throat. >> that was great, mac. thanks for coming to the library. we'll see you next time. every weekend hear eyewitness accounts about american history and the people and events that shaped our nation. oral histories, only on american history tv. coming next weekend, oral history on watergate and president nixon. you'll hear about the supervisor of young lawyers wanting to impeach president nixon. one of the lawyers working on it was hillary rodham, future secretary of state.

watch oral histories every weekend here on cspan-3. with white house officials and reporters who first broke the story of watergate, we begin with the story about the investigation and the cover-up with former white house counsel john dean and senate watergate committee counsel fred thompson. from the watergate office building, this is about 45 minutes. good evening, everyone, and welcome. i'm mary jordan. i'm the editor of "washington post" live which is division of the newspaper which organizes forums and debates. a very special thanks tonight to "washington post" chairman don graham and publisher katherine waynus, our host, and a big thank you to penzance, the owner

of the -- warren is a key player in the watergate scandal. and what you're going to hear onstage, there are lots of people in the audience who loomed large in watergate and i see a couple of them there. alexander butterfield, the man who revealed a taping system from the oval office came all the way from california tonight. and earl filbert, former u.s. attorney for the district of columbia profited quite a bit on "all the president's men." it was on the sixth floor downstairs in this building that 40 years ago this week there was a botched break-in. burglars working for president

nixon who started it all and forever gave the suffix to every political scandal. those sixth floor offices with actually open tonight. 40 years ago they housed the democratic national committee headquarters, but tonight artist lori munn has done portraits of many of the figures, and we urge you to take a look on the way out. tonight we're going to keep the focus forward. how are watergate's lessons relevant today? it's worth remembering that while watergate was a loi poiw for the presidency, it was a high point for congress. every house in america watched 30 hours watergate hearings, 30 hours. can you imagine in the age of twitter how that would work? actually, people are probably answering that question if they hash tag watergate.

okay, we're going to kick things off with a short video, then we're going to hear from a great newsman, tim lehr, author and broadcaster, but right now please watch this. >> at 10:15, there was a line of cabs and cars outside the paper and people waiting to buy the first edition. people wanted to read it at that moment. >> the people reporting were bob woodward and carl bernstein. >> usually if you have a story,

it isn't exclusive for very long because everybody else jumps on it. but with watergate, i thought, if this is so great, where the hell is everybody else? >> there was this lull. the story would just disappear and nothing would happen and then woodward and bernstein would write a piece and it would flare up. >> no known reporter from the "washington post" is ever to be in the white house. is that clear? >> absolutely. >> never in the white house, no church service. >> what we did was a way to keep the story alive when they were trying to hush it up. >> i had lunch with katherine graham and she asked, when is the whole story going to come out? i said, because bob and carl kept it so concealed, maybe never. she said, in a very pained way,

never? don't tell me never. to have the boss, the publisher, understand what we're doing and not just backing it but saying, go all the way. do not give up on this story, don't tell me that. and we really covered this like local reporters would have. if you've seen the movie "all the president's men," you see the non-glamorous nature of this shoe leather endeavor. >> it was a tribute to the importance of careful reporting. when they started, they had no idea, none, where this story would lead. >> in the press room it was wall-to-wall reporters and camera crews. shortly, word came that the president had asked for national television time tonight. >> the president of the united states will address the nation on radio and television from his oval office. >> i shall resign the presidency

effective at noon tomorrow. >> here's the biggest story of our time and we got it right. >> four other people closest to the president -- >> i don't think there's been an event in my lifetime that's had such an impact on journalism. moreover, what carl and bob did was begin to cover the white house, as i like to describe it, from the outside in, not from the inside-out. and that's the most important way of covering not just the white house but the institution of the presidency. >> watergate also posed questions about what the proper role was that a congressional investigation might be. >> if you're looking for the moment that people kind of stepped up and did their job in a nonpartisan way, it was 1973 when the senate was presented with a resolution to set up the watergate committee. the vote was 77-0.

