Do you think President Nixon has participated in a cover-up of the Watergate situation, or not? Yes, 67 percent; No, 19 percent; No opinion, 14 percent
—Gallup Poll conducted June 1–4, 1973
The most important thing to this country was the reelection of Richard Nixon. And I was not about to countenance anything that would stand in the way of that reelection.
—John N. Mitchell, July 11, 1973
President Nixon had no knowledge of or involvement in either the Watergate affair itself or the subsequent efforts of a cover up of the Watergate. . . . I had no such knowledge or involvement.
—H. R. Haldeman, July 30, 1973
The unmasking of the cover-up moved into another stage on May 17, with the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities taking the central role. The nation’s attention shifted away from the series of disclosures that began the end of February, involving McCord, Gray, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Hunt, Magruder, and Liddy, among others. Each disclosure lessened Nixon’s credibility concerning Watergate. Judge Sirica, catalyst for the second stage of the cover-up’s undoing, and Bernstein and Woodward, catalyst for the first stage, continued to ferret out the truth about Watergate. Nonetheless, for two months the main spotlight shone on the Senate Watergate Committee.
Although the committee questioned thirty-three witnesses and television cameras covered the 237 hours of testimony, the most profound impact came from the appearances of the former presidential counsel John Dean and the former Haldeman assistant Alexander Butterfield. The committee carefully planned Dean’s testimony to maximize its effect. Butterfield’s disclosure of Nixon’s taping system, on the other hand, surprised, even shocked, not only the public but even the persons involved in the Watergate investigations. Dean implicated Nixon in the cover-up, and Butterfield described the existence of a taping system that could resolve whether Nixon or Dean was telling the truth.
At 10:00 a.m. on May 17 Senator Sam Ervin called to order the Senate Select Committee. In his opening statement, Ervin declared that the committee began its work “in an atmosphere of the utmost gravity” and emphasized that “the purpose of these hearings is not prosecutorial or judicial, but rather investigative and informative.” The vice chair of the committee, Howard Baker, reiterated these points and added that “any doubts that I might have had about the fairness and impartiality of this investigation have been swept away during the last few weeks. Virtually every action taken by this committee since its inception has been taken with complete unanimity of purpose and procedure.” The Tennessee senator characterized the committee’s preliminary work as “a bipartisan search for the unvarnished truth.”
Room 318 in the Old Senate Office Building, known as the Caucus Room, had been the site of several earlier notable Senate investigations. The most recent included the Estes Kefauver investigation of organized crime (1950–1951), the so-called Army–McCarthy Hearings on communist infiltration of government (1954), and the J. William Fulbright investigation of the Vietnam conflict (1966). These and other hearings had been televised nationally, and public reaction played an important role in the future careers of the major participants. The Kefauver Hearings propelled the Tennessean into national prominence and into serious contention for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 and 1956. The Army–McCarthy Hearings eroded Joseph McCarthy’s support and led to a Senate censure of his conduct. The Fulbright Hearings fueled opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam and made that opposition more respectable.
The Senate’s decision to allow television coverage of the Watergate Hearings, therefore, constituted part of a pattern dating to the early years of television. For the first two weeks, the three networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—carried the hearings live. Starting the third week, despite large audiences, the networks agreed to rotate live coverage so that at any time two networks could broadcast their regular shows. The new Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), meanwhile, taped the entire event and replayed the hearings in the evenings on approximately 150 to 160 PBS stations.
Television news summarized the day’s highlights, and the newspapers did the same the following day. Few Americans could avoid the hearings. The average rating for the proceedings exceeded the average rating for entertainment aired at similar hours. An early August Gallup survey found that almost 90 percent of Americans had watched at least part of the hearings. At the end of May the hearings recessed for a week for the Memorial Day holiday; in June they recessed for another week when the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev visited Washington; and they recessed for ten days over the July 4 break. Brezhnev’s visit and that of the Shah of Iran in July were low-key. During summer 1973 the international scene remained quiet; the Watergate Hearings dominated the news.1
Sam Dash and his staff, with crucial support from Ervin, planned the hearings carefully. They had spent weeks interviewing those involved in the break-in and cover-up and scheduled those witnesses so that their testimony and answers to questions would tell the story in sequence. The committee first wanted a clear understanding of how CREEP operated and its relationship to White House staff. Robert C. Odle Jr., former director of administration for CREEP, and Bruce A. Kehrli, special assistant to the president, the first two witnesses, elaborated on organization charts and transfer of personnel from the White House to CREEP. Three Washington, D.C. police officers who participated in the arrest at Democratic National Headquarters testified next.
