Bill Trotter
WASHINGTON, March 9 (Reuters) – Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who leaked Richard Nixon’s secret recording system and provided “irrefutable evidence” of the Watergate scandal that led to the president’s resignation, has died at the age of 99.
Butterfield’s death was confirmed by his wife, Kim, to The Washington Post and The New York Times, and his revelations about the listening devices and recording system sparked a fierce legal battle over the president’s executive privilege.
Both newspapers said he died a month short of his 100th birthday at his home in San Diego’s La Jolla beachfront area, but did not mention a cause of death.
Butterfield once told journalist Alicia Shepard that he didn’t like being called the person who revealed the existence of the tapes because it gave the impression that he “eagerly and breathlessly” told the Watergate congressional committee about the tapes.
Born in Pensacola, Florida, and raised in California, Butterfield attended UCLA before joining the United States Air Force in 1948 and serving as a combat pilot during the Vietnam War, commanding a tactical reconnaissance squadron. He later gained White House exposure as a military aide to a top Pentagon aide.
Butterfield eventually left the Air Force and joined the White House staff as deputy to H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff and an old friend from UCLA. One of Butterfield’s White House responsibilities was to preserve historical records of the presidency, which included overseeing the installation of a voice-activated recording system.
By the time the investigation into the June 17, 1972, break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Towers reached a fever pitch, Butterfield had left the White House to take the top job at the Federal Aviation Administration.
He was one of the few people in the White House who knew about the recording system, and after learning he would be questioned by the Senate Watergate Committee, formally known as the Select Committee on Presidential Campaigns, Butterfield decided not to lie or volunteer information.
A Republican staff attorney for the committee put the question to him during a private preliminary meeting, when he asked whether the White House had a recording system. Butterfield reluctantly admits there is.
key questions
On July 16, 1973, three days after Butterfield’s first behind-closed-doors disclosure, he appeared during a televised meeting of a Senate committee where Fred Thompson, a future actor and senator who was the committee’s Republican adviser at the time, asked the same question.
Butterfield paused for a long moment before saying, “Yes, sir, I know there was a listening device.”
This was shocking news to the nation because it meant there was a true record of what Nixon said, when and to whom.
Butterfield said the recording system had been secretly recording conversations and meetings in the Oval Office, Nixon’s office in the Executive Office Building and the Cabinet Room, as well as four White House phones. The purpose of the recording, he said, was historic.
Butterfield told People magazine in 1975 that Nixon often forgot his tape recorder and ignored suggestions to destroy the tapes because he never imagined the Watergate scandal would get to the point where he would have to hand over the tapes.
“I’m sure he hated me as much as anyone,” Butterfield said of his former boss, who died in 1994.
He said he thought Nixon should have resigned sooner.
“I’m not sad that the president resigned,” he said. “not at all.”
Nixon’s role revealed
A tape made six days after the Watergate break-in proved to be Nixon’s undoing – “ironclad evidence” that he knew the truth about the cover-up. He was heard to have agreed to plans to halt the break-in investigation for national security reasons.
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately rejected the White House’s claim of executive privilege and ordered Nixon to turn over the subpoenaed tapes as public and political support dwindled. Rather than face impeachment and a Senate trial, he resigned on August 9, 1974.
Since Butterfield had no role in the burglary or cover-up, he was never indicted, but his old friend Haldeman would become one of several Nixon insiders jailed in the scandal.
Butterfield, the focus of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s 2015 book “The Last of the President’s Men,” helped uncover the truth about Watergate by providing Woodward with thousands of documents he had secretly taken from Nixon administration offices.
The documents and interviews with Butterfield paint a picture of what the former White House aide called a “cesspool” within the administration and paint Nixon as eccentric, isolated and resentful.
Butterfield said he was often the target of hostility from Nixon loyalists and told Time magazine that longtime Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods “destroyed the greatest leader this country had ever seen” by saying she accidentally deleted 18 1/2 minutes of the White House tapes and disparaged him as a “son of a bitch.”
Butterfield served as a consultant in Oliver Stone’s 1995 film “Nixon,” in which he also had a cameo as a White House staffer.
Butterfield’s first marriage, to Charlotte Maguire, ended in divorce in 1985. He also previously dated Audrey Geisel, the widow of children’s author and illustrator Theodor Seuss Geisel. Seuss.
(Reporting and writing by Bill Trott; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Diane Craft)