source said. “It was his understanding that an agreement had been reached. Then everything collapsed because Haldeman and Ehrlichman said they didn’t have to drown themselves to clean up the situation.”

According to Dean’s version of events, Mr. Nixon met with Haldeman and Ehrlichman almost immediately after the March 21 session with the former presidential counsel. Following that meeting with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Dean told investigators, Mr. Nixon informed him that he would not tolerate any break in the White House ranks and warned Dean that he would stand alone if he went to the prosecutors.

Last month Newsweek magazine reported that Dean was prepared to make at least two other allegations about the President’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up.

In the first, Dean reportedly told federal investigators that he was summoned to the White House oval office by Haldeman on Sept. 17, two days after the seven Watergate defendants were indicted.

Dean told investigators that he found Haldeman and the President “all grins” and in Dean’s opinion they were pleased at the success of Dean’s effort to keep the lid on and keep other officials in the administration from being indicted.

Dean reportedly quoted the President as saying, “Good job. Bob (Haldeman) told me what a great job you’ve been doing.”

The second alleged incident occurred in December. Newsweek quoted Dean as saying that a lawyer for Watergate defendant E. Howard Hunt Jr. approached White House special counsel Charles W. Colson to say “something had to be done” to avoid a long jail term for Hunt.

Colson reportedly passed the request along to Dean and Ehrlichman, and Ehrlichman was said to have answered, “I’ll check.” According to the Newsweek account of Dean’s statements Ehrlichman then walked into the oval office and returned with what he said was a promise of executive clemency for Hunt.

Ehrlichman then told Colson to tell Hunt’s attorney that “everything is O.K.” but not to be “too specific” in relaying the offer, according to the Newsweek account. That account was independently confirmed by The Washington Post.

Dean became involved in the Watergate investigation soon after the June 17 arrests at the Democrats’ Watergate headquarters.

He sat in on the FBI interrogation of more than 15 White House aides and received 82 of the FBI’s basic investigative files in the case.

Last Aug. 29, President Nixon cited an investigation by Dean as the basis for announcing that “no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident . . .”

Dean has told investigators that he never conducted any such investigation and the White House has conceded that Dean never personally supplied the President with any such report.

Dean has been implicated by CIA officials, former White House aides and former acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III in the cover-up of Watergate. One former White House aide, John Caulfield, testified before the Senate select Watergate committee that Dean repeatedly ordered him to transmit offers of executive clemency to convicted Watergate burglar James McCord in return for his silence.

One associate of Dean said that Dean began to realize that the “house of cards on which the Watergate cover-up was erected” was about to come down during the Watergate trial in January, but more specifically in February and March during Senate confirmation hearings when Gray was nominated by Mr. Nixon to be permanent director.

On March 22, a day after Dean met with the President and reportedly urged full disclosure, Gray testified that Dean had “probably” lied when he told the FBI that he would have to check before he could say whether Hunt had a White House office.

Dean first went to the prosecutors with his story on April 6, according to the sources, and the President announced “major developments” in the case on April 17.

On April 19, The Washington Post published a story quoting federal sources as saying that former deputy campaign manager Jeb Stuart Magruder had implicated Dean in the planning of the Watergate operation and the subsequent payments to the conspirators for their silence.

Break-In Memo Sent to Ehrlichman

By Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 13, 1973

The Watergate prosecutors have a one-page memo addressed to former White house domestic affairs adviser John D. Ehrlichman that described in detail the plans to burglarize the office of Pentagon papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, according to government sources.

The memo sent to Ehrlichman by former White House aides David Young and Egil (Bud) Krogh, was dated before the Sept. 3, 1971 burglary of the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist, the sources said.

The memo was turned over to the prosecutors by Young, who has been granted immunity from prosecution, the sources said.

The sources confirmed earlier reports that Young will testify that Ehrlichman saw the memo and approved the burglary operation.

Ehrlichman could not be reached directly for comment yesterday, but Frank H. Strickler, one of his attorneys, said: “It has been his consistent position that he had no advance knowledge of the break-in and Mr. Ehrlichman stands by that position.”

The burglary was supervised by Watergate conspirators E. Howard Hunt, Jr. and G. Gordon Liddy, who in 1971 were members of the White House special investigations unit called the “plumbers.”

The group which was directed by Young and Krogh, was charged with investigating leaks to the news media and had been established in June, 1971, after the publication of the Pentagon Papers by several newspapers.

The memo from Krogh and Young directly contradicts a statement Ehrlichman made to the FBI on April 27. According to a summary of that interview made public May 2, Ehrlichman stated that he “was not told that these individuals (hunt and Liddy) had broken into the premises of the psychiatrist for Ellsberg until after this incident had taken place. Such activity was not authorized by him, he did not know about this burglary until after it had happened.”

In an affidavit released last month, Krogh had given “general authorization to engage in covert activity” to obtain information on Ellsberg.

Reliable sources said that Krogh prepared his affidavit by referring to an incomplete copy of the memo that he and Young sent to Ehrlichman before the burglary. Missing from that copy, the sources said, was the bottom portion in which plans for the burglary were described.

The top portion merely made a general reference to covert activity and Krogh based his affidavit on that, according to the sources.

The sources said the prosecutors have the entire memo and that Krogh, now reminded of its contents, is expected to change his statement, thus adding to the damaging testimony against Ehrlichman.

The sources said that the bottom portion of the memo was apparently removed late last year or early this year to sanitize Korgh’s files before Senate confirmation hearings on his nomination as undersecretary of Transportation.
Krogh was confirmed without difficulty. He resigned last month after acknowledging that he approved the burglary operation on Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

Young was a member of the National Security Council staff and had previously been the appointments secretary to foreign affairs adviser Dr. Henry A. Kissinger. He resigned in April.

Ehrlichman, one of the President’s closest advisers, resigned April 30.

In another Watergate matter, three government sources said that Ehrlichman and former presidential counsel John W. Dean, III taped telephone and personal face-to-face conversations with other figures in the Watergate affair beginning last January.

Ehrlichman taped one telephone conversation with former acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III concerning some incriminating files removed last summer from the White House safe of Watergate conspirator hunt, the sources said.

In another instance, the sources said that Ehrlichman taped a telephone conversation with Dean about the same explosive documents that Gray later destroyed.

Dean taped several conversations, including a long interview with alleged political saboteur Donald H. Segretti in January, one source said.

Segretti, a California attorney, was allegedly hired to conduct political espionage and sabotage against Democratic presidential contenders by former presidential appointments secretary Dwight L. Chapin and was paid $40,000 by the President’s former personal attorney, Herbert W. Kalmbach.

In a related matter, two sources close to Dean said that the three months of recent Watergate disclosures were triggered in part by a request from Watergate conspirator hunt in mid-March for $130,000 to remain silent.

Hunt had received “hush money” before that, the sources said. They said the White House staff did not have $130,000 at hand and several persons, including Kalmbach and former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, were balking at raising additional money to buy the silence of seven original Watergate defendants.

President Taped Talks, Phone Calls; Lawyer Ties Ehrlichman to Payments

By Lawrence Meyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 17, 1973

President Nixon has been routinely taping all his conversations and meetings in the Oval Office and cabinet room of the White House, in his Executive Office Building office and on four of his personal telephones, former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield told the Senate select Watergate committee yesterday.

Butterfield, now the Federal Aviation Administration administrator, said the tape recording began in the spring of 1971 and was intended “to record things for posterity, for the Nixon library.” Most participants in conversations with the President did not know they were being taped, Butterfield said, because only a few members of the White House inner circle were told about the several hidden recording devices.

Butterfield’s testimony, acknowledged to be correct by the White House, indicates that the White House may have in its possession the means to prove that President Nixon knew nothing about the cover-up of the Watergate affair until March 21, 1973, as he has maintained, or that former White House counsel John W. Dean III was correct in testifying that President Nixon knew about the cover-up well before March 21.

Samuel Dash, chief counsel of the Senate committee, said yesterday that the committee will request White House tapes for specific dates. Dash said there should be “no obstacle to giving us the actual recordings . . . It’s late in the day for anybody to raise withholding that information.”

Deputy White House press secretary Gerald L. Warren declined to comment yesterday when asked if the White House would make the tapes available to the Senate committee.

Sources inside the White House said, however, that the President was expected to stand by his most recent statement, a letter to committee chairman Sam J. Ervin Jr. (DD-N.C.) saying that Mr. Nixon would neither testify before the committee nor release presidential papers to it. The sources included the tapes and any transcripts of the tapes as falling within the category of presidential papers.

Since July 7, the committee has been searching for a means to obtain information from President Nixon about the Watergate affair. Before his hospitalization on July 12, Mr. Nixon had agreed to meet with Ervin, who has repeatedly said that only the President and Presidential papers involving Dean could show finally whether Dean’s testimony about the President was correct.

Special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox also declined to comment yesterday on whether his office will seek any or all of the taped White House conversations. However, it is expected that he also will ask for tapes of conversations between Mr. Nixon and Dean, and for certain other tapes, including one of a talk that Dean said former domestic adviser John D. Ehrlichman had with the President concerning executive clemency for convicted Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt.

According to Butterfield’s testimony yesterday, all conversations were automatically taped in the White House Oval office where the President customarily receives official visitors ranging from personal friends and American business, political and labor leaders to foreign dignitaries.

Butterfield said Mr. Nixon’s Executive Office Building office also is wired so that the sound of a voice automatically activates a recorder. President Nixon is said to enjoy the solitude of the Executive Office Building office but he has staff meetings there occasionally as well as in the White House Oval Office.
Butterfield said that meetings attended by the President in the cabinet room in the west wing of the White House also were taped by a manually operated recorder.

Four telephones — in the Oval Office, the Executive Office Building office, the Lincoln sitting room in the residential quarters of the White House and on President Nixon’s desk in his study in Aspen cabin at Camp David — also are wired to tape all conversations held over them.

Butterfield said that he believed that when foreign dignitaries used Aspen Cabin, “the device was removed prior to occupancy.”

Asked to explain why the extensive recording apparatus was installed, Butterfield said: “There was no doubt in my mind they were installed to record things for posterity, for the Nixon library. The President was very conscious of that kind of thing. We had quite an elaborate set-up at the White House for the collection and preservation of documents, and of things which transpired in the way of business of state.”

Butterfield’s testimony about the elaborate, secret taping system employed by President Nixon provided an ironic twist to the Watergate hearings, which were themselves precipitated by a bugging incident.

Previous witnesses at the hearings have described how White House aides, less elaborately than President Nixon and on their own taped conversations either in their offices or on their telephones. White House aides Charles W. Colson, Dean, John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman all have been mentioned in testimony as having taped conversations without informing the person to whom they were speaking that a recording was being made.

Butterfield testified before Herbert W. Kalmbach, Mr. Nixon’s personal attorney, and after special White House counsel Richard A. Moore yesterday. Moore who testified for a total of 2 ½ days, was pressed yesterday to explain why President Nixon failed to inform any law enforcement agency about violations of law after being informed of them by Dean.

Despite being read notes from official White House logs indicating that on March 13,17 and 21 Dean told President Nixon about possibly illegal acts that had been committed. Moore asserted that “there is nothing here that I can find on which to predicate a question to the television audience that the President knew of criminal activity that he did not report. I do not find it here.”

Moore’s testimony, under questioning by Sen. Joseph M. Montoya (D-N.M.) and assistant chief counsel Terry Lenzner, illustrated apparent gaps in the version of events put out by the White House concerning President Nixon’s knowledge of the cover-up and steps he took to disclose it publicly.

Lenzner, as Ervin has previously in questioning witnesses, used Moore’s testimony to demonstrate the necessity of President Nixon providing some means of clearing up the contradiction between Dean — who says President Nixon had known of the cover-up since Sept. 15, 1972 — and the President himself, who denies knowledge of the cover-up before last March.

Butterfield, following Moore, provided the committee with a potential solution to the impasse.

Butterfield was first interviewed by the committee staff Friday afternoon in what was described as a “routine” session. At one point in the interview Dash told reporters Butterfield was asked if he knew whether an April 15 meeting between Dean and Mr. Nixon in the Executive Office Building office was taped as Dean had testified he suspected. Dash said that Butterfield answered, “‘Yes, it’s possible and this is the reason.’”

