captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008 to mark the 40th anniversary of the watergate break-in on june 17th, the richard nixon presidential library released interviews with key staff charged with investigating whether there were grounds to impeach president nixon. this is the first time many of these individuals have spoken for the record about the inner work ction of the impeachment inquir inquiry. now, we hear from evan davis who

supervised the group of young lawyers working to determine what constituted an impeachable offense. one of the lawyers working on this question was hillary rodham, future first lady and secretary of state. >> i'm director of the richard nixon presidential library. it's september 29th, 2011, and i have the grace and honor to privilege to be interviewing you for the richard nixon oral history program. kevin, thank you for doing this. >> my pleasure. i was born in manhattan, so i'm a real new yorker, but when i was very young, about a year old, i was yelling and streaming so much as a kid in this small manhattan apartment that my parents felt it was really important to move to the

suburbs. so, we moved to connecticut when the suburbs were really quite rural and i grew up in riverside, connecticut. i went to public schools in riverside, through junior high school. and then the high school in riverside was this building that had six or seven stories with three- minute or four-minute passing periods between classes. and while at that time i was quite good at going up and down stairs on crutches, i was not going to be able to do that in three or four minutes with crowds of high school students, so my parents thought i should go to a prep school and i went to exeter. i was at exeter for three years. and i had to climb stairs there, too, but the schedule extends through the day and it was easier to organize. i enjoyed exeter a lot. i often think today most of what i know really comes from exeter, because i actually worked hard

at exeter. law school, too. harvard not so much. then i went to harvard and graduated in '66. i went to columbia law school and i enjoyed law school a lot and i became editor in chief of "the law review" and did well at columbia. i first went to check for a judge on the d.c. circuit who was a former columbia student, also had been editor in chief of "the law review" every year took a columbia clerk, harold leventhal. harold leventhal was an interesting judge. he'd been involved in democratic politics. have been the lawyer handling the fannie lou haimber issues. he'd been an oil and gas regulatory lawyer, a power commission lawyer in washington and became a wonderful circuit court judge with a specialty in administrative law. so, i clerked for him for a

year. and i clerked for a year nor a year for potter stewart. potter stewart had been involved in republican politics. his father had been mayor of cincinnati. he imhad run for the cincinnati council. he'd practiced law in new york city. so, harold leventhal from the democratic side and potter stewart from the republican side were both similar in their approach to issues, in their love of writing, for example, and crafting opinions, so it taught me that there is a little bit of a difference between judging and politics. if people came from two very different political backgrounds. getting a clerkship on the supreme court is a total lottery. there are many, many, many people qualified to do it and you need luck and i had luck to get to clerk for potter stewart. after that i went to work -- >> can you stop for a minute?

actually had an opportunity to ask somebody else. what term did you clerk? >> i clerked the october 1970 term. we had some very important cases. we had the pentagon papers case. we had the cassius clay case. we had some federalism cases of importance, younger versus harris. we had a very important segregation school busing case, swan versus mecklenberg. we had a very important gender discrimination case, grades versus dupower. very important first amendment cases. i happened to be there during a very interesting year on the court. >> would you like to preserve some of your recollections about the pentagon papers case? >> a little off topic, but i

know the justices did not feel comfortable with -- at least potter stewart did not feel comfortable with meshing the demands, the legitimate demands, of national security with the open transparency of the judicial process. i think as the case progressed to higher and higher levels, the government was willing to provide more information about what it saw as security concerns. and this information of necessity has to be provided in a very secret way. so, for example, the law clerks with not allowed to look at it. the justices had to look at it individually. i think it raised discomfort and i think it helped move justice stewart and some of the other judges to the conclusion that the government should be cautious in designating things