On the second day of hearings, James W. McCord Jr. took the stand. In reply to Dash’s questioning, McCord explained how he had burglarized the building and taped the door and that Liddy and Hunt had told him that John Mitchell, John Dean, and Jeb Magruder had approved the operation. McCord described how he had been pressured by the White House aide who had hired him, John Caulfield, to remain silent and had in turn been promised financial support, rehabilitation, employment, and presidential clemency. Caulfield, at this time a Treasury Department official, testified next and confirmed McCord’s story. He related that Dean said the offer of clemency to McCord came from “the highest levels of the White House.” McCord, Caulfield continued, “wanted his immediate freedom,” and if he did not get it, he threatened to make a public statement about Watergate.2
President Nixon attempted to counter the interest the committee generated. The day before the hearings opened, he publicly proposed to Congress the establishment of a nonpartisan, federal election commission “to examine our laws and see what new ones are needed, but also to examine the observance and enforcement of our laws, and those campaign standards and practices not governed by law but rooted in common usage.” Such a commission could produce “a set of proposals that will work and that will help to restore the faith of the American people in the integrity of their political process.”3 The Senate, of course, believed that it already had assigned the committee responsibilities identical to those that Nixon outlined for a newly formed commission.
McCord’s testimony about the offer of clemency, moreover, spurred Nixon to reply. Because McCord testified on a Friday, the president had the weekend to draft a statement. Nixon’s 4,000-word report went well beyond a denial. He explained that the “three security operations initiated in my Administration”—the 1969–1971 wiretaps, the 1970 Huston Plan, and the Special Investigations Unit in the White House—stemmed from national security needs. The president reiterated his position that he neither knew nor approved of illegal activities. Regarding Watergate, he considered it his “responsibility to see that the Watergate investigation did not impinge adversely upon the national security area.” Once again, Nixon categorically denied having “prior knowledge of the Watergate operation,” having taken part in a cover-up, offering clemency or funds, or authorizing “others to attempt to implicate the CIA in the Watergate matter.”4
The media response to Nixon’s lengthy explanation varied. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner concluded that “President Nixon’s strong, comprehensive statement . . . clearly shows that the President himself was not involved.” The Washington Post saw no such clarity. Between the two extremes, the Wall Street Journal found Nixon’s statement about the break-in “a plausible and even persuasive explanation of events” but viewed his comments about the cover-up “far less persuasive” and “a pity” that he had not made them “long ago.” Overall, the editorial concluded, “the President is acting like a man with something to hide.”
In the midst of the Ervin Committee’s opening and Nixon’s response, the Office of Special Prosecutor was opened. Attorney General Elliot Richardson, at the time of his confirmation hearings, had promised to act promptly on the Senate’s unanimous endorsement of Senator Charles Percy’s resolution. Richardson’s announced intention to retain “ultimate authority,” however, was criticized by the president of the American Bar Association and drew rejections of Richardson’s first four choices. Aware of what was at stake, Richardson retreated with his image slightly tarnished. He telephoned Harvard law professor Archibald Cox, offered him the position, and promised complete autonomy. Respected for his ability, experience, independence, and honesty, Cox had served the Kennedy administration as solicitor general, the official who represents the federal government before the Supreme Court. On May 21, Cox appeared with Richardson for questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee; two days later the Senate confirmed his nomination by an eighty-two to three vote.
The sixty-one-year-old Cox immediately antagonized the Ervin Committee when he called a press conference to announce his opposition to public hearings and then petitioned Judge Sirica to postpone the hearings until the Special Prosecutor’s Office made its own investigation and prosecuted any criminals it found. Ervin rejected Cox’s request. Arguing the committee’s position before Sirica, Dash relied heavily on a position that Cox himself had taken while solicitor general. The law overwhelmingly supported the rejection decision that Sirica rendered. Cox did not appeal but set to work.
