Fred LaRue

Fred LaRue emerges as one of the crucial links between John Mitchell’s authority, the secret campaign fund, and the effort to manage the Committee for the Re-election of the President’s response to Watergate. The evidence does not make every allegation about him equally certain: a former official’s early prediction that LaRue would know about active wiretaps was not proof of his involvement. But later accounts placed him in the center of the committee’s response and connected him to money used for political espionage and, eventually, payments to the Watergate conspirators.

Identity and Position

LaRue was described to Carl Bernstein as Mitchell’s right-hand man, a close aide whose participation would be expected in consequential decisions. He had been on the White House staff before leaving to join the Committee for the Re-election of the President, alongside Mitchell’s other former aides Herbert L. Porter and Jeb Stuart Magruder. That move placed him within the campaign organization just as questions about the Watergate break-in were beginning to reach its senior officials.

The name first reached Bernstein through a former Nixon administration official discussing the hiring of James McCord as the committee’s security coordinator. Although the committee had identified Robert Odle as the person who hired McCord, the source argued that Mitchell would not have left such a decision to Odle alone. At least one other person would probably have been involved: LaRue. Bernstein wrote down the name as he heard it, spelling it La Roue. The same source reasoned that if wiretaps were still active at the time of the break-in, LaRue would likely have known about them. This was an informed lead, not independent confirmation that he had participated in the surveillance.

The Secret Fund and Mitchell’s Authority

As The Washington Post investigated the campaign’s concealed finances, LaRue’s name became associated with a fund supervised by Gordon Liddy. A former administration official told Bernstein that the fund was large and that the intended public account would blame Liddy, presenting the money as a precaution against possible disruption at the Republican convention. The source said Mitchell wanted that explanation circulated because too many people knew about the fund. The account describes an attempted transfer of responsibility; it does not by itself establish what LaRue knew about every expenditure.

Hugh Sloan later provided a more direct account of the committee’s financial procedures. When Sloan was first asked for money, he telephoned Mitchell at the Justice Department. Mitchell told him to release it, and Sloan said that similar calls began in 1971. Mitchell initially had sole authority to approve expenditures from the fund; that authority was later passed to others, including Magruder. Sloan described the procedure as routine at the time, in the context of a campaign budget exceeding $50 million. The routine form of the transactions, however, did not make their reported purpose ordinary: the fund financed sensitive political projects directed against the opposition.

The Washington Post’s account stated that several of Mitchell’s principal assistants controlled funds for the Watergate espionage operation and that the money was kept in a special committee account. The story reported more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects, payments to Liddy, destruction of account records, and Sloan’s suspicions about Watergate as the reason for his resignation. LaRue’s importance lay in the position these accounts assigned him: close enough to Mitchell to help connect senior authority with campaign operations and their financial machinery.

Managing the Watergate Response

Sloan also identified LaRue and Robert Mardian as the men Mitchell had selected to develop the committee’s response to the Watergate bugging. In Sloan’s account, they had engineered that response. He recalled a message conveyed within the organization as an instruction to hold ranks and keep the ship together. No one, he said, had explicitly told him to lie, but the implication was difficult to miss. Sloan’s description made LaRue’s role more than a matter of proximity to the fund: it placed him among the officials shaping what the committee would say and what its employees might withhold.

Bernstein’s notes, read back to an FBI agent, summarized allegations that LaRue and Mardian had directed the response beginning June 19; knew that some records had been destroyed; and had told committee employees to avoid questions about areas where records might have been destroyed. Mitchell, according to the same account, had chosen the two men to take charge. The agent objected that the information appeared to come from FBI interview reports and threatened that the reporters could be subpoenaed if they published material based on those records. His angry reaction served as an unusual confirmation that the reporters had touched sensitive investigative material, but it was not a substitute for independent proof of every underlying claim.

Other reporting described a wider atmosphere in which employees feared speaking. During evening visits to committee staff, Bernstein encountered people who trembled, asked him to leave before they were seen, or broke down in tears. One employee’s account implicated LaRue, Magruder, and Porter in knowing about the bugging or lying to the grand jury; she warned Bernstein not to contact her again. The testimony was an informant’s allegation, and its circumstances showed the risks surrounding the reporting as well as the limits on what could be verified. The committee bookkeeper separately said that employees had already lied to the grand jury and that Sally Harmony and others had lied, but did not claim to know precisely what each person had concealed. Together, such accounts helped reporters trace a pattern of silence without resolving every individual act.

From Cover-Up Allegations to Hush Money

The later evidence connected LaRue to the handling of money after the arrests. Months before the reporters could confirm it, Sloan told Bob Woodward and Bernstein that the secret fund had continued to exist and that money had been transferred from Maurice Stans’s safe to LaRue. The reporters held the information because Sloan would not say how much was involved and they could not establish how the money had been spent. That restraint matters: the existence of a transfer, by itself, did not prove that the money had financed payments to keep the defendants silent.

The situation changed when Seymour Hersh reported that James McCord had testified that cash payoffs to the Watergate conspirators came directly from the committee. McCord’s testimony identified Kenneth Parkinson and Dorothy Hunt as conduits for payments. The account also placed LaRue in the chain: he had been Mitchell’s deputy and a co-director of what the book calls the Watergate housecleaning, and he and Mardian had supervised Parkinson and the other committee lawyers. A Committee for the Re-election of the President official, speaking after the disclosures, confirmed the reporters’ sense that LaRue was involved in the payoffs. The earlier, unconfirmed transfer from Stans’s safe now appeared potentially connected to the hush-money scheme, though the account distinguishes that developing inference from the testimony identifying the payment channels.

The strongest public attribution came in the report based on Magruder’s statements to federal prosecutors. The report said Mitchell and White House counsel John Dean had approved and helped plan the bugging operation, and that Mitchell and Dean later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted Watergate conspirators. Magruder was identified as a source for both claims. These statements placed LaRue within a larger sequence of fund handling and post-arrest cleanup, but they did not make him the sole decision-maker: the reported authorizations and arrangements reached Mitchell and Dean, while LaRue’s described role was that of an aide, financial intermediary, and participant in the committee’s response.

Narrative Role and Significance

LaRue’s part in the account is assembled from different kinds of evidence rather than introduced through a single confession or scene of direct explanation. A source’s early expectation about what he must have known becomes, over time, a set of more specific claims about his place in committee decision-making, the response to investigators, and the movement of money. The progression illustrates the reporters’ central problem: contact and authority could identify a promising lead, but they could not alone establish authorization or criminal purpose. Sloan’s account of Mitchell’s telephone approvals, the descriptions of LaRue’s response work, and McCord’s testimony about the payoff channels each added a distinct link to the developing chain.

LaRue is therefore significant less as an isolated character than as an intermediary through whom the story traces how political authority could be translated into campaign spending and then into efforts to contain the consequences. His reported closeness to Mitchell, his place in the committee’s response with Mardian, and his association with transfers and later payoffs connect the secret fund to both the original operation and its aftermath. The record presented here supports those connections while preserving an important distinction: allegations, witness accounts, and confirmed testimony accumulated into a compelling picture, but not every claim about LaRue was established in the same way or to the same degree.