classified, but when they des e designate them 's is classified should take every conceivable step on their own, because once the cat was out of the bag, it would be very hard for the judiciary to solve the problem for them. so, that was the basic attitude the justice had. i think it's reflected in the concurring -- everyone wrote their own opinion. it was in that sense a difficult case because it didn't really fit the typical judicial process. >> given its importance in the history of civil rights, could you just comment a little bit on the mecklenberg case. >> that was a case where i think the judges were more than usually inclined to defer to the judgment of the trial judge, the district court judge, because the district judge was there courageously defending the constitution in a difficult

circumstance, and i think they bent over backwards to support him in his courage of the defense of the constitution. >> what comes next for you? >> so, then, i went to work for the new york city government. i started out in the budget division, where i was the first person to be general counsel of the new york city budget bureau as it was then called. now called the office of management and budget. and after a year there the corporation counsel brought me up to be the chief of the consumer protection division in the law department. so, when i went to work on the impeachment inquiry, i left being chief of the consumer protection division to go to work on the impeachment inquiry. >> tell us how that happened, who called you? >> so, i had had this job

through the quincy administration, the corporation counsel guy i enjoyed a lot and enjoyed working for, and lindsay, his term was over. ed beam had become mayor and i wasn't, you know, violently opposed to beamon anyway, but it didn't seem like it would be quite so surprising. i did not have a political job. i served at the pleasure of the corporation counsel. and i don't -- there was never any sense that he wanted me to leave, but i thought maybe there'd be something more exciting. particularly i had some friends who had started working on impeachment. jan orloff, married to my law schoolroom mate was working on impeachment. a classmate from columbia law school david haymes was working on the impeachment. so, i just decided to send in a

letter. and i wrote my resume, put it in an envelope, and mailed it to the house judiciary committee. and about four or five days later i got a phone call saying that bob sack was going to come to talk to me. so, there in my office in the municipal building, bob sack appears, we chat. he must have given a fairly good report, because the next thing was to talk to john doar, went to washington to talk to john doar and i was hired. i started i remember shortly after my birth, and my birthday was january 18. so, a little bit after january 18th i started in washington. >> what do you remember of your interview with john doar? >> not anything too specific. he wanted to know about my background. he asked the kind of questions that you just asked, my life

story and how i'd gotten to where i was. i believe he asked if i had any preconceived notions, and i said i did not. he asked about, you know, my job and the kind of cases i had, as i recall. i don't recall it being a very long interview, 20 minutes, something like that. and i don't recall more beyond that. >> you get the job. you move to washington. what's your first assignment? >> so, the first assignment after i got moved in, i move into a little room at the congressional annex. congressional arms apartment, a sort of furnished apartment kind of thing and stock up the refrigerator with food thinking i might cook something in the kitchen there. the food was never touched at the end of the time i was there, the food was still in the refrigerator, because there was

no time to cook anything. so, i get there. i think my first assignments, i don't remember particularly, but i think, we were organizing a group that was going to pore over the record as it existed, the various hearings that had been held, particularly the senate select committee hearings. and to digest and absorb and learn very well this record. and there were five or six younger lawyers who were going to be doing this, who were going to be putting it into a chronology, making lists of things, thinking about the testimony. and i was put in charge, i think it happened fairly early on, of this group of young lawyers, digesting the current record. and putting it together. and that process continued for

three, two, three months, something like that, getting all of those papers together. and then we started writing memos about this material and what it showed. and we started thinking about additional information that would be required. and we started thinking about witnesses, who we might want to interview, but the start was particularly i remember the senate selection committee hearings, i don't remember the exact number, maybe ten, each about this thick. >> how did you know what you were looking for? >> well, i wasn't so much looking for any particular thing but wanted to fully under what everyone had said. and then i would see what emerged from that as relevant information.

