Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertently accelerated Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal when he revealed that the president had bugged the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and routinely recorded their conversations, has died. He was 99 years old.
His death was confirmed to the Associated Press by his wife, Kim, and John Dean, who served as Nixon’s White House lawyer during the Watergate scandal and helped expose wrongdoing.
“He had a huge responsibility to reveal something he was sworn to secrecy about, which is the installation of Nixon’s recording system,” Dean said. “He stood up and told the truth.”
As deputy assistant to the president, Butterfield oversaw the recording system connected to voice-activated listening devices that had been secretly placed in four locations, including Nixon’s office in the Executive Office Building and the presidential retreat at Camp David.
Butterfield later said that, besides himself and the president, he believed only White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, an aide to Haldeman, and a handful of Secret Service agents knew about the recording system.
“Everything was recorded… as long as the president was present,” Butterfield told Watergate investigators when he testified under oath during a preliminary interview.
The tapes would expose Nixon’s role in the cover-up that followed the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building. To avoid impeachment by the House, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, less than a month after the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over the relevant tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
Butterfield believed he had had something to do with the president’s fate. “I didn’t like being the cause of it, but I felt like I was, in many ways,” he said in a 2008 oral history for the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
Butterfield, a college friend of Haldeman’s at UCLA who had contacted his friend to ask about opportunities in the new Nixon administration, served as Nixon’s deputy assistant from 1969 to 1973. In that capacity, he worked under Haldeman and, among other roles, was Cabinet secretary and helped oversee White House operations.
The Air Force veteran had left the White House to become administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) when Senate committee staff questioned him privately on July 13, 1973, during their investigation of the Watergate break-in. A routine question about the possibility of a recording system had been prompted by testimony from former White House counsel John Dean that he believed a conversation he had with Nixon might have been recorded.
When Butterfield acknowledged that a recording system did exist, he was brought before a public hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. The public disclosure, on July 16, 1973, of a recording system designed to record all of the president’s conversations surprised both friends and enemies of Nixon. The tapes promised Watergate investigators a rich trove of evidence in their quest to determine what Nixon and others knew about the break-in (a lot, as it turned out).
Investigators’ efforts to gain access to the tapes sparked a year-long legal battle that was resolved in July 1974, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon must turn them over.
The thousands of hours of tapes that have been made public over the years (they are now controlled by the National Archives) offer a unique, often unflattering, view of Nixon. His words exposed bad character, vulgar language, intolerant racial and religious views, and unvarnished opinions about national and international figures.
“I just thought, ‘When you listen to those tapes…’ I mean, I knew what was on those tapes…they’re dynamite,” Butterfield told the Nixon Library. “I guess I didn’t foresee that the president could be removed or impeached, but I thought it would be a dangerous few years for him. I guess I couldn’t conceive of (Nixon) being forced out of office. It had never happened before.”
Butterfield later said he believed Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, fired him as FAA administrator in 1975 as part of an agreement worked out between Nixon and Ford staff members. He said he had heard from White House friends that he had been attacked shortly after his testimony before the Senate committee.
After leaving the FAA, Butterfield worked as a business executive in California. He earned a master’s degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1994.
Butterfield was relentless in his criticism of the former president in later years. While he praised Nixon’s achievements in foreign affairs, he considered his former boss “not an honest man” and “a criminal” and believed that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in before it occurred and was the architect of the subsequent cover-up.
Butterfield found himself “applauding…just applauding” the day Nixon resigned, he told the Nixon Library, because “justice had prevailed.”
“I didn’t think it would happen for a while,” he said. “This guy was the ringleader.”