Cox posed a long-range threat to Nixon, but the clash between the CIA and the president’s former closest aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, served to erode public confidence. On May 21, while the former CIA director Richard Helms appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the agency’s deputy director Vernon A. Walters testified before the House Armed Services Intelligence Subcommittee. Walters told of his and Helms’s June 23, 1972, meeting, at Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s initiative, during which the White House aides had asked the CIA to block FBI investigation of Water-gate. Walters’s notes of the meeting recorded Haldeman as stating “it is the President’s wish.” The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had heard Walters testify a week earlier and asked Helms if he remembered Haldeman’s exact words. Helms did not but said that at the time he assumed Haldeman spoke for the president. Both Helms and Walters swore that Haldeman and Ehrlichman both knew the CIA had no involvement in the Watergate break-in before they requested the June 23 meeting.
On May 30 and 31 the two former aides testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee about the role of the CIA in the Watergate affair. Directly contradicting the two top CIA administrators, Haldeman and Ehrlichman insisted that the White House had not attempted to obtain CIA assistance in blocking the FBI’s investigation. Walters and Helms seemed credible; Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s denials did not. The damage to Nixon was obvious.
During the exchange of contradictory testimonies, the New York Times reported that in 1969 and again in 1970 the CIA had investigated but had found “no substantial evidence to support the Nixon administration’s view that foreign governments were supplying undercover agents and funds to radicals and Black Panther groups.”5 This finding undercut Nixon’s more recent statement that “some of the disruptive activities were receiving foreign support,” a factor that he used as partial explanation for the drafting of the Huston Plan. Two weeks later the New York Times published a text of the plan. Several accompanying documents identified its proposed operations as “clearly illegal.”
The last week of May a minor incident regarding Nixon’s San Clemente house eroded a bit more of the president’s credibility. On May 25, in response to a charge that Nixon had used campaign funds to buy the house, his office issued a statement detailing how the president had financed the purchase of the house and surrounding land and how he later sold some of the acreage. The next day the deputy press secretary Gerald L. Warren advised reporters that the government had spent $39,525 on the property to improve security, most of it for a protective screen and fence. Two days later, however, the Associated Press reported that it had checked the building permits that were public record and learned that the government really had spent more than $100,000 on property improvements, not all of them related to security. Within the next month, the General Services Administration, which has charge of such work, three times revised its original figure of $39,525 that Warren originally had released. The final account totaled $703,365 and included the installation of a swimming pool heater and $4,834 for den furniture.
On June 5 the Ervin Committee resumed hearings following the Memorial Day recess. Of the first six witnesses who testified between that date and June 14, five left no doubt that Nixon’s closest aides were implicated in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. On the first day Sally J. Harmony, a former secretary to Liddy, told of typing summaries of wiretapped telephone conversations and using stationery with a Gemstone letterhead (the code name for Liddy’s intelligence operation). Harmony also recalled viewing photographs of documents from the Democratic National Committee headquarters and shredding files after the break-in.
The next witness, twenty-six-year-old Robert Reisner, an administrative assistant to Magruder, remembered sending Gemstone documents to Mitchell. Reisner also recalled that copies of all memos that went to Mitchell also went to Haldeman. Reisner said that Magruder, the afternoon following the break-in, telephoned from California and directed the office manager, Robert Odle, to take home the Gemstone folder.
Hugh W. Sloan Jr., the former treasurer of CREEP, provided the committee an account of how Magruder and Frederick C. LaRue, one of Mitchell’s assistants, had pressured him to commit perjury regarding Liddy’s budget. Sloan also disclosed that Dean had requested that he take the Fifth Amendment. Unwilling to follow either suggestion, the thirty-two-year-old Sloan resigned from CREEP. On June 7 Nixon’s 1972 director of scheduling, Herbert L. Porter, during his testimony admitted that with Magruder’s encouragement he had perjured himself at the Watergate burglary trial.