>> i was one of the first republicans to split with the party. it was a moment in history, and the lessons in that moment were that we were going to say that no person is above the law no matter how powerful you were in this country, you must be held accountable for your position. >> watergate led to the creation, something called the independent prosecutor, a new form of power in washington. in a sense, a permanent investigation. >> we said, look, we are going to investigate and go to court and speak what we know to be the truth about the evidence. and had the president of the united states not taped himself, he would have remained in office. >> when richard nixon taped, he assumed he would be the only one to listen to those tapes unless

he decided to let somebody else listen to them. he owned them. he was the last president to have that assumption. presidential papers became public property as a result of watergate. and that, i believe, constituted a new check on presidential power. >> the fact that we came out of it whole and with a sense that believers of government, the balance of power that's written into our constitution, a living document, survived. >> as president richard nixon has drawn crowds to the vast ellipse south of the white house before, but those were triumphs. this was not. >> it was very hard for me to see the president at the top of all of that. the rule of law does not stop at

the white house door. watergate demonstrated that. [ applause ] i am jim lera of t erlerer the pbs news hour. so here we are, and the question is, what was watergate? what is it now? what will it be tomorrow and all the tomorrows still to come? in the beginning, as mary said and as you all know, it was, in

fact, just a piece of real esta estate, this particular building. and unless somebody demolishes it, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon, it may always be a watergate as a building. but it was also a crime, a crime not of passion, a crime not of greed, but a crime of corruption. political corruption of institutions by individuals high and low who saw the need and/or the opportunity to violate laws and standards of personal conduct. their lives were changed forever by what they did. most paid an enormous price and a loss of liberty and a loss of reputation. some of them went on to various forms of public as well as private redemption. watergate the crime also spawned

good deeds among people that required from then on a lifelong cloak of admiration and appreciation. they were people of the law and the judiciary, of politics and government, and of course of journalism. for whom watergate provided an opportunity to do the right thing, and they took that opportunity. many of those folks were also changed forever by what happened in this building 40 years ago and the events that followed. more generally, watergate, of course, has come to be so much more than a building, a washington crime wave and a series of stunning political events and personal experiences. its meenanings now are so broad and so different that just seeing or hearing the word watergate triggers a variety of rorschach tests for us all. watergate, yes, that's when the

system worked. a bad president and his fellow bad apples were exposed and vanished along with the sins of evil and money-driven politics, among many other things. no, no, no, watergate was when the system collapsed. saved only by a lone federal judge, two kid newspaper reporters with adult bosses, a whistleblower, some white house tapes, and a handful of honest united states senators. watergate, a stain, a cleansing, a proud moment, a terrible moment. something to remember with pain and shame or with pride and cheer. take your choice. which we will do now with some of those people who were there 40 years ago. the first three are john dean, who was the white house counsel to president nixon.

[ applause ] >> fred thompson, who was the chief minority counsel of the republicans on the senate watergate committee. [ applause ] >> and richard benviniste who was the lead prosecutor in the prosecutor's office. [ applause ] >> the discussion among them will be moderated by timothy naptali, a historian and former director of the president nixon library and museum where he created a watergate exhibit. tim? you're on. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. first of all, i want to thank mary jordan. and secondly, i'm going to sit down.

what we're going to do now is set up the -- set up the story a little bit for you so that those of you who are listening here or watching it on the web and are too young to have either experienced watergate because you were alive at the time or your high school history class didn't get past 1965, we're going to set it up because we have a remarkable opportunity tonight to listen to people who were there, and then we'll take some questions from the audience and pose basically a few of the issues that mr. lerher posed. what's the value, what's the meaning, what's the legacy of watergate today? i've asked john dean to start. if you don't know what the crime was, you don't know why there was an investigation. john, would you tell us a little bit about the first week after the june 17, 1972 bungled