Dash said Butterfield then described the recording apparatus installed by the Secret Service at the request of President Nixon through White House chief of staff H.R. (Bob) Haldeman. Ironically, Butterfield testified that Dean was one of the many White House staff members who was never informed of the President’s recording devices.

Butterfield testified initially that the system had been installed in the spring or summer of 1970 but corrected his testimony to say it was the spring of 1971 after Ervin read a letter from special counsel to the President J. Fred Buzhardt dating the system’s first use by the President to 1971.

According to Butterfield, part of the recording system is linked to an electronic “locator” device run by security personnel, that shows President Nixon’s whereabouts in the White House by lights for each of seven locations. Butterfield said that whenever Mr. Nixon is in the Oval Office or in his Executive Office Building office, and the light for that location is flashed, it automatically turns on tape recorders that begin taping when a person’s voice is heard. Butterfield said the recorders “picked up all conversations or all noise” when the President is in the Oval Office and the Executive Office Building office.

The device in the cabinet room, which Butterfield said is manually activated by buttons in that room and another office, did not work as well. The conversations that Dean has testified he had with Mr. Nixon occurred in the Oval office and in the Executive Office Building office.

The telephone tapes, Butterfield said, are activated simply by picking up the phone to make or receive a call. Dash said under recent Supreme Court rulings, which permit taping of conversations if there is “one partly consent,” no law is violated by the taping of conversations on the phone or in the various offices so long as President Nixon is aware of the recordings.

Butterfield said he was describing the system in order to be truthful in his testimony but that he was reluctant to discuss the matter. “It is very obvious that this could be — I cannot say that any longer — is embarrassing to our government,” Butterfield said. “And also because I felt it could be something the President would like to present at a later time in defense of his own position.”

Dash said after yesterday’s sessions that Haldeman and White House aide Lawrence Higby also had been asked by the Senate Committee about taping of conversations in the White House. Dash indicated, however, that Butterfield’s testimony was the first acknowledgment that such tapings took place.

Whether the tape, which Butterfield said are maintained by date by the White House, fall under the doctrine of executive privilege described by President Nixon is an unanswered question.

In his May 22 statement, president Nixon said, “Executive privilege will not be invoked as to any testimony concerning possible criminal conduct or discussions of possible criminal conduct, in the matters presently under investigation, including the Watergate affair, and the alleged cover-up.” It was under this interpretation that Dean testified before the Senate committee about his conversations with the President.

President Nixon’s statement of July 7, however, denied the committee access to presidential papers.

Ervin on July 11, while questioning former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, gave his own definition of executive privilege: “I think a President is entitled to have kept secret confidential communications had between him and an aide or had among his aides which were had for the purpose of assisting the president to perform in a lawful manner one of his constitutional or legal duties.”

Ervin continued, “And I think also that is the full scope and effect of executive privilege. Since . . .there is nothing in the Constitution requiring the President to run for re-election, I don’t think that executive privilege covers any political activities whatsoever. They are not official and have no relation to his office.

“I also take the position that executive privilege does not entitle a president to have kept secret information concerning criminal activities of his aides or anybody else because there is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes or makes it the official duty of a President to have anything to do with criminal activities,” Ervin said.

Dash said following yesterday’s hearing that the committee would consider a request to the White House for tapes of specific dates mentioned in testimony when it meets in executive session Wednesday.

Reliable government sources said yesterday that Alfred Wong, the former head of the technical services division for the Secret Service at the White House, was in charge of installing the listening devices. Wong had recommended James W. McCord Jr., who was later convicted in the Watergate case, for McCord’s position as head of security at the President’s re-election committee.

Secret Service agents Louis B. Sims and Raymond C. Zumwalt, both presently assigned to the technical services division at the White House were in charge of maintaining the elaborate eavesdropping operation at the White House and changing the tapes, according to the sources.

There was some question yesterday whether the White House would let the agents testify before the Senate Watergate committee, the sources said.

Moore, who preceded Butterfield at the witness table and who holds the title of special counsel to the President, has testified that it is his “firm conviction” that President Nixon was not aware of the cover-up until March 21.

Moore on Friday recounted a conversation with President Nixon on April 19 in which Mr. Nixon acknowledged that Dean had told him about the Watergate cover-up on March 21, including the demands of Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt Jr. For cash payments to remain silent about his involvement in the break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

Under questioning by assistant chief committee counsel Lenzner, who read from White House log summaries made by minority counsel Fred Thompson that were verified by the White House to be accurate. Moore consistently resisted acknowledging that the log summaries accurately reflected conversations held by President Nixon.

Moore, under questioning by Lenzner, agreed that he had concluded on March 20 that “the President could not be aware of the things that Mr. Dean was worried about.” Dean’s concerns, according to Moore, included the cover-up and the increasing possibility that it would be unraveled publicly.

“Mr. Moore,” Lenzner asked, “do you agree now that your understanding of the President’s information and knowledge was basically incorrect That he did, in fact, have information at that meeting . . . on March 20 concerning Mr. Strachan (Gordon Strachan, an aide to Haldeman) and also possible involvement in Watergate and also involving the Ellsberg break-in?. . .”

“You have heard my statement on that, of course, that he (Nixon) did not, that it was my judgment that he did not,” Moore replied. “I know of nothing to change that.”

Lenzner then read Moore a portion of the White House log summaries stating that Dean had told President Nixon “Strachan could be involved” on March 13 and that on March 17 “Dean told the President of the Ellsberg break-in but that it had nothing to do with the Watergate.”

Does not that information, Lenzner asked Moore, “indicate that in fact your perception was wrong and Mr. Nixon, the President, did know about both Strachan’s possible involvement and the Ellsberg break-in?”

“It seems to me,” Moore replied, “the answer to that question can only be given to you by someone who was at the meeting and when you speak of the White House report, and you use the word White House as a building rather loosely, anything done in the White House is done by a person, and when you speak of this as a White House report, Mr. Thompson very candidly and properly has said this is his summary of a telephone conversation . . . All I know is what I saw and heard . . . It doesn’t change my opinion one bit and I think if you want to get at that, you should ask someone who was at the meeting.”

The hearings will resume at 10 a.m. today with Kalmbach continuing his testimony.

President Refuses to Turn Over Tapes; Ervin Committee, Cox Issue Subpoenas Action Sets Stage for Court Battle on Powers Issue

By Carroll Kilpatrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 24, 1973

President Nixon set the stage yesterday for a major constitutional confrontation by refusing to turn over presidential tape recordings to either Senate Watergate committee or to Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.

Cox immediately served a subpoena for the tapes on presidential counsel J. Fred Buzhart, who must respond in federal court by Thursday. The Senate Committee followed suit, serving two subpoenas on another presidential lawyer, Leonard Garment.

The committee chairman, Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.), reacted to the President’s decision with an emotional statement, saying:

“I deeply regret that this situation has arisen, because I think that the Watergate tragedy is the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered. I used to think that the Civil War was our country’s greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.”

The committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Howard H. Baker (R-Tenn.), expressed disappointment at being “on the brink of a constitutional confrontation between the Congress and the White House.” He added that the material sought by the subpoenas is “essential, if not vital, to the full, thorough inquiry mandated and required of this committee.”

It seemed certain last night that the confrontation between the President and the investigators ultimately would have to be decided in the Supreme Court. How the court might rule on the central issues — executive privilege and the separation of governmental powers — is unknown.

The President made no concessions on those issues in a letter to Ervin yesterday. He would reply “at an appropriate time” to the issues raised by the Watergate affair and to charges concerning this own involvement, Mr. Nixon said in the letter. But “the special nature of tape recordings of private conversations is such that these principles (of executive privilege) apply with even greater force to tapes of private Presidential conversations than to Presidential papers,” he declared.

The tapes in question were made secretly and involved alleged conversations between Mr. Nixon and various of his assistants on matters relating to the Watergate break-ins and the subsequent efforts to cover up that crime.

The President said that contrary to the Ervin committee’s assumptions, the “tapes would not finally settle the central issues before your committee. Before their existence became publicly known, I personally listened to a number of them.

“The tapes are entirely consistent with what I know to be the truth and what I have stated to be the truth. However, as in any verbatim recording of informal conversations, they contain comments that persons with different perspectives and motivations would inevitably interpret in different ways.

“Furthermore, there are inseparably interspersed in them a great many very frank and very private comments on a wide range of issues and individuals, wholly extraneous to the Committee’s inquiry.”

Thus the stage was set for a great constitutional struggle between a President determined not to give up executive documents and materials and a Senate committee and a federal prosecutor who are determined to get them. The ultimate arbitration, it was believed, would have to be made by the Supreme Court. Even if the court were to rule against the President, it has no independent power to compel him to act. He is, however, subject to the impeachment powers of Congress.

Deputy press secretary Gerald L. Warren said Mr. Nixon had not heard the tapes before issuing his statement of May 22 that he had no knowledge of the Watergate cover-up and had never offered executive clemency to Watergate defenders.

Mr. Nixon first began listening to some of the tapes in early June, Warren said. He would give no further details.

Warren also confirmed reports that the taping of presidential conversations has been stopped. Asked why, he said that they had been “compromised” by public disclosure that they were being made.

In a separate letter yesterday to Ervin, the President said he did not believe any “useful purpose . . . would be served by our having a meeting at this time.”

The President earlier had agreed to confer with the senator on the issue of presidential papers and Ervin had said he sought the meeting to avoid a “constitutional crisis” between the executive and legislative branches.

Ervin said yesterday that in view of the President’s refusal of the tapes he agreed that nothing would be gained by a meeting at this time.

Expressing deep regret over the President’s decision, Ervin said, “I love my country, I venerate the office of President and I have best wishes for the success of the present incumbent.” But he said he had very different ideas from Mr. Nixon about separation of powers.

The President had written Ervin July 6 that he would not testify before the committee or make presidential documents available to it. The President wrote yesterday that he had “concluded that principles stated” in the earlier letter also applied to the request for the tapes.

It came to public knowledge last week that presidential telephone and office conversations were recorded on a daily basis when FAA Administrator Alexander Butterfield testified before the Ervin committee. Butterfield was the person responsible for setting up the operation in the spring of 1971, when he was a White House aide.

The tapes will remain “under my sole personal control,” Mr. Nixon wrote in the letter received by the committee during its noon recess yesterday. “None has been transcribed or made public and none will be.”

He said that “inseparably interspersed” in the tapes relating to Watergate are “a great many very frank and very private comments, on a wide range of issues and individuals, wholly extraneous to the committee’s inquiry.”

The President’s most startling admission was that the tapes, while supporting his interpretation of his Watergate role, nevertheless might be interpreted in different ways by different persons.

They can be “accurately understood or interpreted only by reference to an enormous number of other documents and tapes,” he said, “so that to open them at all would begin an endless process of disclosure and explanation of private presidential records totally unrelated to Watergate, and highly confidential in nature.

“They are the clearest possible example of why presidential documents must be kept confidential.”

In the letter, Mr. Nixon again promised to “address publicly” the Watergate issue at an appropriate time. It is now believed that he will make his statement sometime next month after the committee concludes the current phase of its hearings.

The statement will be made, Mr. Nixon said, “in a way that preserves the constitutional principle of separation of powers, and thus serves the interests not just of the Congress or of the President, but of the people.”

After the committee voted to subpoena the tapes, Ervin said the doctrine of executive privilege that Mr. Nixon claimed existed only in connection with official duties and under no circumstances could be invoked in connection with alleged illegal activities.

“I am certain that the doctrine of separation of powers does not impose upon any President the duty or the power to undertake to separate a congressional committee from access to the truth concerning alleged criminal activities,” Ervin said.

The senator called the President’s letter “rather remarkable about the tapes.

“If you notice, he says he’s not going to let anyone else have them for fear they might draw a different conclusion … I was in hopes that the President would accede to the request of this committee.”

Charles Alan Wright, a special White House consultant, wrote a separate letter to special prosecutor Cox denying the tapes to him.

“I am instructed by the President to inform you that it will not be possible to make available to you the recordings that you have requested,” Wright wrote.