Maurice H. Stans, the chairman of the Finance Committee of CREEP, on the other hand, declared himself free of blame and of any knowledge of the Segretti dirty tricks program, the break-in, and the cover-up. He emphasized that his committee only raised money and paid bills. During heated questioning by Senator Ervin, Stans insisted that there was no connection between the break-in and his destruction six days later of the records of campaign contributions made before April 7, 1972. He said he destroyed them to protect the anonymity of contributors and because no law required keeping them.
Magruder took the stand on June 14 for what became a five-hour session. He began by reading a brief prepared statement admitting “errors in judgment” and pointing out that as far as he knew “at no point during this entire period from the time of planning of the Watergate to the time of trying to keep it from public view did the President have any knowledge of our errors in this matter.” The cooperative Magruder added that in his desire to “give you the facts” he would “name others who participated with me in the Watergate affair.”6
The “others” were those who worked closest to the president. Magruder claimed that Mitchell had authorized Liddy’s espionage activities, that Colson had pressured the men to get them under way, and that Haldeman’s chief aide, Gordon Strachan, had read transcripts of taped telephone conversations from the Democratic National Headquarters and knew of the Watergate plans in advance. Contradicting Stans, Magruder recounted meeting with him and Mitchell on June 24, 1972, to discuss the break-in. Magruder also described the involvement of Mitchell, Haldeman, Dean, and others in the cover-up. During his testimony, Magruder admitted to having repeatedly perjured himself and to having persuaded Porter to do the same before the grand jury and at the Watergate trial. Despite the incriminating nature of Magruder’s testimony, the former CREEP director was only a preliminary episode in the proceedings, because his confessions and charges stopped at the door of the Oval Office. The main event would be John Dean, who, as everyone who followed Watergate knew, would incriminate the president.
Between Magruder’s and Dean’s testimonies, the hearings recessed for a week in deference to the Brezhnev-Nixon meetings in Washington. Tension mounted during the wait because of disclosures published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time. At the beginning of the hiatus on June 16, Dean met for five hours in executive session with Dash, Baker, and their staff members, and what he told them was soon leaked to members of the press. They reported that when the hearings resumed, Dean would charge Nixon with participation in the cover-up and with an attempt to stop tax audits of friends; he would describe Hunt’s demand for money in return for his silence and Mitchell’s acquiescence in Hunt’s demand. Press reports also asserted that Dean would claim that Haldeman had ordered the telephone tap on the chair of the Democratic National Committee and that Colson had prior knowledge of the taps.
Another press story described the April 15, 1973, meeting of Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen, the president, and then Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, at which Petersen had urged the president to suspend Haldeman and Ehrlichman because of their integral involvement in the cover-up. The story reminded readers that on April 30, when the president publicly announced the resignations of his two assistants, he had emphasized that the resignations were not “evidence of any wrong doing by either one. Such an assumption would be unfair and unfounded.”
The press also reported Dean’s story that he had custody of $15,200 in leftover 1972 campaign funds and that he borrowed $4,850 of the money, leaving his personal check as a record, to finance his marriage and honeymoon. Dean repaid the money and deposited the entire amount in a special account when he left the White House on April 30, 1973. Hugh Scott, the Republican leader in the Senate, at his daily news briefing, used this information in an attempt to discredit Dean. Scott concluded that “a man who can embezzle can easily tell lies.” The next day Scott added that the story had “considerably shaken” Dean’s credibility. Because of the leaks to the press from the June 16 executive session, Ervin canceled the scheduled additional executive sessions.
In the midst of the Ervin Committee revelations, the federal district court in Washington, D.C., found the Finance Committee of CREEP guilty of concealing the $200,000 cash contribution from financier Robert L. Vesco. The court ordered the maximum possible penalty, a $3,000 fine. Five months earlier the Finance Committee had pled no contest for its failure to report cash payments to Liddy.
On June 25 Dean finally took the stand as the person the Watergate Committee assumed would be its most important witness. For six weeks during May and June, Dash had questioned Dean; only Ervin knew of the meetings. The Dash-Dean sessions gave Dash background information and helped Dean jog his memory and organize his recollections. Because of these sessions, Dean came to the hearings well prepared. The first day he read, for more than five hours, a 245-page statement describing the mood of the White House staff as well as the events themselves.
