Spilling the Beans

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A pretty convincing case can be made that what happened 40 years ago today was what marked the beginning of the end for Richard Nixon.

Three weeks earlier, Nixon's claim to have been uninvolved in — in fact, to have been unaware of — either the planning of the Watergate burglary or its coverup took a severe (but hardly lethal) blow when his former counsel, John Dean, spent a week testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee.

Nixon's defenders insisted that it was the word of only one man against the words of everyone else. Had it remained that way, Nixon might well have weathered the storm and limped through his second term. I'm sure there would have been lingering suspicions about Nixon's guilt or innocence — but no evidence to elevate those suspicions from whispered rumors to criminal accusations.

But what happened 40 years ago today changed things.

I'm speaking of Alexander Butterfield's revelation of the existence of a White House taping system that had been recording all of Nixon's meetings and phone conversations. Butterfield was a deputy assistant to Nixon, having gotten that position through an old college friend of his, Bob Haldeman, the president's chief of staff.

(I always thought that was historically significant, but the only mention I have seen of it — other than an opinion piece that, appropriately, ran in the Washington Post a month ago — has been in the form of rather brief entries in "Today in History" type columns.)

Butterfield's job in the White House never struck me as being particularly glamorous — but his duties did differ from those of his colleagues in at least one important regard. He was responsible for maintaining the taping system, and very few people knew about that.

But everyone knew about it on this day in 1973.

Butterfield was called in to testify in public after undergoing pre–testimony questioning from the committee's staff three days earlier.

In his testimony three weeks earlier, Dean had suggested that Nixon's behavior had led him to believe conversations might have been recorded, and the committee had been following up on that in routine pre–testimony questioning of witnesses. Butterfield later said that he had decided not to voluntarily disclose the existence of the system, but he would truthfully answer any direct question that was put to him.

It turned out that Butterfield was asked a direct question in that pre–testimony session — by the counsel for the minority, Donald Sanders — and he confirmed that such a system did exist. This put him at the head of the line for witnesses who would be called the following Monday — when the chief counsel for the minority, Fred Thompson, asked him the now–famous question, "Are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?"

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Butterfield replied that, when he was working at the White House, he had been aware of the presence of listening devices and that they had been installed about three years earlier.

After describing the extent of the taping system and identifying who had knowledge of its existence, Butterfield was asked if either John Ehrlichman or John Dean would have known about it.

"It would be very unlikely," Butterfield replied. "My guess is they definitely did not know."

As I have written here before, my family was out of the country in the summer of 1973 so I do not have any firsthand knowledge of what the atmosphere was like on that Monday in July. But my guess is that, after watching extensive testimony from the former attorney general and the former counsel to the president, viewers couldn't have been enthusiastic when Butterfield, the former deputy assistant to the president, was called to testify.

He sounded like something of a nuts and bolts guy when he described his duties in the White House.

"I was in charge of administration," Butterfield told the committee, "that is to say that the staff secretary, who is the day–to–day administrator at the White House, reported directly to me. And, of course, I reported to Mr. Haldeman, as did everyone.

"I was responsible for the management and ultimate supervision for the Office of Presidential Papers and the Office of Special Files ... I was in charge of security at the White House insofar as liaison to the Secret Service and the Executive Protection Service is concerned and insofar as FBI background investigations for prospective presidential appointees is concerned."

Even after hearing a rundown on his duties, viewers had to wonder who this guy was and what he could possibly contribute to the discussion. They were about to find out.

It was a critical moment in the evolution of the Watergate scandal. Of that, there can be no doubt.

But it seems appropriate at this point to mention something.

I have heard some people complain that it is an urban myth that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters responsible for the early coverage of the scandal, brought down the Nixon presidency. I'm willing to concede that point to a certain extent.

Woodward and Bernstein alone did not bring down the Nixon presidency. It was the accumulated weight of the various investigations, like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill, that brought Nixon down — along with his own hubris and paranoia.

Woodward and Bernstein kept the story alive when virtually no one else in the Fourth Estate was willing to take the chance. Nixon, after all, enjoyed approval ratings in the upper 50s, even lower 60s, in the summer of 1972, and he wielded enormous power. No one wanted to offend him. No one wanted to challenge him. The existence of the "enemies list" was not acknowledged publicly until after Dean testified, but many in the press had long suspected that there was such a thing — if not on paper, certainly in the minds of Nixon and his minions.

By this day in 1973, plenty of questions had been raised but practically no answers had been given. In the minds of most — and in spite of mountains of apparent evidence to the contrary — it was still seen as one man's word against another's.

But when Butterfield told the Senate Watergate Committee 40 years ago today that a taping system had been recording every Oval Office meeting and conversation that involved the president, everyone knew that there was a witness, a silent witness, that would verify whether Nixon or Dean was telling the truth.

In short, it was now possible, everyone knew, to get an answer to Sen. Howard Baker's memorable question: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

This witness was not vulnerable to accusations of faulty memory, but it could be tampered with — as America would discover in a few months.

A Continuing Mystery

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This was called the "Rose Mary Stretch."

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Sometimes it seems that many of the things that happened in America and the world when I was growing up have never had a full public accounting.

That really isn't true. It took awhile, but several things that happened when I was a child have been resolved. It took three decades to close the books on the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, for example, but Byron De La Beckwith was ultimately held accountable for the crime.

