by Bob Woodward
“It isn’t so much that I want to,” Butterfield replied. “It’s just that I’ve been here four years and I’ve loved every minute of it, Mr. President. I just thought it might be good to get out to one of the departments.”
“Well,” Nixon said, “if you’re going, I’d like you to consider the State Department, deputy secretary of state for political affairs.” State was the liberal-leftist hangout, Nixon had repeatedly said.
Butterfield did not feel guilty proposing a change. He felt he and Nixon worked well together, but the distance between them was ever present, as it seemed for everyone working for Nixon. The president was so withdrawn, isolated, lonely. They were never close. They had almost complete proximity but little intimacy. “I don’t think that he went home and wept when at the end of the first term I’m one of the first guys who wants to get out of there.”
Butterfield had concluded that Nixon developed real admiration, what he termed love affairs—what might now be called man-crushes—with four people: Secretary of the Treasury John Connally, special counsel and tough guy Charles Colson, deputy national security adviser Alexander Haig, and counselor Patrick Moynihan.
“I might put myself in there as perhaps a half love affair,” Butterfield later said with a chuckle.
The job of finding a new assignment for Butterfield was passed to John Ehrlichman. Because of Butterfield’s Air Force and vast piloting experience, Ehrlichman suggested that Butterfield become the head of the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA oversees and enforces civil aviation regulations and air safety. The current FAA chief was having trouble because he was in the newspapers for his extensive travels to play golf, Ehrlichman said. So he was out.
“If you want, you can go to the FAA and then in a year you can go be secretary of the Navy.”
Butterfield liked the idea of the FAA. “I felt well suited for that because I had broken so many FAA regulations in my time.”
Nixon later told him he liked the idea because then Butterfield would be one of “our guys” in the Transportation Department along with Bud Krogh, who was nominated to be deputy transportation secretary. The president wanted at least one senior key person in each department and agency, saying they were a team and their home base was the White House.
• • •
Some leaders build personal bonds that extend way beyond the office. Nixon had never built the bond that would create that do-or-die loyalty in Butterfield.
“I had come to like him,” Butterfield said in one of our interviews. “We had tacitly kissed and made up” from the early days in 1969. “But he was rude to me. He was clearly rude, but I softened.” Still Butterfield always remembered. “Two or three times he was rude to me,” he recalled, his eyes narrowing as he thought back. There had never been an apology. They had never closed the deal. Some experiences were indelible and could not be forgotten or erased.
Butterfield took snubs very personally, and by his own account they tended to almost live within him for years, even decades afterward. One enduring snub occurred when he worked for McNamara in the 1960s, and he wrote about it in his book draft. Wearing civilian clothes, not his uniform, Butterfield was at a reception at the Johnson White House and a powerful congressman, Wayne Hays, approached him. Hays would later become famous for putting his mistress Elizabeth Ray, who could not even type, file or answer the phone, on his House payroll.
“Hi! Wayne Hays, Ohio,” he said extending his hand.
“I’m Colonel Butterfield,” he replied, shaking Hays’s hand firmly. “I’m here with Mr. McNamara.”
Hays scowled, quickly pulled his hand away, and without a word spun around and walked away.
A full 39 years later Butterfield wrote this of the Hays incident: “I was dumbfounded . . . incredulous. . . . Who the hell did he think he was? I remember feeling warm, flush, then furious. It couldn’t have been my name, I thought to myself. It’s the military thing again. Goddamn it! I thought of seeking him out, confronting him right there and challenging him point blank to tell me what it was he didn’t like about me.” In his imagination, he wrote that he wanted to say Are you one of those arrogant bastards who looks down his nose at the military? Is that it, you half-pint son of bitch? “But I was so full of rage, I doubted I could keep myself under control. The hell with it! I put my drink on an empty tray, retrieved the chart kit [of Vietnam maps] and returned at once to the Pentagon. In the days that followed, I thought of little else. I worked. I did what I had to do, but the incident with Wayne Hays never left my mind.”
It was 50 years later when I asked Butterfield about the encounter with Hays and the memory still triggered an outpouring.
Another apparent snub that stuck with Butterfield also dated back to the Johnson White House. During a routine meeting with McGeorge Bundy, Johnson’s national security adviser, a secretary came in to say there was a call for “Colonel Butterfield.” Apparently Bundy, who had seen him often and always been friendly, didn’t know that Butterfield was in the military.
He wrote, “As I excused myself and got up to leave, I looked over at Bundy for a nod or sign of consent. He appeared at once startled, or so it seemed. Then he gave me a hard cold stare. It was part scowl, a mean look; and because the others saw it, and he knew that, it was unforgivably rude.”
Two other times, Butterfield wrote that Bundy did not speak to him and on another occasion, “I felt his failure to at least make eye contact and say hello was purposeful.” This, he wrote, “was devastating to me . . . the truth was that I’d been deeply hurt.”
• • •
So in mid-February 1973 Butterfield moved to an office in the Executive Office Building to prepare for his Senate confirmation hearings as head of the FAA.