He opened with his conclusion that “the Watergate matter was an inevitable outgrowth of a climate of excessive concern over the political impact of demonstrators, excessive concern over leaks, an insatiable appetite for political intelligence, all coupled with a do-it-yourself White House staff, regardless of the law.” Dean then told, among other things, of the political intelligence work of Jack Caulfield and Anthony Ulasewicz, the meetings regarding Liddy’s plan, and the details of the cover-up. Almost immediately after the break-in, Dean maintained, “a pattern had developed where I was carrying messages from Mitchell, Stans, and Mardian to Ehrlichman and Haldeman—and vice versa—about how each quarter was handling the cover-up.” Dean related Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up and his instructions to Dean “to keep a good list of the press people giving us trouble, because we will make life difficult for them after the elections.” According to Dean, the president wanted to have the Internal Revenue Service harass his “enemies.”
In a solemn, unemotional voice Dean recounted his first meeting with Nixon on September 15, 1972. Dean left “with the impression that the President was well aware of what had been going on regarding the success of keeping the White House out of the Watergate scandal.” He later described his March 21, 1973, meeting with the president, a meeting during which Dean likened the cover-up to “a cancer growing on the Presidency and that if the cancer was not removed that the President himself would be killed by it.” Dean claimed to have told Nixon that the cover-up could not continue and had further recommended that the president “get out in front of this matter.” To Dean’s disappointment, he realized later that day that Nixon planned to continue the cover-up.7
For the next four days the committee and its staff questioned Dean; one side emphasized events to establish complicity and the other side to discredit his testimony. At stake was Nixon’s presidency. Dean, who had challenged the president and accused him of criminal activities, proved an unshakable witness to Nixon’s defenders. Years later Dash called Dean the most impressive witness he had ever observed.
During his initial questioning of Dean, the Republican vice chair of the Watergate Committee framed what became the central question in the entire investigation: “What did the President know and when did he know it?”8 By posing this question, Senator Baker intended to protect Nixon, in essence, by forcing investigators to produce specific evidence tying Nixon to the break-in or the cover-up. In reality, Baker’s clear question accentuated the Nixon-Dean polarization. Nixon and his supporters, however, believed that in such a polarization the public would side with the president, without evidence to the contrary.
Although newspaper editorials cautioned readers that Dean’s charges were uncorroborated, the Dallas Times Herald observed that the testimony had “set off shock waves” and had driven Nixon “into a grave defensive position that now demands credible refutation.” The Nashville Tennessean believed that Dean’s charges could “be answered only in the same open way—and by the President himself.” Dean bore the onus of an administration turncoat and a lawyer who in the past had lied, but much of what he described concurred with the testimonies of Magruder, Walters, Helms, and McCord. Dean’s testimony also conformed to the numerous newspaper stories based on leaks from grand jury and Justice Department investigations.
When Dean completed his testimony on Friday, June 29, the Ervin Committee recessed the hearings until July 10. During this break Watergate stories continued to attract national attention. On June 28, just before Dean finished, Hunt testified before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence that he had used CIA equipment in his investigations. The next day Colson admitted that he had sent Hunt to find scandalous information about Senator Ted Kennedy. Colson also admitted to having allowed a reporter to read classified State Department cables. The same day Ehrlichman appeared on a CBS–TV interview and repeated his claim that he had played no part in the Watergate break-in or cover-up.
On July 4, CBS–TV presented a “status report” on the Watergate investigation conducted by Justice Department prosecutors Seymour Glanzer, Earl Silbert, and Donald Campbell. This report, sent to Special Prosecutor Cox, recommended the indictment of Mitchell, Dean, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman. In addition, it recommended reduced charges in exchange for guilty pleas by Magruder, Gray, and Strachan.
Two days later the chairman of American Airlines, George A. Spater, released a statement admitting that his airline illegally contributed $55,000 to Nixon’s campaign. Federal laws prohibited political contributions from corporations. Spater explained that Herbert W. Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney, had solicited the money.
