by Bob Woodward
Eight words that shook the world. It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved. They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open—way open. Then after a few seconds, came a stirring and sudden rush of comment. It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.
Butterfield could see that those in the room were momentarily stunned. Listening devices in the Oval Office! Tapes! The intensity was immediate. White House tapes! Butterfield could see it in their faces, hear it in the voices. The secret was out: Nixon Bugged Himself. Not at random but continually. It was baffling that the president had turned over the secret record of his presidency to machines. Even to Butterfield, who had known the secret for years, it was nothing less than incredible. “Wonders of Watergate do not cease,” William Greider of the Post wrote on the front page.
• • •
During his testimony he was asked about his reluctance to disclose. Yes, he said, he was worried that he might be preempting the president. “But obviously not so reluctant that I failed to answer.”
He closed with words that for the rest of his life he wished he had not uttered: “This matter which we have discussed here today, I think, is precisely the substance on which the president plans to present his defense. I believe, of course, that the president is innocent”—and he looked up at the senators—“of any crime or wrongdoing, that he is innocent likewise of any complicity.”
More than 40 years later, Butterfield found it difficult to review his testimony. We had just spent some time concentrating on how honest he had been when he disclosed the taping system.
“I’ve just sat here telling you about how I don’t lie,” he said to me in 2015, “and wouldn’t lie, but that is a white lie. I did not believe the president was innocent. So I have to admit that.”
Butterfield said he was playing both roles—riding both horses—one of the aggressive, truth-telling citizen and the other of a former, loyal member of the Nixon team. “I got one leg in the stirrup of the other horse,” he said.
At that moment years before, he said, he was confused, disoriented. “I was being put through a wringer there, and I wasn’t sure how I felt. But I like to think what I did was the right thing to do.”
At the same time, he was full of mixed emotions. “I felt confused, conflicted and regretful,” he told me in 2015.
He exited the Caucus Room at 3:20 p.m. He walked alone down the empty corridor, not a soul in sight. The reporters were all filing bulletins or putting together stories. He likened it, in his own mind, to leaving the Rose Bowl at the end of the first quarter. But he had no idea where he was. He didn’t know how to get out. He finally found an office and paged his driver, who had been driving around in circles. Finally Butterfield found him, and they went back to the FAA.
Lou Churchville, Butterfield’s public relations officer, ran into his office ecstatic. For months, Churchville had been working to get Butterfield known in the aviation community and Washington. “I don’t have anything to do now!” he said. “You’re known. They know who you are now.”
Butterfield didn’t look at television that night since he had to pack for the long trip to the Soviet Union and get to bed.
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* * *
The next morning, Tuesday, July 17, he rose early to make sure he was at the FAA hangar at Washington National Airport at 5:40 a.m. His plane was a four-engine, eight-passenger JetStar. He took the left seat, the pilot’s. The copilot took the right. The plane was airborne at 6 a.m. “I love making takeoffs right on time,” he recalled later. He took the JetStar to 8,000 feet, rolled left and swung around through the sun. Shortly they were passing over Washington, and he looked down wondering. He had been in too much of a rush to look at the morning’s Washington Post or tune into the radio. He was in a bubble.
As he took the plane through 16,000 feet, his copilot took over, apparently aware of and sympathetic to Butterfield’s distraction and momentary inattention.
Butterfield could imagine the stir now, the chatter, the excitement, the sense that the mystery of Nixon might be solved. “Goddamnit!” he thought. Part of him wished he hadn’t gotten himself involved. He had inflicted the major blow on Nixon, probably more than major.
A great part of the Nixon presidency was designed to keep the outside world from seeing the real Nixon, from intruding into the inner sanctum. And here was the possibility of the biggest exposure of all time, ripping open the curtain, peeling off the masks.
For a moment Butterfield wanted to blame Senator Baker for not rescuing him from being the agent of public disclosure. Slippery Howard Baker.
Then, in a moment of clarity, Butterfield realized it was not Baker’s fault. The senator had promised nothing.
As the plane headed for the first fuel stop in Newfoundland, he developed another line. He couldn’t have done anything differently, he reasoned, ticking off the forces and circumstances. The Senate committee was legal, they had come to him, they had asked the questions, he had only answered them. Nixon had said in a major speech in May that all his aides were free to testify and that he would not invoke executive privilege.
Butterfield had protected the tapes for years. He was no blabbermouth, no leaker. He was only testifying in the spirit of cooperation urged by Nixon. Why had the White House lawyers given Nixon’s direct quotes to the Senate Watergate Committee? Without those, almost certainly, there would have been no such question from Sanders, “Was there ever any other kind of taping system in the president’s office?”
No question, no need to answer. But he caught himself. This was all supposition. Why did all this sound so defensive, he wondered? Why the feeling of hopelessness? Why the despair? No, it was not that he regretted his decision, only that the duty—if that was the right word—had fallen to him. It was so personal now. He had crossed to the other side of the political divide.
As he gazed out the window he tried to think of other things but couldn’t come close. What would Nixon do? What would his response be? What could it be? Having been there, so up close, Butterfield knew there would be a scramble.
