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born in 1940, was a White House aide who became caught up in the Watergate scandal.
    I started working at the White House as an assistant to the president’s appointment secretary during Nixon’s first term in office. I was very young and driven, and it was exciting to see the inner workings of government. When election time neared I was put on a team to help organize the Committee to Reelect the President. Working on the campaign was even more exciting than working at the White House. We were all working for a cause and by and large we were all believers, so there was a lot of enthusiasm around the office.
    One morning I was in the office and I saw G. Gordon Liddy, who was in charge of campaign security, hurrying down the hall in a state of panic. As he ran by, I heard him say something like, “My boys got caught last night. I told him I’d never use anybody from here. I made a big mistake.” I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about at first, but it got me thinking. Then I read in the papers about the Watergate break-in, and I saw that James McCord was one of the people arrested. I knew McCord; he was directly involved in the Committee to Reelect the President. The pieces fell together pretty quicklyin my mind. It was obvious by the way everyone was acting around the office that the campaign was somehow involved in the break-in. The men who were arrested had a fair amount of cash on them, most of it new hundred-dollar bills. I suspected that cash might have come from money that I had given Liddy, purportedly for campaign security. All of a sudden I started wondering whether the investigators would be able to pick my fingerprints off of those bills.
    As the Watergate situation ballooned, the atmosphere around the office became very bizarre. I couldn’t get straight answers about anything. I told some people at the White House that there were real problems over here at the committee and that they needed to do something. But their reaction was to just turn their backs on it.
    Next I talked to the two attorneys who had been hired by the campaign committee. They said that if what I was telling them [about the money] was accurate, then they’d been lied to by other people in the campaign. They were worried that I would be subpoenaed before they had time to deal with this, and they asked if I had any legitimate reason for being out of town. When I got home that night, Fred LaRue [the director of the re-election committee] called me and said that Ishould fly to California to help raise money for the campaign. He wanted to know if I could be on the morning plane from Dulles Airport [in Washington, D.C.]. And then he said, “Oh, by the way, could you spend the night at a motel near the airport so you won’t be subpoenaed in the meantime?” So I did.
    The next day on the flight I had a long time to think. Everything started to seem so crazy to me. Here I was, fleeing from the authorities. It was like I was a character in a movie. The lawyers for the campaign were there to protect the more senior people, and they weren’t concerned about what happened to someone like me. Obviously I was in the chain of command that paid all of these people to do something that was illegal. The question was, would anybody know that I was not part of the conspiracy in the first place?
    It was during that flight to California that I decided I could no longer work every day with people that were clearly trying to abort the investigation and, in essence, cover it up. I knew I would have to testify, and I felt an immense pressure to be as accurate as possible because I knew my testimony was going to have an impact on people’s lives. I think the tragedy in all of this was that I saw a lot of young, enthusiastic people make terriblemistakes and get chewed up in the gears. Particularly people who had no direct involvement, but who perjured themselves to protect more senior people. So many people went to