break-in here in this building? >> as you know, tim, i have trouble looking at that week from the time i lived it to the time i look back on it. today i know a lot more about that week than i did at that time. so i can't help but look at it from hindsight. the cover-up really starts within moments of the white house learning about the fact that five men had been arrested here in this building wearing business suits, rubber gloves, money stashed in their pocket and that they're from the reelection committee. jim mcgruder, the deputy director of the reelection committee, calls bob haldeman who is in florida with the president who happens to be in the bahamas. gets an update very quickly as to what's going on, tells mcgruder that he's got to get back to washington immediately. does that. they put out a press release very quickly at the reelection

committee that is a totally bogus account, because one of the men arrested happened to be the head of security at the reelection committee, jim mccord. so it starts right at that moment and quickly unfolds that first week. what really cast the die, i happened to have been personally in manila giving a graduation speech. made my first mistake when i came home. but i did and went in the office on monday. i got a call from mcgruder, amongst others. mcgruder said, you've got to talk to gordon litty. i said, you talk to him. he said, i can't talk to him. he threatened to kill me. so i met with litty and learned from litty, who confesses the whole thing to me that not only has he been involved with watergate, but two of the men in the d.c. jail as part of his team were involved in an earlier operation on behalf of the white house to break into daniel

elsburg's psychiatry office. it's right at that moment that i realized we've got really big problems and i don't have a clue what to do with them. my predecessor, john ehrlichman, who had been white house counsel, one of the things i said to him very early in the conversations after reporting what i knew is i said, john, we probably need a criminal lawyer here. he dismissed that. i realized if there was anything that was essential at that white house, it was that mr. nixon have the most talented criminal lawyer that was available. that didn't happen to be the case. so we proceed from there trying to gather the information as to what's going on. as i say, the die is cast that week. one of the more interesting bits that happened is that nixon calls john mitchell when he gets back to washington from the residence. not a recorded call, but the call has been recorded not on the eob phone where he later reports to haldeman what happened, but rather the room

phone. it's a fascinating conversation where mitchell is told by the president that he thinks that the matter can be controlled, and he comes up with a plan to have a cuban committee in miami raise money and protect -- and support these people who have been arrested. richard, i don't think, from the prosecutors i've talked to, that a committee that had been made public, and that was his plan was to public publicize it and it for political reasons. >> we didn't do that. litty said commitments had been made with him when they undertook the task, and he immediately starts extracting those commitments from the reelection committee, turning to the white house to get help to raise the money, and of course that will get us all across the line into an obstruction of justice. >> now, one of the key things

was to keep the number of indictments down, right? there are five people who are arrested in this building. there are two more across the street, hunt and litty. >> that appeared very quickly that howard hunt, his name was found in first a notebook but also in a remarkable document in the room of the burglars next door at the hotel where hunt had written a check to a country club out in maryland for $6.36 for his out-of-state dues asking bernard barker to mail it from florida so he could contain -- or remain in out-of-state status. a pretty sure clue there was some trouble. and not only did the police and the fbi find this immediately, but so did the media. because the "washington post" had one of its better police reporters right there in the room, i've now learned all these

years later, covering that particular activity. >> now, this is serious business, but there is a little bit of keystone cops about it because they also had stacks of money, didn't they? >> in their pocket. >> stacks of money which would later be important when you had to follow the money. >> well, they didn't actually follow the bills, but they quickly tracked bernard barker's bank account, found that he had very large transactions. it's interesting, historically we know that litty could have cashed those checks at the riggs bank. instead he sends them to miami, to barker, to have them cashed, and it immediately raises the antenna of the fbi that this might be the source of the money. when they get hugh sloan, when earl brings them in, and i'm glad earl is here today, because he was certainly paramount in unraveling this. >> in september of '92, you meet with president nixon and he's

happy. why is he happy? >> he's happy because there's only seven people that have been arrested. it stops at hunt and litty and the people who are actually in this building. >> richard, how many get arrested in the end? >> i've lost count. a lot. >> okay, so -- >> 30, 40. >> so the cover-up is working. senator, john was about, what, 33 at this time, 34? >> which one, when the break-in occurred? >> when the break-in occurred. >> 30. >> you're 30 years old, working on howard baker's campaign. he calls you, and what does he ask you to do. >> he asked me to consider becoming counsel on the watergate committee. told about the formation of the urban committee. he was going to be the ranking member, and as the ranking republican, he had a right to choose the counsel for the republicans. i've got to say, as a republican, it's wonderful to be back at another watergate