Butterfield dwelled for a moment on the man on the street, the average American. What would he or she think? What would they be saying around the water cooler? This would be big, big news. High drama indeed, the roiling, snowballing scandal.
For Butterfield, it was not a happy time. “I know I’m toast. I’m on my way out. I’m sorry that the task has fallen to me.”
• • •
He saw the first newspaper about the disclosure when they arrived in Great Britain. An article in The New York Times quoted his mother. “He always stood for moral integrity and straightforwardness. He doesn’t like me to talk this way, but he was an Eagle Scout and carried the cross in church.” Oh, my God, Butterfield thought. She added that he “was brought up very strictly by a Navy father, who’s trying to get me off the phone right now.”
Too late.
• • •
Nixon later wrote in his memoir, “I was shocked by this news. As impossible as it must seem now, I had believed that the existence of the White House taping system would never be revealed. I thought at least executive privilege would have been raised by any staff member before verifying its existence.” He also said he wrote a note on his bedside notepad: “Tapes—once start, no stopping.”
Al Haig, who had taken over as Nixon’s chief of staff just two months earlier, said in his overlooked 1992 memoir, Inner Circles, that he knew some tapes were made in the Nixon White House but Butterfield’s testimony came as an unimaginable surprise.
“This was the first I had heard of the existence of an eavesdropping system that recorded every word uttered in the presence of Nixon, and it came as a total surprise to me,” Haig wrote. “I had no foreknowledge of Butterfield’s appearance, let alone the nature of his testimony.”
Haig, who was predisposed to let loose with his inn
er feelings, added (and Nixon was still alive when this was published): “It never occurred to me that anyone in his right mind would install anything so Orwellian as a system that never shut off, that preserved every word, every joke, every curse, every tantrum, every flight of presidential paranoia, every bit of flattery and bad advice and tattling by his advisers.”
That pretty much said it all. On his own, without consulting the president, Haig ordered the system dismantled. “Tear it out,” he directed.
Nixon was in Bethesda Naval Hospital for viral pneumonia and Haig went out to see him because he believed the Butterfield revelation was too sensitive to discuss over the phone. Always the options man, Haig said Nixon had two—keep the tapes or destroy them.
The White House Watergate lawyers accompanied Haig to see Nixon. They were divided. Fred Buzhardt, the West Point graduate, Southerner, former Pentagon general counsel and Haig’s good friend, said, “Destroy the tapes.”
Leonard Garment, the New York intellectual, excitable and a Democrat at heart, issued a warning rather than advice after hearing Buzhardt’s bottom line.
“Mr. President,” he told Nixon, “that would be an intolerable act. If you were to do such a thing, I must tell you that I would feel obligated to resign in protest and publicly explain the reasons for my resignation.”
“Get out of here,” Nixon ordered both lawyers. “Al, you stay.”
There was no decision that night, and Haig returned to the hospital the next morning.
“Al, I’ve thought about this all night long,” Nixon said. “Maybe Alex Butterfield has done us a favor. These tapes will be exculpatory. I know I never said anything to anybody that could be interpreted as encouragement to cover things up. Just the opposite.”
The president continued, according to Haig, “Al, we know that Dean lied and the tapes proved that. We don’t know what other lies may be told by people who are trying to save themselves.” His suspicion extended to his closest former aides. “Who knows what Ehrlichman might say, or even Bob Haldeman. The tapes are my best insurance against perjury. I can’t destroy them.”
It was unclear if this was an all-consuming case of denial or whether it was a way of enlisting Haig further into another round of the cover-up. Maybe it was the viral pneumonia that was causing him to hallucinate.
One immediate consequence, as Haig wrote, was that the tapes made Nixon a “laughingstock. All over the country, his supporters and enemies were asking the same question: How could he, of all people, have been so dumb as to install such a system?”
• • •
The disclosure of the tapes launched a political fight, a legal fight, a character fight, and a moral fight that strained the constitutional system for over a year. That story of dramatic struggle has been told elsewhere. There was the Saturday Night Massacre when Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, the disclosure of a mysterious 181/2 minute gap on one of the tapes, endless hearings, the House impeachment investigation, the backdating of the deed to Nixon’s vice presidential papers to claim a $500,000 tax deduction, the use of government funds to vastly improve his estates in Key Biscayne and San Clemente, and more questionable or illegal campaign contributions.
Butterfield often thought of the fate of the Nixon aides who were involved in Watergate crimes and did jail time. “Disciples of the president,” Butterfield called them. There was Bud Krogh, one of the supervisors of the Plumbers break-in team who did four and one half months in prison. Dwight Chapin, the Nixon appointments secretary and White House political spying and espionage contact, did eight months. Jeb Magruder, the deputy Nixon campaign manager, spent seven months in prison.
“These guys,” Butterfield said, “young, bright and full of enthusiasm, were ensnared by the glitter and deceit of the presidency. Their loyalties were used and exploited by Nixon.” It was particularly repugnant to Butterfield that these enthusiastic Nixon disciples and their families were left to pay the price.
