Tapes Don't Lie, People Do (part 1)

I'll venture a guess that most of you have never heard the name Alexander Porter Butterfield , even though he is a fairly important person in American history.

No, he was not one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, nor was he ever elected to any government position. He did not write any books or develop a vaccine. He was not an explorer, a scientist or an inventor.

But he was the man whose responsibilities included maintaining the secret audio taping system in selected portions of the White House , Oval Office , Old Executive Office Building , Cabinet Room and Camp David , during the Nixon administration.

It was, quite appropriately, Friday the 13th of July, 1973 —an unlucky day for President Nixon —when Alexander Butterfield was called to testify before the Watergate Committee.

The Watergate Committee Deputy Counsel, Donald G. Sanders , asked Butterfield a direct question: whether he had knowledge of a secret recording system in the White House.

Butterfield did not want to admit voluntarily to the committee that Nixon had installed an audio taping system, but he had decided, prior to the hearing, that if he was asked a direct question about it, he would not lie.

“I was hoping you fellows wouldn’t ask me that,” he said.

Reluctantly he went on to tell the Watergate Committee, in private, that “everything was taped as long as the President was in attendance.”

Butterfield also said that he knew “it was probably the one thing that President Nixon would not want revealed.”

Before Butterfield's testimony, on June 25, 1973, John Wesley Dean III , special counsel to the president, had implicated Nixon in his testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee. He also implicated other members of the administration, in covering up the burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington D.C. on the morning of June 17, 1972.

He was the first member of the Nixon administration to suggest that the president was directly involved, but it was a classic case of “my word against yours” and, of course, the president’s word would take precedence over Dean’s.

Nixon denied all accusations against him, and Dean had no proof beyond some notes he had taken, and his “recollections.”

Dean, however, had an eerie suspicion that his White House conversations were being taped, and said so to the committee. The committee then routinely began to ask all witnesses if they had knowledge of a secret taping system.

They hit the jackpot with Butterfield.

The Watergate staff kept Butterfield's private Friday the 13th revelation quiet over the weekend, and had him testify publicly before the Senate select Watergate committee in a televised hearing the following Monday, July 16, 1973.

What Butterfield revealed, under oath and on television to the Watergate Committee, was that Nixon had been secretly taping all his conversations, unbeknownst to all but a few key White House aides.

Butterfield's testimony meant that the United States Senate, and now the nation, could decide who was being truthful—Dean or Nixon—and find out for sure, as Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee put it, “What did the president know and when did he know it,” simply by listening to the key tapes.
Butterfield’s revelation set off months of legal wrangling, as Nixon attempted to assert “executive privilege” to keep the tapes private.

The concept of executive privilege provides the president with confidentiality in communication with his advisors, especially where defense and national security are concerned.

Nixon was able to resist the pressure to turn over the actual tapes, but he did agree to release the edited transcripts of a large number of them.

The following month, it was discovered that a gap of over 18-1/2 minutes had been omitted from the transcript of a conversation between President Nixon and White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman , on June 20, 1972, three days after the burglary.

Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods , was suspected, but denied having deliberately erased the tape while she was transcribing select passages. Woods testified that she had made a “terrible mistake,” erasing the tape by accidentally pressing the record button instead of the stop button, while answering a phone call. Eventually, experts determined that the gap had been erased several times, with the start and stop buttons pressed as many as nine times, refuting the “accidental erasure” explanation. (More on this next time.)

But on July 24, 1974, in United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), in a unanimous decision the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the argument of “executive privilege,” on the basis that it was not an absolute and had to give way to the demands of the legal system in a criminal case.

Faced with this court decision, Nixon finally relented and turned over all the tapes to Special Watergate Prosecutor Leon Jaworski , and it was clearly established that he had been involved in the Watergate cover-up almost from its beginning—just as John Dean had alleged.

One of the tapes—often referred to as the “Smoking Gun” and recorded on June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in—contained a critical discussion between Nixon and Haldeman. Told that the FBI’s investigation was leading to Nixon’s re-election campaign, which was derisively referred to as "Creep" (Committee to Re-elect the President), Nixon instructed Haldeman to tell the FBI, “Don't go any further into this case, period.”

There was evidence that almost from day one, Nixon had played a role in the conspiracy to conceal White House involvement.

The House Judiciary Committee had already approved three articles of impeachment, but the vote was by party line: Democrats firmly against Nixon, Republicans mostly in support (some things never change). Nixon still held out, though, for acquittal in the Senate.

With the release of the “Smoking Gun” tape, however, all of Nixon's support collapsed, and on August 9th, four days later, Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign , and Gerald R. Ford became the 38th president of the United States.

But it was Alexander Butterfield’s testimony before the Watergate commission that was fatal to Nixon, and the catalyst that brought down his presidency. Without the tape recordings, Watergate would most likely have been a blemish on the Nixon presidency, instead of the event that forced him to resign.

Nixon’s resignation has most assuredly changed American history over the past thirty-plus years. It is unlikely that Nixon would have had to give up the presidency if the audiotapes had not been discovered, and one can only wonder who would have succeeded Nixon as president, and how our nation’s history would have been different, for better or worse.