Cox has said the separation of powers argument should not bar his access to the tapes because he is a member of the Executive Branch.

Cox later added, according to Wright, that his role was hard to define since he is not subject to the direction of the President and the Attorney General.

Wright said that if Cox is a part of the Executive Branch “you are subject to the instructions of your superiors, up to and including the President, and can have access to presidential papers only as and if the President sees fit to make them available to you.”

But even more significant, Wright added, is the fact that production of the tapes for Cox would lead to their use in court, “and questions of separation-of-powers are in the forefront when the most confidential documents of the presidency are sought for use in the Judicial Branch.

Cox said after receiving Wright’s letter, “Careful study before requesting the tapes convinced me that any blanket claim of privilege to withhold this evidence from a grand jury is without legal foundation.”

“It therefore becomes my duty promptly to seek subpoenas and other available legal procedures for obtaining the evidence for the grand jury . . .

“The effort to obtain these tapes and other documentary evidence is the impartial pursuit of justice according to law. None of us should make assumption about what the tapes will show.

“They may tend to show that there was criminal activity — or that there was none. They may tend to show the guilt of particular individuals or their innocence.

“The one clear point is that the tapes are evidence bearing directly upon whether there were criminal conspiracies, including a conspiracy to obstruct justice, among high government officials.”

The Senate committee asked for four tapes of conversations the President held with former counsel Dean to determine if they supported Dean’s contentions that the President knew of the Watergate cover-up.

Cox requested eight tapes, including two with Dean, one involving a telephone conversation between the President and former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and one a meeting with Mitchell. The others involved meetings with former aides John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman.

Nixon Forces Firing of Cox; Richardson, Ruckelshaus Quit President Abolishes Prosecutor’s Office; FBI Seals Records

By Carroll Kilpatrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 21, 1973

In the most traumatic government upheaval of the Watergate crisis, President Nixon yesterday discharged Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus.

The President also abolished the office of the special prosecutor and turned over to the Justice Department the entire responsibility for further investigation and prosecution of suspects and defendants in Watergate and related cases.

Shortly after the White House announcement, FBI agents sealed off the offices of Richardson and Ruckelshaus in the Justice Department and at Cox’s headquarters in an office building on K Street NW.

An FBI spokesman said the agents moved in “at the request of the White House.”

Agents told staff members in Cox’s office they would be allowed to take out only personal papers. A Justice Department official said the FBI agents and building guards at Richardson’s and Ruckelshaus’ offices were there “to be sure that nothing was taken out.”

Richardson resigned when Mr. Nixon instructed him to fire Cox and Richardson refused. When the President then asked Ruckelshaus to dismiss Cox, he refused, White House spokesman Ronald L. Ziegler said, and he was fired. Ruckelshaus said he resigned.

Finally, the President turned to Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, who by law becomes acting Attorney General when the Attorney General and deputy attorney general are absent, and he carried out the President’s order to fire Cox. The letter from the President to Bork also said Ruckelshaus resigned.

These dramatic developments were announced at the White House at 8:25 p.m. after Cox had refused to accept or comply with the terms of an agreement worked out by the President and the Senate Watergate committee under which summarized material from the White House Watergate tapes would be turned over to Cox and the Senate committee.

In announcing the plan Friday night, the President ordered Cox to make no further effort to obtain tapes or other presidential documents.

Cox responded that he could not comply with the President’s instructions and elaborated on his refusal and vowed to pursue the tape recordings at a televised news conference yesterday.

That set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the departure of Cox and the two top officials of the Justice Department and immediately raised prospects that the President himself might be impeached or forced to resign.

In a statement last night, Cox said: “Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.”

The action raised new questions as to whether Congress would proceed to confirm House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to be Vice President or leave Speaker of the House Carl Albert (D-Okla.) next in line of succession to the highest office in the land.

Richardson met at the White House in the late afternoon with Mr. Nixon and at 8:25 p.m. Ziegler appeared in the White House press room to read a statement outlining the President’s decisions.

The President discharged Cox because he “refused to comply with instructions” the President gave him Friday night through the Attorney General, Ziegler said.

Furthermore, Ziegler said, the office of special prosecutor was abolished and its functions have been turned over to the Department of Justice.

The department will carry out the functions of the prosecutor’s office “with thoroughness and vigor,” Ziegler said.

Mr. Nixon sought to avoid a constitutional confrontation by the action he announced Friday, the press secretary said, to give the courts the information from the tapes which the President had considered privileged.

That action was accepted by “responsible leaders in the Congress and in the country,” Ziegler commented, but the special prosecutor “defied” the President’s instructions “at a time of serious world crisis” and made it “necessary” for the President to discharge him.

Before taking action, Ziegler said, the President met with Richardson to instruct him to dismiss Cox, but Richardson felt he could not do so because it conflicted with the promise he had made to the Senate, Ziegler said.

After Richardson submitted his resignation, the President directed Ruckelshaus to dismiss Cox. When Ruckelshaus refused to carry out the President’s directive, he also was “discharged,” Ziegler said. The President’s letter to Bork said Ruckelshaus resigned.

Mr. Nixon then directed Bork to carry out the instruction. Bork did so in a two-paragraph letter to Cox, in which he said that at the instruction of the President he was “discharging you, effective at once, from your position as special prosecutor, Watergate special prosecution force.”

Bork signed his letter as “acting Attorney General.”

Richardson told the President in his letter that he was resigning with “deep regret.” He explained that when named Attorney General “you gave me the authority to name a special prosecutor.”

“At many points throughout the nomination hearings, I reaffirmed my intention to assure the independence of the special prosecutor,” Richardson said.

He said he promised that Cox would not be dismissed except for “extraordinary improprieties.”

“While I fully respect the reasons that have led you to conclude that the special prosecutor must be discharged, I trust that you understand that I could not in the light of these firm and repeated commitments carry out your direction that this be done,” Richardson said.

Richardson expressed “lasting gratitude” to the President, under whom he also served as under secretary of state, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and Secretary of Defense. He became Attorney General in May after the resignation of Richard G. Kleindienst, who explained that because of his close association with former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and others involved in Watergate he did not believe he should stay in the post and carry out their prosecution.

“It has been a privilege to share in your efforts to make the structure of world peace more stable and the structure of our own government more responsive,” Richardson wrote Mr. Nixon.

“I believe profoundly in the rightness and importance of those efforts, and I trust that they will meet with increasing success in the remaining years of your presidency.”

The President replied with a one-sentence letter, addressed “Dear Elliott.” It said: “It is with the deepest regret and with an understanding of the circumstances which brought you to your decision that I accept your resignation.”

The White House did not release an exchange of letters between Ruckelshaus and the President. But Ruckelshaus wrote a resignation letter and released it.

In a letter to Bork, the President, noting that by law he was acting Attorney General, said that Cox had “made it apparent that he will not comply with the instructions I issued to him.”

“Clearly the government of the United States cannot function if employees of the executive branch are free to ignore in this fashion the instructions of the President,” Mr. Nixon wrote.

“Accordingly, in your capacity of acting Attorney General, I direct you to discharge Mr. Cox immediately and to take all steps necessary to return to the Department of Justice the functions now being performed by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force.

“It is my expectation that the Department of Justice will continue with full vigor the investigations and prosecutions that had been entrusted to the Watergate special prosecution force.”

At the Justice Department, where there were repeated requests by newsmen to interview Richardson and Ruckelshaus, department spokesman John W. Hushen said they had “no desire to come out and talk to newsmen.”

Hushen quoted Bork: “All I will say is that I carried out the President’s directive.”

Hushen said that Richardson would hold a news conference “within a few days.” Beginning about 8 p.m., Richardson spent an hour or so calling “relatives, friends and associates,” Hushen said.

White House aides, visibly shocked by the developments, argued that when direct quotations from the presidential tapes are released they will restore confidence in the President.

Sen. John Stennis (D-Miss.), picked by Mr. Nixon to listen to all the tapes, will have “unlimited” access to the pertinent recordings and can decide what should or should not be disclosed.

Stennis is expected to begin listening to them soon, possibly early this week. Those requested by the special prosecutor run 10 hours and one minute. Stennis may decide to listen to all or parts of them more than once. He will be the only one to do so. The President’s statement on the tapes and excerpts from them will be delivered to the U.S. District Court here and to the Senate Watergate committee at the same time, officials said.

Nixon Tells Editors, ‘I’m Not a Crook’

By Carroll Kilpatrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 1973

Orlando, Fla, Nov. 17 — Declaring that “I am not a crook,” President Nixon vigorously defended his record in the Watergate case tonight and said he had never profited from his public service.

“I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life I have never obstructed justice,” Mr. Nixon said.

“People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”

In an hour-long televised question-and-answer session with 400 Associated Press managing editors, Mr. Nixon was tense and sometimes misspoke. But he maintained his innocence in the Watergate case and promised to supply more details on his personal finances and more evidence from tapes and presidential documents.

The President was loquacious in his answers and at the end solicited a question on the charges that the administration raised milk support prices in exchange for campaign contributions from the milk lobby.

Denying the charge, the President said Democrats led the fight in the House and Senate for higher support prices and pointed a gun at his head requiring him to boost support prices.

The President acknowledged that he had “made a mistake” in not more closely supervising campaign activities. In a question on what he may do after he leaves office, he quipped that it depended on when he left.

Then, becoming serious, he said that he would write but not speak, practice law or serve on boards of directors. One thing he will do is work for new rules of campaign procedures. He said he did not want to be remembered as a President who did many things but let his own campaign get out of hand.

Mr. Nixon acknowledged under questioning that he paid only nominal income taxes in 1970 and 1971 but he did not give figures. He also said that his brother Donald’s phone was tapped for unexplained security reasons.

Discussing energy conservation, Mr. Nixon drew laughter when he said that he had made a saving by refusing to allow a back-up aircraft to follow him on this trip.

“If this one goes down,” he said in reference to his Air Force plane, “they don’t have to impeach.”

While the President was nervous, he was not floored by any of the questions but answered them much as he does in any press conference.

He flew here tonight from his Key Biscayne, Fla., home for the much-heralded question-and-answer period. He was well prepared, remembering dates and times when he held key meetings with various aides on Watergate matters.

Summing up, he declared that the White House tape recordings would prove that he had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in, that he never offered executive clemency for the Watergate burglars, and in fact turned it down when it was suggested, and had no knowledge until March 21, 1973, of proposals that blackmail money be paid a convicted Watergate conspirator.

Regarding the June 20, 1972, brief telephone conversation with former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, Mr. Nixon said no tape was made because the call was from the family quarters in the White House. He said he called to cheer up Mitchell because Mitchell was chagrined because he had not properly controlled those under him — in the re-election campaign, which he once headed, and the burglary was embarrassing the administration.

Mr. Nixon said he was very greatly disappointed that the tapes of the Mitchell conversation and the April 15, 1973, conversation with former counsel John W. Dean III did not exist.

He was told first on Sept. 29 or 30 this year that the tapes in question might not exist, the President said. After a search, it was determined on Oct. 26 that they did not exist, he said.

He said he dictated a report on the Mitchell conversation, which does exist, and has notes on the Dean conversation which he has turned over to U.S. District Court Judge John J. Sirica.

His own taping system was “a little Sony with lapel mikes” at his desk, and it was not as good as the system President Johnson had, Mr. Nixon said.

But the tapes can be heard, he said, and will prove that he was not involved in the Watergate cover-up, he insisted.

When he was asked about a report in the Providence Journal that he paid $702 in income taxes in 1970 and $878 in 1971, Mr. Nixon congratulated the paper on its sources of information but did not confirm or deny the figures, although he said they were nominal. He said he paid $79,000 in income taxes in 1969.

After Mr. Nixon entered office, former President Johnson told him he had given his presidential papers and that he, Mr. Nixon, could give his vice-presidential papers to the government for a tax deduction.

The Internal Revenue Service appraised the papers at $500,000 and the people who prepared his returns took that deduction, the President said.

“I can only say that what we were told was the right thing to do and of course what President Johnson has done before. And that doesn’t prove certainly that it was wrong because he had done exactly what the law required. Since 1969 of course I should point out presidents can’t do that.”

