Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who revealed the Watergate tapes, dies at the age of 99

WASHINGTON (AP) — Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertently hastened Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal when he revealed that the president had wiretapped the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room and routinely recorded his conversations, has died. It was 99.

His death was confirmed to The Associated Press by his wife, Kim, and John Dean, who served as a White House adviser to Nixon during the Watergate scandal and, along with Butterfield, helped expose wrongdoing.

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“He had a huge responsibility to reveal something he was sworn to secrecy, which was the installation of Nixon’s recording system,” Dean said. “He stood up and told the truth.”

As deputy assistant to the president, Butterfield oversaw a recording system connected to voice-activated listening devices that were secretly placed at four locations, including Nixon’s office in the Executive Office Building and the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Butterfield later said that he, along with himself and the president, believed that only White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Haldeman’s aide 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 will reveal Nixon’s role in the cover-up that followed the 1972 burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Building. To avoid impeachment by the House of Representatives, 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 a hand in the president’s fate. “I didn’t like being the cause of it, but I felt like it, 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 called his friend to ask about opportunities in the new Nixon administration, served as Nixon’s deputy aide from 1969 to 1973. In this capacity, he worked under Haldeman and, among other duties, 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 when Senate committee staff questioned him privately on July 13, 1973, during their investigation into the Watergate break-in. A routine question about the possibility of a recording system was raised by former White House counsel John Dean’s testimony that he believed a conversation he had with Nixon may have been recorded.

When Butterfield admitted that a recording system actually existed, he was brought before a public hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. The July 16, 1973, public unveiling of the recording system designed to record all of the president’s conversations stunned Nixon’s friends and enemies alike. The tapes promised Watergate investigators a rich line of evidence as they sought to determine what Nixon and others knew about the break-in — a great deal, as it turned out.

Efforts by investigators to access the tapes sparked a year-long legal battle that was resolved in July 1974 when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Nixon must give them up.

The thousands of hours of tapes released over the years — and now under the control of the National Archives — provide a unique, if often unflattering, view of Nixon. His lyrics revealed a bad temper, foul language, intolerant racist and religious views, and outspoken opinions about national and international figures.

“I just thought: When they hear those tapes… I mean I knew what was on those tapes… it’s dynamite,” Butterfield told the Nixon Library. “I guess I didn’t expect the president to be removed from office or impeached, but I thought it would be a risky few years for him. I guess I couldn’t imagine (Nixon) being forced out of office. That had never happened before.”

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Butterfield later said he believed Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford, fired him as FAA administrator in 1975 as part of an agreement reached between Nixon’s and Ford’s staff. He said he heard from friends in the White House that he was targeted shortly after he testified before the Senate committee.

After leaving the FAA, Butterfield worked as a business executive in California. He received his master’s degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1994.

Alexander Porter Butterfield was born on April 6, 1926 in Pensacola, Florida.

He left UCLA to join the Navy and later earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in 1956 and a master’s degree from George Washington University in 1967.

In 1948, he joined the Air Force and served as an instructor at a base near Las Vegas during the Korean War and later served in Germany. In Washington, he was Military Assistant to the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense in 1965 and 1966 and later served as Senior United States Military Representative and Representative of the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Forces, in Australia. He retired with the rank of colonel after 20 years in the Air Force.

Butterfield was harsh in his criticism of the former president in later years. While he praised Nixon’s accomplishments in foreign affairs, he considered his former boss “not an honest man” and a “fraud” and believed that Nixon knew of the Watergate break-in before it happened and was the architect of the cover-up that followed.

Butterfield found himself “cheering…just cheering” on the day Nixon resigned, as he told the Nixon Library, because “justice prevailed.”

“I didn’t think it would happen for a while,” he said. “This man was the leader of the gang.”