Robert Odle

Robert Odle, a former White House aide and personnel director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP), became a consequential but uncertain figure in the reporting on the Watergate cover-up. Identified as the person who hired James McCord as the committee’s security coordinator, he was also reported to have inventoried and removed CRP records after the break-in and later to have provided requested files to the FBI. The evidence places him at a junction between the committee’s political operations and the investigators seeking its records, but stops short of establishing that he knew about the bugging or destroyed the material he removed.

Position and Access

The Senate committee identified Odle as the man who hired McCord, who served as CRP’s security coordinator. That connection made him more than a personnel official in the emerging inquiry: the choice of a security coordinator raised questions about who inside the campaign organization had made the decision and who had authority over it. A former official disputed the idea that Odle would have selected McCord independently, insisting that John Mitchell would not relinquish such a decision and would consult someone with security knowledge. The former official added that Mitchell’s aide Fred LaRue would almost certainly have been involved. This was an account of the likely decision-making chain, not proof of Odle’s role in the hiring or of his knowledge of McCord’s later conduct.

Odle worked inside an organization that had made access and information unusually difficult to penetrate. Since June 17, visitors to CRP were met by a uniformed guard, cleared by press or security staff, escorted to appointments, and led back out. Even a one-page telephone roster containing more than one hundred campaign officials was treated as classified: a researcher who obtained a copy from a committee contact was warned that the source could lose a job if discovered. The roster’s floor numbers and telephone extensions allowed reporters to infer who worked near whom and, by arranging the extensions in sequence, who reported to whom. As director of personnel, Odle occupied a position within this tightly controlled structure, although the account does not specify that he administered its security procedures.

The Records After the Break-in

An employee who said she had been at the committee for much of the weekend of the break-in told Carl Bernstein that the FBI had never asked her whether she was there. She alleged that Odle had not told investigators everything he knew and described seeing him remove records: “He would tell everybody to get out of the room and then close the door. Then he’d leave with the records.” She expressly left the central question unresolved: “I don’t know if he destroyed them or not.” Her account is therefore specific about the removal she said she witnessed, but not about what happened to the documents afterward. She also said that the rest of what she knew was hearsay and believed the full truth would remain concealed.

Bernstein’s draft assembled a broader account of the post-break-in handling of CRP files. It described the destruction of wiretap memoranda, the single-sheet accounting of the secret fund—including withdrawals by Porter, Jeb Magruder, and G. Gordon Liddy—and as many as seven ledger books listing contributors and their donations before April 7. According to the draft, Robert Mardian and LaRue began searching for incriminating evidence on June 19, and relevant records were gone by the time the FBI examined the committee’s files. Odle, the draft further reported, spent the weekend after the break-in taking an inventory and removing records. After the destruction, CRP assigned him to provide the FBI with the documents it requested. The sequence made his later cooperation with the document requests a striking reversal in function: the employee reported to have handled the files at the outset became the committee’s channel for supplying them to investigators. The draft’s account does not, by itself, establish that Odle participated in destroying records.

What Colleagues Said He Knew

The evidence offers sharply different descriptions of Odle’s proximity to wrongdoing. A CRP bookkeeper characterized him as “a glorified office boy, Magruder’s runner” and said he was not involved in knowing about the bugging. She placed the operation on the political side of the committee, rather than in its finance division, and said Jeb Magruder was definitely involved. Yet her dismissal of Odle’s knowledge of the bugging did not settle questions about his later handling of records or candor with investigators. Her statements were judgments from within the organization, not a complete account of what Odle did during the weekend or what he told the FBI.

The bookkeeper also recalled that Odle spoke to her after appearing before the grand jury. He asked, “Don’t you feel like you’ve been through the wringer?” She answered, “No, and you wouldn’t feel so bad if you’d tell them the whole truth.” She would not explain what, specifically, she thought he had concealed. The exchange records her suspicion of evasion without identifying a false statement or the subject of any omission. Elsewhere, she said that employees questioned by the grand jury had already lied, and that she and others had been promoted despite concern about what they knew. Sally Harmony, who had worked for G. Gordon Liddy and was promoted before working for Odle, was among those the bookkeeper believed possessed more information. That context exposes a workplace in which promotion, silence, and suspicion overlapped, but it does not show that Odle arranged Harmony’s promotion or knew what she had withheld.

A Figure Between Two Accounts

Odle’s significance lies partly in the contrast between the limited role attributed to him by one colleague and the operational importance assigned to him in the account of the records. In the bookkeeper’s telling, he was a subordinate runner without knowledge of the bugging. In the employee’s account and Bernstein’s draft, he had access to files during the first days after the break-in, removed records, and later dealt with the FBI’s requests. These accounts are not necessarily direct contradictions: one concerns knowledge of the bugging, the others concern document handling. Together, however, they made Odle’s position an important point of inquiry, because a person could be peripheral to planning the operation yet central to what investigators were able to examine afterward.

The reporting preserves that uncertainty rather than converting suspicion into a settled verdict. Odle is connected to McCord’s hiring, the committee’s files, and the subsequent production of records, but the surviving testimony presented here does not resolve whether he destroyed documents, what he knew about their contents, or what he disclosed to investigators. His role thus illustrates the difficulty of reconstructing a concealed organization from partial testimony: access and sequence can establish why a person matters without proving what that person intended or knew.