Richard Kleindienst

Richard Kleindienst appears in the Watergate narrative at a point when the investigation was reaching the highest levels of the administration. His brief but consequential arc runs from a canceled breakfast with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to a private meeting with Richard Nixon about the case, his withdrawal from its handling amid reports that colleagues might be indicted, and his resignation on April 30, 1973. The account establishes his proximity to the investigation and the political crisis around it, but does not attribute to him a specific role in the break-in or its cover-up.

Attorney General During the Investigation

By the time Watergate reporting had become a sustained public crisis, Kleindienst was attorney general and a central figure in the government’s response. His position placed him between the Department of Justice’s inquiry and the White House, a boundary that became increasingly difficult to maintain as the case widened from the burglary to alleged obstruction by administration officials.

One episode makes that proximity concrete. Woodward and Bernstein had been promised breakfast at Kleindienst’s home in Virginia. They drove there the next morning, but his wife told them he had been called to the White House and could not discuss Watergate. She explained that he had gone for services and had to remain for a meeting. The reporters were left with an appointment that had been displaced by events at the center of the government’s response.

The narrative later identifies the meeting that kept Kleindienst from breakfast. Nixon had met with him and Assistant Attorney General Henry E. Petersen to review facts that had come to the President in his own investigation and to discuss the progress of the Department of Justice investigation. The canceled visit thus becomes more than a scheduling detail: it marks Kleindienst’s participation in a high-level review at the same time Nixon was presenting himself publicly as an investigator determined to see justice done.

A Case Reaching the White House

Nixon’s involvement altered the appearance of the investigation. He described examining the facts and announced that people in government who were indicted would be suspended. He also stated that no person who held a major administration position, past or present, should receive immunity from prosecution. The book’s account places Kleindienst in the meeting where the President reviewed both his own inquiries and the department’s progress, making the attorney general a participant in the administration’s response at a moment when the President was also publicly claiming an investigative role.

That overlap matters to Kleindienst’s place in the story, though the evidence does not say that he directed Nixon’s actions or shared the President’s public presentation of them. Instead, the episode shows him in a position where the executive branch’s investigation and the White House’s political interests were drawing close together. The distinction between those functions would become more consequential as reports turned toward possible indictments of administration officials.

Disqualification and Resignation

On April 19, the New York Times reported that Kleindienst had disqualified himself from handling the Watergate case. The reason given was persistent reports that three or more of his colleagues might be indicted. The inquiry, as described in the same account, had shifted emphasis from the burglary itself toward obstruction of justice by administration officials thought to be involved in the cover-up. John Dean was reported to be ready to implicate others if he were indicted.

The reporting did not establish that Kleindienst himself was among those facing indictment. Rather, it situated his withdrawal amid the prospect that people around him could become subjects of the investigation. His disqualification was a change in his official relationship to the case: the attorney general who had been present at a presidential review would no longer handle the inquiry, as concern about possible indictments among his colleagues grew.

Eleven days later, on April 30, Kleindienst resigned. His departure came with the resignations of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman; John Dean was fired. Elliot Richardson was moving from the Department of Defense to become attorney general. The account presents the changes as a collective upheaval in the administration, not as a resignation explained by a stated finding against Kleindienst. The timing, however, placed his departure within the same extraordinary day on which Nixon addressed the country about Watergate and accepted responsibility as the person at the top.

The Crisis After His Departure

The investigation continued to produce major developments after Kleindienst left office. By late February 1974, several figures connected to the campaign and the cover-up had pleaded guilty, while Dwight Chapin was under indictment for perjury and John Mitchell and Maurice Stans were on trial on obstruction-of-justice and perjury charges. On March 1, a grand jury indicted seven former White House and campaign aides for conspiracy to obstruct justice. These later events do not establish a further part for Kleindienst in the proceedings; they show instead how far the crisis expanded beyond the moment of his departure.

His narrative significance rests on that sequence of changing proximity: he was summoned from a promised meeting with reporters to confer with Nixon about the investigations, then disqualified from handling the case amid reports about possible indictments, and finally swept out of office during the April 30 upheaval. The account does not resolve his private views or assign him a specific act of wrongdoing. It records his institutional position as the investigation pressed closer to the White House, and his departure as one of the visible changes through which the administration’s crisis became undeniable.