Who PressedRecord

On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the Democratic Party's offices at the Watergate building in Washington. The money in their pockets traced back to the committee working to reelect President Nixon. That November Nixon won 49 states.

John Dean had been counsel to the President until Nixon fired him on April 30, 1973. On June 25 he spent the day reading a 245 page statement to the Senate Watergate Committee on live television. He said he had warned Nixon in the Oval Office on March 21, 1973.

I began by telling the President that there was a cancer growing on the Presidency and that if the cancer was not removed that the President himself would be killed by it.

John Dean, testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee, June 25, 1973

Dean had helped run the cover up himself, and the White House said he was blaming his boss to get a lighter sentence. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, the committee's top Republican, kept asking one question: what did the President know, and when did he know it?

On Friday, July 13, Senate staff interviewed Alexander Butterfield, a former aide who had worked a few steps from the Oval Office. A Republican staff lawyer, Donald Sanders, asked whether Dean might be right that some conversations had been recorded. Butterfield told him the truth. Three days later, on live television, Fred Thompson asked him again.

THOMPSON: Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?

BUTTERFIELD: I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir.

Senate Watergate Committee, July 16, 1973

In February 1971 the Secret Service had hidden seven microphones in the Oval Office and two in the Cabinet Room, and later added four in Nixon's private office across the street. The Oval Office microphones switched on by themselves when someone spoke. Only a handful of people knew, including Nixon, his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, and Butterfield. By July 1973 the system had captured about 3,400 hours of conversation.

Within days, the committee and the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, demanded the tapes. Nixon refused. He said a president's private conversations were protected by executive privilege, the idea that presidents need to get honest advice without every word becoming public.

Cox took the President to court and won. Instead of handing over the tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox on Saturday, October 20, 1973. Richardson resigned rather than do it. His deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused as well and left. The third man in line, Solicitor General Robert Bork, fired Cox. The newspapers called it the Saturday Night Massacre.

Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.

Archibald Cox, statement after his firing, October 20, 1973

Within days of the public outcry Nixon agreed to give up the tapes. On November 17 he told a room of newspaper editors, People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.

Four days later his lawyers told Judge John Sirica that one tape had a problem. On a June 20, 1972 conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, three days after the break in, 18 and a half minutes of voices had been replaced by a loud buzz. Haldeman's own handwritten notes from that meeting show that Watergate was one of the topics.

Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, testified that she may have erased about five minutes by accident. She said she reached for a ringing phone while her foot was still on the recorder's pedal.

In January 1974 a panel of six audio experts, chosen jointly by the court and the White House, examined the tape and the machine. No one has ever recovered what was said.

The new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, subpoenaed 64 more conversations. On April 29, 1974, Nixon went on television beside a stack of binders and released more than 1,200 pages of edited transcripts instead of the tapes. Wherever the President had cursed, the pages said expletive deleted.

The case reached the Supreme Court. On July 24, 1974, the justices ruled 8 to 0 that Nixon had to hand the tapes over. Justice William Rehnquist sat out because he had worked in Nixon's Justice Department. Chief Justice Warren Burger, whom Nixon had appointed, wrote the opinion.

The generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.

United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, July 24, 1974

The Court did not throw out executive privilege. It set a limit on it. Three days later the House Judiciary Committee began voting on articles of impeachment, the formal charges that could send a president to trial in the Senate.

One of the conversations the Court forced into the open was recorded on June 23, 1972, six days after the break in. Haldeman told Nixon the FBI was tracing the burglars' money. His plan was to have the deputy director of the CIA, Vernon Walters, tell the acting head of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray, to back off by claiming the case touched national security. It did not.

HALDEMAN: . . . have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, "Stay the hell out of this" . . .

NIXON: Right, fine.

NIXON: Play it tough. That's the way they play it and that's the way we are going to play it.

Oval Office, June 23, 1972 · Watergate trial exhibit transcript, Nixon Library

For two years Nixon had said he did not learn about the cover up until Dean told him in March 1973. This tape showed him approving it six days after the arrests. It was released on August 5, 1974. Charles Wiggins of California, the President's strongest defender on the Judiciary Committee, announced that he would now vote to impeach. Other Republicans who had voted no followed him.

On August 7 three Republican leaders, Senator Barry Goldwater, Senator Hugh Scott and House leader John Rhodes, went to the White House. Accounts of that meeting differ, but the number of senators Goldwater said were still with Nixon was somewhere between about 15 and 18. Removing a president takes 67 votes in the Senate, so Nixon needed 34 to survive.

On the night of August 8 Nixon told the country he would resign. At 11:35 the next morning his letter reached Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.

Richard Nixon, letter to Henry Kissinger, August 9, 1974

A month later, on September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a full pardon.