On July 7, Senator Ervin released to the press, with the prior consent of Nixon, a copy of the letter the president had sent advising that “I shall not testify before the Committee or permit access to Presidential papers.” Nixon explained as his reason the “constitutional obligation to preserve intact the powers and prerogatives of the Presidency.” Elaborating on his position, Nixon cited President Harry S. Truman as a precedent; in 1953 the former president had refused to honor a House Committee subpoena for documents.9 The day after Nixon’s refusal, two committee members, Democrat Herman Talmadge and Republican Edward J. Gurney, appeared on ABC–TV’s Issues and Answers and criticized Nixon’s position, although they agreed that their committee lacked the authority to subpoena the president.
On July 9, Tom Charles Huston, a former White House assistant, testified about the 1970 intelligence-gathering plan that bore his name and that he had helped draft. He told the House Armed Services Intelligence Subcommittee that Nixon never formally canceled the plan as he had claimed in his speech to the nation on May 22, 1973. Also on July 9, the New York Times reported that during the 1972 campaign, White House officials operated two programs to sabotage Democratic presidential candidates. The public learned that two of Haldeman’s assistants, Dwight Chapin and Gordon Strachan, conceived of one program and, after Haldeman’s approval, hired Donald Segretti to implement the dirty tricks operation. Magruder managed the second sabotage program, with help from Colson. Unreported campaign contributions financed both programs.
The Ervin Committee reconvened, with John Mitchell as its first witness. Mitchell, appearing under a subpoena, offered no opening statement and during his two and a half days of questioning volunteered little information in his generally terse answers. Repeatedly, he contradicted the testimonies of Dean and Magruder and insisted that the president had no prior knowledge of the break-in and was unaware of the cover-up. Mitchell acknowledged that he knew of the cover-up payments to the burglars and of perjured testimonies but never told Nixon that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and others had committed these crimes. When Senator Talmadge asked Mitchell why he withheld this information, the former attorney general replied, “The reelection of Richard Nixon, compared to what was available on the other side, was so much more important.”
Mitchell further explained that he learned of what he labeled “the White House Horrors” only after the Watergate break-in. These included the proposed bombing of the Brookings Institute, the forging of State Department cables to implicate President Kennedy in the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, the unauthorized wiretapping, the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and the secret investigations of Senator Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick accident, among other activities. Mitchell believed that had the president known of these horrors he would have “lowered the boom” and enforced the law in these areas and, by doing so, would have endangered his reelection.
During the second day of questioning, in response to Senator Daniel Inouye, Mitchell explained again that “my reasons—my motives—had to do with an entirely different subject matter and that had to do with the White House horror stories, not the Watergate.” To Senator Baker, Mitchell repeated his rationale “that the most important thing to this country was the reelection of Richard Nixon. And I was not about to countenance anything that would stand in the way of that reelection.”10 Mitchell remained defiant to the end, although to believe him meant to disbelieve Magruder, Dean, Reisner, McCord, Stans, and Sloan. The public rated Mitchell accordingly. Indeed, both the Gallup and Harris Polls found that the public viewed Dean more favorably than Mitchell, Ehrlichman, or Haldeman.11
Richard A. Moore, the special public relations counsel to Nixon, testified after Mitchell. The fifty-eight-year-old Moore contradicted Dean’s testimony several times, although he said Dean reported accurately the substance of their private conversations. Dash considered Moore “a White House apologist and genteel hatchet man against John Dean.” On occasion, Dean had mentioned that he confided in Moore, but beyond that Moore’s name rarely surfaced during the hearings.
