Alexander Butterfield

Alexander Porter Butterfield (born April 6, 1926 in Pensacola , Florida ) is a retired American government official . He was an assistant in the White House from 1969 to 1973 and a key figure in the Watergate affair .

Life

Alexander Butterfield was born in Pensacola. He attended the University of Maryland in College Park until 1956 and received his Masters degree from George Washington University in 1967 .

His father, Horace B. Butterfield, was a pilot in the US Air Force . The enthusiasm for military aviation also infected Alexander Butterfield. From 1949 to 1969 he was a member of the Air Force . During the Vietnam War , he commanded a squadron of slow-flying reconnaissance aircraft . He received the Distinguished Flying Cross . In 1968 he became a project companion of the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark strategic bomber .

After retiring from military service in 1969, he became a staff member of Chief of Staff Harry Robbins Haldeman , whom he knew from his student days.

In the White House, Butterfield was responsible for routine tasks (such as guided tours of the White House), among other things, for the president's secret recording system. A total of 4,000 hours of political and confidential discussions were recorded on tapes. Very few staff, including President Richard Nixon , were aware of this.

Butterfield actually wanted to hide the existence of the recorder and only admit it when asked directly. During the routine questioning of the Committee of Inquiry , chaired by Senator Sam Ervin , Republican Donald Sanders asked the same straightforward question, and Butterfield on July 13, 1973 confirmed the existence of this secret record keeping system.

The Senate Committee then asked President Nixon to select the tapes. There was a month-long tug-of-war between the President and the Senate Committee over the release of the tapes. It was only after a decision by the Supreme Court that Nixon was forced to surrender the tapes that proved Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal from the start and confirmed the testimony of John Dean .

Butterfield himself was not involved in the Watergate scandal and was therefore not charged. In 1972 he had been appointed head of the Federal Aviation Administration as the successor to John H. Shaffer , which he remained until 1975.

In 1995 Butterfield was Oliver Stone's technical consultant for the Nixon film . In the same year he gave an interview to the daily newspaper The Hartford Courant . In it he was one of the very few who correctly speculated about the true identity of Deep Throat : "I think it was a guy named Mark Felt ." That was ten years before Mark Felt's own outing in 2005.

literature

Bob Woodward : The Last of the President's Men . Simon and Schuster, New York City 2015, ISBN 978-1-5011-1644-5

personal data
SURNAME	Butterfield, Alexander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Butterfield, Alexander Porter (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American White House Assistant, a key figure in the Watergate scandal
DATE OF BIRTH	April 6, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH	Pensacola , Florida