March 1, 1974

March 1, 1974, was a turning point in the Watergate investigation: the grand jury that had indicted the original burglars charged seven former White House and campaign aides with conspiring to obstruct justice, while sending its report and evidence concerning President Richard Nixon to Judge John Sirica for referral to Congress. The indictments gave the cover-up a defined criminal case; the accompanying report carried the inquiry toward the constitutional question of presidential responsibility.

From campaign money to a cover-up case

The path to the March indictments ran through money and authority. During the investigation, reporters examined a $25,000 cashier’s check payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg. Deposited with four checks routed through Mexico, it helped make a total deposit of $114,000; four days later, $25,000 was withdrawn, and the remaining $89,000 was taken out separately. The check connected a particular contribution to the broader trail of funds, but it did not by itself establish who had authorized the political operation or how the money was ultimately used.

A subsequent report described a special Committee for the Re-election of the President account holding more than $300,000 for sensitive political projects. The account’s significance lay not only in its size: records relating to it had been destroyed, G. Gordon Liddy had received money from it, and treasurer Hugh Sloan had resigned after becoming suspicious about Watergate. The story suggested that the arrests had not ended the conspiracy and that people inside the campaign organization might know more than the indictments had established.

Sloan’s account helped clarify the authorization chain. He said that when he was first asked to provide money, he telephoned John Mitchell at the Justice Department and received instructions to disburse it. The calls began in 1971, when Mitchell was Attorney General. Mitchell had initially been the sole person authorized to approve expenditures; that authority was later passed to others, including Jeb Stuart Magruder. This testimony connected campaign payments to decisions by senior figures, though the distinction between evidence of a money trail and proof of a particular person’s knowledge of the burglary remained important.

The reporting also assembled testimony about the alleged operation itself. According to accounts attributed to Magruder and conveyed to the newspaper through three sources, Mitchell and White House Counsel John Dean had approved and helped plan the Watergate bugging operation; Magruder also said they later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. Those reported statements made the alleged movement from political espionage to concealment central to the case that culminated on March 1.

A climate of silence, then testimony

Inside the campaign organization, reporters encountered fear as well as fragments of information. During evening visits to employees’ homes, one person trembled and pleaded with Bernstein to leave before others saw him; another began to cry. Employees spoke of pressure at the committee and of records being destroyed after the break-in, but some of what they knew was secondhand and lacked specifics. Their accounts pointed toward a culture in which information was difficult to obtain and potentially dangerous to disclose.

The Bookkeeper, who had worked for Sloan and later for Maurice Stans, told Bernstein that people had lied to the grand jury before it knew what questions to ask. She said that Sally Harmony and others had lied, but did not supply a complete account of what they had concealed. Sloan, for his part, said that no one had explicitly ordered him not to talk, yet the message to keep the organization together had been clear. He also explained that his lawyers had discouraged public statements because they could be used against him in civil litigation. These different forms of silence—fear, organizational pressure, and legal caution—help explain why the investigation developed through partial accounts rather than a single, immediate disclosure.

The evidence widened as insiders began to speak more directly. In a separate conversation, Donald Segretti said he wanted to tell the whole story, that he had not understood the larger operation, and that he had learned what it was about by reading the papers; he identified the White House as the source of the instructions that had limited what he was told. Later, after James McCord’s disclosures connected cash payoffs to the Committee for the Re-election of the President, a committee official angrily described how the White House had handled the affair and said the handling had undermined the presidency. Such accounts did not make every link equally certain, but together they shifted attention from individual operatives to the people and institutions above them.

The March 1 indictments

On March 1, the Washington grand jury that had indicted the original burglars of the Democratic National Committee headquarters issued its major indictments in the Watergate cover-up case. It charged seven former aides with conspiracy to obstruct justice: H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, John Mitchell, Gordon Strachan, Robert Mardian, and lawyer Kenneth Parkinson. The charges placed figures from both the White House and the campaign organization in the same alleged conspiracy.

The indictments were a formal accusation, not a finding of guilt. Their importance was that the investigation had moved beyond the men who entered the Democratic headquarters to the alleged effort to obstruct the inquiry afterward. The sequence assembled by reporters and investigators—funds, authorizations, destroyed records, reported hush-money arrangements, and accounts from people inside the campaign—now had a criminal framework centered on conspiracy and obstruction.

The surrounding cases showed how broad the crisis had become. By late February, Jeb Stuart Magruder, Bart Porter, Segretti, Herbert Kalmbach, Fred LaRue, Egil Krogh, and Dean had pleaded guilty. Eight corporations and their officers had also pleaded guilty to charges of making illegal contributions to the campaign committee. Dwight Chapin was under indictment for perjury, while Mitchell and Stans were on trial on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. The March 1 action thus arrived amid a growing series of pleas, indictments, and trials, rather than as an isolated legal development.

Referral to Congress and the date’s significance

Alongside the seven indictments, the grand jury gave Sirica a briefcase containing a report and its supporting evidence. Prosecutors had argued strongly that the Constitution precluded indicting an incumbent president. The jurors therefore recommended that the report and evidence be turned over to the House Judiciary Committee, acting for the House of Representatives, which holds the sole power to impeach.

A week later, another grand jury issued indictments in the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, charging Ehrlichman, Colson, Liddy, and three Cuban Americans, including Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, who had also been defendants in the original Watergate break-in case. That later action underscored that the inquiry extended beyond the Watergate cover-up alone. But March 1 had already marked the decisive institutional change: evidence gathered in a criminal investigation was being directed toward a congressional inquiry into possible presidential wrongdoing.

The date’s significance therefore rests on two linked developments. The indictments named a group of former aides accused of joining an obstruction conspiracy; the grand jury’s transfer recommendation opened a route for Congress to consider evidence concerning Nixon without indicting him. March 1 did not settle the question of presidential responsibility. It made that question impossible to confine to the original burglary or to the actions of its immediate participants.