celebration. [ laughter ] >> our boys kind of left a mess, didn't they? >> what was the state of play, though? when you're asked to be minority counsel, and the white house, we know from the tapes, thought you were quite young -- 30. what's the stage of play? how do you and the senator view this? is this a real investigation? are you concerned it's an attempt to get the president -- how partisan is it at that point? >> well, most of my concerns were practical ones. i just started practicing law, i had been on the campaign trail with senator baker. and i was trying to get my law practice reestablished. i had been assistant united states attorney there with john mitchell's certificate of appointment hanging over my wall. and so i had not kept up with it at all. i remember something about a break-in.

and when i came up in february, it was just the most rudimentary of information, and i had most of it from the "washington post." and i think most of us thought that in typical campaign fashion that there were some young, inexperienced, over-aggressive people who had done some things that were stupid that did notice that some of the people who got caught weren't that young, but maybe pulling the strings behind the scene. and that certainly never occurred to me, that the president of the united states, for example, or his key people would be involved in something so ridiculous both from a moral standpoint and from a practical standpoint. as you remember, it was a totally botched job from every way imaginable.

they practically left a blueprint, you know, for the law enforcement authorities to follow and the whole thing. and these were supposed to be cia-experienced people. so it was bizarre, and it was clearly important because it had to do with the congress of the united states and the president. >> how important was this man's testimony before your committee? >> well, it was all important. it was the key testimony before the committee. and without his -- i've always thought about how unique this situation was in that so many things came together to end results. you had to have a willing press that was aggressive, and of course we certainly had that. you had to have a deep throat in this case.

you had to have a -- not necessarily a status, but you had, in this case, white house counsel, john here, who was testifying. he was willing to testify about conversations. the president gave him permission to do that. and then you had a taping system. i don't think -- maybe if you didn't have either of those four, you would not have had the result that you had. certainly that pertains to john's testimony. >> senator, so you're in the congress, but we have another investigation going on, and it's the watergate special prosecution force. and richard over here was the head of the task force on the watergate issue. richard, how important was john dean's testimony? >> well, it was very, very important. but to fred's litany, i would add two other things. you had to have an opposing

party controlling the senate, and you had to have a judge like john sericka, who was willing to follow the evidence and to be aggressive in in not allowing his courtroom to be used to steal further cover. so i watched john dean's testimony before i was appointed to the special prosecutors' office. i saw this young man only four years older than i. i was an assistant u.s. attorney in the southern district of new york at the time. and i saw him drone on and on in that john dean monotone for hours and hours, and i listened to the content and i absolutely couldn't believe that richard nixon, the arch-strategist, whether or not i had other

opinions about him, i certainly didn't think that he would be the type of person to allow a young man, inexperienced as john dean was, to have as much authority as john dean seemed to have, according to his testimony, and certainly not to have richard nixon incriminate himself in the ways that john dean had suggested in his testimony rather explicitly that he had involved himself in a criminal cover-up. so it was not until much later after i was appointed, after we did our investigation, and most importantly, after we were able to hear richard nixon and his closest advisers on tape -- >> finish that thought, then we're going to get to -- >> -- that john dean testimony became solidified as

unimpeachable. >> there are people in this audience who think of fred thompson as a dramatic performer in "law & order." for historians, fred thompson's greatest role was when he asked a particular question to alexander butterfield. would you please set that up? because that changes the whole investigation. maybe also his life, i don't know, but certainly the whole investigation. so senator, tell us about asking alexander butterfield the big questions. >> this was a monday. the friday afternoon before, staff had come to us and said, we've just been interviewing a guy by the name of alexander butterfield. and there's a taping system in the white house. we immediately went to urban and baker and over the weekend they decided to -- that we needed to immediately, you know, get in before the cameras. so that happened monday. >> and wereou