After four years of such proximity, what was the good-bye session with Nixon?
There was none, Butterfield said.
“You don’t remember a kind of good-bye?”
“No, no, no.”
Butterfield just cleaned out some personal books. Left the large color picture of Nixon and the first lady that was hanging above the fireplace. He also left four large pictures of Nixon on the far wall. It was a set he had personally selected from White House Photographer Ollie Atkins—head shots of Nixon. In one Nixon was sipping coffee, in another he had his hand on his chin, in a third he looked thoughtful, and in the last he looked almost impish.
“I liked them. They’re interesting pictures. And I had them nicely arranged on the wall in my office, prominently displayed.”
So you left them?
“I left everything as it was.” Having stood by as Nixon signed his signature hundreds of times over the four years, he never asked the president to sign a picture or memento to him.
There was no good-bye at all, no drop in to his office, no good luck, Alex, at the FAA, no party?
“No muss, no fuss. We just didn’t have ceremonies. To suggest a farewell session would have put pressure on Nixon. It really would have. He didn’t want that and I didn’t need it.”
As the person who was supposed to make sure departing White House aides left their official papers behind, Butterfield had witnessed many senior aides taking dozens of boxes. There was no good way to tell what was personal and what was technically official. He had seen Arthur Burns, the Nixon counselor, leaving in 1970 to become chairman of the Federal Reserve. Burns had packed up boxes equivalent to a small library.
So when it was his turn, Butterfield too carted off boxes of files and documents. “I just took my boxes of stuff and left,” he recalled. “I had my car there. Charlotte had her car . . . and I took them straight to the FAA and put them in a storage room next to my office.”
• • •
The importance of the tapes to Nixon is illustrated by a recorded conversation he had with Haldeman on his 60th birthday, January 9, 1973, as Butterfield was winding down his time in the White House.
“I want control of these,” Nixon said again, reminding Haldeman, “I want nothing ever
transcribed out of this.”
“You have total control,” Haldeman said. “Nobody knows it exists except Alex and me and one guy, one technician.” Higby and at least three Secret Service agents, however, also knew.
Nixon said that someday he “would get somebody to write a history” using the tapes.
They could expand verbatim coverage, Haldeman suggested. “With that little Sony [recorder] . . . we could use those in places where you could just keep it inside a drawer or something, you know?”
“I don’t know whether it’d pick up,” Nixon said.
“We could run some tests,” Haldeman said. “It’s a damn sensitive mic.”
“We’ll see.”
Haldeman said the secret, voice-activated tapes were beyond anyone’s reach. “The point of these tapes that are locked in a vault that nobody knows what they are or anything else, and they—I don’t think Rose or anybody else knows about them.”
“Don’t tell them,” Nixon said. “Don’t tell them.”
“That kind of thing,” Haldeman said sounding a note of comfort, “that’s yours.”
* * *
I. Included were: alternate to Haldeman; supervise staff secretary and everything “destined for the President’s desk”; supervise the security office and security clearances for all nominations for presidential appointments; supervise offices of Presidential Papers, Special Files, presidential receptionists, the president’s daily schedule, the Secret Service, the ushers, the military assistants, the Office of White House Visitors; serve as single point of contact for cabinet members’ foreign travel, significant presidential ceremonies; supervise or coordinate the president’s exchanges of gifts; principal coordinator of decision on when to lower the U.S. flag over federal buildings and when to close federal buildings; coordinate use of presidential aircraft or for “White-House directed” missions; coordinate all recommendations for telephone calls the president should make; principal adviser to White House telephone switchboard operators; secretarial support for the president at Camp David or Key Biscayne; “special liaison between the president and the First Lady”; maintain inventory of the president’s personal wines; maintain master record of the president’s contacts with “distinguished foreign personages”; maintain a master record of all the president’s contacts with cabinet and sub-cabinet officials; function as secretary to the cabinet.
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* * *
During the nine months following the Watergate burglary, the White House cover-up seemed to be working.
I asked Butterfield about stories that Carl Bernstein and I had written in The Washington Post tying Watergate to a larger illegal effort, a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage run by the Nixon White House and reelection campaign.
“That didn’t scare me at all,” Butterfield said. “Because of the power of the White House, even if we do get in trouble, we’ll pull out. The White House would never really go down.”
That was a widely held view. Conventional wisdom was that Nixon was too smart to be involved. Interest in the scandal was low—with two important exceptions. One came from the legislative branch, and the other from the judicial. The first was Senator Sam Ervin, the North Carolina Democrat. He called me to his office on January 11, 1973, to say he was going to chair a full-scale investigation by a Senate committee that would have full subpoena power to get documents and call all and any of Nixon’s White House and campaign aides. Ervin said he had read our stories in the Post about the involvement of higher-ups. “Any leads or sources of information you might be willing to share with us, it certainly would be appreciated and held in the strictest of confidence.”
I said that a reporter could not share that information with the government. Ervin said he understood but they were going ahead with a full-fledged investigation. “Now,” he said, “I believe that everyone mentioned in your and Mr. Bernstein’s accounts should be given an opportunity to come down and exonerate himself. And if they decline, we’ll subpoena them to ensure they have a chance to clear their names.” He smiled, barely able to contain himself as his bushy eyebrows danced.