• • •
A year after he disclosed the taping system, Butterfield was called before the House Judiciary Committee investigating the impeachment of Nixon. It was July 1974. Butterfield had gone through a sea change. Any redeeming characteristics in Nixon had been overshadowed by the extent of the lies and the crimes. Butterfield cooperated fully with John Doar, the chief counsel of the impeachment investigation. Butterfield’s essential point in his testimony was that though he had no personal knowledge of the Watergate cover-up and other abuses and crimes, he did know how the White House worked. Nixon was obsessively a detail person, he said, and Haldeman was a pure extension of Nixon. And it was inconceivable, Butterfield testified, that Haldeman would have done anything without Nixon’s knowledge and approval. Butterfield consciously decided to tell it all—and to contradict the president’s claim that he did not know about the Watergate cover-up. Butterfield said he was certain that Nixon not only knew but was in charge of all Watergate-related activity.I
After the testimony on July 2, 1974, which was closed to the public, word quickly got back to the White House that Butterfield had been excessively cooperative and was openly anti-Nixon. He was clearly no Nixon supporter, as if anyone needed more evidence.
“You’re destroying the greatest leader this country ever had!” Rose Mary Woods declared loudly in an evening phone call to his home one night that month. She sounded highly intoxicated.
Butterfield defended himself and his actions. “Rose, don’t say that,” he insisted. “That’s simply not true.”
He received about five similar calls at home from Woods that month.
“You’re on the other side,” she said in one call. “You always were.”
• • •
On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes to the Watergate prosecutor. This included the so-called smoking-gun tape that established that Nixon was actively in charge of the cover-up, directing that the CIA move to limit the investigation. The tape proved in detailed, vivid back-and-forth conversations between Nixon and Haldeman that Butterfield was right about how the president controlled the Watergate decisions and actions.
Just 15 days later, on the evening of August 8, Nixon announced in a live national television address that he would resign the presidency the following day at noon.
That day Butterfield was alone in his FAA office. He tuned into the TV set to watch Nixon’s farewell address to cabinet, staff and friends in the East Room of the White House. Butterfield could see it was a talk without text or order. Perspiring, Nixon talked about his father, mother, money, brothers and death.
Nixon put on his eyeglasses and read from Theodore Roosevelt’s diary about the loss of his first wife: “And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.”
Nixon waved his hand as if to urge that his final point not be lost: “Always remember, others may hate you—but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
It was as if Nixon finally unraveled the essence of himself. He had witnessed the awful destructive power of hate. Instead of getting the others, it had eaten and doomed him.
That was it, Butterfield realized. The hating was at Nixon’s center, the driving force to get the “sons of bitches,” to settle all the scores for all the slights and snubs and opposition. This hate, the duplicity, the incessant plotting had become the engine of his presidency.
Butterfield almost couldn’t absorb it. The East Room was full of sobbing, the clear sound of weeping. Some held handkerchiefs to their faces, squeezed their arms to contain themselves, and a few held hands. “I could not believe that people were crying in that room,” he said. “It was sad, yes. But justice had prevailed. Inside I was cheering. That’s what I was doing. I was cheering.”
* * *
I. Under oath Butterfield told the House Judiciary Committee that Haldeman had initially approached him for the White House job out of the blue. Butterfield omitted that he had w
ritten Haldeman to request a meeting about working in the administration. Butterfield told me that he had asked Haldeman to omit that part of the story. Haldeman, however, confirms that Butterfield wrote him.
“I had virtually forgotten his existence,” Haldeman wrote in his 1978 memoir, The Ends of Power. “Then a letter from Australia arrived at our New York headquarters. . . . I had not seen nor heard of him in twenty years. . . .
“Remembering him as a nice guy, and impressed with his record, I ran some additional checks and found he was highly recommended. In his letter, he had urged that I let him fly to New York to meet with me personally. I called him in Australia . . . and told him to come on. At that stage I was still impressed with the thought of someone hopping on an airplane and flying himself around the world for a job interview.
“We had a good talk, and I felt he would be an excellent choice for the job of my deputy.”
Haldeman speculates that it is possible Butterfield was a “plant” but offers no evidence. “Whatever Butterfield’s motivations, his answer to a Senate staffer’s questions about a taping system triggered Nixon’s downfall.” Haldeman adds generously, “I still consider him a personal friend.” (The Ends of Power [New York: Times Books, 1978], p. 204.)
EPILOGUE
“What extraordinary vehicles destiny selects to accomplish its design,” Kissinger writes near the end of his memoir White House Years. It is a thought worth pondering.
For a long time, Butterfield could see that people from the Nixon administration avoided him. Often it wasn’t subtle. Old friends would walk right by him. But it was seldom rude. There were a few whispered signs of approval, “Hey, Alex, nice going. We were proud of you.” But not many, maybe not enough.
• • •
One incident in 1986, a dozen years after Nixon’s resignation, particularly bothered him. His 86-year-old father, retired Rear Admiral Horace Butterfield, had a heart attack in Alaska. His mother, who had dementia, was traveling with her husband and was left in a small motel 100 miles away when his father was flown to a hospital in Anchorage.
