Alexander P. Butterfield
Alexander P. Butterfield will discuss Bob Woodward’s book The Last of the President’s Men.
“There’s more to the story of Nixon,” confided Alexander P. Butterfield, the aide who disclosed the president’s greatest secret – the taping system that provided the evidence of his Watergate crimes and ended the Nixon presidency. For three years as Deputy Assistant to the President, working and watching from an office adjoining the Oval Office, Butterfield was often the first to see Nixon in the morning and the last at night, the ultimate insider and the most dangerous witness. Butterfield supervised the installation of the taping system and was one of a handful who knew about it. Even Nixon’s top aides, Henry Kissinger and John Ehrlichman, were not aware of it. In his memoir RN, the president wrote that he believed the secret “would never be revealed.”
Butterfield’s insights reveal Nixon’s secrets, rages, obsessions, and deceptions and his vindictive preoccupation with disinformation and suppression of the press, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post. Sound familiar?