This is an extremely rare and real hand written letters and some typed from James McCord, one of the Key Watergate players… Related to Kurt Singer. With a copy of Newsweek with James McCord on cover. Six letters written by James W. But Ron Von Klaussen, the. If I had won, Mr. Von I Klaussen said darkly, I would have turned the letters over to someone in authority. Watergate, in fact, furnished, a link last night between the McCord letters and two documents from President Thomas Jefferson, said to constitute the first known use of Executive Privilege. These letters, cited Wednes. Day by Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Watergate. The recipient of the McCord letters, Kurt Singer, scoffed last night at the assertion that they had been written in code, Mr. Singer, author of a dozen spy novels, said they related to contacts he had made with spies in Northern Europe in the late nineteenfifties. If it’s code, Mr. Singer said by telephone from Anaheim; Calif. Then I don’t know about it. James Walter McCord Jr. (born June 26, 1924) is a former CIA officer, later involved, as an electronics expert, in the burglaries which precipitated the Watergate scandal. McCord was born in Waurika, Oklahoma[3][4] and briefly attended Baylor University before receiving a B. From the University of Texas at Austin in 1949. In 1965, he received an M. In international affairs from George Washington University. McCord worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1961, and under his direction, a counter-intelligence program was launched against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. [5] During his career McCord was a security coordinator for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and worked for the FBI and CIA, where he was in charge of physical security at Langley headquarters. He also held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U. McCord was interviewed and then hired by Jack Caulfield in January 1972 “for strict, solely defensive security work at the Republican National Committee and the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP)”. He and four other accomplices were arrested during the second break-in to the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. The arrests led to the Watergate scandal and resignation of President Nixon. McCord was one of the first men convicted in the Watergate criminal trial; on eight counts of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping. [3] In a later letter, written to U. District Judge John Sirica, McCord stated that his plea and testimony, some of which he claimed was perjured, were compelled by pressure from White House counsel John Dean and former Attorney General John N. The letter implicated senior individuals in the Richard Nixon administration of covering up the conspiracy that led to the burglary. (My opinion of letter contents). These letters give you the insight of a real intelligence officer. Gathering data from field assets and paying them. These letters do not delve into Watergate materiel. The mainly are a back and forth conversation with a field asset famous author…. Very interesting, extremely rare. This also comes with a near mint issue of Newsweek May 28, 1973. I have allowed buyers to remain anonymous on this item due to its political nature and that James McCord is still with us. About Kurt Singer: Who the letters were to. Kurt Singer, 94; Espionage Writer and Biographer Spied on Nazis in World War II. Kurt Singer, an anti-Nazi activist and spy during World War II whose dozens of books include works on espionage and biographies on subjects as diverse as Hitler henchman Hermann Goering and actor Danny Kaye, has died. Singer died Friday in Santa Barbara of natural causes, said his son, Kenneth. The prolific and eclectic writer was born in Vienna and grew up in Berlin, where he became increasingly worried about the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. With his first wife, Hilde Tradelius, he began publishing an anti-Nazi underground weekly in 1933. The Nazis soon put a price on his head, and he fled to Stockholm. Working as a journalist for Swedish and Swiss publications, Singer helped found a pro-Allies newspaper and a committee to free anti-Nazi leader Carl von Ossietzky from a concentration camp. Grossman, he wrote a biography of Von Ossietzky that he believed helped win the Nobel Peace Prize for the humanitarian. In Sweden and later in the U. The writer functioned as a spy, providing information for the Allies about Russian and Nazi activities in Scandinavia. I was deeply involved in espionage as my contribution to fight and destroy the Hitler regime, Singer said in a recent autobiography for the Danish Peace Academy. I worked with the Swedish secret service, the British, the American and mostly with the Norwegian secret service of their government in exile. When Singer published the biography Goering: Germanys Most Dangerous Man in 1940, Germany demanded that Sweden confiscate all copies and hand over Singer. Although Sweden originally denied the extradition, it did ban the book, and Singer made plans to leave for the United States. In 1943, he published Duel for the Northland: The War of Enemy Agents in Scandinavia. That book sparked a long line of works about espionage — among them Spies and Traitors of World War II, Three Thousand Years of Espionage, The Worlds 30 Greatest Women Spies, The Worlds Best Spy Stories and Spy Omnibus. He edited many other books on espionage and a biography of the legendary Mata Hari. Singers major books on crime were My Greatest Crime Story, by Police Chiefs of the World and My Strangest Case, by Police Chiefs of the World. With his second wife, Jane Sherrod, to whom he was married from 1955 until her death in 1985, Singer wrote juvenile books such as Spies for Democracy, Great Adventures of the Sea, Great Adventures in Crime and Ghost Book. As an editor, he frequently delved into the supernatural, working on such books as I Cant Sleep at Night: 13 Weird Tales, Plague of the Unknown and Ghouls and Ghosts. In 1955 he founded Singer Communications Inc. A syndicated international news service based in Anaheim, and served as its president. A lecturer on World War II and the history of espionage, he donated his collection of historical works to the Special Collections Archives at Boston University. Born Kurt Deutsch, Singer took his mothers maiden name. He studied at the University of Zurich and at Labor College in Stockholm. In 1951, the year he became a U. Citizen, he received a doctorate from the Divinity College of Metaphysics in Indianapolis. In addition to his son, the once-divorced and once-widowed Singer is survived by his wife of 18 years, Katherine, and two grandchildren. His daughter, Marian, died in 2004. (January 26, 1924 June 15, 2017)[2] was an American CIA officer, later involved as an electronics expert in the burglaries which precipitated the Watergate scandal. McCord was born in Waurika, Oklahoma. [4][5] He served as a bombardier with the rank of second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces during World War II. [6] He briefly attended Baylor University before receiving a B. [7] In 1965, he received an M. [7][8] After beginning his career at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), McCord worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ultimately ascending to a GS-15 position in the Agency’s Office of Security. For a period of time, he was in charge of physical security at the Agency’s Langley headquarters. [10] According to Russ Baker, then-Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles once introduced McCord to an Air Force colonel as “the best man we have”. In 1961, under his direction, a counter-intelligence program was launched against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. [12] He also held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force Reserve. Shortly after resigning from the CIA, McCord was interviewed and then hired by Jack Caulfield in January 1972 “for strict, solely defensive security work at the Republican National Committee and the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP)”. McCord was one of the first men convicted in the Watergate criminal trial; on eight counts of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping, for which McCord received a sentence of 25 years in federal prison. [4][14] In a later letter, written to U. As a result of the letter, McCord flipped and became a cooperating witness and was released for time served. His letter and subsequent cooperation is said to have broken the Watergate case “wide open”. After serving four months in prison, McCord set up his own security firm, retiring later to Pennsylvania. McCord died at the age of 93 from pancreatic cancer on June 15, 2017, at his home in Douglassville, Pennsylvania. His death was not reported in local and national news outlets until 2019. He truth of it is, like Deep Throat told Bob Woodward in the movie, these guys just werent very bright. The basics of tradecraft, of political skulduggeryof common sensecalled for cutouts: burglars and buggers with no ties to President Richard Nixon who, should they happen to be caught planting listening devices at Democratic Party headquarters, would not lead the authorities to the White House. But after Washington police were summoned to investigate a reported burglary at