Secret Fund Ledger Sheet

The Secret Fund Ledger Sheet was a single page recording names and cash disbursements from a covert Nixon campaign fund. Its destruction after the Watergate break-in removed the only written account of those withdrawals, turning an ordinary sheet of lined paper into a consequential absence: its contents had to be pieced together from people who had seen, handled, or distributed the money.

Form and Function

The Bookkeeper described a lined sheet with names covering about half the page. Roughly fifteen names appeared, each paired with an amount distributed. She had seen the sheet more than once and updated it whenever a disbursement was made; the amounts, she recalled, kept growing. She also said she had added the figures to work out what had happened to the money, rather than seeing it paid out in one lump sum.

The page belonged to an accounting system built around cash. The Bookkeeper said Hugh Sloan knew the whole story and had handed out the money. Sloan later described cash contributions to the Nixon campaign being put into Maurice Stans’ safe. The fund had existed for more than eighteen months, and, Sloan estimated, its total was closer to $300,000; at any given time, about $700,000 might have been in the safe. These figures describe the broader fund and its cash holdings, not a surviving ledger that could now be checked entry by entry.

What the Sheet Recorded

The surviving account of the page names several recipients. A later report on the post-break-in destruction of CRP records identified withdrawals for Bart Porter, Jeb Magruder, and G. Gordon Liddy among the information recorded on the single-sheet account. The Bookkeeper’s description also led the reporters to ask how roughly fifteen names could relate to the smaller number of people they believed had been involved. She directed them to the GAO report as a way to isolate names, while noting that some had appeared in the press without necessarily being identified there in connection with the fund.

Sloan supplied further detail but also marked the limits of what he would disclose. Asked whether the sheet included people still working for the White House, he would not say. He described G. Gordon Liddy and Porter as a logical grouping, while indicating that no withdrawals comparable to theirs had been made. The reporters understood the Bookkeeper’s references to amounts exceeding $50,000 apiece for Liddy and Porter as a point where her guessing game stopped; Sloan confirmed that the total associated with them was closer to $300,000. The testimony connected the ledger to substantial withdrawals without restoring a complete list of entries or resolving every recipient’s identity.

Destruction and Reconstruction

The sheet’s disappearance was part of a wider reported destruction of records in the days after the break-in. The Post’s account said that wiretap memoranda, the ledger sheet, and as many as seven ledger books listing campaign contributors and pre-April 7 contributions were destroyed. According to that account, Robert Mardian and Fred LaRue began searching for incriminating evidence on June 19, and the relevant records were gone by the time the FBI examined CRP’s files. Robert Odle had inventoried and removed records over the weekend after the break-in, then was assigned by CRP to provide the FBI with requested documents.

With the page gone, the investigation depended on testimony and corroboration rather than direct inspection of its entries. The Bookkeeper’s recollection offered the page’s physical description and method of updating; Sloan’s knowledge of the fund and role in distributing money offered another route to its contents. Their accounts could establish details about the system and particular withdrawals, but could not supply the missing original for independent comparison.

Evidentiary Significance

The Secret Fund Ledger Sheet was both an accounting tool and a point of vulnerability for the secret fund: it gathered names and amounts in one place, making the cash trail legible while it existed. Its destruction did not erase all knowledge of the payments—witnesses could still describe the page and identify withdrawals—but it left the record incomplete and dependent on what surviving sources remembered or were willing to say. The tension between a precise, updated sheet and the uncertainty that followed its destruction gives the object its significance in the reporting: the reporters could trace parts of the fund, but the most direct record of its disbursements was no longer available.