Mr. Nixon said the government could give him back the papers any time and he could make more than $500,00 by publishing them.

“I am the first President since Harry Truman who hasn’t owned any stock” since taking office, Mr. Nixon said.

When he left office as Vice President in 1961 his net worth was $47,000, he said. “In the next eight years, I made a lot of money,” he said.

Mr. Nixon said he made $250,000 from his book, Six Crises, and earned between $100,000 and $250,000 a year practicing law.

In 1968, he said, he sold all his stock for about $300,000, his new New York condominium apartment for $300,000, and received $100,000 due him from his law firm.

“I made my mistakes,” he said, “but in all of my years of public life I have never profited from public service.”

When asked whether Donald Nixon’s telephone was tapped by the Secret Service, the President said the Secret Service “did maintain a surveillance. They did so for security reasons, and I will not go beyond that. They were very good reasons, and my brother was aware of it.”

The President did not use the phrase “national security,” but only “security.” When questioned further he said the surveillance “involved not what he was doing (but) others who were trying to get him, perhaps to use improper influence and support might be doing, and particularly anybody who might be in a foreign country.”

[In September, The Washington Post quoted reliable sources as saying Mr. Nixon ordered his brother’s phone tapped because he feared that his brother’s various financial activities might embarrass the administration.]

Asked if his brother was aware of the surveillance, he said. “He was aware during the fact, because he asked about it, and he was told about it. And he approved of it. He knew why it was done.”

The questioning continued to focus on Watergate almost for the entire hour even though the President seemed pleased when he got a few questions on other subjects.

When asked whether he still thought former aides John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. (Bob) Haldeman were fine public servants, as he once characterized them, Mr. Nixon called them “dedicated, fine public servants, and it is my belief, based on what I know now, that when these proceedings are completed that they will come out all right.”

But he said it “probably doesn’t make any difference whether the grand jury indicts them or not, because unfortunately they have already been convicted in the minds of millions of Americans by what happened before the Senate (Watergate) committee.”

It was in this context that the President seriously misspoke himself, saying, “I hold that both men and others who have been charged are guilty until we have evidence that they are not guilty.”

His press secretary arranged for a subsequent questioner to make a correction.

The President recalled that Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen said six months ago that the Watergate cases were 90 per cent completed. Yet former Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox never brought the cases to conclusion, Mr. Nixon said. He urged that the cases be brought to trial as quickly as possible to clear those who are innocent and fix the blame on those who are guilty.

The President said he did not know until March 17, 1973, that the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist had been broken into by White House “plumbers.”

“I personally thought it was a stupid thing to do, apart from being an illegal thing to do,” he said.

The President remarked toward the end of his scheduled hour that the editors had not raised some of the subjects that he had obviously expected, including milk prices and the International Telephone and Telegraph Corp. case.

He said he would raise these questions himself and hoped that he could answer them “through the medium of a television conference like this.”

He went on to say he would send to the “editors of the nation’s newspapers, all 10,000 of them, the facts. I trust that you will use them . . . but if you feel you need more information, write to me and I will give it to you.”

Another Tape Found Faulty, Sirica Is Told Haldeman, Nixon Talk Is Involved

By George Lardner Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 22, 1973

White House lawyers told U.S. District Court Chief Judge John J. Sirica yesterday that an 18 minute segment of another of President Nixon’s subpoenaed Watergate tapes is blank.

White House special counsel J. Fred Buzhardt said that “the phenomenon” cropped up in the midst of a recorded conversation between Mr. Nixon and former White House chief of staff H. R. (Bob) Haldeman.

The meeting took place in Mr. Nixon’s Executive Office Building suite on June 20, 1972, just three days after discovery of the break-in and bugging at Democratic National Committee headquarters here. According to former Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox’s subpoena, “there is every reason to infer that the meeting included discussion of the Watergate incident.”

Dismayed at the report of another missing coversation, Judge Sirica gave the President until Monday to submit all the extant recordings that Cox subpoenaed for safekeeping at the U.S. courthouse here.

If Mr. Nixon is unwilling to do that voluntarily, Sirica said, he would ask Watergate prosecutors to issue a fresh subpoena for the full reels of tape containing the disputed conversations.

Judge Sirica said he was taking the step “not because the court doesn’t trust the White House or the President,” but “in the interest of seeing that nothing else happens” to the still-secret tapes.

Sirica had been planning to leave the original recordings in White House custody until a panel of experts completed a series of tests for any signs of tampering, a process that is expected to take several weeks.

Buzhardt said the June 20 discussion breaks off into what he described as “an audible tone and no conversation” for an 18-minute interval. He said there was conversation between the President and Haldeman both at the beginning and at the end of the unrecognizable portion.

Watergate prosecutors who briefly monitored the recording before yesterday’s hearing said it is “partially obliterated.”

Buzhardt did not contest that description. The White House lawyer said he was told that whatever was said between the President and Haldeman in those 18 minutes has been lost forever. “It is my understanding that it cannot be gotten back,” Buzhardt told reporters after the hearing.

The startling new disclosure came just one day after Mr. Nixon assured the Republican Governors Association in Memphis that the GOP would not be hit with any more bombshells in the Watergate case.

“If there are any more bombs, I’m not aware of them,” the President told the governors Tuesday at their winter conference.

Buzhardt acknowledged that the President knew of the problem with the June 20 tape when he made that remark. The White House lawyer said the missing segment was discovered last Wednesday, Nov. 14, when he and other attorneys for the President were playing back a copy of the original tape to compile an analysis and index that had been ordered by the courts.

The President, Buzhardt said was told “shortly thereafter.”

Buzhardt’s remarks indicated that the White House at least briefly contemplated taking the legal position that the June 20 meeting with Haldeman was not covered by the Cox subpoena because of what Buzhardt called its “ambiguity.”

Cox’s subpoena, Buzhardt said, described the June 20 session as just “one meeting” between the President, Ehrlichman and Haldeman. Actually, the White House lawyer said, there were two sessions, the first between the President and Ehrlichman and the second between the President and Haldeman.

The sessions had been prefaced by a get-together earlier that same day at the White House between Haldeman, Ehrlichman, former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, former White House Counsel John W. Dean III and reportedly Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst.

“This was their first opportunity for full discussion of how to handle the Watergate incident,” Cox said in his subpoena, “and Ehrlichman has testified that Watergate was indeed the primary subject of the meeting.

“From there,” the subpoena said, “Ehrlichman and then Haldeman went to see the President. The inference that they reported on Watergate and may well have received instructions, is almost irresistible.”

White House aides had also been busy the day before these sessions. On June 19, Dean has said, he spoke to several people, including Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy.

According to reported logs of Mr. Nixon’s meetings on June 20, the President met with Ehrlichman from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. The meeting with Haldeman, including the 18 blank minutes, apparently lasted from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The tape of those conversations was apparently the first one that Mr. Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, attempted to transcribe in September at Camp David. She said it eventually took her more than 30 hours to get through it.

Miss Woods testified earlier this month that she could not recall the date of the tape that caused her so much trouble, but she said, “It was the first one on the list . . . It was between the President and Ehrlichman chiefly and Haldeman briefly. It was on all sorts of things. It must have been a two-hour or three-hour meeting.”

The only meeting fitting that approximate description on Cox’s subpoena list took place on June 20, 1972.

In her testimony, Miss Woods said the tape was of “very bad” quality. But she did not mention any long blank spot.

Buzhardt said the White House conducted “a large number of technical tests” with the problem tape Tuesday, but all were “unsuccessful.”

“We don’t know what the character of the problem is,” Buzhardt told reporters. The cause, he said, is also unknown.

The White House had already told Judge Sirica last month that two other subpoenaed conversations — a phone call from the President to former Attorney General Mitchell on the evening of June 20 and an April 15, 1973 meeting with Dean — had never been recorded.

The Washington Post subsequently reported being told by five different sources that difficulties had arisen concerning the quality of the seven other tapes Cox had subpoenaed.

Except for the June 2- conversation with Haldeman, however, Buzhardt told the court yesterday that “all of the other tapes subpoenaed have been audible throughout.”

Judge Sirica was first told of the missing segment in a chambers conference yesterday afternoon. He then ordered a report made in open court.

Sirica said he was surprised by the disclosure and called it “just another instance” that convinced him he should take some steps to preserve the rest of the recordings. He proposed putting the six-hour reels of tape containing the disputed conversations in a courthouse safe under round-the-clock guard by two deputy U.S. marshals.

Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste said the report that the June 20 conversations with Haldeman is “partially obliterated” would get intensive scrutiny.

White House officials briefly played back the original tape of the Haldeman meeting for Watergate prosecutors yesterday morning to pinpoint the conversation-less segment.

At the hearing before Judge Sirica, Buzhardt protested production of the full six-hour reels on grounds that they include many other conversations not covered by the subpoena, but Sirica did not seem persuaded. He said he did not intend to listen to them.

Judge Sirica said he would resume his hearings on the tapes at 10 a.m. Monday. Meanwhile, he announced the appointment of a six-member panel of experts “to study the authenticity and integrity” of the tapes.

Selected jointly by the White House and the Watergate prosecution force, the panel includes:

Richard H. Bolt, chairman of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., firm that specializes in acoustics and computer technology.

Franklin Cooper, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of Connecticut, a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, and a former research engineer for General Electric Research Laboratories.

James L. Flanagan, an electrical engineer now with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former Bell Laboratories specialist in digital coding of speech and acoustic measurements.

John G. (Jay) McKnight, an electrical engineer and audio systems consultant.

Thomas G. Stockham Jr., an associate professor in the University of Utah’s computer science department.

Mark R. Weiss, vice president for acoustics research of the Federal Scientific Corp. of New York City.

Sirica said their testing would involve physical and electrical measurements of the tapes and should be completed in January.

Part III

President Nixon gestures toward transcripts of White House tapes after announcing he would turn them over to House impeachment investigators and make them public in April of 1974. (AP photo)

Nixon Resigns

“One year of Watergate is enough,” President Nixon declared in his State of the Union address in January 1974. But the embattled president could not put the issue behind him. Special prosecutor Jaworski and the Senate Watergate Committee continued to demand that the White House turn over tapes and transcripts. As public support for Nixon waned, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives began to consider the ultimate sanction for a president—impeachment.

Nixon cast himself as a defender of the presidency. He insisted that he had made mistakes but broke no laws. He said he had no prior knowledge of the burglary and did not know about the cover-up until early 1973. To release the tapes, he said, would harm future chief executives. The pressure on Nixon mounted in March 1974, when the special prosecutor indicted former Attorney General John Mitchell, former aides Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and four other staffers for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with the Watergate burglary. While the grand jury wanted to indict Nixon himself, Jaworski declined to do so doubting the constitutionality of indicting a sitting president.

To mollify his critics, Nixon announced in April 1974 the release of 1,200 pages of transcripts of conversations between him and his aides. The conversations, “candid beyond any papers ever made public by a President,” in the words of The Post stoked more outrage. Even Nixon’s most loyal conservative supporters voiced dismay about profanity-laced discussions in the White House around how to raise blackmail money and avoid perjury.

Nixon’s legal defense began to crumble in May when a federal court ruled in favor of Jaworksi’s subpoena for the White House tapes. Nixon’s lawyers appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. His political position faltered in June, amid reports that all 21 Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee were prepared to vote for impeachment. On July 24, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the White House to hand over the tapes to the special prosecutor. Two days later the Judicary Committee approved one article of impeachment to be voted on by the entire House.

When Nixon released the tapes a week later, a June 23, 1972, conversation showed that Nixon had, contrary to repeated claims of innocence, played a leading role in the cover-up from the very start. Dubbed “the smoking gun” tape, this recording eliminated what little remained of Nixon’s support. Even his closest aides told him he had to resign or face the almost certain prospect of impeachment.

On August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation. “By taking this action,” he said in a subdued yet dramatic television address from the Oval Office, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.” In a rare admission of error, Nixon said: “I deeply regret any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision.” In a final speech to the White House staff, a teary-eyed Nixon told his audience, “Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn into office on Aug. 9, 1974, declaring “our long national nightmare is over.” One month later, Ford granted Nixon a “full, free and absolute pardon” for all crimes that Nixon “committed or may have committed” during his time in the White House.