the Watergate office building on that spring night in 1972, one of those arrested at the scene, and taken away in handcuffs, was James W. The head of security for Nixons fundraising organization, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, better known as CREEP. The Oklahoma-born McCord was 48, a veteran aviator of World War II, and a longtime CIA counterintelligence operative who had retired from the agency in 1971 to start his own security firm. To the outside worldor so the White House tried to maintainhis job was to guard the offices of the presidents fundraising committee election campaign and Republican Party from surveillance or intrusion by hostile forcesnot lead a pre-dawn break-in at the opposition headquarters. Sending McCord and the other burglars into the Watergate was just one of the moronic decisions made by the teams leaders, Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy. Within hours, he was publicly identified as well. Liddy and McCord had also OK’d a crude procedure: the taping of the locks in the doors of the stairwell that led up to Democratic headquarters. The tape was found by a security guard, who summoned the police to the scene. Their bungling was so flagrant that it helped to spark a cottage industry for conspiracy theorists. Because Hunt and McCord had once worked for the CIA, and Liddy, McCord and another key member of the team were former FBI agentsas, it turns out, was Deep Throatit became an article of faith for die-hard Nixon loyalists: It was an inside job. What some now call the deep state had taken down a president. The Watergate burglarsThe Plumbers, as they were calledjust couldnt have been that stupid, could they? Alas, it was so. They kept mum for many months, allowing Nixon to win reelection in a landslide. It was only in March 1973, when the burglars were threatened by District Judge John Sirica with lengthy prison terms if they didnt tell all they knew, that McCord cracked. He wrote a letter to the court and, as Sirica said, broke the case wide open. On March 23, 1973, Sirica read McCords letter aloud in court: There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. Perjury occurred during the trial. Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified. It was the bombshell of bombshells. McCord told his story to federal and congressional investigators. Nixon aides like Jeb Magruder and John Dean were knocking on the prosecutors door, offering to trade what they knew in return for preferred treatment. Nixons chief of staff, H. Haldeman, and other top aides resigned. The Senate Watergate Committee scheduled hearings at which McCord, Dean and others testified. It was hearsay, the presidents Republican defenders insisted. But then, at one of those hearings, a White House aide told the world about the presidents secret tapes, which Nixon was compelled to release not long before becoming the only president in U. History to resign from office. There was a time of reckoning and a wave of reform to clean up campaigns and government and curb the imperial powers of the presidency. But time passed, memories faded and most of the post-Watergate reforms eroded. The media was again declared an enemy. A president turned to nefarious activities to tar his opponent. For his services as a cooperating witness for federal prosecutors and the Senate Watergate Committee, McCords sentencepotentially up to 45 yearswas reduced to four months He went on to write a strange, almost-mystical memoir and made a few appearances on panels at conferences marking Watergate anniversaries. But gradually he faded from view, living out his last years in Pennsylvania. Unlike the other public figures listed in these pages, McCord did not die in 2019. He died of cancer in 2017, at his home in Douglassville, Pennsylvaniaas anonymous in death as he was famous in the spring of 1973. Its emblematic of his clandestine character, perhaps, that his death escaped notice by the media for two years. Or, perhaps, its emblematic of lessons we have forgotten. McCord was one of the first of the president’s men to take the fall for Watergate. After leaving the infamous piece of tape on a door in the Watergate building that alerted a security guard to the break-in, he was arrested the night of the burglary along with the four other men, pleaded guilty, and was convicted on six counts. However, he later wrote a letter to Judge John J. Sirica claiming that the defendants had pleaded guilty under pressure (from John Dean and John Mitchell, among others) and that perjury had been committed. McCord’s allegations that the White House knew of the burglary and attempt to cover it up were crucial in causing investigators to push further. McCord was the security director of the Committee for the Reelection of the President at the time and had formerly worked as an officer in the CIA and FBI. After retiring from the CIA, he operated his own security consulting firm in Rockville, McCord Associates, and secured a contract to provide security to the Republican National Committee. He was also a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve. In 1974 he published a book entitled, A Piece of Tape — The Watergate Story: Fact and Fiction. He Watergate scandal was a political scandal in the United States involving the administration of U. President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon’s resignation. The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration’s continuous attempts to cover up its involvement in the June 17, 1972 failed break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Washington, D. After the five perpetrators were arrested, the press and the U. Justice Department connected the cash found on them at the time to the Nixon re-election campaign committee. [1][2] Further investigations, along with revelations during subsequent trials of the burglars, led the U. House of Representatives to grant its judiciary committee additional investigation authority to probe into “certain matters within its jurisdiction, “[3][4] and the U. Senate to create a special investigative committee. The resultant Senate Watergate hearings commenced were broadcast “gavel-to-gavel” nationwide by PBS and aroused public interest. [5] Witnesses testified that the president had approved plans to cover up administration involvement in the break-in, and that there was a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office. [6][7] Throughout the investigation, the administration resisted its probes, which led to a constitutional crisis. Several major revelations and egregious presidential action against the investigation later in 1973 prompted the House to commence an impeachment process against Nixon. Supreme Court ruled that Nixon must release the Oval Office tapes to government investigators. The tapes revealed that Nixon had conspired to cover up activities that took place after the break-in and had attempted to use federal officials to deflect the investigation. [10][11] The House judiciary committee then approved articles of impeachment against Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. With his complicity in the cover-up made public and his political support completely eroded, Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974. It is believed that, had he not done so, he would have been impeached by the House and removed from office by a trial in the Senate. [12][13] He is the only U. President to have resigned from office. On September 8, 1974, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. There were 69 people indicted and 48 peoplemany of them top Nixon administration officialswere convicted. [14] The metonym Watergate came to encompass an array of clandestine and often illegal activities undertaken by members of the Nixon administration, including bugging the offices of political opponents and people of whom Nixon or his officials were suspicious; ordering investigations of activist groups and political figures; and using the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Internal Revenue Service as political weapons. [15] The use of the suffix “-gate” after an identifying term has since become synonymous with public scandal, especially political scandal. [16][17][18][19][20]. Wiretapping of the Democratic Party’s headquarters. Cover-up and its unraveling. Kidnapping of Martha Mitchell. Role of the media. Senate Watergate hearings and revelation of the Watergate tapes. Legal action against Nixon Administration members. Release of the transcripts. Release of the tapes. Final investigations and resignation. President Ford’s pardon of Nixon. Final legal actions and effect on the law profession. Political and cultural reverberations. Purpose of the break-in. During the break-in, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy remained in contact with each other and with the burglars by radio. These Chapstick tubes outfitted with tiny microphones were later discovered in Hunt’s White House office safe. Transistor radio used in the Watergate break-in. Walkie-talkie used in Watergate break-in. DNC filing cabinet from the Watergate office building, damaged by the burglars. On January 27, 1972, G. Gordon Liddy, Finance Counsel for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP) and former aide to John Ehrlichman, presented a campaign intelligence plan to CRP’s Acting Chairman Jeb Stuart Magruder, Attorney General John