Nixon Re-election Committee

The Nixon Re-election Committee (CRP) was not merely the administrative vehicle for Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign: it became the organizational hub through which the book traces a secret fund, political intelligence operations, and a chain of delegation that obscured who authorized what. Its campaign personnel connected the White House to covert political work, while the division between those who approved payments, those who received them, and those who carried out operations made responsibility difficult to establish—and easier for senior figures to deny.

Formation and Organization

The committee was formed in March 1971, with H. R. Haldeman choosing Jeb Magruder and Hugh Sloan to run its day-to-day political and financial operations. Both belonged to Haldeman’s circle of young White House recruits from advertising and marketing, known as the Beaver Patrol. Other members of that network also moved into the campaign organization: Dwight Chapin was among Haldeman’s most trusted aides, Gordon Strachan served as his liaison to CRP, and Bart Porter left the White House to become CRP’s chief advance man. The committee therefore operated not as a detached campaign office but as a destination for personnel whose loyalties and working relationships already ran through the White House.

The visible organization was only part of the structure reporters tried to reconstruct. A personnel roster listed managers, private secretaries, office floors, and telephone extensions. By comparing locations and extension sequences, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein could infer who worked near whom and who reported to whom. Yet the people who might confirm those connections often would not speak. The reporters began making evening visits to CRP employees’ homes, where fear and silence were tangible: one employee trembled and begged Bernstein to leave before others saw him; another said she wanted to help and then burst into tears. Such encounters suggested that the committee’s internal hierarchy was also a system for containing information.

The book describes that silence alongside indications that records had been destroyed soon after the Watergate break-in. Several employees mentioned wholesale destruction, but said they had heard of it secondhand and could provide no specifics. The distinction matters: the accounts gave reporters a pattern to investigate, not direct proof of who ordered each act. Even so, the reported destruction, the employees’ evident anxiety, and the difficulty of tracing lines of authority all pointed to an organization in which access to information was tightly controlled.

The Secret Fund and Its Authorization Chain

The committee’s secret fund supplied a financial link between campaign operations and political espionage. In one deposit, four Mexican checks were joined by a fifth check: a $25,000 cashier’s check payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, drawn on a Boca Raton bank. The five checks made a total deposit of $114,000 on April 20. Four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The check’s size, date, and route through the account gave reporters a concrete transaction to follow, even before they knew who Dahlberg was.

Hugh Sloan’s account helped explain how the fund was controlled. He said that when he was first approached for money, he telephoned John Mitchell at the Justice Department and Mitchell told him to release it. The calls began in 1971. Mitchell was initially the sole person authorized to approve expenditures; later, authority passed to four others. Two were identified as Maurice Stans, then the campaign’s finance chairman, and Jeb Magruder. The other two were described as a senior White House official involved in the campaign and a campaign aide outside Washington. Sloan also said that withdrawals were made by G. Gordon Liddy, Porter, and Magruder. The emerging picture separated the people who could authorize payments from those who physically received money.

The Washington Post reported that the fund held more than $300,000 for sensitive political projects and that records relating to it had been destroyed. It also reported that Sloan had resigned because of his suspicions about Watergate. The General Accounting Office determined that the fund’s existence appeared to violate campaign-finance law because its expenditures had not been reported. At the same time, the reporting preserved an important limit: the Watergate grand jury had not established that the intelligence-gathering fund directly financed the illegal eavesdropping. Sources described its primary purpose as financing wider intelligence-gathering operations against Democrats. The distinction between evidence of a covert campaign fund and proof that it paid for a particular break-in remained central to the unfolding investigation.

Political Intelligence and Sabotage

The investigation gradually placed the fund inside a broader operation. The Washington Post reported that FBI agents had established that the Watergate bugging stemmed from a large campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted for Nixon’s re-election and directed by White House and CRP officials. According to the account, the activities targeted all major Democratic presidential contenders and had formed a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort since 1971. The committee was thus presented not simply as a source of money for isolated acts, but as part of an organized political effort whose scope extended beyond the break-in.

