The electric moment that doomed Richard Nixon’s presidency occurred when Alexander Butterfield, a little-known former White House aide, appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee on July 16, 1973.
“Mr Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president,” Fred Thompson, a legal adviser to the committee, asked him as millions of Americans watched on live television.
Butterfield hesitated. “I was aware of listening devices. Yes, sir,” he replied, then proceeded to explain how, at Nixon’s request, he had installed a secret, sound-activated recording system in the Oval Office with microphones in the president’s desk and lamps on the mantelpiece.
Butterfield’s revelation ignited the Watergate inquiry. For a year the investigators fought for the release of the tapes. Nixon finally capitulated the following summer after the Supreme Court rejected his claim that they were protected by executive privilege, and the tapes proved damning.
They demonstrated beyond doubt that Nixon had known of the break-in at the Democrats’ national headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex before the 1972 presidential election, and had approved the subsequent cover-up. The “smoking gun” was a recording of Nixon agreeing to a plan to halt the investigation for national security reasons made six days after the break-in.
Within days Nixon, facing impeachment, became the first and only US president to resign.
But if Butterfield’s public...
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