Mitchell, and Presidential Counsel John Dean that involved extensive illegal activities against the Democratic Party. According to Dean, this marked “the opening scene of the worst political scandal of the twentieth century and the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency”. Mitchell viewed the plan as unrealistic. Two months later, Mitchell approved a reduced version of the plan, including burgling the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D. Ostensibly to photograph campaign documents and install listening devices in telephones. Liddy was nominally in charge of the operation, [citation needed] but has since insisted that he was duped by both Dean and at least two of his subordinates, which included former CIA officers E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, the latter of whom was serving as then-CRP Security Coordinator after John Mitchell had by then resigned as Attorney General to become the CRP chairman. In May, McCord assigned former FBI agent Alfred C. Baldwin III to carry out the wiretapping and monitor the telephone conversations afterward. [24] McCord testified that he selected Baldwin’s name from a registry published by the FBI’s Society of Former Special Agents to work for the Committee to re-elect President Nixon. [citation needed] Baldwin first served as bodyguard to Martha MitchellJohn Mitchell’s wife, who was living in Washington. [citation needed] Baldwin accompanied Martha Mitchell to Chicago. [citation needed] Eventually the Committee replaced Baldwin with another security man. On May 11, McCord arranged for Baldwin, whom investigative reporter Jim Hougan described as “somehow special and perhaps well known to McCord”, [citation needed] to stay at the Howard Johnson’s motel across the street from the Watergate complex. [citation needed] Room 419 was booked in the name of McCord’s company. [citation needed] At behest of Liddy and Hunt, McCord and his team of burglars prepared for their first Watergate break-in, which began on May 28. Two phones inside the DNC headquarters’ offices were said to have been wiretapped. At the time, Oliver was working as the executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen. While successful with installing the listening devices, the Committee agents soon determined that they needed repairs. They plotted a second “burglary” in order to take care of the situation. Sometime after midnight on Saturday, June 17, 1972, Watergate Complex security guard Frank Wills noticed tape covering the latches on some of the complex’s doors leading from the underground parking garage to several offices, which allowed the doors to close but stay unlocked. [citation needed] He removed the tape, believing it was nothing. [27] Responding to the call was an unmarked car with three plainclothes officers Sgt. Leeper, Officer John B. Barrett, and Officer Carl M. Shoffler working the overnight “bum squad”dressed as hippies and on the lookout for drug deals and other street crimes. [28] The burglars’ sentry across the street, Alfred Baldwin, was distracted watching TV and failed to observe the arrival of the police car in front of the hotel. [28] Neither did he see the plainclothes officers investigating the DNC’s sixth floor suite of 29 offices. By the time Baldwin finally noticed unusual activity on the sixth floor and radioed the burglars, it was already too late. [28] The police apprehended five men, later identified as Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis. [22] They were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications. The following morning, Sunday, June 18, G. Gordon Liddy called Jeb Magruder in Los Angeles and informed him that “the four men arrested with McCord were Cuban freedom fighters, whom Howard Hunt recruited”. Initially, Nixon’s organization and the White House quickly went to work to cover up the crime and any evidence that might have damaged the president and his reelection. On September 15, 1972, a grand jury indicted the five office burglars, as well as Hunt and Liddy, [31] for conspiracy, burglary, and violation of federal wiretapping laws. The burglars were tried by a jury, with Judge John Sirica officiating, and pled guilty or were convicted on January 30, 1973. Address book of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, discovered in a room at the Watergate Hotel, June 18, 1972. Within hours of the burglars’ arrest, the FBI discovered E. Howard Hunt’s name in Barker and Martínez’s address books. Nixon administration officials were concerned because Hunt and Liddy were also involved in a separate secret activity known as the “White House Plumbers”, which was established to stop security “leaks” and investigate other sensitive security matters. Dean later testified that top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman ordered him to “deep six” the contents of Howard Hunt’s White House safe. Ehrlichman subsequently denied this. In the end, Dean and the FBI’s Acting Director L. Patrick Gray (in separate operations) destroyed the evidence from Hunt’s safe. Nixon’s own reaction to the break-in, at least initially, was one of skepticism. Watergate prosecutor James Neal was sure that Nixon had not known in advance of the break-in. As evidence, he cited a conversation taped on June 23 between the President and his Chief of Staff, H. Haldeman, in which Nixon asked, Who was the asshole that did that? [33] However, Nixon subsequently ordered Haldeman to have the CIA block the FBI’s investigation into the source of the funding for the burglary. A few days later, Nixon’s Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, described the event as “a third-rate burglary attempt”. On August 29, at a news conference, Nixon stated that Dean had conducted a thorough investigation of the incident, when Dean had actually not conducted any investigations at all. Nixon furthermore said, I can say categorically that… No one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident. ” On September 15, Nixon congratulated Dean, saying, “The way you’ve handled it, it seems to me, has been very skillful, because youputting your fingers in the dikes every time that leaks have sprung here and sprung there. Main article: Martha Mitchell § June 1972 Kidnapping, aftermath and vindication. A few days later, Marcia Kramer, a veteran crime reporter of the New York Daily News, tracked Mitchell to the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York, and described Mitchell as “a beaten woman” with visible bruises. [35][34] Mitchell made several attempts to escape via the balcony, but was physically accosted, injured, and forcefully sedated by a psychiatrist. [36][37] Following conviction for his role in the Watergate burglary, in February 1975, McCord admitted that Mitchell had been “basically kidnapped, ” and corroborated her reports of the event. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: “Watergate scandal” news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message). On June 19, 1972, the press reported that one of the Watergate burglars was a Republican Party security aide. [39] Former Attorney General John Mitchell, who was then the head of the CRP, denied any involvement with the Watergate break-in. He also disavowed any knowledge whatsoever of the five burglars. Made out to the Finance Committee of the Committee to Reelect the President, the check was a 1972 campaign donation by Kenneth H. The donor’s checks demonstrated the burglars’ direct link to the finance committee of the CRP. Investigators’ examination of the bank records of a Miami company run by Watergate burglar Barker revealed an account controlled by him personally had deposited a check and then transferred it (through the Federal Reserve Check Clearing System). The banks that had originated the checks were keen to ensure the depository institution used by Barker had acted properly in ensuring the checks had been received and endorsed by the check’s payee, before its acceptance for deposit in Bernard Barker’s account. Only in this way would the issuing banks not be held liable for the unauthorized and improper release of funds from their customers’ accounts. The investigation by the FBI, which cleared Barker’s bank of fiduciary malfeasance, led to the direct implication of members of the CRP, to whom the checks had been delivered. Those individuals were the Committee bookkeeper and its treasurer, Hugh Sloan. As a private organization, the committee followed the normal business practice in allowing only duly authorized individuals to accept and endorse checks on behalf of the Committee. No financial institution could accept or process a check on behalf of the committee unless a duly authorized individual endorsed it. The checks deposited into Barker’s bank account were endorsed by Committee treasurer Hugh Sloan, who was authorized by the Finance Committee. However, once Sloan had endorsed a check made payable to the Committee, he had a legal and fiduciary responsibility to see that the check was deposited only into the accounts named on the check. Sloan failed to do that. Barker tried to disguise the funds by depositing them into accounts in banks outside of the United States. All five Watergate burglars were directly or indirectly tied to the 1972 CRP, thus causing Judge Sirica to suspect a conspiracy involving higher-echelon government officials. On September 29, 1972, the