One example involved the Quaker demonstrators who maintained a round-the-clock vigil outside the White House. Craig Hillegass told Woodward that his fraternity brother Theodore F. Brill had said CRP paid him $150 a week to infiltrate the group, report on demonstrators’ personal lives and plans, and help set them up for drug arrests. Police eventually raided the vigil but found nothing. Brill was chairman of the Young Republicans at George Washington University, and CRP terminated his job two days after the Watergate arrests. The arrangement paired political surveillance with an attempted law-enforcement embarrassment: information gathered inside the protest group was meant to produce arrests that could damage Democrats by association.

Brill’s salary had not been reported under the new campaign disclosure law. After the story appeared, the General Accounting Office audited CRP’s books again; the audit helped establish that Kenneth Rietz had headed a group of young spies described as a Kiddie Corps. This episode made the committee’s operation visible at a smaller scale than the Watergate break-in, while showing how campaign employment, unreported pay, and political intelligence could converge in a single assignment.

Exposure, Denial, and the Cover-Up

As the reporting widened, CRP’s public responses did not resolve the questions about its funds. When Bernstein asked about the secret-fund story, a committee spokesman called the reporters’ sources bad and said CRP would not comment further. Behind that denial, Sloan’s account connected the money to repeated authorizations by Mitchell and, later, by other officials. The committee’s formal refusals and the reporters’ reconstruction of its internal payment chain therefore moved on separate tracks: one defended the organization against public accusation; the other sought corroboration from former employees, financial records, and investigators.

The Watergate trial brought the competing explanations into sharper focus. Prosecutor Earl Silbert said he could account for only $50,000 of the $235,000 in presidential campaign funds handed to Liddy in $100 bills. Relying chiefly on statements by Magruder and Herbert Porter, Silbert argued that Liddy had received money for legitimate intelligence work and had gone off on his own to plan and execute the illegal operation. This was the low-level account that reporters had previously encountered as CRP’s cover story. Its presentation at trial confronted them with the difference between a theory that assigned the break-in to Liddy and their accumulating evidence of wider campaign operations and multiple levels of authorization.

Later disclosures linked the committee’s money to the effort to keep the Watergate defendants silent. Sloan had told the reporters that the secret fund continued after the arrests, and that money had been moved from Stans’s safe to Fred LaRue; he had not specified the amount or how it was spent, so they had not published the claim. James McCord’s testimony that payments to the conspirators came directly from CRP made the previously unconfirmed account newly consequential. McCord identified Kenneth Parkinson and Dorothy Hunt as conduits. A LaRue associate later described payoff money as an additional $350,000, supplementing an original $80,000 that LaRue had received from Sloan and funneled to the conspirators. A Justice Department official confirmed that the grand jury was operating on the assumption that both bundles, in $100 bills, had been used for payments. These were reported claims and investigative assumptions, not interchangeable proof of every step in the money’s route.

The committee’s significance also lay in the way its organization could separate action from apparent command. Haldeman’s method, as the reporters understood it, was to preserve deniability by having others implement controversial decisions. Sloan said Haldeman seldom dealt directly with CRP and that Strachan handled the liaison; the committee and White House staff were described as layers between senior figures and operational contact. This structure did not by itself prove that a particular official ordered a particular act. It did, however, explain why investigators had to assemble a chain from phone calls, payment authority, intermediaries, personnel ties, and testimony rather than expect to find a single direct instruction.

By the time Magruder cooperated with prosecutors, the committee’s internal hierarchy had become a source of disclosures as well as concealment. He was reported to have told prosecutors that Mitchell and White House Counsel John Dean approved and helped plan the Watergate bugging operation, and that the two later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. The allegations came from Magruder through sources in the White House and CRP; their publication made the committee’s deputy campaign manager a witness against senior figures with whom he had worked. In the book’s account, CRP is therefore both a campaign institution and the crucial middle ground where funds, personnel, political operations, and the struggle to contain Watergate converged.