While the committee questioned Moore, in another room two majority staff members, Scott Armstrong and Gordon Eugene Boyce, and one minority counsel, Donald G. Sanders, questioned Alexander Butterfield in routine preparation for his appearance before the committee. At the time, Butterfield headed the Federal Aviation Administration, but from January 1969 to March 1973 the former career air force officer had served as Haldeman’s immediate deputy. As a friend of Haldeman since college, Butterfield enjoyed his confidence and after January 1970 assumed many of Haldeman’s administrative duties. Butterfield’s office door was next to the Oval Office. He traveled with the president whenever Haldeman stayed in Washington. In spring 1971, when Nixon decided he wanted a White House taping system installed to preserve a record of conversations, Haldeman gave the assignment to Butterfield, who made the arrangements with the Secret Service. Only Butterfield, his secretary, two or perhaps three Secret Service officers, Nixon, Haldeman, and Haldeman’s aide, Lawrence Higby, knew of the system, which taped approximately 4,000 hours of telephone conversations and meetings in the Oval Office, the presidential office in the Old Executive Office Building, Camp David, the Cabinet Room, and the Lincoln Sitting Room.
During the questioning of Butterfield, Armstrong asked him how the White House kept records of conversations between the president and his aides. As he posed the question, he handed Butterfield a copy of the notes from the president’s Watergate attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, summarizing the subjects Dean and Nixon had discussed in twenty-three conversations. Butterfield only partially answered the question. Later in the session, Sanders commented that Dean once expressed a suspicion that Nixon had taped one of their conversations and asked Butterfield if Dean had reason for his suspicion. Butterfield could not evade such a direct question without lying, and he was too honest to do that. Although Butterfield thought that perhaps Higby or Haldeman already had revealed the existence of the taping system, he learned later that they had not and that his answer to Sanders had given the committee the single most explosive bit of information it would receive during its investigation.
Butterfield was immediately called to testify publicly at 2:00 p.m. on Monday, July 16. Because Sanders, who had asked Butterfield the key question, worked for the minority side of the committee, Baker requested that Dash permit Fred Thompson, the minority counsel, to start the questioning. Asking routine questions about the deputy’s White House responsibilities, Thompson inquired, “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?” Butterfield replied, “I was aware of listening devices; yes, sir.” After thirty minutes, Ervin thanked Butterfield and dismissed him. He then announced that he had just received a letter, dated that day, from Buzhardt, Nixon’s counsel. The letter confirmed Butterfield’s testimony “that the President’s meetings and conversations in the White House have been recorded since the spring of 1971.” Actually, the taping system first began operating on February 16 that year.12
With Butterfield’s announcement, the tapes immediately became the focal point of the Watergate affair. Dean had told the country that the president was deeply involved, but neither he nor anyone else could offer documentary evidence to corroborate the charge. The tapes held the truth. Without the documentary evidence that the tapes supplied, Nixon might have prevailed in his struggle to remain in office. Even after the court subpoena, Nixon might well have avoided impeachment had he shredded or burned the tapes, repeated the importance of presidential confidentiality, and left the courts and Congress to take whatever actions they wished.
The day the public learned about the taping system, Nixon was in the hospital with viral pneumonia, but apparently he had made a decision about the tapes earlier. In his memoirs, he wrote that he first listened to some of the tapes on June 3 and concluded that although embarrassing and ambiguous, “they indisputably disproved Dean’s basic charge that I had conspired with him in an obstruction of justice over an eight-month period.” Nixon also agreed with the premise “that destruction of the tapes would create an indelible impression of guilt.”13 Moreover, he believed in July 1973 that the courts would sustain the concept of executive privilege, based on the separation of powers between the legislative, judicial, and executive branches. Originally, Nixon wanted the tapes so that he could draw from them when writing his memoirs and so that future historians would have a detailed record of his administration. Ever distrustful, he also thought that some of the persons with whom he had held discussions might later distort his or their position or advice. The tapes would offer the truth. Nixon knew, furthermore, that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had taped conversations and that their presidential libraries housed those tapes. Nixon planned to leave similar material. Future generations of scholars, he believed, removed from the passions of an anti-Nixon generation, would evaluate him more favorably and would downplay the importance of Watergate. Nixon believed that in the history of his administration the Watergate cover-up should be a footnote, compared to his brilliant orchestration of withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, of Soviet détente, and of relations with the People’s Republic of China. Nixon’s mistaken judgment in this instance cost him his presidency. The demand for release of the tapes came from Republicans as well as Democrats, from conservatives as well as liberals, and from Nixon’s supporters as well as his critics.