press reported that John Mitchell, while serving as Attorney General, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance intelligence-gathering against the Democrats. On October 10, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported that the FBI had determined that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the Nixon re-election committee. Despite these revelations, Nixon’s campaign was never seriously jeopardized; on November 7, the President was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in American political history. The connection between the break-in and the re-election committee was highlighted by media coveragein particular, investigative coverage by The Washington Post, Time, and The New York Times. The coverage dramatically increased publicity and consequent political and legal repercussions. Relying heavily upon anonymous sources, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered information suggesting that knowledge of the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deeply into the upper reaches of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and the White House. Woodward and Bernstein interviewed Judy Hoback Miller, the bookkeeper for Nixon’s re-election campaign, who revealed to them information about the mishandling of funds and records being destroyed. Garage in Rosslyn where Woodward and Felt met. Also visible is the historical marker erected by the county to note its significance. Chief among the Post’s anonymous sources was an individual whom Woodward and Bernstein had nicknamed Deep Throat; 33 years later, in 2005, the informant was identified as William Mark Felt, Sr. Deputy director of the FBI during that period of the 1970s, something Woodward later confirmed. Felt met secretly with Woodward several times, telling him of Howard Hunt’s involvement with the Watergate break-in, and that the White House staff regarded the stakes in Watergate as extremely high. Felt warned Woodward that the FBI wanted to know where he and other reporters were getting their information, as they were uncovering a wider web of crimes than the FBI first disclosed. All the secret meetings between Woodward and Felt took place at an underground parking garage somewhere in Rosslyn over a period from June 1972 to January 1973. Prior to resigning from the FBI on June 22, 1973, Felt also anonymously planted leaks about Watergate with Time magazine, the Washington Daily News and other publications. During this early period, most of the media failed to understand the full implications of the scandal, and concentrated reporting on other topics related to the 1972 presidential election. [45] Most outlets ignored or downplayed Woodward and Bernstein’s scoops; the crosstown Washington Star-News and the Los Angeles Times even ran stories incorrectly discrediting the Post’s articles. After the Post revealed that H. Haldeman made payments from the secret fund, newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer failed to publish the information, but did publish the White House’s denial of the story the following day. [46] The White House also sought to isolate the Post’s coverage by tirelessly attacking that newspaper while declining to criticize other damaging stories about the scandal from the New York Times and Time Magazine. After it was learned that one of the convicted burglars wrote to Judge Sirica alleging a high-level cover-up, the media shifted its focus. Time magazine described Nixon as undergoing “daily hell and very little trust”. The distrust between the press and the Nixon administration was mutual and greater than usual due to lingering dissatisfaction with events from the Vietnam War. At the same time, public distrust of the media was polled at more than 40%. Nixon and top administration officials discussed using government agencies to “get” (or retaliate against) those they perceived as hostile media organizations. [45] Such actions had been taken before. At the request of Nixon’s White House in 1969, the FBI tapped the phones of five reporters. The Administration and its supporters accused the media of making “wild accusations”, putting too much emphasis on the story, and of having a liberal bias against the Administration. [1][45] Nixon said in a May 1974 interview with supporter Baruch Korff that if he had followed the liberal policies that he thought the media preferred, Watergate would have been a blip. [48] The media noted that most of the reporting turned out to be accurate; the competitive nature of the media guaranteed widespread coverage of the far-reaching political scandal. Applications to journalism schools reached an all-time high in 1974. Rather than ending with the conviction and sentencing to prison of the five Watergate burglars on January 30, 1973, the investigation into the break-in and the Nixon Administration’s involvement grew broader. Nixon’s conversations in late March and all of April 1973 revealed that not only did he know he needed to remove Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean to gain distance from them, but he had to do so in a way that was least likely to incriminate him and his presidency. Nixon created a new conspiracyto effect a cover-up of the cover-upwhich began in late March 1973 and became fully formed in May and June 1973, operating until his presidency ended on August 9, 1974. [49] On March 23, 1973, Judge Sirica read the court a letter from Watergate burglar James McCord, who alleged that perjury had been committed in the Watergate trial, and defendants had been pressured to remain silent. In an attempt to make them talk, Sirica gave Hunt and two burglars provisional sentences of up to 40 years. Urged by Nixon, on March 28, aide John Ehrlichman told Attorney General Richard Kleindienst that nobody in the White House had prior knowledge of the burglary. On April 13, Magruder told U. Attorneys that he had perjured himself during the burglars’ trial, and implicated John Dean and John Mitchell. John Dean believed that he, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman could go to the prosecutors, tell the truth, and save the presidency. Dean wanted to protect the president and have his four closest men take the fall for telling the truth. During the critical meeting between Dean and Nixon on April 15, 1973, Dean was totally unaware of the president’s depth of knowledge and involvement in the Watergate cover-up. It was during this meeting that Dean felt that he was being recorded. He wondered if this was due to the way Nixon was speaking, as if he were trying to prod attendees’ recollections of earlier conversations about fundraising. Dean mentioned this observation while testifying to the Senate Committee on Watergate, exposing the thread of what were taped conversations that would unravel the fabric of the conspiracy. Two days later, Dean told Nixon that he had been cooperating with the U. On that same day, U. Attorneys told Nixon that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, and other White House officials were implicated in the cover-up. On April 30, Nixon asked for the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, two of his most influential aides. They were both later indicted, convicted, and ultimately sentenced to prison. He asked for the resignation of Attorney General Kleindienst, to ensure no one could claim that his innocent friendship with Haldeman and Ehrlichman could be construed as a conflict. He fired White House Counsel John Dean, who went on to testify before the Senate Watergate Committee and said that he believed and suspected the conversations in the Oval Office were being taped. This information became the bombshell that helped force Richard Nixon to resign rather than be impeached. The President announced the resignations in an address to the American people. In one of the most difficult decisions of my Presidency, I accepted the resignations of two of my closest associates in the White House, Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know. Because Attorney General Kleindienst, though a distinguished public servant, my personal friend for 20 years, with no personal involvement whatsoever in this matter has been a close personal and professional associate of some of those who are involved in this case, he and I both felt that it was also necessary to name a new Attorney General. The Counsel to the President, John Dean, has also resigned. On the same day, April 30, Nixon appointed a new attorney general, Elliot Richardson, and gave him authority to designate a special counsel for the Watergate investigation who would be independent of the regular Justice Department hierarchy. In May 1973, Richardson named Archibald Cox to the position. Main article: Nixon White House tapes. See also: United States Senate Watergate Committee and G. From left to right: minority counsel Fred Thompson, ranking member Howard Baker, and chair Sam Ervin of the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973. On February 7, 1973, the United States Senate voted 77-to-0 to approve 93 S. 60 and establish a select committee to investigate Watergate, with Sam Ervin named chairman the next day. [22] The hearings held by the Senate committee, in which Dean and other former administration officials testified, were broadcast from May 17 to August 7, 1973. The three major networks of the time agreed to take turns covering the