March 1, 1974 Watergate cover-up indictments

The March 1, 1974 Watergate cover-up indictments charged seven former White House and campaign aides of Richard Nixon with conspiring to obstruct justice. They gave formal legal shape to a trail that had emerged piecemeal through campaign-finance records, reluctant insiders, and disclosures about the handling of evidence; the same day, the Watergate grand jury also sent a report and accompanying evidence concerning the President to the House for consideration.

From secret funds to a wider investigation

The public trail had begun with money. In examining checks deposited in Mexico, Bernstein found a fifth check: a $25,000 cashier’s check drawn on a Boca Raton bank and payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg. It had been deposited with four Mexican checks, bringing the total to $114,000; four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000, and the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. At that point, investigators were still trying to establish who Dahlberg was, but the check connected a named donor to the money under scrutiny.

A later Washington Post report described the broader fund behind the espionage operation. It said that principal assistants to John Mitchell, Nixon’s former campaign manager, controlled funds held in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. More than $300,000 had been earmarked for sensitive political projects; G. Gordon Liddy had received money, records relating to the account had been destroyed, and Hugh Sloan’s resignation had followed his suspicions about Watergate. The report’s significance was not only the amount or the list of recipients: it suggested that the indictments of the original burglars had not ended the conspiracy and that people within the campaign organization might know more.

Sloan later described how campaign money had been released. When first asked for funds, he called Mitchell at the Justice Department; Mitchell told him to distribute the money. The calls began in 1971. Sloan said Mitchell had initially been the sole person authorized to approve expenditures, with authority later passed to others, including Jeb Stuart Magruder. The account did not by itself establish that Mitchell had known about the Watergate bugging, but it gave investigators a specific route by which campaign funds had been authorized and disbursed.

Witnesses, silence, and the emerging cover-up

The reporting also encountered an organization whose employees were afraid to speak. During evening visits to campaign workers’ homes, one employee trembled and pleaded with Bernstein to leave before others saw him; another said she wanted to help and burst into tears. These encounters did not supply a complete account of the operation, but they conveyed the pressure surrounding people who might have information. The reporters also pursued a lead that Sally Harmony, secretary to Liddy at the committee, had not told the FBI and grand jury everything she knew. A Justice Department attorney said prosecutors suspected her testimony lacked candor but had insufficient evidence to charge perjury. Employees also spoke, at second hand, of records being destroyed after the break-in.

The committee bookkeeper described an inquiry already compromised by falsehoods: she said the grand jury had called her early, when people had already lied and investigators did not yet know what to ask. She said Harmony and others had lied, while stopping short of identifying all the matters those lies concealed. Sloan, for his part, said that although nobody had explicitly ordered him not to talk, the message had been to hold ranks and keep the organization together. His account helps explain why the path from an internal warning to public evidence was slow: legal advice, loyalty, fear, and the risk of civil liability all constrained what witnesses would say.

The pattern widened as insiders began to speak more directly. Sloan told the reporters that matters were worse than the published account had suggested and that his suspicions about the worst had been why he left. He nevertheless hesitated to go on the record because his lawyers warned that public statements could be used against him in civil litigation. Later, a Committee for the Re-election of the President official, reacting to James McCord’s disclosures about payments to the Watergate conspirators, expressed disillusionment with the White House’s handling of the affair. McCord’s testimony supplied a possible connection between the continuing secret fund and payments meant to secure the conspirators’ silence; earlier, Sloan had said that money had passed from Maurice Stans’s safe to Fred LaRue, though the reporters had not published the claim without confirmation.

Allegations and evidence of suppression

A separate public challenge had come from Democratic Party chairman O’Brien, who filed a $1 million civil-damages suit against the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Citing the possible involvement of Charles Colson, he argued that the facts were developing a line to the White House and asked how many other attempts there had been. His suit was an accusation, not a finding of guilt, but it made the question of responsibility beyond the burglars a visible political and legal issue.

Magruder’s statements to federal prosecutors supplied a more direct allegation against senior figures. According to a Washington Post report based on three sources in the White House and the committee, Magruder said that Mitchell and White House Counsel John Dean had approved and helped plan the Watergate bugging operation. He also said they later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. These were reported statements to prosecutors, not the wording of the March 1 charges themselves; their importance lay in the way they connected the original operation to an alleged later effort to contain its consequences.

Another account of suppression concerned files held by L. Patrick Gray. Deep Throat told Woodward that Gray had been informed in a meeting with John Ehrlichman and Dean that the files were politically explosive and should never become public. Ehrlichman had earlier urged Dean to dispose of them in the river; Gray later said he put them in a burn bag. The account described an effort to remove damaging material from view, while preserving a distinction between an explicit order and Gray’s understanding of what his superiors wanted.

The indictments and their reach

By late February 1974, the special Watergate prosecution force had obtained guilty pleas from Magruder, Bart Porter, Donald Segretti, Herbert Kalmbach, LaRue, Egil Krogh, and Dean. Eight corporations and their officers had also pleaded guilty to illegal-contribution charges. Dwight Chapin faced a perjury indictment, while Mitchell and Stans were on trial in New York on obstruction-of-justice and perjury charges. The cover-up case thus arrived amid a widening series of proceedings, not as an isolated accusation.

On March 1, the Washington grand jury that had indicted the original burglars handed up its major cover-up indictments. It charged seven former White House and campaign aides with conspiracy to obstruct justice: H. R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Mitchell, Gordon Strachan, Robert Mardian, and lawyer Kenneth Parkinson. The charges brought figures from the administration and the campaign into the same formal case, extending the legal focus beyond the men who had entered the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

The day’s proceedings also reached beyond the seven named defendants. A second Washington grand jury indicted Ehrlichman, Colson, Liddy, and three Cuban Americans, including Barker and Eugenio Martinez, in the conspiracy to burglarize Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Meanwhile, the chief Watergate grand jury gave Judge Sirica a briefcase containing a report and supporting evidence concerning the President. Because prosecutors argued that the Constitution precluded indicting an incumbent President, the jurors recommended that the report and evidence go to the House Judiciary Committee, acting for the House of Representatives, which holds the sole power to impeach. The indictments therefore opened a formal case against seven aides while directing the evidence concerning Nixon into a separate constitutional and congressional process.