Alexander Butterfield

Distinguished US air force officer and White House aide who revealed the existence of the secret Watergate tapes

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Alexander Butterfield, who once called Nixon's presidency a 'cesspool', testifying to the Senate select committee on 16 July 1973.

(Bettman Archive)

It was a hot, boring Washington afternoon in mid-July 1973 - Friday the 13th for the superstitious - when the right question was suddenly asked of the right person and an honest answer brought down a dishonest president.

Alexander Butterfield, a former aide in Richard Nixon's White House, had spent three hours being questioned by four members of the Senate Watergate Committee in private when one had a hunch.

He asked Butterfield about the surprising amount of detail in the memo of a meeting between Nixon and his White House counsel to discuss a break-in at the Democrat headquarters in the Watergate complex. The aide said there had been no stenographers and the president’s memory was good but not that good. Asked where the information had come from, Butterfield said: “Let me think about that awhile”

The interview continued until Don Sanders, a former FBI man turned lawyer, found the words to express a question that had been, to use an apposite word, bugging him. Was it possible, he suggested, that the president’s conversations had been taped?