Jeb Stuart Magruder

Watergate scandal
The Watergate complex in 2006
Events
List Presidency of Richard Nixon Timeline Nixon White House tapes Operation Sandwedge Operation Gemstone 1972 presidential election "Saturday Night Massacre" Impeachment process against Richard Nixon United States v. Nixon Resignation speech Inauguration of Gerald Ford
People
Watergate burglars Bernard Barker Virgilio Gonzalez Eugenio Martínez James W. McCord Jr. Frank Sturgis
Groups Master list of Nixon's political opponents Nixon's Enemies List Watergate Babies Watergate Seven White House Plumbers
CRP Committee for the Re-Election of the President Fred LaRue Jeb Stuart Magruder Robert Mardian John N. Mitchell Kenneth Parkinson Hugh W. Sloan Jr. Maurice Stans
White House Richard Nixon Alexander Butterfield Charles Colson John Dean John Ehrlichman Gerald Ford H. R. Haldeman E. Howard Hunt Egil Krogh G. Gordon Liddy Gordon C. Strachan Rose Mary Woods
Judiciary Archibald Cox Leon Jaworski John Sirica
Journalists Carl Bernstein Bob Woodward Barry Sussman Harry M. Rosenfeld Howard Simons Ben Bradlee Katharine Graham Lesley Stahl The Washington Post
Intelligence community Mark Felt ("Deep Throat") L. Patrick Gray Richard Helms James R. Schlesinger
Congress Howard Baker Sam Ervin Peter W. Rodino U.S. Senate Watergate Committee Impeachment process
Related Frank Wills (security guard) James F. Neal (prosecutor) All the President's Men (book, film) The Final Days (book, film) Blind Ambition (miniseries) Dick (1999 film) Mark Felt: The Man who Brought Down the White House (2017 film) Watergate (2019 board game) Slow Burn (2020 series) Gaslit (2022 series) White House Plumbers (2023 miniseries)

Magruder served in the White House until the spring of 1971, when he left to manage the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP, also known as CREEP), first as director. By early 1972 in the election year, Attorney General John N. Mitchell took over as director of CREEP and Magruder acted as his deputy. As Mitchell became preoccupied with a scandal involving the ITT Corporation and by his efforts to restrain his outspoken wife Martha, Magruder took on more of the management of the CREEP.[22]

The 1972 campaign to re-elect the President won 49 of 50 states. Nixon lost only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia to Democrat George McGovern. The final tally of Nixon's victory was 520 to 17 electoral votes, the second largest Electoral College (United States) margin in history up until then, after Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1936 victory over Alf Landon, (523 to 8).

Magruder worked as inaugural director from October 1972 to arrange Nixon's United States presidential inauguration ceremony and celebration in January 1973.[23] In March 1973, he began a job as director of policy planning with the United States Department of Commerce. He resigned soon afterward, as the Watergate scandal began to heat up and become scrutinized again by media following James McCord's disclosures of perjury during the original Watergate trial of the five burglars; the former Watergate burglar wrote about this to the Washington Star. [24]

Magruder met with White House Counsel John Dean and John Mitchell on January 27 and February 4, 1972, to review preliminary plans by G. Gordon Liddy (Counsel to CREEP) for intelligence gathering ideas for the 1972 campaign. The Watergate burglaries would evolve from those meetings. From the day they met in December 1971, Magruder and Liddy (who had been hired by Mitchell and Dean) had a conflicted personal relationship.[25]

During April 1973, Magruder began cooperating with federal prosecutors. In exchange, Magruder was allowed to plead guilty in August 1973 to a one-count indictment of conspiracy to obstruct justice, to defraud the United States, and to illegally eavesdrop on the Democratic Party's national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. On May 21, 1974, Magruder was sentenced by Judge John Sirica to ten months to four years for his role in the failed burglary of Watergate and the following cover-up. After his sentencing, Magruder said, "I am confident that this country will survive its Watergates and its Jeb Magruders." In the end, he served three months of his sentence at a Federal minimum security prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, and was moved for the remaining four months (before Sirica's pardon) to a "safe house prison" at the Fort Holabird Base in Baltimore Harbor, along with Chuck Colson, John Dean and Herb Kalmbach, due to threats on the four by inmates at Allenwood.

Portrait of Magruder as a member of the Nixon Administration

Magruder originally testified that he knew nothing to indicate that President Nixon had any prior knowledge of the Watergate burglary.

In his book, An American Life: One Man's Road to Watergate (1974), he wrote,

I know nothing to indicate that Nixon was aware in advance of the plan to break into the Democratic headquarters. It is possible that Mitchell or Haldeman told him in advance, but I think it's likelier that they would not have mentioned it unless the operation had produced some results of interest to him.

This book was published before Magruder's sentencing on May 21, and before Nixon resigned as the president.

Magruder had testified that he thought that he was helping establish a legal intelligence-gathering operation. In his book Magruder wrote about former attorney general John Mitchell and Fred LaRue meeting in late March 1972 in Key Biscayne, Florida. He wrote that Mitchell approved the plan to eavesdrop on the Watergate complex soon after this meeting.[26]

In 1990 Magruder consented to interviews with authors Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin while the two were conducting research for their 1991 book Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (St. Martin's Press). Magruder admitted that he had lied to prosecutors, to the Senate's Watergate Committee, and in his 1974 book An American Life: One Man's Road to Watergate, concerning aspects of the early cover-up.

To Colodny and Gettlin, he said that he had called John Dean several hours after the (second) Watergate break-in was discovered, and that Dean set in motion several cover-up strategies. This version of events tallied closely with that of Liddy, as set out in his 1980 book Will. Books published earlier by others, however, such as Magruder's in 1974 and Dean's Blind Ambition (1976), had become the accepted 'truth' of the cover-up. These versions had very profound and damaging effects on the reputations of senior figures such as Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Mitchell.[29]

To Colodny and Gettlin, Magruder admitted specifically instructing Liddy on the second Watergate break-in, something which he had earlier denied. At the time these interviews were conducted, Magruder was a Presbyterian minister in Columbus, Ohio.[29]

In 2003 Magruder was interviewed again, by PBS researchers and the Associated Press. According to his account in a PBS documentary, Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History, and in an interview with the Associated Press, he asserted that Nixon knew about the Watergate burglary early in the process, and well before the scandal broke. During the 2003 interviews, Magruder said that he had attended a meeting with Mitchell on March 30, 1972, at which he heard Nixon tell Mitchell by telephone to begin the Watergate plan. This account, however, has been contested by Fred LaRue. LaRue, who was the only other person present at the meeting in which the alleged telephone call from Nixon to Mitchell occurred, has said that no telephone call from Nixon to Mitchell took place during this meeting. Magruder is the only direct participant of the scandal to claim that Nixon had specific prior knowledge of the Watergate burglary, and that Nixon directed Mitchell to proceed with the burglary. These statements contradict Magruder's earlier accounts that the cover-up had reached no higher in the Administration than Mitchell.

In his 1974 book, Magruder had said that the only telephone call from the White House during this meeting came from H.R. Haldeman's aide, Gordon C. Strachan. Sixteen years later, in the August 7, 1990 interview with Colodny and Gettlin, Magruder changed his account, claiming that the telephone call from the White House came from Haldeman himself. In 2003, Magruder changed his account again, saying that President Nixon had telephoned Mitchell at the Key Biscayne meeting.

Magruder moved to be near family in Danbury, Connecticut in 2012, and died at age 79 on May 11, 2014, due to complications from a stroke.[33]