The Watergate affair was over, but its influence was not. The interlinked scandals generated a new and enduring skepticism about the federal government in American public opinion. The lingo of the scandal—"to cover-up,” to “stonewall,” and “to leak"—became part of the American political vocabulary. The newly assertive Congress passed campaign finance reform legislation and probed abuses of power at the CIA and other national security agencies. Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting, recounted in a best-selling book, All the President’s Men, and a hit movie infused American journalism with a new adversarial edge. Before long, the appointment of special prosecutors to investigate allegations of presidential wrongdoing became the norm in Washington. Watergate had changed American politics permanently and profoundly.

The stories leading up to his resignation:

President Hands Over Transcripts Initial Reaction on Hill Divided Along Party Lines

By Haynes Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 1, 1974

The Nixon Watergate papers, the most extraordinary documents ever to come out of the White House, have been made public to the Congress and the American people.

They are massive in content (more than 200,000 words), riveting in language and characterization of public figures, and explosive in their revelations about the President’s role in Watergate.

Release of the 1,254 pages of the secretly recorded conversations of crucial Watergate-related meetings from September, 1972, through April, 1973, came in two distinct installments yesterday.

The first segment, made public in the morning after the President’s nationally televised address, was in the form of a White House summary of the conversations — in effect, an official “white paper” on the Watergate affair.

Its tone was that of a lawyer’s brief, strongly arguing that the public disclosure will establish, once and for all, the President’s innocence.

“In all of the thousands of words spoken,” the White House summary said, “even though they often are unclear and ambiguous, not once does it appear that the President of the United States was engaged in a criminal plot to obstruct justice.”

Throughout the morning and early afternoon an intensive White House public relations effort was under way across the country to reinforce that view. White House aides were calling editors and reporters in an attempt to demonstrate that the “truth” of Watergate, as now made public, completely absolves the President.

The immediate reaction on Capitol Hill divided along political lines. John Rhodes of Arizona, the House Republican leader, said the transcripts showed the President “in substantial compliance” with a House Judiciary Committee subpoena.

Democratic response tended to follow the lead of House Speaker Carl Albert. “Why substitute other evidence when the direct evidence [the actual tapes] is available?” he said.

Then, shortly after 3 p.m., the second wave struck in the release of the edited documents. They, clearly, were open to other interpretations than those given by the White House brief.

The conversations show the President discussing at length raising blackmail money; discussing the merits of offering clemency or parole; suggesting how to handle possible perjury or obstruction of justice charges; urging the adoption of a “national security” defense for potential White House defendants.

They are candid beyond any papers ever made public by a President. Even though the transcripts were edited to remove expletives, they still contain occasional profanities and harsh judgments on individuals. They also contain disclosures of a kind that are certain to inspire even stronger future controversy about Mr. Nixon’s role.

The controversy over Mr. Nixon’s compliance with the congressional subpoena also continues. Today the House Judiciary Committee will meet to give its formal response on whether its members find the President in compliance with their legal request for the production of 42 tapes and related materials — or whether they will initiate contempt proceedings in Congress.

Such a finding could become a key charge in the impeachment proceedings now under way.

The transcripts, even in their expurgated form, are certain to be talked about and read long after Mr. Nixon leaves the White House: the Government Printing Office is already planning to sell them at $12.25 a set, and they will be the subject of countless other books and studies about the way the Nixon administration handled its Watergate crisis.

The conversations are laced with references to “laundering” money and cash payments, to “coded” phone conversations and burglaries and break-ins and even, in one instance, to a Mafia-type operation.

At one point in the celebrated March 21, 1973, meeting between the President and his then-counsel, John W. Dean III, Mr. Nixon responds to the question of raising $1 million in “hush money” by saying:

“We could get that. On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is, Who would handle it? Any ideas on that?”

Dean had an idea — former Attorney General John N. Mitchell. The President agreed. “I would think so, too,” he said.

In that same conversation, Dean had complained that the people at the White House were not “pros” at “this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do . . .”

“That’s right,” the President responded.

The conversation continued:

Dean: It is a tough thing to know how to do.

Mr. Nixon: Maybe it takes a gang to do that.

His release of his private conversations comes exactly a year to the day after he first reported in full to the public on the Watergate affair.

Now he is even more deeply engaged in fighting the most difficult political battle of his life.

Court Orders Nixon to Yield Tapes; President Promises to Comply Fully Justices Reject Privilege Claim in 8-to-0 Ruling

By John P. MacKenzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 25, 1974

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday unanimously, and definitively, that President Nixon must turn over tape recordings of White House conversations needed by the Watergate special prosecutor for the trial of the President’s highest aides.

Ordering compliance with a trial subpoena “forthwith,” the court rejected Mr. Nixon’s broad claims of unreviewable executive privilege and said they “must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.”

The President said he was “disappointed” by the decision but said he would comply. His lawyer said the time-consuming process of collecting and indexing the tapes would begin immediately.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger delivered the historic judgment in a packed and hushed courtroom. His 31-page opinion drew heavily on both the great cases of the court’s past, as well as the pro-prosecution edicts of a court dominated by Nixon appointees.

Only a few times in its history has the court grappled with such large assertions of governmental power. As in most of those encounters, the justices concluded that the judiciary must have the last word in an orderly constitutional system even though its view of the Constitution is “at variance with the construction given the document by another branch.”

Brushing aside warnings by presidential lawyer James D. St. Clair that it was in an impeachment thicket, the court handed down its 8-to-0 ruling hours before the House Judiciary Committee was scheduled to open debate on proposed articles of impeachment.

One justice, William H. Rehnquist, disqualified himself because of his previous association with former Attorney General John N. Mitchell in the Justice Department.

The decision itself had implications for the impeachment proceedings. Although the court said it was not concerned with “congressional demands for information,” the ruling weakened the White House legal argument against Judiciary Committee subpoenas.

Calls for prompt compliance with the Supreme Court decision came from Congress. A few voices were heard for slowing down the impeachment drive long enough to explore the remote hope that Congress could obtain the tapes from U.S. District Court Judge John J. Sirica or Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski.

Jaworski, who has denied St. Clair’s charge that his office is a mere conduit of evidence for pro-impeachment forces, was restrained in expressing satisfaction at the ruling. “It doesn’t leave any doubt in anyone’s mind,” he said.

Only one of St. Clair’s arguments came close to persuading the justices. The court declared, in its most extensive discussion of the issue to date, that executive privilege is “constitutionally based” even though it is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.

But while communication between the President and his advisers is “presumptively privileged,” the court said that this presumption can be outweighed by the demonstrated needs of the judicial process.

The court recognized a privilege for matters dealing with diplomatic or national security secrets, but stressed that federal judges may inspect such material in chambers in the course of selecting evidence the prosecutor should have.

No such security claims have been advanced in the current dispute over subpoenaed tapes and documents covering 64 conversations — most of which implicate the President himself in the Watergate cover-up conspiracy, according to Jaworski — between June, 1972, and April 26 of this year.

Any national security arguments must now be advanced directly to Judge Sirica, whose May 20 order to produce the material for his inspection was affirmed in all respects.

The judge initially gave St. Clair 11 days to produce the original tapes and documents along with an index showing what portions the White House contended were irrelevant, together with copies of 20 tapes for which Mr. Nixon published edited White House transcripts on April 30.

This screening process may consume most of the seven weeks that remain before the Sept. 9 trial of John N. Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman and other Nixon confidants. Evidence introduced at that trial would be available to Congress, too late for the scheduled House impeachment vote but in time for a Senate trial if that occurs.

If White House lawyers disagree with any ruling by Judge Sirica on relevance or executive privilege, they are free to attempt piecemeal delaying appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but the high court indicated that the judge’s rulings should not be lightly overturned.

St. Clair in a statement last night at the Western White House in San Clemente indicated that collecting and organizing the tapes for submission to Judge Sirica had not yet begun. In a brief statement he told newsmen the process “will begin forthwith.”

During the oral argument July 8, Justice Thurgood Marshall suggested that the process should have begun some time ago. St. Clair said he hadn’t started because he did not expect to lose the appeal from Judge Sirica’s order.

Among the numerous defeats suffered by Mr. Nixon was the high court’s decision to ignore St. Clair’s contention that the grand jury had no constitutional right to brand the President an unindicted co-conspirator in the cover-up case.

The court said the validity of Judge Sirica’s order could be decided without tackling that question, so it dismissed “as improvidently granted” the writ of review it had issued on that point.

As a result, the White House must go to the U.S. Court of Appeals with its motion to expunge the grand jury’s 19-to-0 vote to name the President as a conspirator. The finding will stand in the meantime.

More important than the label of “conspirator” was the indication in Burger’s opinion that the evidence at trial may link Mr. Nixon to the alleged conspiracy. If that happens, Mr. Nixon’s taped statements are easily admissible as evidence against the defendants. Burger said Judge Sirica did not err in his preliminary, pre-trial estimate that the evidence was admissible and therefore should be produced now.

Burger said the pre-trial test of executive privilege was especially appropriate in this case because, although no President is “above the law,” it would be “unseemly” to frame the dispute as a case of contempt for violating a court order.

The impact of the court’s decision was increased by the fact that it was delivered by Burger, appointed to the nation’s top judicial post by President Nixon.

Equally impressive was the court’s unanimity on every issue in the case — a tricky question of the court’s jurisdiction, the enforcement of the subpoena under conventional criminal law standards and the merits of the executive privilege controversy.

The issue of jurisdiction, considered by some legal scholars to be St. Clair’s strongest point, also raised a storm in Congress over whether the administration had reneged on its pledge giving Jaworski independence and the right to take the President to court over disputes on executive privilege.

St. Clair argued that the pledges, contained in published Justice Department regulations, did not and could not guarantee that the courts would have the legal power to decide contests between President Nixon and his executive branch subordinate, Jaworski.
Jaworski replied that this argument would make a “mockery” of his role, which was worked out to prevent a repetition of the “Saturday night massacre” firing last October of his predecessor, Archibald Cox.

Burger easily disposed of St. Clair’s argument. He said the unique job security and authority granted to Jaworski under regulations having “the force of law” made the case far more significant that the mere “intra-branch” squabble St. Clair said it was.

Even assuming the President once had the power to order Jaworski fired, Burger said, he denied himself that authority with the regulations. And while “it is theoretically possible” to revoke the regulations, the attorney general “has not done so. So long as this regulation remains in force the executive branch is bound by it, and indeed the United States as the sovereign composed of the three branches is bound to respect and to enforce it.”

This reasoning also appears to mean it was illegal to fire Cox last fall, since a similar regulation was in force then. A decision in U.S. District Court here declaring the Cox firing illegal is currently on appeal.

Although Burger did not mention it, it is widely assumed that any move now to dismiss Jaworski would result in another “firestorm” of protest and hasten President Nixon’s impeachment.

Burger said that looking beneath the formal titles of the parties and their formal relationship within the same branch of government, the case was clearly “the kind of controversy courts traditionally resolve,” especially since it comes up in the course of a criminal trial in a federal court.

Moving to the propriety of the subpoena under ordinary criminal law rules, Burger said Judge Sirica clearly acted within his powers in finding the requested evidence relevant to the prosecution, probably admissible as evidence and sufficiently specific to avoid being characterized as part of a “fishing expedition.”

Burger said Jaworski was able to show where each of the 64 conversations fits into the prosecution’s case aided by White House logs, testimony from last summer’s Watergate hearings and grand jury evidence.

Burger said St. Clair’s “most cogent objection to the admissibility of the taped conversations” was that they were “hearsay” statements by individuals “who will not be subject to cross-examination” at trial.

It was here that the chief justice appeared to acknowledge that President Nixon could be treated as a co-conspirator for purposes of admitting his statements in evidence, even if the President was correct in contending that the grand jury lacked power to label him a conspirator in a formal vote. Burger said:

“Declarations by one defendant may also be admissible against other defendants upon a sufficient showing, by independent evidence of a conspiracy among one or more other defendants and the declarant and if the declarations at issue were in furtherance of that conspiracy.”

