Committee for the Re-election of the President

The Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP) was Richard Nixon’s campaign organization, but its significance in the Watergate investigation reached far beyond ordinary electoral work. Reporting traced political espionage funds through the committee, linked senior campaign figures to decisions about their use, and described an organization whose guarded offices and pressured employees made information difficult to obtain. The CRP became both the institutional setting for the operation and a contested source of evidence about who had authorized it and what happened afterward.

Identity and Institutional Structure

The CRP employed Alfred C. Baldwin III as a security guard and James McCord as its security coordinator. After the Watergate break-in, John Mitchell, the former attorney general and Nixon’s campaign manager, publicly said that McCord’s private security agency had been employed months earlier to help install the committee’s security system. Mitchell also disavowed the burglars’ actions, saying they had not operated on the committee’s behalf or with its consent. The statement offered an account of McCord’s legitimate role while drawing a sharp boundary between that role and the break-in.

The committee’s internal arrangements appeared unusually closed to outsiders. Visitors were met by a uniformed guard, screened for access, escorted to appointments, and led back out. Its telephone roster, a single sheet listing more than one hundred campaign officials, was treated as classified; a researcher who obtained a copy was warned that the source could lose a job if discovered. The roster listed offices, extensions, and secretaries, allowing reporters to infer who worked near whom and, by sequencing extensions, some lines of authority. What looked like a directory became an indirect map of an organization that would not explain itself openly.

Secret Funds and Political Operations

The financial trail connected the CRP to cash used for political espionage. Investigators described hundreds of thousands of dollars in unaccounted cash and a slush fund of at least $100,000. One investigator told Bob Woodward that this fund included money from Bernard Barker’s account, which had received funds by cashing Kenneth Dahlberg’s check. The check was one of five deposited on April 20: together, the four Mexican checks and Dahlberg’s $25,000 cashier’s check made a $114,000 deposit. Four days later, Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. These transactions furnished concrete links between campaign money and an account associated with the Watergate operation.

The Washington Post later reported that funds for the espionage operation were controlled by several of John Mitchell’s principal assistants and kept in a special CRP account. The account held more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects; Gordon Liddy had received money from it, records relating to it had been destroyed, and Hugh Sloan’s suspicions about Watergate had contributed to his resignation. A former administration official told Carl Bernstein that the committee planned to present the fund as convention-security money intended to protect the Republican convention from disruption, while insisting that this explanation did not describe the truth. Clark MacGregor subsequently made a public attempt to place responsibility on Liddy, saying Liddy had spent campaign funds on his own initiative in preparation for a possible attack on Richard Nixon at the convention. The competing accounts exposed a struggle over whether the fund represented an authorized campaign function or an operation that could be attributed to one subordinate.

Sloan’s account added a more direct description of how money was authorized. He said that when first approached for funds, he called Mitchell at the Justice Department; Mitchell would tell him to distribute the money. The calls began in 1971, and the procedure had seemed routine amid a campaign budget exceeding $50 million. Sloan said Mitchell initially was the sole person authorizing expenditures and that authority was later passed to others, including Jeb Magruder. His account connected the fund to a chain of decisions rather than simply to the people who physically handled cash, while leaving room for the distinction between evidence of authorization and proof of what each senior figure knew about particular operations.

Employee Silence and Internal Pressure

The committee’s guarded structure was reinforced by the fear of its employees. In mid-August, Bernstein and Woodward began visiting CRP personnel at home after work, pursuing leads that office interviews had not yielded. Their first encounters were marked by alarm: one employee trembled and asked Bernstein to leave before anyone saw him; another said she wanted to help and burst into tears. The reactions did not establish what each employee knew, but they showed reporters how risky even a conversation about the committee seemed to those inside it.

The conditions surrounding official interviews offered another explanation for the scarcity of testimony. The FBI interviewed campaign personnel at committee headquarters rather than at their homes, and interviews took place in the presence of a committee lawyer or Robert Mardian, the committee’s political coordinator and a former Justice Department official. Some employees said Mardian and others had instructed them not to volunteer information unless agents asked a question they could not evade, especially questions about committee finances. The investigation therefore encountered not merely missing records or reluctant witnesses, but a process in which the setting and presence of committee representatives could constrain what employees felt able to say.

The Bookkeeper, who had worked for Sloan and later for Maurice Stans, told Bernstein that she had been called before the grand jury early, when, in her view, people had already lied and investigators did not know what to ask. She said Sally Harmony and others had lied, but did not claim that Harmony had discussed the matter with her. The reporters had separately heard that Harmony, Gordon Liddy’s secretary, had not told investigators everything and might have lied to protect Magruder; prosecutors were suspicious of her testimony but lacked evidence to charge her with perjury. These fragments pointed toward possible omissions without resolving precisely what had been concealed. Employees also spoke secondhand of records being destroyed in the days after the break-in, though the reporters had no specifics at that stage.

Sloan described the pressure not as an explicit order to lie but as a repeated demand for organizational solidarity. He said employees were never directly told not to talk; the message instead was to hold ranks and keep the ship together. He acknowledged that this could reasonably be understood as an instruction to conceal information. His own departure, by contrast, followed suspicion that matters were worse than he had first believed. He told Bernstein that his lawyers had advised him against speaking publicly because his statements could be used in civil litigation. His account captures the conflict between leaving the organization, remaining silent under legal advice, and providing information that might clarify its conduct.

From Campaign Committee to Watergate Evidence

As the investigation developed, the CRP’s role became harder to separate from the Watergate operation and its aftermath. The committee was not only where McCord held a security position and where campaign funds were maintained; its employees, financial records, and internal instructions became lines of inquiry into the operation. A Washington Post report said records relating to the special account had been destroyed, while accounts from employees described broader destruction of records after the break-in. The distinction between what investigators could document and what employees had only heard remained important: the evidence accumulated in pieces rather than arriving as a complete organizational record.

Later disclosures brought the question of responsibility closer to the campaign’s senior leadership. According to three sources in the White House and the CRP, Magruder told federal prosecutors that Mitchell and White House Counsel John Dean had approved and helped plan the Watergate bugging operation. Magruder also said that Mitchell and Dean later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. These were reported statements attributed to Magruder, not an institutional admission by the committee. Their significance was that they joined the espionage operation to the later effort to silence its participants, while placing alleged decisions above the operatives who had carried out the break-in.

The CRP’s history in the investigation is thus defined by competing organizational functions: an electoral committee with a formal security apparatus, a source of funds for sensitive political projects, and a workplace in which employees faced pressure and feared disclosure. Its official denials and public explanations attempted to isolate responsibility; the reporters’ reconstruction instead followed money, records, testimony, and chains of authorization back through the committee. That contrast made the CRP indispensable to understanding how a political operation could be funded and administered—and why establishing responsibility required more than identifying the people caught inside the Watergate offices.