Henry E. Petersen

Henry E. Petersen, an Assistant Attorney General, occupies a consequential but narrowly documented place in the Watergate investigation: prosecutors relied on him to inform Richard Nixon that indictments of the President’s closest aides were imminent, and John Dean later told him about L. Patrick Gray’s destruction of files from E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe. The account shows Petersen carrying information between investigators and the President, while leaving his own motives and response largely unstated.

Role in the Investigation

In the week before Nixon’s April 17 announcement, federal prosecutors told Petersen that they were close to indicting several of the President’s current and former aides. They insisted that Nixon be informed personally, and Petersen conveyed the warning. The prosecutors expected Nixon to announce the resignations of John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman at once; instead, he resisted for almost two weeks. They had also asked him to order his staff to cooperate, but that cooperation did not come. The prosecutors were left confused and disturbed by the President’s actions.

This account places Petersen in a channel of communication central to the investigation’s widening reach: the prosecutors did not merely pursue evidence against aides but sought to ensure that the President knew what was coming. Petersen’s role in delivering that message is specifically reported, but the passage does not say what he advised Nixon or how he evaluated the President’s delay.

Information Reaching the President

On April 17, Nixon presented himself as an investigator pursuing the truth and said he had met with Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and Petersen to review information that had come to him and the progress of the Justice Department investigation. The meeting connected Petersen’s prosecutorial role to the President’s public account of his own involvement in the inquiry. The narrative’s contrast is sharp: prosecutors had already asked Nixon to act on impending indictments, while the President’s announcement emphasized his review of the case and his determination to see justice done.

The account does not establish that Petersen controlled Nixon’s response or shared the President’s public framing. It establishes the meeting and the earlier warning, leaving the tension between the prosecutors’ expectations and Nixon’s conduct visible without assigning Petersen an undocumented position in that conflict.

The Gray Files

A separate disclosure places Petersen in the chain of information about files taken from E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe. After reports that Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray had destroyed documents from the safe, a Senate aide confirmed the account to Bob Woodward and said that John Dean had told Petersen about it ten days earlier. The reported files included fabricated State Department cables concerning President John F. Kennedy and material Hunt had collected on Senator Edward Kennedy.

Deep Throat later told Woodward that Gray had been urged by John Ehrlichman and Dean to ensure the files never became public, and that Gray eventually put them in a burn bag. Petersen’s connection in the account is more limited: Dean had told him of the destruction before the story reached Woodward through the Senate aide. The episode adds another documented instance in which serious information about the handling of Watergate-related evidence had reached Petersen, but the passage does not describe what action, if any, he took after hearing it.