Burger said a blend of deference to the trial judge and to the President was appropriate in handling this delicate question. Trial judges are afforded wide discretion in ordinary cases, he noted, but added that reviewing courts “should be particularly meticulous to insure that the standards” of criminal law have been correctly applied “where a subpoena is directed to a President of the United States.

The justices have examined the record, including some grand jury material that is still under seal, and they are satisfied that Judge Sirica met the standards in evaluating the question of probable admissibility, Burger said.

Finally, Burger reached the heart of the dispute and he quickly found that President Nixon was wrong in arguing that courts must honor without question any presidential claim of executive privilege.

Burger repeatedly said the court had the utmost respect for the other branches of government but was obliged to reach its own judgment on whether the President’s need for confidentiality was as great as the judiciary’s need for the evidence.

Acknowledging that each branch of government “must initially interpret the Constitution and the interpretation of its powers by any branch is due great respect from the others,” Burger then quoted and reaffirmed a classic phrase from the 1803 opinion of Chief Justice John Marshall in the case of Marbury vs. Madison:

“It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

Burger also acknowledged Jaworski’s argument that “executive privilege” isn’t mentioned in the Constitution although some enumerated privileges have been given restricted scope by the high court. But he accepted St. Clair’s argument instead and declared that “certain powers and privileges flow from the nature of enumerated powers. The protection of the confidentiality of presidential communications has similar constitutional underpinnings.”

But, said Burger, “when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises.” Without a plea to protect military, diplomatic or national security secrets, he said, “we find it difficult to accept” the argument that confidentiality would be significantly diminished by a turnover.

“We cannot conclude,” he said, “that advisers will be moved to temper the candor of their remarks by the infrequent occasions of disclosure because of the possibility that such conversations will be called for in the context of a criminal prosecution.”

Nixon Resigns

By Carroll Kilpatrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 9, 1974

Richard Milhous Nixon announced last night that he will resign as the 37th President of the United States at noon today.

Vice President Gerald R. Ford of Michigan will take the oath as the new President at noon to complete the remaining 2 ½ years of Mr. Nixon’s term.

After two years of bitter public debate over the Watergate scandals, President Nixon bowed to pressures from the public and leaders of his party to become the first President in American history to resign.

“By taking this action,” he said in a subdued yet dramatic television address from the Oval Office, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”

Vice President Ford, who spoke a short time later in front of his Alexandria home, announced that Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger will remain in his Cabinet.

The President-to-be praised Mr. Nixon’s sacrifice for the country and called it “one of the vary saddest incidents that I’ve every witnessed.”

Mr. Nixon said he decided he must resign when he concluded that he no longer had “a strong enough political base in the Congress” to make it possible for him to complete his term of office.

Declaring that he has never been a quitter, Mr. Nixon said that to leave office before the end of his term “ is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.”

But “as President, I must put the interests of America first,” he said.

While the President acknowledged that some of his judgments “were wrong,” he made no confession of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” with which the House Judiciary Committee charged him in its bill of impeachment.

Specifically, he did not refer to Judiciary Committee charges that in the cover-up of Watergate crimes he misused government agencies such as the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Internal Revenue Service.

After the President’s address, Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski issued a statement declaring that “there has been no agreement or understanding of any sort between the President or his representatives and the special prosecutor relating in any way to the President’s resignation.”

Jaworski said that his office “was not asked for any such agreement or understanding and offered none.”

His office was informed yesterday afternoon of the President’s decision, Jaworski said, but “my office did not participate in any way in the President’s decision to resign.”

Mr. Nixon’s brief speech was delivered in firm tones and he appeared to be complete control of his emotions. The absence of rancor contrasted sharply with the “farewell” he delivered in 1962 after being defeated for the governorship of California.

An hour before the speech, however, the President broke down during a meeting with old congressional friends and had to leave the room.

He had invited 20 senators and 26 representatives for a farewell meeting in the Cabinet room. Later, Sen. Barry M. Goldwater (R-Ariz.), one of those present, said Mr. Nixon said to them very much what he said in his speech.

“He just told us that the country couldn’t operate with a half-time President,” Goldwater reported. “Then he broke down and cried and he had to leave the room. Then the rest of us broke down and cried.”

In his televised resignation, after thanking his friends for their support, the President concluded by saying he was leaving office “with this prayer: may God’s grace be with you in all the days ahead.”

As for his sharpest critics, the President said, “I leave with no bitterness toward those who have opposed me.” He called on all Americans to “join together . . . in helping our new President succeed.”

The President said he had thought it was his duty to persevere in office in face of the Watergate charges and to complete his term.

“In the past days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort,” Mr. Nixon said.

His family “unanimously urged” him to stay in office and fight the charges against him, he said. But he came to realize that he would not have the support needed to carry out the duties of his office in difficult times.

“America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress,” Mr. Nixon said. The resignation came with “a great sadness that I will not be here in this office” to complete work on the programs started, he said.

But praising Vice President Ford, Mr. Nixon said that “the leadership of America will be in good hands.”

In his admission of error, the outgoing President said: “I deeply regret any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision.”

He emphasized that world peace had been the overriding concern of his years in the White House.

When he first took the oath, he said, he made a “sacred commitment” to “consecrate my office and wisdom to the cause of peace among nations.”

“I have done my very best in all the days since to be true to that pledge,” he said, adding that he is now confident that the world is a safer place for all peoples.

“This more than anything is what I hoped to achieve when I sought the presidency,” Mr. Nixon said. “This more than anything is what I hope will be my legacy to you, to our country, as I leave the presidency.”

Noting that he had lived through a turbulent period, he recalled a statement of Theodore Roosevelt about the man “in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” and who, if he fails “at least fails while daring greatly.”

Mr. Nixon placed great emphasis on his successes in foreign affairs. He said his administration had “unlocked the doors that for a quarter of a century stood between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.”

In the mideast, he said, the United States must begin to build on the peace in that area. And with the Soviet Union, he said, the administration had begun the process of ending the nuclear arms race. The goal now, he said, is to reduce and finally destroy those arms “so that the threat of nuclear war will no longer hang over the world.” The two countries, he added, “must live together in cooperation rather than in confrontation.”

Mr. Nixon has served 2,026 days as the 37th President of the United States. He leaves office with 2 ½ years of his second term remaining to be carried out by the man he nominated to be Vice President last year.

Yesterday morning, the President conferred with his successor. He spent much of the day in his Executive Office Building hideaway working on his speech and attending to last-minute business.

At 7:30 p.m., Mr. Nixon again left the White House for the short walk to the Executive Office Building. The crowd outside the gates waved U.S. flags and sang “America” as he walked slowly up the steps, his head bowed, alone.

At the EOB, Mr. Nixon met for a little over 20 minutes with the leaders of Congress — James O. Eastland (D-Miss.), president pro tem to the Senate; Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), Senate majority leader; Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), Senate minority leader; Carl Albert (D-Okla.), speaker of the House; and John Rhodes (R-Ariz.), House minority leader.

It was exactly six years ago yesterday that the 55-year-old Californian accepted the Republican nomination for President for the second time and went on to a narrow victory in November over Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey.

“I was ready. I was willing. And events were such that this seemed to be the time the party was willing for me to carry the standard,” Nixon said after winning first-ballot nomination in the convention at Miami Beach.

In his acceptance speech on Aug. 8, 1968, the nominee appealed for victory to “make the American dream come true for millions of Americans.”

“To the leaders of the Communist world we say, after an era of confrontation, the time has come for an era of negotiation,” Nixon said.

The theme was repeated in his first inaugural address on Jan. 20, 1969, and became the basis for the foreign policy of his first administration.

Largely because of his breakthroughs in negotiations with China and the Soviet Union, and partly because of divisions in the Democratic Party, Mr. Nixon won a mammoth election victory in 1972, only to be brought down by scandals that grew out of an excessive zeal to make certain he would win re-election.

Mr. Nixon and his family are expected to fly to their home in San Clemente, Calif. early today. Press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler and Rose Mary Woods, Mr. Nixon’s devoted personal secretary for more than two decades, will accompany the Nixons.

Alexander M. Haig Jr., the former Army vice chief of staff who was brought into the White House as staff chief following the resignation of H.R. (Bob) Haldeman on April 30, 1973, has been asked by Mr. Ford to remain in his present position.

It is expected that Haig will continue in the position as staff chief to assure an orderly transfer of responsibilities but not stay indefinitely.

The first firm indication yesterday that the President had reached a decision came when deputy press secretary Gerald L. Warren announced at 10:55 a.m. that the President was about to begin a meeting in the Oval Office with the Vice President.

“The President asked the Vice President to come over this morning for a private meeting — and that is all the information I have at this moment,” Warren said.

He promised to post “some routine information, bill actions and appointments” and to return with additional information” in an hour or so.”

Warren’s manner and the news he had to impart made it clear at last that resignation was a certainty. Reports already were circulating on Capitol Hill that the President would hold a reception for friends and staff members late in the day and a meeting with congressional leaders.

Shortly after noon, Warren announced over the loudspeaker in the press room that the meeting between the President and the Vice President had lasted for an hour and 10 minutes.

At 2:20 p.m., press secretary Ziegler walked into the press room and, struggling to control his emotions, read the following statement:

“I am aware of the intense interest of the American people and of you in this room concerning developments today and over the last few days. This has, of course, been a difficult time.

“The President of the United States will meet various members of the bipartisan leadership of Congress here at the White House early this evening.

“Tonight, at 9 o’clock, Eastern Daylight Time, the President of the United States will address the nation on radio and television from his Oval Office.”

The room was packed with reporters, and Ziegler read the statement with difficulty. Although his voice shook, it did not break. As soon as he had finished, he turned on his heel and left the room, without so much as a glance at the men and women in the room who wanted to question him.

There were tears in the eyes of some of the secretaries in the press office. Others, who have been through many crises in recent years and have become used to overwork, plowed ahead with their duties, with telephones ringing incessantly.

In other offices, loyal Nixon workers reacted with sadness but also with resignation and defeat. They were not surprised, and some showed a sense of relief that at last the battle was over.

Some commented bitterly about former aides H.R. (Bob) Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman. The President’s loyal personal aide and valet Manola Sanchez, a Spanish-born immigrant from Cuba whose independence and wit are widely admired, did not hide his feelings.

Speaking bluntly to some of his old friends, he castigated aides he said had betrayed the President. One long-time official, who heard about the Sanchez remarks, commented: “They [Haldeman and Ehrlichman] tried three times to fire him because they couldn’t control him. Imagine, trying to fire someone like Manola.”

But why did the President always rely on Ehrlichman and Haldeman? The official was asked. “Will we ever know?” he replied. “When Mr. Nixon was Vice President,” he recalled, “he demanded that we never abuse the franking privilege. If there was any doubt, we were to use stamps. Everything had to be above board.

“Surely his friendship with Ehrlichman and Haldeman was one of the most expensive in history.”

But the President himself, said another long-time aide, must have been two persons, the one who was motivated by high ideals and another who connived and schemed with his favorite gut-fighters.

One man who worked through most of the first Nixon term said he saw the President angry only once. Often he would say, “That will be tough politically, but we must do the right thing.”

When that official left his post after nearly four years of intimate association with the President, he told his wife: “I’ve never gotten to know what sort of man he is.”

One official, who has known Mr. Nixon well for many years and remains a White House aide, commented: “He is obviously a bad judge of character. But a lot was accomplished. So much more could have been accomplished but for these fun and games. It was such a stupid thing to happen.”

The march of events that brought about the President’s downfall turned its last corner Monday when Mr. Nixon released the partial transcripts of three taped conversations he held on June 23, 1972 with Haldeman.

It seemed inevitable then that this would be his last week in office, yet he continued to fight back and to insist that he would not resign. On Tuesday, the President held a Cabinet meeting and told his official family that he would not resign.

On Wednesday, however, the end appeared near, for his support on Capitol Hill was disappearing at dizzying speed. There were demands from some of his staunchest supporters that he should resign at once.

Late Wednesday, the President met with Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Barry M. Goldwater (R-Ariz.).

They said afterward that the President had made no decision, but it was obvious later that for all intents and purposes the decision had been made despite what the leaders said. They obviously could not make the announcement for him, but it must have been apparent to them that the end was at hand.

