RIP: Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed Watergate tapes, dies at 99.
Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertently hastened Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal when he revealed that the president had bugged the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and routinely recorded his conversations, has died. He was 99.
His death was confirmed to The Associated Press by his wife, Kim, and John Dean, who served as White House counsel to Nixon during the Watergate scandal and went on to, along with Butterfield, help expose the wrongdoing.
“He had the heavy responsibility of revealing something he was sworn to secrecy on, which is the installation of the Nixon taping system,” Dean said. “He stood up and told the truth.”
As a deputy assistant to the president, Butterfield oversaw the taping system connected to voice-activated listening devices that had been secretly placed in four locations, including Nixon’s office in the Executive Office Building and the presidential retreat at Camp David.
Butterfield later said that, besides himself and the president, he believed that only White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, a Haldeman assistant and a handful of Secret Service agents knew about the taping system.
At Media Myth Alert in 2013, Joseph Campbell wrote: The Nixon tapes: A pivotal Watergate story that WaPo missed.
The book, All the President’s Men, says that Woodward had found out about private testimony that Butterfield had given to staff members of the select committee and he called Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor, for guidance.
The call to Bradlee was on a Saturday night. After outlining what he knew, Woodward, according to the book, said:
“We’ll go to work on it, if you want.”
In reply, Bradlee is quoted as saying with some slight irritation, “Well, I don’t know.”
How would you rate the prospective story? Woodward asked him.
“B-plus,” Bradlee replied.
Woodward figured a B-plus wasn’t much, according to the book.
“See what more you can find out, but I wouldn’t bust one on it,” Bradlee is quoted as instructing Woodward.
And Woodward didn’t “bust one.”
Two days later, on July 16, 1973, Butterfield made his reluctant disclosure at a public session of the Senate select committee.
The following day, according to All the President’s Men, Bradlee conceded that the lead about the taping system was “more than a B-plus.”
The anecdote from All the President’s Men is suggestive of the overall minor role that the Post played in uncovering Watergate. As I point out in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, unraveling a scandal of the dimension of Watergate “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.
“Even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of Watergate’s signal crime, the break-in in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
As Glenn has written, “Recent Events Have Made Me Doubt the Entire Watergate Story:” Nixon’s Revenge.