relating to the president's conduct in those instances. so, i think i read testimony of some of the key people, haldeman and ehrlichman, you know, john dean a number of times. and we also were working at the same time thinking about what was an impeachable offense. and joe woods did a lot of work on that topic. there was a memo written. i don't remember the name of it, but it was a fairly elaborate memo about what was a reason for impeachment. and so that sort of meshed into what i was doing. >> may i stop you there? bill weld and hillary rodham worked on that. did you participate at all in that process? >> i think it stayed in discussions. i did not participate in the

research. i remember discussions about, for example, whether we were talking about, you know, obviously what high crimes and misdemeanors means in the constitution, that phrase. i remember talking about and my having a view, which i think others shared, of the need to read that phrase in connection with what the constitution says about the duties of the president, particularly to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. and so that high crime or misdemeanor i recall thinking personally and discussing with others could well be something that a president was uniquely able to commit, a constitutional crime that the president was uniquely able to commit. because others didn't have the obligations or the power that the president had to essentially

subvert the constitution and that, therefore, defining the constitutional crime of high crime and misdemeanor would take into account the functions, roles, duties, and powers of the president. i remember personally feeling that we should set the bar high, because i felt that, you know, remembering back to my government courses and all that kind of thing that the president needed substantial room for independence of action so that it had to be something very, very serious, of the same kind of seriousness that a statutory crime would be but that it couldn't be defined simply as a statutory crime because it was a constitutional crime given the role. so, i remember talking about it having to be serious, having to

be to some degree persistent, it having to have not a public purpose, the subversion of the constitution, but some kind of private purpose would compound it. and i remember talking about the standard of evidence and thinking that it should be a high standard of evidence of proof because, well, for the same reasons that to use a very parochial example, when lawyers are disciplined for misconduct because you lose your job and everything, you get disbarred, it's clear and convincing evidence is required. and it's not protecting the lawyer unduly, but it's just recognizing that the here has to have room for zealousness and the advocacy of a client. the president needs room. so, it should be a high bar. those are the kind of discussions i remember. but i did not do the research.

others did. and i did not draft the memos. but i did participate in those kinds of talks. >> for us to get a sense of the staff, because there were over 100 of you, these kinds of conversations, were they -- did you have -- there was a senior leadership, and did they include others? it wasn't all 100 of you or -- i think there were 40 lawyers. it wasn't all 40 lawyers. these groups, were these informal groups over lunch, or was there -- did john doar put together a group of lawyers that would discuss this kind of thing? >> i think some of it was at the level of kibitzing. there was not an anti-kibitzing rule and, of course, with all of these interesting topics all around you, you do want to kibitz. secondly, the work that everyone was doing was interrelated. knowing what you were looking for in the factual record was

obviously tied with how you were going to think about what might be an impeachable offense, so, you could see if evidence existed of that kind of offense. so, there was a need for everyone to be -- i don't recall it being meetings in john doar's office particularly or anything like that. i recall more informal meetings that people would get together to talk about these issues. i remember attending meetings at which hillary and others were present, even though that wasn't my area. to some extent. but also to volunteer my own thoughts. >> when did you start to focus primarily on the watergate side of the issue as opposed to abuse of power, the agency abuse? >> very early on. my assignment and the assignment of this task force that i headed

up was watergate and the cover-up, that was my assignment. and i was not -- another person who was very active in the same area was dick kags. and dick had a broader role, and dick did a lot more over the period, you know, we're talking in total about six months that this was -- it seemed like in many ways two years, but it was only six months. and during that six-month periodic did a lot more conferring with members and going over information with them and answering their questions, members being members of the committee. i did not do that. i worked with this group within the staff on the watergate and the cover-up. so, i looked at the evidence. i participated in talking to relevant witnesses. i participated in drafting articles of impeachment related

to that topic, but that was my topic. >> what did you know about it starting out? >> well, the thing i -- you mean before i came. i was the -- you know, i read the newspapers. i particularly remember as one of the not on the level of, you know, the assassination of president kennedy or the "challenger" crash but at a level not too far below that, the firing of archie cox. i remember listening to television, watching on the radio and feeling that there needed to be continuing process, whatever it was going to be.