Later Wednesday, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger twice conferred with Mr. Nixon, first in the early evening for half an hour and then from 9:30 p.m. until midnight.

It was not known whether the two men were alone or accompanied by Haig and others.

Yesterday, Kissinger met with principal deputies in the State Department to tell them what to expect and to assign tasks to different people. Messages will be sent to heads of state to notify them formally of the change.

A White House spokesman said more than 10,000 telephone calls were received in the past two days expressing “disbelief and the hope that the President would not resign.”

Thursday was a wet, humid August day, but despite intermittent rain the crowds packed the sidewalks in front of the White House. It was an orderly crowd, resigned and curious, watching newsmen come and go and being a part of a dramatic moment in the life of the nation.

Part IV

Joan Felt and her father W. Mark Felt ("Deep Throat") appear in front of their home in Santa Rosa, Calif. in this May 31, 2005, file photo. After I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s conviction on perjury charges people wonder if President Bush will to risk the kind of political grief that pardons form Richard Nixon, Mark Felt, Caspar Weinberger and Marc Rich brought the presidents who granted them. (AP Photo/Ben Margot, File)

Deep Throat Revealed

On May 31, 2005 one of Washington’s best-kept secrets was revealed.

Vanity Fair magazine identified a former top FBI official named Mark Felt as Deep Throat, the secret source high in the U.S. government who helped Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unravel the Watergate conspiracy. Woodward, Bernstein and the paper’s editors confirmed the story.

“Felt’s identity as Washington’s most celebrated secret source had been an object of speculation for more than 30 years,” wrote Post reporter David Von Drehle the next day.

The reporters had written about their trusted source in their best-selling 1974 book, All the President’s Men, and the 1975 movie of the same name dramatized his sometimes cryptic advice about how pursue the connection between the Nixon White House and a crew of seven burglars caught in the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the night of June 17, 1972. His true identity, the object of “countless guesses” over the years, remained secret until Vanity Fair’s story. “I’m the guy they call Deep Throat,” Felt told members of his family.

The day after the story broke, Woodward wrote a first person account of his relationship with Felt, which began with a chance encounter between a junior naval officer and a wary bureaucrat in 1970. Woodward cultivated him as a source. When The Post began to pursue the Watergate story, Woodward relied on Felt for guidance.

In May 2005 Vanity Fair magazine revealed that Mark Felt, pictured above with his daughter, was the source referred to ad “Deep Throat.” The former No. 2 official at the FBI secretly confirmed to Woodward and Bernstein what they discovered from other sources in reporting on the cover-up.

“I was thankful for any morsel or information, confirmation or assistance Felt gave me while Carl and I were attempting to understand the many-headed monster of Watergate. Because of his position virtually atop the chief investigative agency, his words and guidance had immense, at times even staggering, authority,” Woodward wrote.

But as The Post noted, Woodward and Bernstein also “expressed a concern that the Deep Throat story has, over the years, come to obscure the many other elements that went into exposing the Watergate story: other sources, other investigators, high-impact Senate hearings, a shocking trove of secret White House tape recordings and the decisive intervention of a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court.”

“Felt’s role in all this can be overstated,” said Bernstein, who went on after Watergate to a career of books, magazine articles and television investigations. “When we wrote the book, we didn’t think his role would achieve such mythical dimensions. You see there that Felt/Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources.”

The story:

FBI’s No. 2 Was ‘Deep Throat’

By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Deep Throat, the secret source whose insider guidance was vital to The Washington Post’s groundbreaking coverage of the Watergate scandal, was a pillar of the FBI named W. Mark Felt, The Post confirmed yesterday.

As the bureau’s second- and third-ranking official during a period when the FBI was battling for its independence against the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, Felt had the means and the motive to help uncover the web of internal spies, secret surveillance, dirty tricks and coverups that led to Nixon’s unprecedented resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, and to prison sentences for some of Nixon’s highest-ranking aides.

Felt’s identity as Washington’s most celebrated secret source had been an object of speculation for more than 30 years until yesterday, when his role was revealed by his family in a Vanity Fair magazine article. Even Nixon was caught on tape speculating that Felt was “an informer” as early as February 1973, at a time when Deep Throat was supplying confirmation and context for some of The Post’s most explosive Watergate stories.

But Felt’s repeated denials, and the stalwart silence of the reporters he aided — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — kept the cloak of mystery drawn up around Deep Throat. In place of a name and a face, the source acquired a magic and a mystique.

He was the romantic truth teller half hidden in the shadows of a Washington area parking garage. This image was rendered indelibly by the dramatic best-selling memoir Woodward and Bernstein published in 1974, All the President’s Men. Two years later, in a blockbuster movie of the same name, actor Hal Holbrook breathed whispery urgency into the suspenseful late-night encounters between Woodward and his source.

For many Americans under 40, this is the most potent distillation of the complicated brew that was Watergate. Students who lack the time or interest to follow each element of the scandal’s slow unraveling in comprehensive history books can quickly digest the vivid relationship of a nervous elder guiding a relentless reporter.

As dramatic as those portrayals were, they hewed closely to the truth, Woodward said.

“Mark Felt at that time was a dashing gray-haired figure,” Woodward recalled, and his experience as an anti-Nazi spy hunter early in his career at the FBI had endowed him with a whole bag of counterintelligence tricks. Felt dreamed up the signal by which Woodward would summon him to a meeting (a flowerpot innocuously displayed on the reporter’s balcony) and also hatched the countersign by which Felt could contact Woodward (a clock face inked on Page 20 of Woodward’s daily New York Times).

“He knew he was taking a monumental risk,” said Woodward, now an assistant managing editor of The Post whose catalogue of prizewinning and best-selling work has been built on the sort of confidential relationships he maintained with Deep Throat.

Felt also knew, by firsthand experience, that Nixon’s administration was willing to use wiretaps and break-ins to hunt down leakers, so no amount of caution was too great in his mind. Woodward rode multiple taxis, sometimes in the wrong direction, and often walked long distances to reach the middle-of-the-night meetings.

For once, real life was as rich as the Hollywood imagination. But yesterday Woodward and Bernstein expressed a concern that the Deep Throat story has, over the years, come to obscure the many other elements that went into exposing the Watergate story: other sources, other investigators, high-impact Senate hearings, a shocking trove of secret White House tape recordings and the decisive intervention of a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court.

By tethering the myth to a real and imperfect human being, Americans may be able to get a clearer picture of Watergate in the future, they said. “Felt’s role in all this can be overstated,” said Bernstein, who went on after Watergate to a career of books, magazine articles and television investigations. “When we wrote the book, we didn’t think his role would achieve such mythical dimensions. You see there that Felt/Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources.”

The identification is also likely to encourage new arguments about the essential meaning of Watergate, which has been construed by partisans and historians as the fruit of Vietnam, of Nixon’s obsession with the Kennedy family, of the president’s mental instability, and as a press coup, a congressional uprising and more. Felt’s role places the fact of a disgruntled FBI front and center.

Felt, 91 and enfeebled by a stroke, lives in California, his memory dimmed. For decades, Woodward, Bernstein and Benjamin C. Bradlee, The Post’s executive editor during the Watergate coverage, maintained that they would not disclose his identity until after his death. “We’ve kept that secret because we keep our word,” Woodward said.

The secrecy held through some amazing twists of fate. In 1980, Felt and another senior FBI veteran were convicted of conspiring nearly a decade earlier to violate the civil rights of domestic dissidents in the Weather Underground movement; President Ronald Reagan then issued a pardon.

Woodward had prepared for Felt’s eventual death by writing a short book about a relationship he describes as intense and sometimes troubling. His longtime publisher, Simon & Schuster, is rushing the volume to press — but the careful unveiling of the information did not proceed as Woodward or The Post had envisioned.

Yesterday morning, Vanity Fair released an article by a California lawyer named John D. O’Connor, who was enlisted by Felt’s daughter, Joan Felt, to help coax her father into admitting his role in history. O’Connor’s article quoted a number of Felt’s friends and family members saying that he had shared his secret with them, and it went on to say that Felt told the author — under the shield of attorney-client privilege — “I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat.”

O’Connor wrote that he was released from his obligation of secrecy by Mark and Joan Felt. He also reported that the Felts were not paid for cooperating with the Vanity Fair article, though they do hope the revelation will “make at least enough money to pay some bills,” as Joan Felt is quoted in the magazine.

Woodward and others at The Post were caught by surprise. Woodward had known that family members were considering going public; in fact, they had talked repeatedly with Woodward about the possibility of jointly writing a book to reveal the news. An e-mail from Felt’s daughter over the Memorial Day weekend continued to hold out the idea that Woodward and Felt would disclose the secret together.

Throughout those contacts, Woodward was dogged by reservations about Felt’s mental condition, he said yesterday, wondering whether the source was competent to undo the long-standing pledge of anonymity that bound them.

Caught flatfooted by Vanity Fair’s announcement, Woodward and Bernstein initially issued a terse statement reaffirming their promise to keep the secret until Deep Throat died. But the Vanity Fair article was enough to bring the current executive editor of The Post, Leonard Downie Jr., back to Washington from a corporate retreat in Maryland. After he consulted with Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee, “the newspaper decided that the newspaper had been released from its obligation by Mark Felt’s family and by his lawyer, through the publication of this piece,” Downie said. “They revealed him as the source. We confirmed it.”

Downie praised Woodward’s willingness to abide by his pledge even while the Felt family was exploring “what many people would view as a scoop.”

“This demonstrates clearly the lengths to which Bob and this newspaper will go to protect sources and a confidential relationship,” Downie said.

Bradlee said he was amazed that the mystery had lasted through the decades. “What would you think the odds were that this town could keep that secret for this long?” he said.

It wasn’t for lack of sleuths. “Who was Deep Throat?” has been among the most compelling questions of modern American history, dissected in books, in films, on the Internet, and in thousands of articles and hundreds of television programs. Virtually every figure in the Nixon administration, from Henry A. Kissinger to Patrick J. Buchanan to Diane Sawyer, has been nominated for the role — sometimes by other Nixon veterans. Former White House counsel John W. Dean III, who tried to cover up Watergate on Nixon’s instructions and then gave crucial testimony about the scheme, was a frequent contributor to the speculation, as was another Nixon lawyer, Leonard Garment.

Recently, an investigative-reporting class at the University of Illinois compiled what professor Bill Gaines believed to be a definitive case that Deep Throat was the deputy White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding. Those findings were publicized around the world. Perhaps the most insightful argument was mustered in the Atlantic magazine by journalist James Mann in 1992. “He could well have been Mark Felt,” Mann wrote cautiously in a piece that laid bare the institutional reasons why FBI loyalists came to fear and resent Nixon’s presidency.

Felt fended off the searchlight each time it swung in his direction. “I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!” he wrote in his 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid.

“It would be contrary to my responsibility as a loyal employee of the FBI to leak information,” he told journalist Timothy Noah six years ago.

In an article being prepared for tomorrow’s Washington Post, Woodward will detail the “accident of history” that connected a young reporter fresh from the suburbs to a man whom many FBI agents considered the best choice to succeed the legendary J. Edgar Hoover as director of the bureau. Woodward and Felt met by chance, he said, but their friendship quickly became a source of information for the reporter. On May 15, 1972, presidential candidate George Wallace was shot and severely wounded by Arthur H. Bremer, in a parking lot in Laurel.

Eager to break news on a local story of major national importance, Woodward contacted Felt for information on the FBI’s investigation. Unlike many in the bureau, Felt was known to talk with reporters, and he provided Woodward with a series of front-page nuggets — though not with his name attached.

By coincidence, the Bremer case came two weeks after the death of Hoover, an epochal moment for the FBI, which had never been led by anyone else. Felt wanted the job, he later wrote. He also wanted his beloved bureau to maintain its independence. And so his motivations were complex when Woodward called a month later seeking clues to the strange case of a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex. Again, the young reporter had a metro angle on a national story, because the five alleged burglars were arraigned before a local judge.

Wounded that he was passed over for the top job, furious at Nixon’s choice of an outsider, Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray III, as acting FBI director, and determined that the White House not be allowed to steer and stall the bureau’s Watergate investigation, Mark Felt slipped into the role that would forever alter his life.