And even most of the cases where some questions still remain have had an official resolution — Lee Harvey Oswald is still blamed for President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 and James Earl Ray remains the gunman of record in Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, even though legitimate questions have been asked about the participation of both. Sirhan Sirhan fired his weapon in a room full of people so it would have been hard for him to resist the charge of being involved in Bobby Kennedy's assassination, but questions remain about whether a second gunman was in that pantry that night.

A few years ago, we learned that former FBI associate director Mark Felt was the legendary "Deep Throat" who blew the whistle on the Nixon White House. Felt died last December at the age of 95.

For the longest time, I thought I would never know the identity of "Deep Throat." Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who stayed with the Watergate story when no one else was connecting the dots and altered the course of history in their vital role as government watchdogs, had promised not to reveal his identity before his death. When it actually was revealed, it was done so by Felt's choice; Woodward and Bernstein confirmed the truth of his claim.

As a young person, I really admired Woodward and Bernstein. I must have been about 14 when I read "All the President' Men." I think I was probably 16 when I read their sequel, "The Final Days," and I even got Bernstein to autograph my copy when I heard him speak in person nearly 20 years later.

I've often thought that it was the work of Woodward and Bernstein that inspired me to study journalism in college and work in the field for many years.

Those two reporters managed to tie together nearly all of the loose ends. But one mystery that remains unresolved is the cause of the infamous 18½-minute gap in the White House tapes.

Only former White House counsel John Dean had challenged Richard Nixon's version of events before White House aide Alexander Butterfield was questioned by the Senate Watergate committee in the summer of 1973. But the senators had been intrigued when Dean testified — he suggested that he had been under the impression at times that, during meetings with Nixon, he had been asked numerous leading questions, as if a recording were being made and a record were being kept of his statements.

A few weeks later, Butterfield revealed the existence of Nixon's taping system. Later that year, one of Nixon's attorneys, while reviewing tapes that had been subpoenaed, discovered the lengthy erasure. Further scrutiny indicated that there had been between five and nine separate erasures, which suggests that whoever erased that portion of the tape did so repeatedly, reviewing what was still audible, then erasing some more until all the incriminating portions of that conversation seemed to have been deleted.

Butterfield said that the only people he knew of who were aware of the taping system were Nixon, chief of staff Bob Haldeman, Gen. Alexander Haig, Lawrence Higby (one of Haldeman's assistants), Stephen Bull (assistant to Nixon), Butterfield himself and Butterfield's secretary. He said that he did not think Dean or presidential assistant John Ehrlichman knew about it.

After the existence of the gap was revealed, Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's secretary, took the blame for up to five minutes of the erasure. In the picture above, she demonstrates for the press how she may have unknowingly placed her foot on the "record" pedal during her transcription of the tape when she was interrupted to answer a phone.

But to achieve this would have required the somewhat diminutive Woods to perform a rather gymnastic maneuver — and hold it for the duration of the phone conversation.

The tape in question was made three days after the Watergate break–in so it seems likely the conversation dealt with the Watergate matter.

In his movie "Nixon," director Oliver Stone portrayed Nixon alone in a room in the White House, fumbling clumsily with the tape recorder while reviewing the content of the tapes. As I recall, it was implied that Nixon was the one who really made all the erasures, which seems plausible to me.

Woods was fiercely loyal to Nixon; she had worked for him for more than 20 years. But she only took the blame for up to five minutes of the erasure.

And those who knew about the taping system before it was made public had nothing to gain from taking a bullet for the president.

The existence of the gap was not conclusive proof of Nixon's involvement, but it certainly cast a shadow over the president. Ultimately, the tapes that were left intact provided clear evidence of Nixon's participation in the coverup, and he became the first president to resign.

Bob Woodward once observed that, rather than an 18½–minute gap, Nixon would have needed an 18,500–minute gap to obliterate all taped evidence of his participation in the coverup.

Nearly everyone who played a role in the Watergate scandal is gone now. Next month, in fact, it will be 15 years since Nixon himself died.

So I'm inclined to believe that we will never know the truth about the 18½–minute gap. Was it Nixon, struggling with technology he couldn't comprehend? That seems like the most likely scenario. Although he was regarded as brilliant in some circles, Nixon was frequently out of step with what was considered modern technology in the 1970s — and seems ridiculously simple by today's standards.

It seemed obvious to me then — and seems even moreso today — that the most logical strategy for someone who was determined to destroy evidence was to listen to the tape carefully, pinpoint how much needed to be deleted, play it through again to time it and determine how much of an erasure would be needed and then make a single erasure. The likelihood of five to nine separate erasures conjures a mental image not unlike the one shown in Stone's movie of a man recklessly, almost randomly, erasing two or three minutes at a time, then playing it back to see if he could get away with what remained.

The tapes are in the possession of the National Archives. My understanding is that it has made several attempts to restore the missing portion but without success. The tapes are now being kept in a climate–controlled vault to preserve them in case a future breakthrough provides the means to recover what was erased.

As I say, it will probably still be a mystery when I die. And I doubt it is a mystery that will ever be resolved. I mean, even if the National Archives can restore the erased part, it can never tell us who was responsible for the erasures.

I'm inclined to believe that only Nixon could have cleared it up for us.

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.