and i remember that incident, you know, when first one and then another attorney general resigned, it indicated, you know, a serious problem. so, that's what i remember mostly. i was by no means a buff of watergate facts. i was a consumer advocate. i was one of the -- probably the youngest division chief in the history of the law department, so i was on a learning curve in that job. that was stressful. and i was, you know, arguing consumer cases, doing anti-trust cases for the city and learning a tremendous amount. so, i didn't have time. but i think one of the things that when i decided that

impeachment would be an interesting thing, i thought about, at least subconsciously, you know, helping to fill the gap of the firing of cox, to have a process that would provide the public with some kind of resolution. >> the viewers of the senate watergate committee were faced with this dilemma. were you going to believe john dean or richard nixon had is a very, you know, tough challenge. when you started out, you didn't have any tapes to start. as a lawyer how to make the case or at least to figure it out, you weren't quite yet making a case, how were you going to think through the process of finding the president or john dean the more credible witness? >> so, a lot of what was done in the beginning is go through the

testimony of all of these witnesses and find the points of intersection or contradiction, corroboration or contradiction. and particularly focus on points of corroboration, and those would be pretty hard, factual elements because they were corroborated. and see what picture was painted by the corroborated points, where haldeman's testimony or ehrlichman's testimony or dean's testimony was consistent. and we did have certain things before the tapes came along. we had logs. we had meetings. we had public statements. and my recollection, too, is the tapes came along fairly early in the process. i can't give you the exact date, but it was fairly early. and in terms of watching the senate select committee the summer before, i had

occasionally watched it i think. i don't think i -- i don't remember watching john dean's testimony. i do remember the news flashes about butterfield's testimony because that was very dramatic. i didn't happen to be watching it, but it was on the news, and it was certainly -- and the head hein in the "daily news," you know, nixon bugs himself, you know, that's a -- i noticed that headline, as a lot of people did. but when i got there, i was trying to grasp these facts, focusing on where people agreed, where they disagreed, and if they disagreed, how you could resolve it, or where they agreed, what kind of picture did it paint. what did all these factual data points add up to in terms of the kinds of inferences they would support. obviously absent the tapes, you

know, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence. but if you add up all the circumstantial evidence and one circumstance after another points in the same direction, then it becomes weighty evidence, can become clear and convincing evidence. so, i did that, and we all worked very hard on it, and then we at one point i was able to talk to john dean and interview john dean. and i felt he was -- i felt he was truthful but looking out for himself is the way i felt about john dean. and, of course, his performance giving that account from memory

and then when it was compared to the tapes being so accurate was rather -- my memory is not like that at all. i could not have done that. i just have -- but the tapes did corroborate what he said, but still meeting him, i felt that he was, you know, focusing on his own interests but his own interests coincided with his accurately recalling the meetings he had been in. >> how helpful were the materials from the watergate special prosecution force? >> they were somewhat helpful, but the special prosecutor had a slightly different take on things than john did. john was very good friends with hank rose who was a very important person on the special prosecutor staff, and they'd gone back to civil rights days i think it was, maybe even the

neshoba county case together, they knew each other very well, and ruth liked john. i recall john saying that hank ruth felt that the thing was to prove airtight a criminal obstruction of justice, one incident of clearly obstructing justice in an airtight way and that the special prosecutor people felt they had done that with regard to the money on march 21st, the howard hunt -- howard hunt's going to blow if he doesn't get the money thing. and they felt they'd built a very strong case, including against the president, as i think they may have referred to him as an unindicted co-conspirator or something like

that on that. and john didn't agree with that on two counts. first of all, he was not infatuated -- this comes across in some of the reports, so on -- with the notion that a president is a co-conspirator because the president has so much power that really in a conspiracy it's just one person agrees with another to do a wrongful act and then does something to further their agreement. well, that's not the way john thought the white house or the president worked. the president was the person in charge. these people were his agents, and he didn't see criminal conspiracy law as relevant. the other thing, though, was that he did feel, too, that impeachment because of our feeling that it was a constitutional crime but had to have the seriousness and persistence -- it had