He makes his first appearance as a literary figure in Chapter 4 of All the President’s Men.

“Woodward had a source in the Executive Branch who had access to information at [Nixon’s campaign committee] as well as at the White House,” Bernstein and Woodward wrote. “His identity was unknown to anyone else. He could be contacted only on very important occasions. Woodward had promised he would never identify him or his position to anyone.”

Felt established extremely strict initial ground rules: He could never be quoted — even as an anonymous source — and he would not provide information. He would “confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere and . . . add some perspective,” in the words of the book.

At first, the two men spoke by telephone. But Watergate was, after all, a case that began with a telephone wiretap. Felt had been summoned at least once to the White House, before Watergate, to discuss the use of telephone surveillance against administration leakers. He soon concluded that his own phones — and the reporters’ — might be tapped. That’s when he developed the system of coded signals and parking-garage encounters.

The relationship immediately bore fruit. On June 19, 1972, two days after the botched break-in, Felt assured Woodward that The Post could safely make a connection between burglars and a former CIA agent linked to the White House, E. Howard Hunt. Three months later, Felt again provided key context and reassurance, telling Woodward that a story tying Nixon’s campaign committee to the break-in could be “much stronger” than the first draft, and still be on solid ground.

One of the most important encounters between Woodward and his source came a month later, on Oct. 8, 1972. In four months the scandal had grown in its reach yet faded in its seeming importance. Nixon was sailing to what would be a landslide reelection, and his opponent, Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.), was having no luck making a campaign issue of Watergate.

In the wee hours in a deserted garage, Felt laid out a much broader view of the scandal than Woodward and Bernstein had yet imagined.

From the book: Woodward “arrived at the garage at 1:30 a.m.

“Deep Throat was already there, smoking a cigarette. . . .

“On evenings such as these, Deep Throat had talked about how politics had infiltrated every corner of government — a strong-arm takeover of the agencies by the Nixon White House. . . . He had once called it the ‘switchblade mentality’ — and had referred to the willingness of the president’s men to fight dirty and for keeps. . . .

“The Nixon White House worried him. ‘They are underhanded and unknowable,’ he had said numerous times. He also distrusted the press. ‘I don’t like newspapers,’ he had said flatly.”

As Felt talked through the night — of his love for gossip and his competing his desire for exactitude, of the danger Nixon posed to the government and The Post specifically — he urged Woodward to follow the case to the top: to Nixon’s former attorney general, John N. Mitchell; to Nixon’s inner brace of aides, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and John H. Ehrlichman; and even to Nixon himself.

“Only the president and Mitchell know” everything, he hinted.

That meeting and others gave senior Post editors the confidence they needed to stick with the story through withering fire from the administration and its defenders.

Later that month, at what Bradlee called “the low point” of the saga, Woodward and Bernstein misunderstood a key detail of a major story linking Haldeman to the financing of Watergate and other dirty tricks. When Nixon’s defenders — and other media outlets — pounced on The Post’s mistake, Felt provided both a scolding to Woodward that he must be more careful and the encouragement that the reporters were still on the right track.

“He gave us encouragement,” Bernstein said yesterday.

“And he gave Ben comfort,” Woodward added, although Bradlee knew only Felt’s status as a top FBI official. The editor did not learn Felt’s name until after The Post had won the Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate coverage and Nixon had resigned.

Woodward’s source became such a key part of the discussions among the Post brass that then-Managing Editor Howard Simons decided he needed a nickname. “Deep Throat” was a blend of the rules of engagement Felt had with Woodward — “deep background” — and the title of a notorious pornographic movie.

When the book and then the movie were released, Woodward said, Felt was shocked to have his place in history tagged with such a tawdry title.

Watergate Timeline

1968
November 5 — Richard Milhous Nixon, the 55-year-old former vice president who lost the presidency for the Republicans in 1960, reclaims it by defeating Hubert Humphrey in one of the closest elections in U.S. history.

1969
January 21 — Nixon is inaugurated as the 37th president of the United States.

1970
July 23 — Nixon approves a plan for greatly expanding domestic intelligence-gathering by the FBI, CIA and other agencies. He has second thoughts a few days later and rescinds his approval.

1971
June 13 — The New York Times begins publishing the Pentagon Papers — the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War. The Washington Post will begin publishing the papers later that same week.

September 3 — The White House “plumbers” unit — named for their orders to plug leaks in the administration — burglarizes a psychiatrist’s office to find files on Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

1972
June 17 — Five men, one of whom says he used to work for the CIA, are arrested at 2:30 a.m. trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel and office complex.

June 19 — A GOP security aide is among the Watergate burglars, The Washington Post reports. Former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Nixon reelection campaign, denies any link to the operation.

August 1 — A $25,000 cashier’s check, apparently earmarked for the Nixon campaign, wound up in the bank account of a Watergate burglar, The Washington Post reports.

September 29 — John Mitchell, while serving as attorney general, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats, The Post reports.

October 10 — FBI agents establish that the Watergate break-in stems from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of the Nixon reelection effort, The Post reports.

November 7 — Nixon is reelected in one of the largest landslides in American political history, taking more than 60 percent of the vote and crushing the Democratic nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.

1973
January 30 — Former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. are convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in the Watergate incident. Five other men plead guilty, but mysteries remain.

April 30 — Nixon’s top White House staffers, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resign over the scandal. White House counsel John Dean is fired.

May 18 — The Senate Watergate Committee begins its nationally televised hearings. Attorney General-designate Elliot Richardson taps former solicitor general Archibald Cox as the Justice Department’s special prosecutor for Watergate.

June 3 — John Dean has told Watergate investigators that he discussed the Watergate cover-up with President Nixon at least 35 times, The Post reports.

June 13 — Watergate prosecutors find a memo addressed to John Ehrlichman describing in detail the plans to burglarize the office of Pentagon Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, The Post reports.

July 13 — Alexander Butterfield, former presidential appointments secretary, reveals in congressional testimony that since 1971 Nixon had recorded all conversations and telephone calls in his offices.

July 18 — Nixon reportedly orders the White House taping system disconnected.

July 23 — Nixon refuses to turn over the presidential tape recordings to the Senate Watergate Committee or the special prosecutor.

October 20 — Saturday Night Massacre: Nixon fires Archibald Cox and abolishes the office of the special prosecutor. Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus resign. Pressure for impeachment mounts in Congress.

November 17 — Nixon declares, “I’m not a crook,” maintaining his innocence in the Watergate case.

December 7 — The White House can’t explain an 18 ½-minute gap in one of the subpoenaed tapes. Chief of Staff Alexander Haig says one theory is that “some sinister force” erased the segment. Post story.

1974
April 30 — The White House releases more than 1,200 pages of edited transcripts of the Nixon tapes to the House Judiciary Committee, but the committee insists that the tapes themselves must be turned over.

July 24 — The Supreme Court rules unanimously that Nixon must turn over the tape recordings of 64 White House conversations, rejecting the president’s claims of executive privilege.

July 27 — House Judiciary Committee passes the first of three articles of impeachment, charging obstruction of justice.

August 8 — Richard Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to resign. Vice President Gerald R. Ford assumes the country’s highest office. He will later pardon Nixon of all charges related to the Watergate case.

2002

June 13 — Stanley L. Greigg, 71, the former Democratic National Committee official who filed the original criminal complaint against the Watergate burglars, dies in Salem, Va.

June 25 - One week after the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, an alternative theory of what prompted the most famous burglary in American political history returns to U.S. District Court.

2003
February 10 — Ronald Ziegler, 63, who as President Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary at first described the Watergate break-in as a “third-rate burglary,” a symbol of his often-testy relations with reporters, dies after a heart attack. He once was suspected of being “Deep Throat.”

April 8 — In one of the largest such purchases in American history, the University of Texas at Austin buys the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for $5 million, the university announced.

July 16 — Chesterfield Smith, 85, a prominent Florida lawyer who, as president of the American Bar Association in 1973, became a critic of President Richard Nixon’s efforts to avoid the stains of the Watergate scandal, dies in a hospital in Coral Gables, Fla., after a heart attack.

July 27 — Thirty years after the Senate select committee hearings on Watergate riveted the nation and doomed the Nixon presidency, a key figure in the scandal says he has a fresh and explosive revelation: Richard M. Nixon personally ordered the burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex.

August 24 — John J. Rhodes, 86, an Arizona Republican who as minority leader of the House of Representatives played a critical role in the events leading to the 1974 resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, dies of cancer at his home in Mesa, Ariz.

October 31 — Thomas F. McBride, 74, an associate prosecutor in the Watergate investigation and former inspector general of the Agriculture and Labor departments, dies of a cerebral hemorrhage while walking his dog in a park near his home in Portland, Ore.

November 13 — Congressional negotiators agree to undo part of a Watergate-era law that prevented former president Richard M. Nixon from taking his tapes and papers with him, but say the records would still have to be processed here before being released to establish the presidential library that Nixon and his family always wanted.

December 11 — National Archives and Records Administration releases 240 more hours of tape of the 37th president.

2004

April 9 — Helen M. Smith, 84, who worked at the White House as press secretary and trusted aide to first lady Pat Nixon during the turbulent Watergate years, dies of vascular disease at her home in Washington.

May 27 — Transcripts of telephone conversations released show President Richard M. Nixon jokingly threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on Capitol Hill in March 1974 as Congress was moving to impeach him over the Watergate scandal.

May 29 — Archibald Cox, 92, the Harvard law professor and special prosecutor whose refusal to accept White House limits on his investigation of the Watergate break-in and coverup helped bring about the 1974 resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, dies at his home in Brooksville, Maine.

May 29 — Samuel Dash, 79, the chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee whose televised interrogation into the secret audiotaping system at the White House ultimately led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation, dies of multiple organ failure May 29 at Washington Hospital Center.

July 29 — Frederick Cheney LaRue, 75, the shadowy Nixon White House aide and “bagman” who delivered more than $300,000 in payoffs to Watergate conspirators, dies of coronary artery disease in a Biloxi, Miss., motel room, where he lived.

2005

January 22 — Rose Mary Woods, 87, the Nixon White House secretary whose improbable stretch was supposed to account for part of an 18 ½-minute gap in a crucial Watergate tape, dies at a nursing home in Alliance, Ohio, where she lived.

February 4 — Thousands of pages of notes, memos, transcripts and other materials collectively known as the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers opens to the public at the University of Texas, minus the most fascinating detail connected to the demise of the Nixon administration: the identity of Deep Throat.

February 5 — James Joseph Bierbower, 81, a well-known Washington lawyer who represented Nixon campaign aide Jeb Stuart Magruder during the Watergate trials and EPA official Rita Lavelle during a Superfund inquiry, dies at Charlotte Hall Nursing Home in St. Mary’s County.

February 18 — Robert R. Merhige Jr., a judge who who wrote the decision that threw out the appeals of Watergate figures G. Gordon Liddy, Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez after they were convicted of breaking into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist dies.

May 31 — The Washington Post confirms that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was Deep Throat, after Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Felt, now a retiree in California, as the long-anonymous Watergate source.

July 6 — L. Patrick Gray, the acting director of the FBI who passed its investigative reports on the Watergate scandal to the White House, and who was left to “twist slowly, slowly in the wind” by President Richard M. Nixon, died July 6 at his home in Atlantic Beach, Fla., at age 88.

2006

May 16 — Martin F. Dardis, who connected the Watergate burglars to President Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President, died of vascular disease May 16 at a nursing home in Palm City, Fla., at age 83.

July 17 — Robert C. Mardian, the attorney for President Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President whose conviction of conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Watergate scandal was overturned on appeal, dies at age 82 at his home in San Clemente, Calif.

2007

January 27 — E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA agent who organized the Watergate break-in and other “dirty tricks” that ultimately brought down the Nixon presidency, dies of complications from pneumonia at a hospital in Miami at age 88.

2008

April 25 — DeVan L. Shumway, the spokesman for the Committee to Re-Elect the President who staunchly defended the Nixon administration throughout the Watergate scandal, dies in Baltimore of lung disease at age 77.

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