hearings live, each network thus maintaining coverage of the hearings every third day, starting with ABC on May 17 and ending with NBC on August 7. An estimated 85% of Americans with television sets tuned into at least one portion of the hearings. On Friday, July 13, 1973, during a preliminary interview, deputy minority counsel Donald Sanders asked White House assistant Alexander Butterfield if there was any type of recording system in the White House. [57] Butterfield said he was reluctant to answer, but finally admitted there was a new system in the White House that automatically recorded everything in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room and others, as well as Nixon’s private office in the Old Executive Office Building. On Monday, July 16, 1973, in front of a live, televised audience, chief minority counsel Fred Thompson asked Butterfield whether he was “aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President”. Butterfield’s revelation of the taping system transformed the Watergate investigation. Cox immediately subpoenaed the tapes, as did the Senate, but Nixon refused to release them, citing his executive privilege as president, and ordered Cox to drop his subpoena. Main article: Saturday Night Massacre. On October 20, 1973, after Cox refused to drop the subpoena, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire the special prosecutor. Richardson resigned in protest rather than carry out the order. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, but Ruckelshaus also resigned rather than fire him. Nixon’s search for someone in the Justice Department willing to fire Cox ended with the Solicitor General Robert Bork. [59] Bork carried out the presidential order and dismissed the special prosecutor. These actions met considerable public criticism. Responding to the allegations of possible wrongdoing, in front of 400 Associated Press managing editors at Disney’s Contemporary Resort[60][61] on November 17, 1973, Nixon emphatically stated, Well, I’m not a crook. [62][63] He needed to allow Bork to appoint a new special prosecutor; Bork chose Leon Jaworski to continue the investigation. On March 1, 1974, a grand jury in Washington, D. Indicted several former aides of Nixon, who became known as the “Watergate Seven”H. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John N. Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinsonfor conspiring to hinder the Watergate investigation. The grand jury secretly named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. The special prosecutor dissuaded them from an indictment of Nixon, arguing that a President can be indicted only after he leaves office. [64] John Dean, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and other figures had already pleaded guilty. On April 5, 1974, Dwight Chapin, the former Nixon appointments secretary, was convicted of lying to the grand jury. Two days later, the same grand jury indicted Ed Reinecke, the Republican Lieutenant Governor of California, on three charges of perjury before the Senate committee. President Nixon explaining release of edited transcripts, April 29, 1974. The Nixon administration struggled to decide what materials to release. All parties involved agreed that all pertinent information should be released. Whether to release unedited profanity and vulgarity divided his advisers. His legal team favored releasing the tapes unedited, while Press Secretary Ron Ziegler preferred using an edited version where “expletive deleted” would replace the raw material. After several weeks of debate, they decided to release an edited version. Nixon announced the release of the transcripts in a speech to the nation on April 29, 1974. Nixon noted that any audio pertinent to national security information could be redacted from the released tapes. Initially, Nixon gained a positive reaction for his speech. As people read the transcripts over the next couple of weeks, however, former supporters among the public, media and political community called for Nixon’s resignation or impeachment. Vice President Gerald Ford said, While it may be easy to delete characterization from the printed page, we cannot delete characterization from people’s minds with a wave of the hand. “[66] The Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott said the transcripts revealed a “deplorable, disgusting, shabby, and immoral performance on the part of the President and his former aides. [67] The House Republican Leader John Jacob Rhodes agreed with Scott, and Rhodes recommended that if Nixon’s position continued to deteriorate, he “ought to consider resigning as a possible option”. The editors of The Chicago Tribune, a newspaper that had supported Nixon, wrote, He is humorless to the point of being inhumane. He is willing to be led. He displays dismaying gaps in knowledge. He is suspicious of his staff. His loyalty is minimal. “[69] The Providence Journal wrote, “Reading the transcripts is an emetic experience; one comes away feeling unclean. [70] This newspaper continued that, while the transcripts may not have revealed an indictable offense, they showed Nixon contemptuous of the United States, its institutions, and its people. According to Time magazine, the Republican Party leaders in the Western U. Felt that while there remained a significant number of Nixon loyalists in the party, the majority believed that Nixon should step down as quickly as possible. They were disturbed by the bad language and the coarse, vindictive tone of the conversations in the transcripts. The issue of access to the tapes went to the United States Supreme Court. On July 24, 1974, in United States v. Nixon, the Court ruled unanimously (80) that claims of executive privilege over the tapes were void. Then-Justice William Rehnquistwho had recently been appointed to the Court by Nixon and most recently served in the Nixon Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counselrecused himself from the case. The Court ordered the President to release the tapes to the special prosecutor. On July 30, 1974, Nixon complied with the order and released the subpoenaed tapes to the public. The tapes revealed several crucial conversations[72] that took place between the President and his counsel, John Dean, on March 21, 1973. In this conversation, Dean summarized many aspects of the Watergate case, and focused on the subsequent cover-up, describing it as a “cancer on the presidency”. And that’s an obstruction of justice. Just looking at the immediate problem, don’t you have to havehandle Hunt’s financial situation damn soon? You’ve got to keep the cap on the bottle that much, in order to have any options. At the time of the initial congressional proceedings, it was not known if Nixon had known and approved of the payments to the Watergate defendants earlier than this conversation. Nixon’s conversation with Haldeman on August 1, 1972, is one of several that establishes he did. They have to be paid. That’s all there is to that. [74] During the congressional debate on impeachment, some believed that impeachment required a criminally indictable offense. Nixon’s agreement to make the blackmail payments was regarded as an affirmative act to obstruct justice. On December 7, 1973, investigators found that an 18 12-minute portion of one recorded tape had been erased. Later forensic analysis in 2003 determined that the tape had been erased in several segmentsat least five, and perhaps as many as nine. Main article: Impeachment process against Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon’s resignation speech. Resignation speech of President Richard Nixon, delivered August 8, 1974. Problems playing this file? Nixon’s position was becoming increasingly precarious. On February 6, 1974, the House of Representatives approved H. 803 giving the Judiciary Committee authority to investigate impeachment of the President. [76][77] On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted 27-to-11 to recommend the first article of impeachment against the president: obstruction of justice. The Committee recommended the second article, abuse of power, on July 29, 1974. The next day, on July 30, 1974, the Committee recommended the third article: contempt of Congress. On August 20, 1974, the House authorized the printing of the Committee report H. 931305, which included the text of the resolution impeaching Nixon and set forth articles of impeachment against him. Nixon Oval Office meeting with H. Haldeman “Smoking Gun” Conversation June 23, 1972 Full Transcript. On August 5, 1974, the White House released a previously unknown audio tape from June 23, 1972. Recorded only a few days after the break-in, it documented the initial stages of the cover-up: it revealed Nixon and Haldeman had conducted a meeting in the Oval Office during which they discussed how to stop the FBI from continuing its investigation of the break-in, as they recognized that there was a high risk that their position in the scandal may be revealed. Haldeman introduced the topic as follows. The Democratic break-in thing, we’re back to thein the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because Gray doesn’t exactly know how to control them, and they have… Their investigation is now leading into some productive areas… And it goes in some directions we don’t want it to go. House Judiciary Committee members and staff, 1974. This is ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it. Nixon approved the plan, and after he was given more information about the involvement of his campaign in the break-in, he told Haldeman: All right, fine, I understand it all. We won’t second-guess Mitchell and the rest. ” Returning to the use of the CIA to obstruct the FBI, he instructed Haldeman: “You call them in. That’s the way they play it and that’s the way we are going to play it. Nixon denied that this constituted an obstruction of justice, as his instructions ultimately resulted in the CIA truthfully reporting to the FBI that there were no national security issues. Nixon urged the FBI to press forward with the investigation when they expressed concern about interference. Before the release of this tape, Nixon had denied any involvement in the scandal. He claimed that there were no political motivations in his instructions to the CIA, and claimed he had no knowledge before March 21, 1973, of involvement by senior campaign officials such as John Mitchell. The contents of this tape persuaded Nixon’s own lawyers, Fred Buzhardt and James St. Clair, that “the President had lied to the nation, to his closest aides, and to his own lawyersfor more than two years”. [83] The tape, which Barber Conable referred to as a “smoking gun”, proved that Nixon had been involved in the cover-up from the beginning. In the week before Nixon’s resignation, Ehrlichman and Haldeman tried unsuccessfully to get Nixon to grant them pardonswhich he had promised them before their April 1973 resignations. Further information: Richard Nixon’s resignation speech and Inauguration of Gerald Ford. Nixon’s resignation letter, August 9, 1974. Pursuant to federal law, the letter was addressed to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. When Kissinger initialed the letter at 11:35 a. Ford officially became president. Atkins’ photo of Nixon leaving the White House shortly before his resignation became effective, August 9, 1974. Atkins’ photo of Nixon leaving the White House on Marine One shortly before his resignation became effective, August 9, 1974[85]. The release of the “smoking gun” tape destroyed Nixon politically. The ten congressmen who had voted against all three articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee announced they would all support the impeachment article accusing Nixon of obstructing justice when the articles came up before the full House. [86] Additionally, Rhodes, the House leader of Nixon’s party, announced that he would vote to impeach, stating that “coverup of criminal activity and misuse of federal agencies can neither be condoned nor tolerated”. On the night of August 7, 1974, Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and Congressman Rhodes met with Nixon in the Oval Office. Scott and Rhodes were the Republican leaders in the Senate and House, respectively; Goldwater was brought along as an elder statesman. The three lawmakers told Nixon that his support in Congress had all but disappeared. Rhodes told Nixon that he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House; indeed, by one estimate, no more than 75 representatives were willing to oppose impeachment. [87] Goldwater and Scott told the president that there were enough votes in the Senate to convict him, and that no more than 15 Senators were willing to vote for acquittal. Realizing that he had no chance of staying in office and that public opinion was not in his favor, Nixon decided to resign. [88] In a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on the evening of August 8, 1974, the president said, in part. In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the Nation. Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. As long as there was such a base, I felt strongly that it was necessary to see the constitutional process through to its conclusion, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit of that deliberately difficult process and a dangerously destabilizing precedent for the future. I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations. I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad. To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home. Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office. The morning that his resignation took effect, the President, with Mrs. Nixon and their family, said farewell to the White House staff in the East Room. [90] A helicopter carried them from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Nixon later wrote that he thought, As the helicopter moved on to Andrews, I found myself thinking not of the past, but of the future. What could I do now? At Andrews, he and his family boarded an Air Force plane to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California, and then were transported to his home La Casa Pacifica in San Clemente. Further information: Pardon of Richard Nixon. Pen used by President Gerald R. Ford to pardon Richard Nixon on September 8, 1974. Wikisource has original text related to this article. With Nixon’s resignation, Congress dropped its impeachment proceedings. Criminal prosecution was still a possibility at both the federal and the state level. [64] Nixon was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford as President, who on September 8, 1974, issued a full and unconditional pardon of Nixon, immunizing him from prosecution for any crimes he had “committed or may have committed or taken part in” as president. [91] In a televised broadcast to the nation, Ford explained that he felt the pardon was in the best interest of the country. He said that the Nixon family’s situation is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must. Nixon continued to proclaim his innocence until his death in 1994. In his official response to the pardon, he said that he “was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy”. Some commentators have argued that pardoning Nixon contributed to President Ford’s loss of the presidential election of 1976. [94] Allegations of a secret deal made with Ford, promising a pardon in return for Nixon’s resignation, led Ford to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on October 17, 1974. In his autobiography A Time to Heal, Ford wrote about a meeting he had with Nixon’s Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig. Haig was explaining what he and Nixon’s staff thought were Nixon’s only options. He could try to ride out the impeachment and fight against conviction in the Senate all the way, or he could resign. His options for resigning were to delay his resignation until further along in the impeachment process, to try to settle for a censure vote in Congress, or to pardon himself and then resign. Haig told Ford that some of Nixon’s staff suggested that Nixon could agree to resign in return for an agreement that Ford would pardon him. Haig emphasized that these weren’t his suggestions. He didn’t identify the staff members and he made it very clear that he wasn’t recommending any one option over another. What he wanted to know was whether or not my overall assessment of the situation agreed with his. Next he asked if I had any suggestions as to courses of actions for the President. I didn’t think it would be proper for me to make any recommendations at all, and I told him so. Gerald Ford, A Time to Heal[97]. The remaining five members of the Watergate Seven indicted in March went on trial in October 1974. On January 1, 1975, all but Parkinson were found guilty. In 1976, the U. Court of Appeals ordered a new trial for Mardian; subsequently, all charges against him were dropped. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell exhausted their appeals in 1977. Ehrlichman entered prison in 1976, followed by the other two in 1977. Since Nixon and many senior officials involved in Watergate were lawyers, the scandal severely tarnished the public image of the legal profession. The Watergate scandal resulted in 69 government officials being charged and 48 being found guilty, including:[14]. Mitchell, Attorney General of the United States who resigned to become Director of Committee to Re-elect the President, convicted of perjury about his involvement in the Watergate break-in. Served 19 months of a one- to four-year sentence. Richard Kleindienst, Attorney General, convicted of “refusing to answer questions” (contempt of court); given one month in jail. Jeb Stuart Magruder, Deputy Director of Committee to Re-elect the President, [26] pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to the burglary, and was sentenced to 10 months to four years in prison, of which he served seven months before being paroled. LaRue, Advisor to John Mitchell, convicted of obstruction of justice. He served four and a half months. Haldeman, Chief of Staff for Nixon, convicted of conspiracy to the burglary, obstruction of justice, and perjury. Served 18 months in prison. John Ehrlichman, Counsel to Nixon, convicted of conspiracy to the burglary, obstruction of justice, and perjury. Egil Krogh, aide to John Ehrlichman, sentenced to six months for his part in the Daniel Ellsberg case. Dean III, counsel to Nixon, convicted of obstruction of justice, later reduced to felony offenses and sentenced to time already served, which totaled four months. Chapin, deputy assistant to Nixon, convicted of perjury. Kalmbach, personal attorney to Nixon, convicted of illegal campaigning. Colson, special counsel to