Asked If There Were Tapes, Nixon Aide 'Told the Truth'

Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertently hastened 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 his conversations, has died. He was 99. Butterfield died at his home in the La Jolla section of San Diego, per the Washington Post. "He had the heavy responsibility of revealing something he was sworn to secrecy on, which is the installation of the Nixon taping system," said John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel during the Watergate scandal who, with Butterfield, help expose the wrongdoing. "He stood up and told the truth."

As a deputy assistant to the president, the AP reports, Butterfield oversaw the taping 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 he thought that, besides himself and the president, only White House chief of staff HR Haldeman, a Haldeman assistant, and a few Secret Service agents knew about the taping system. "Everything was taped" if the president was present, Butterfield told Watergate investigators. The tapes would expose Nixon's role in the cover-up that followed the burglary in 1972 at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building. To avoid impeachment by the House, Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974, less than a month after the Supreme Court had ordered him to surrender the relevant tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.

Butterfield believed he'd had a hand in the president's fate. "I didn't like to be the cause of that, but I felt that I was, in a lot of ways," he said in a 2008 oral history for the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Butterfield, a college friend of Haldeman's at UCLA, served as a deputy assistant to Nixon from 1969 to 1973. In that capacity he worked under Haldeman and, among other duties, was secretary to the Cabinet and helped oversee White House operations. The Air Force veteran had left the White House to become administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration when Senate committee staffers privately questioned him on July 13, 1973, during their investigation of the Watergate break-in. A routine question about the possibility of a taping system had been prompted by Dean's testimony that he believed a conversation he had had with Nixon may have been recorded.

When Butterfield acknowledged that a taping system existed, he was brought before a public hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. The public revelation on July 16, 1973, of a taping system designed to record all the president's conversations stunned Nixon friends and foes alike. The tapes promised Watergate investigators a rich vein of evidence in their quest for determining what Nixon and others knew about the break-in. Efforts by investigators to gain access to the tapes sparked a yearlong legal battle that was resolved in July 1974 when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had to give them up. Butterfield found himself "cheering … just cheering" the day Nixon resigned, he told the library, because "justice had prevailed."