On July 1, 1975, under gray skies, two Watergate prosecutors arrived in the office of the White House counsel. Also present was the deputy national security adviser, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft. They were gathered for a burial.
The intended object was a 297-page transcript created the previous week, when eight members of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, joined by a stenographer and two members of a federal grand jury, among others, had interrogated Richard Nixon under oath near his home in San Clemente, Calif. Over two days, the ex-president’s grand jury testimony consumed 11 hours. Then came an interview by the prosecutors, undisclosed until now, that lasted another two.
President Gerald Ford had pardoned Nixon for all crimes he committed or may have committed in office, but the threat of perjury still hung over him. It was, by all accounts, the first time that any president had appeared before a grand jury and the only time that Nixon testified in depth about Watergate.
Since early 1973, when the scandal morphed from a caper covered chiefly by newspapers into a televised national obsession — the dawn of saturation coverage — the nation had endured a cascade of headlines, resignations, hearings, trials, reports, memoirs and archival releases. In the eyes of prosecutors, the former president figured centrally in what one termed the “organized criminal activity” of the Nixon administration: the Ellsberg break-in, the Kissinger wiretaps, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters cash, Howard Hughes and the casinos, the sale of ambassadorships, I.R.S. abuses, C.I.A. assassination plots.
Near the end of Nixon’s second and final day on the stand, the examination strayed into a subject that wasn’t listed on the agenda. This prompted Nixon to admonish his interrogator, “I would strongly urge the special prosecutor: Don’t open that can of worms.” More extraordinary still, the prosecutors agreed.
The four men gathered in the White House that July recognized that the document they held was a road map to the darkest precincts of the Cold War. In a sworn setting, the nation’s only ex-president had explored, from his lonely perspective, the entwined subjects of war and peace, power and money, scandals and secrets. Proper procedure required secrecy; the officials went beyond that.
The transcript was placed under the protective seal of the grand jury and ordered withheld even from top officials at the Justice Department. In the White House counsel’s office, General Scowcroft determined that one seven-page segment, focused on the very subject that Nixon had warned about, was so incendiary that it needed to be withheld even from the rest of the grand jury.