Nixon, convicted of obstruction of justice. Served seven months in Federal Maxwell Prison. Porter, aide to the Committee to Re-elect the President. Gordon Liddy, Special Investigations Group, convicted of masterminding the burglary, original sentence of up to 20 years in prison. [102][106] Served 4 12 years in federal prison. Howard Hunt, security consultant, convicted of masterminding and overseeing the burglary, original sentence of up to 35 years in prison. [102][106] Served 33 months in prison. Convicted of six charges of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. [102] Served two months in prison. Virgilio Gonzalez, convicted of burglary, original sentence of up to 40 years in prison. [102][106] Served 13 months in prison. Bernard Barker, convicted of burglary, original sentence of up to 40 years in prison. [102][106] Served 18 months in prison. Eugenio Martínez, convicted of burglary, original sentence of up to 40 years in prison. [102][106] Served 15 months in prison. Frank Sturgis, convicted of burglary, original sentence of up to 40 years in prison. [102][106] Served 10 months in prison. To defuse public demand for direct federal regulation of lawyers (as opposed to leaving it in the hands of state bar associations or courts), the American Bar Association (ABA) launched two major reforms. First, the ABA decided that its existing Model Code of Professional Responsibility (promulgated 1969) was a failure. In 1983 it replaced it with the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. [111] The MRPC have been adopted in part or in whole by 49 states and is being consideredwhen? By the last one, California. Its preamble contains an emphatic reminder that the legal profession can remain self-governing only if lawyers behave properly. Second, the ABA promulgated a requirement that law students at ABA-approved law schools take a course in professional responsibility (which means they must study the MRPC). The requirement remains in effect. On June 24 and 25, 1975, Nixon gave secret testimony to a grand jury. Aided by the Public Citizen Litigation Group, the historian Stanley Kutler, who has written several books about Nixon and Watergate and had successfully sued for the 1996 public release of the Nixon White House tapes, [113] sued for release of the transcripts of the Nixon grand jury testimony. On July 29, 2011, U. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted Kutler’s request, saying historical interests trumped privacy, especially considering that Nixon and other key figures were deceased, and most of the surviving figures had testified under oath, have been written about, or were interviewed. The transcripts were not immediately released pending the government’s decision on whether to appeal. [114] They were released in their entirety on November 10, 2011, although the names of people still alive were redacted. Texas A&M UniversityCentral Texas professor Luke Nichter wrote the chief judge of the federal court in Washington to release hundreds of pages of sealed records of the Watergate Seven. In June 2012 the U. Department of Justice wrote the court that it would not object to their release with some exceptions. [116] On November 2, 2012, Watergate trial records for G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord were ordered unsealed by Federal Judge Royce Lamberth. According to Thomas J. Johnson, a professor of journalism at University of Texas at Austin, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger predicted during Nixon’s final days that history would remember Nixon as a great president and that Watergate would be relegated to a “minor footnote”. When Congress investigated the scope of the president’s legal powers, it belatedly found that consecutive presidential administrations had declared the United States to be in a continuous open-ended state of emergency since 1950. Congress enacted the National Emergencies Act in 1976 to regulate such declarations. The Watergate scandal left such an impression on the national and international consciousness that many scandals since then have been labeled with the suffix “-gate”. One of a variety of anti-Ford buttons generated during the 1976 presidential election: it reads Gerald… ” and depicts a thief cracking a safe labeled “Watergate. Disgust with the revelations about Watergate, the Republican Party, and Nixon strongly affected results of the November 1974 Senate and House elections, which took place three months after Nixon’s resignation. The Democrats gained five seats in the Senate and forty-nine in the House (the newcomers were nicknamed “Watergate Babies”). Congress passed legislation that changed campaign financing, to amend the Freedom of Information Act, as well as to require financial disclosures by key government officials (via the Ethics in Government Act). Presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt had recorded many of their conversations but the practice purportedly ended after Watergate. Ford’s pardon of Nixon played a major role in his defeat in the 1976 presidential election against Jimmy Carter. In 1977, Nixon arranged an interview with British journalist David Frost in the hope of improving his legacy. Based on a previous interview in 1968, [119] he believed that Frost would be an easy interviewer and was taken aback by Frost’s incisive questions. The interview displayed the entire scandal to the American people, and Nixon formally apologized, but his legacy remained tarnished. [120] The 2008 movie, Frost/Nixon is a media depiction of this. The phrase was never used in the 1974 book All the President’s Men and did not become associated with it until the movie of the same name was released in 1976. [121] The 2017 movie, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, is about Mark Felt’s role in the Watergate scandal and his identity of being Deep Throat. The parking garage where Woodward and Felt met in Rosslyn still stands. Its significance was noted by Arlington County with a historical marker in 2011. [122][123] In 2017 it was announced that the garage would be demolished as part of construction of an apartment building on the site; the developers announced that the site’s significance would be memorialized within the new complex. Despite the enormous impact of the Watergate scandal, the purpose of the break-in of the DNC offices has never been conclusively established. Records from the United States v. Liddy trial, made public in 2013, showed that four of the five burglars testified that they were told the campaign operation hoped to find evidence that linked Cuban funding to Democratic campaigns. [126] The longtime hypothesis suggests that the target of the break-in was the offices of Larry O’Brien, the DNC Chairman. [citation needed][127] However, O’Brien’s name was not on Alfred C. Baldwin III’s list of targets that was released in 2013. [citation needed] Among those listed were senior DNC official R. Spencer Oliver, Oliver’s secretary Ida “Maxine” Wells, co-worker Robert Allen and secretary Barbara Kennedy. [citation needed] Instead, Nichter sided with late journalist J. Anthony Lukas of the New York Times, who had concluded that the committee was seeking to find evidence linking the Democrats to prostitution, as it was alleged that Oliver’s office had been used to arrange such meetings. However, Nichter acknowledged that Woodward and Bernstein’s theory of O’Brien as the target could not be debunked unless information was released about what Baldwin heard in his bugging of conversations. In 1968, O’Brien was appointed by Vice President Hubert Humphrey to serve as the national director of Humphrey’s presidential campaign and, separately, by Howard Hughes to serve as Hughes’ public-policy lobbyist in Washington. O’Brien was elected national chairman of the DNC in 1968 and 1970. In late 1971, the president’s brother, Donald Nixon, was collecting intelligence for his brother at the time and asked John H. Meier, an adviser to Howard Hughes, about O’Brien. The loan’s existence surfaced during the 1960 presidential election campaign, embarrassing Richard Nixon and becoming a political liability. According to author Donald M. Bartlett, Richard Nixon would do whatever was necessary to prevent another family embarrassment. [129] From 1968 to 1970, Hughes withdrew nearly half a million dollars from the Texas National Bank of Commerce for contributions to both Democrats and Republicans, including presidential candidates Humphrey and Nixon. Hughes wanted Donald Nixon and Meier involved but Nixon opposed this. Meier told Donald that he was sure the Democrats would win the election because they had considerable information on Richard Nixon’s illicit dealings with Hughes that had never been released, and that it resided with Larry O’Brien. [131] According to Fred Emery, O’Brien had been a lobbyist for Hughes in a Democrat-controlled Congress, and the possibility of his finding out about Hughes’ illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign was too much of a danger for Nixon to ignore. Neal, who prosecuted the Watergate 7, did not believe Nixon had ordered the break-in because of Nixon’s surprised reaction when he was told about it. Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam referred to the American presidency’s “parlous position” without the direct wording of the Watergate scandal during Question Time in May 1973. [134] The following day responding to a question upon “the vital importance of future United States-Australia relations, ” Whitlam parried that the usage of the word’Watergate’ was not his. [135] United States-Australia relations have been considered to have figured as influential when, in November 1975, Australia experienced its own constitutional crisis which led to the dismissal of the Whitlam Government by Sir John Kerr, the Australian Governor-General. [136] Max Suich has suggested that the US was involved in ending the Whitlam government. Chinese then-Premier Zhou Enlai said in October 1973 that the scandal did not affect the relations between China and the United States. [138] According to Thai then-Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj of Thailand in July 1975, Chairman Mao Zedong called the Watergate scandal the result of’too much freedom of political expression in the U. “[139] Mao called it “an indication of American isolationism, which he saw as’disastrous’ for Europe. He further said, Do Americans really want to go isolationist? In the two world wars, the Americans came [in] very late, but all the same, they did come in. They haven’t been isolationist in practice. In August 1973, then-Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka said that the scandal had no cancelling influence on U. Leadership in the world. Tanaka further said, The pivotal role of the United States has not changed, so this internal affair will not be permitted to have an effect. “[141] In March 1975, Tanaka’s successor, Takeo Miki, said at a convention of the Liberal Democratic Party, “At the time of the Watergate issue in America, I was deeply moved by the scene in the House Judiciary Committee, where each member of the committee expressed his own or her own heart based upon the spirit of the American Constitution. It was this attitude, I think, that rescued American democracy. Then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said in August 1973, As one surprising revelation follows another at the Senate hearings on Watergate, it becomes increasingly clear that the District of Columbia Washington D. , today is in no position to offer the moral or strong political and economic leadership for which its friends and allies are yearning. [143] Moreover, Lee said that the scandal may have led the United States to lessen its interests and commitments in world affairs, to weaken its ability to enforce the Paris Peace Accords on Vietnam, and to not react to violations of the Accords. Lee said further that the United States “makes the future of this peace in Indonesia an extremely bleak one with grave consequence for the contiguous states”. Lee then blamed the scandal for economic inflation in Singapore because the Singapore dollar was pegged to the United States dollar at the time, assuming the U. Dollar was stronger than the British pound sterling. In June 1973, when Chairman Leonid Brezhnev arrived in the United States to have a one-week meeting with Nixon, [145] Brezhnev told the press, I do not intend to refer to that matter[the Watergate]. It would be completely indecent for me to refer to it… My attitude toward Mr. Nixon is of very great respect. ” When one reporter suggested that Nixon and his position with Brezhnev were “weakened” by the scandal, Brezhnev replied, “It does not enter my mind to think whether Mr. Nixon has lost or gained any influence because of the affair. ” Then he said further that he had respected Nixon because of Nixon’s “realistic and constructive approach to Soviet UnionUnited States relations… Passing from an era of confrontation to an era of negotiations between nations. Talks between Nixon and Prime Minister Edward Heath may have been bugged. Heath did not publicly display his anger, with aides saying that he was unconcerned about having been bugged at the White House. According to officials, Heath commonly had notes taken of his public discussions with Nixon so a recording would not have bothered him. However, officials privately said that if private talks with Nixon were bugged, then Heath would be outraged. Even so, Heath was privately outraged over being taped without his prior knowledge. Iranian then-Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi told the press in 1973, I want to say quite emphatically… That everything that would weaken or jeopardize the President’s power to make decisions in split seconds would represent grave danger for the whole world. “[141] An unnamed Kenyan senior official of Foreign Affairs Ministry accused Nixon of lacking interest in Africa and its politics and then said, “American President is so enmeshed in domestic problems created by Watergate that foreign policy seems suddenly to have taken a back seat [sic]. “[141] Cuban then-leader Fidel Castro said in his December 1974 interview that, of the crimes committed by the Cuban exiles, like killings, attacks on Cuban ports, and spying, the Watergate burglaries and wiretappings were “probably the least of [them]. After the fall of Saigon ended the Vietnam War, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in May 1975 that, if the scandal had not caused Nixon to resign, and Congress had not overridden Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution, North Vietnam would not have captured South Vietnam. [149] Kissinger told the National Press Club in January 1977 that Nixon’s presidential powers weakened during his tenure, thus (as rephrased by the media) “prevent[ing] the United States from exploiting the [scandal]”. The publisher of The Sacramento Union, John P. McGoff, said in January 1975 that the media overemphasized the scandal, though he called it “an important issue”, overshadowing more serious topics, like a declining economy and an energy crisis. List of American federal politicians convicted of crimes. List of federal political scandals in the United States. List of scandals with “-gate” suffix. I was born in Vienna, Austria on August 10, 1911, with the name Kurt Deutsch. When the Nazis came to power, I took my mothers maiden name, Singer. Her family was Bohemian Jews living in Vienna. In 1919, following the German Revolution, my family moved to Berlin. When Hitler came to power in 1933, my wife Hilde and I started an anti-Nazi underground newspaper which we published in the basement of our bookstore in Berlin. The newspaper reported on the suffering of the first German concentration camp prisoners. The camps at that time were created for the Nazi opposition including political prisoners and the racially unacceptable. In our newspaper, we asked people to send food packages to inmates of the camps, and we had reports from foreign broadcasts. The newspaper was distributed clandestinely through a group of resistance workers who placed papers in Storm Trooper barracks, government buildings, restaurants and sporting events, and wherever the public was assembled. This was a fight of the mosquito against the elephant. When one of our co-workers was caught and brutally beaten, she gave away our address. I was wanted for high treason. I was considered a traitor to the state, and if caught I would have been executed. Hilde was caught, and received a lenient one-year prison sentence due to the fact that she was represented by a high Nazi attorney hired by her family. When she was released, she joined me in Sweden. There, Hilde wrote and published the book I was Hitler’s Prisoner. While in Sweden, I published several books on topics related to the Nazi regime: on the Nazi policy of forced sterilization, on Hitlers Olympics, and the coming air war. I wrote the first biography of Carl von Ossietzky, a Liberal editor of a Democratic magazine called Die Weltbuhne, which was strongly anti-Nazi. This book was instrumental in getting Ossietzky, a concentration camp prisoner, the Nobel Peace Prize which was awarded in 1936. In 1940, I wrote a biography of Hermann Göring, the Nazi Air Force chief who ordered the aerial bombardment of England. Göring asked that the book be banned and confiscated, and that I should be extradited to Germany. As a correspondent for a Swedish newspaper. I lost all contact with my mother and her parents, who vanished into the concentration camps. I have no idea how they died. A surviving cousin told me that 66 members of our family were killed by the Nazis. Over 100 books I wrote were published including: Spies and Traitors of World War II, and biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, Danny Kaye, Charles Laughton, Albert Schweitzer, and Mata Hari. I wrote a memoir entitled, I Spied and Survived. I did intelligence work during World War II for the U. As a journalist, some of the highlights of my career were my interviews with Albert Einstein and Leon Trotsky. I currently write for Aufbau, a German-Jewish cultural newspaper, and contribute to a weekly journal Ossietzky. Never forget that there were considerable numbers of Jewish groups that were part of the resistance movement against the Nazis whose members were beheaded. They were brave people. The item “JAMES MCCORD SPY LETTERS NIXON WATERGATE HANDWRITTEN & TYPED WITH PROVENANCE” is in sale since Sunday, June 21, 2020. This item is in the category “Collectibles\Autographs\Political\Other Political Autographs”. The seller is “collectiblecollectiblecollectible” and is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This item can be shipped to United States.