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Alexander Butterfield's Bombshell: The Secret Tapes That Doomed Nixon
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When White House aide Alexander Butterfield revealed Nixon's secret Oval Office recording system in 1973, a political scandal became a constitutional crisis. From the Watergate break-in to John Dean's testimony, this is the chapter where the cover-up began to crack.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
One witness. One answer.
June seventeenth, nineteen seventy-two. Five men were arrested inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington.
The Nixon White House dismissed the arrests as a third-rate burglary. The expectation was that the story would fade.
The break-in didn't come from nowhere. Nixon had been running covert operations against political enemies for years.
By the spring of nineteen seventy-three, the cover-up was under serious pressure. Nixon's White House counsel, John Dean, had spent months managing the effort to keep the investigation contained.
Butterfield had served as a deputy assistant to the president. In the week before his public testimony, Senate investigators interviewed him privately.
Archibald Cox was the special prosecutor appointed to investigate Watergate independently. He was meticulous and he was serious.
In July of nineteen seventy-four, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon could not withhold the tapes from investigators on grounds of executive privilege. He had to hand them over.
Nixon was gone. But Watergate didn't end with his resignation.
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