Including Haldeman? I asked.
“Mr. Haldeman or Mr. Whomever,” Ervin said.
The second person who took an unusual interest in our Post stories was Judge John Sirica, who oversaw the trial of the five Watergate burglars and their supervisors, G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA man. All either pleaded guilty or were found guilty. I ran into Sirica at a reception at the time and he told me he was deeply troubled by the inconsistency between the government’s case and the Post stories. The government had alleged in his courtroom that Gordon Liddy was boss and mastermind of Watergate. Our stories said that Watergate was a massive spying and sabotage operation aimed at the Democrats and run and funded by the White House (Haldeman and others) and the reelection committee (Mitchell and others).
Bernstein and I had written about a $25,000 campaign check that had been deposited in the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker.
At the trial, Sirica asked the government prosecutor, Earl Silbert, “Are you going to offer any evidence in this case on the question of how the $25,000 check got into the possession of Mr. Barker?”
Silbert wanted to convict the seven defendants, wasn’t focused on any higher-ups, and didn’t have a good answer for Sirica, who was interested in tracing the money and a wider conspiracy.
At a court hearing three days after the verdict, Sirica publicly criticized the government. “I have not been satisfied, and I am still not satisfied that all the pertinent facts that might be available—I say might be available—have been produced before an American jury. . . .
“Everyone knows that there’s going to be a congressional investigation in this case. I would frankly hope, not only as a judge but as a citizen of a great country and one of millions of Americans who are looking for certain answers, I would hope that the Senate committee is granted the power by Congress by a broad enough resolution to try to get to the bottom of what happened in this case. I hope so. That is all I have to say.”
The next month the Senate voted 77–0 to set up the Watergate committee. The unanimity was almost unheard of. Even Republicans smelled something.
In March, James McCord, the leader of the five-man Watergate burglary team, sent a letter to Judge Sirica, who read it in open court. McCord said that he and others were under “political pressure” to plead guilty and remain silent, that perjury had been committed at the trial and that higher-ups had approved the Watergate operations. By the end of April, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had been forced to resign, and Mitchell was poised to testify before the Senate Watergate committee about what he later called the “White House horrors.”
• • •
For four days in June 1973, former White House counsel John Dean transfixed the country—and much of the world—with his sworn, televised testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee. In stunning detail, Dean described meetings with Nixon that showed the president was deeply involved in the Watergate cover-up and running the illegal effort to obstruct justice. After the last day of Dean’s testimony, The New York Times front-page headline said: “Dean Ends Testimony, Story Unshaken.”
From the 10th floor of the FAA Building on Independence Avenue in downtown Washington Butterfield tuned in on his office TV.
“One who knew about the tapes,” he recalled, “could not help but think about the tapes all through the Dean testimony.” The absolute secret of the tapes was still holding. “But Dean was saying for the first time anyone ever uttered the words, that the president is guilty of complicity in the cover-up.”
From his four years at the center of the Nixon-Haldeman operation, Butterfield was certain Dean’s charges were true. “The president is the choreographer of the cover-up,” Butterfield said later. “He’s the director of all activity.”
The tapes, he believed with certainty, would be the needed proof and settle
the question. The public opinion polls at the time showed that about two thirds of the country believed the president’s denials. And Dean was seen as a young, ambitious lawyer out of his depth, desperate to keep himself out of jail.
“I was thinking of the tapes the whole time,” Butterfield recalled. “God, if they only knew. If they only knew. In a way I wanted it to be known. In the deep recesses of my brain, I was eager to tell.
“It isn’t that I wanted to shout out, ‘There are tapes out there!’ But I thought that would settle everything. I can settle everything.”
What was his obligation and to whom? At times he said he thought he might have no choice. If he were interested in the truth, the real truth—“there is only one kind of truth,” he once told me—then he should come forward. “To get it out,” he said later. “Get it over.”
But he did not want to volunteer. That would mean crossing the political divide in America. You were either with Nixon or against him.
I asked at one point, “Don’t we go through our lives—in part—seeking cover for our best instincts?”
“Sure,” he answered. Yet the questions remained: What was his best instinct? And what might be the best cover? So he stewed over his dilemma and did what a cautious person often does—nothing.
• • •
One day, as Butterfield watched, Dean was testifying about an April 15 meeting with Nixon:
“The most interesting thing that happened during the conversation was very near the end. He [Nixon] got up out of his chair, went behind his chair to the corner of the Executive Office Building office and in a barely audible tone said to me he was probably foolish to have discussed” executive clemency for one of the Watergate co-conspirators, Howard Hunt. Dean said he thought the room might have been bugged and Nixon knew, thus accounting for his actions to move and speak so softly.
There it was! Butterfield realized, but no one seemed curious and there was no follow-up. He found that hard to believe. Dean later wrote in his memoir, Blind Ambition, that he too was surprised there was no follow-up.
