Revealing the Silent Witness

It's hard to remember the context now, but 35 years ago today, the revelation that Richard Nixon had installed a massive recording system in the Oval Office to capture every presidential conversation on tape came as a huge surprise to the millions of Americans who watched the Watergate hearings on television.

In mid-July of 1973, many people who had worked or were still working in the Nixon White House had testified before the Senate Watergate committee and many others were scheduled to testify in the coming weeks — and, to that point, only former White House counsel John Dean had contradicted Nixon's version of events.

But the tide began to turn on July 16, 1973.

On that date, former presidential aide Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the taping system while being questioned on national television.

Butterfield was one of only a handful of people (including Nixon) who knew about the taping system. Nixon wanted the system to be secret. He wanted to be able to compile a complete audio record of the proceedings in his Oval Office — it was so secret, in fact, that Nixon himself apparently forgot about it, thus explaining the candid way he spoke about everything.

In fact, Nixon attempted to conceal his candid language by inserting a parenthetical "expletive deleted" in many offensive spots in the printed transcripts of conversations that he circulated in the press and the public instead of turning over the tapes themselves to investigators.

(Reportedly, Nixon was disturbed by the impression his language would have given to his mother, Hannah Nixon, a devout Quaker who died before he was elected president.)

In later years, Butterfield told interviewers he knew the explosive nature of the information he had, but he had decided not to volunteer anything about it. He would only respond to direct questions.

Ironically, such a direct question was asked of Butterfield by the Republican counsel — Fred Thompson. Butterfield was asked if he was aware of "listening devices" in the Oval Office — which, in hindsight, should have been an obvious question to ask, considering that the burglars who were arrested at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in June 1972 were found to have bugging equipment in their possession.

To give any answer other than the one he gave would have been perjury, as Butterfield (who left the White House after the 1972 election to become administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration) knew. So he acknowledged that he had been aware of such listening devices when he was at the White House.

It would be another year before the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had to turn over his tapes to investigators — which sealed Nixon's fate. The tapes clearly revealed Nixon's involvement in the coverup, the "smoking gun" that forced him to resign on Aug. 9, 1974.

But Butterfield's testimony was the crack in the dam, and the unrelenting pressure would eventually lead to its destruction.

Watergate will always be a cautionary tale, for public officials and the public they serve.

To remain free, we must be ever diligent. Our enemies are not always outside our borders.