Geoff Shepard, former staffer in the Nixon Administration and author of The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, explained in an exclusive interview with The Michael Patrick Leahy Show how he came to the conclusion that the Watergate scandal had been misinterpreted for nearly 40 years.
Shepard, a graduate of both Whittier College and Harvard Law School, was selected to be a White House Fellow in 1969 and assigned to the Treasury Department, where he worked under Paul Volcker, then undersecretary for monetary affairs.
After serving out his year as a Fellow, Shepard joined John Ehrlichman’s Domestic Council staff at the Nixon White House, where he served for five years, primarily focusing on “law and order” issues.
As a result of his work as the youngest lawyer on President Nixon’s White House staff, Shepard worked closely with senior officials at the Department of Justice, including a majority of the major Watergate figures.
In his 2021 book The Nixon Conspiracy, Shepard, with a personalized touch, details the Watergate prosecutors’ internal documents uncovered after years of research in previously sealed archives.
During Monday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Shepard said since thoroughly researching the previously-sealed documents, he has concluded that the Watergate prosecutors were “so eager to convict Nixon and his top people that they cheated.”
“Ever since I’ve been embarked on a great discovery effort of [the prosecutors’] records – this is like learning 30 years later that you can get the playbook from the opposing coach who beat you in the state finals – it turns out they were so eager to convict Nixon and his top people that they cheated. They were meeting secretly with the judges, they were meeting secretly with congressional staff, they were giving them secret grand jury information unlawfully,” Shepard said.
While working on Nixon’s Watergate defense team at the time of the scandal, he served as principal deputy to the President’s lead lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt.
In that role, he helped transcribe the White House tapes, ran the document rooms holding the seized files of H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Dean, and staffed White House counselors Bryce Harlow and Dean Birch on Watergate issues and developments.
One tape Shepard transcribed, known as the Smoking Gun Tape, was originally interpreted as the tape that proved Nixon was engaged in the coverup.
However, Shepard explained how the meaning of the tape has since been unveiled as the protection of the identities of two “very significant donors to Nixon’s reelection campaign who were ardent Democrats” and not to protect the identity of the individuals that had been engaged in the Watergate break-in.
“I devoted every waking moment after my fellowship, being a member of his staff, happily devoted every waking moment to working on his behalf and including a full year as deputy counsel on this Watergate defense team. I transcribed the tapes. I ran the document and I was as loyal a person as could be and then out of nowhere, this tape materializes which is now called the Smoking Gun Tape, June 23rd, 1972, and my boss, the lead defense lawyer, Fred Buzhardt, when he first heard the tape he was just appalled,” Shepard explained.
“He thought, turns out he was wrong, but he thought it confirmed Nixon’s involvement in the coverup from day one.. It turned out not to be true. He asked me to transcribe that. I was the third person to hear that tape. Nixon, Buzhardt, and me. He assigned me the responsibility on July 24th when the Supreme Court ruled that 64 tapes had to be turned over. This was one of them. Nobody else had ever heard it and I prepared the transcript. I’m the one that called it the Smoking Gun,” Shepard said. “That’s the tape where the president concurs with Bob Haldeman’s recommendation that the way to head off these FBI interviews, that they don’t want to occur, is to have the CIA tell the FBI they’re part of a CIA operation and Nixon concurs.”
“The difficulty is Buzhardt and I, operating under Buzhardt, misinterpreted the meaning of the tapes. It was to protect the identities of two very significant donors to Nixon’s reelection campaign who were ardent Democrats and they were hedging their bets. [George] McGovern was on the other side and they wanted to have friends in the Nixon administration they thought would be reelected, and they gave big bucks under the absolute assurance it would never become public. So the purpose of that call was to try to protect their identities,” Shepard added.
Shepard went on to discuss the 1972 break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building, noting how there was “no question” that the break-in happened and was “illegal as hell.”
“There really was a break-in. People from the reelection committee broke into the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugging devices and to photocopy files, illegal as hell. They got caught, they were caught red handed…So there really was a break-in. There’s no question about it,” Shepard said.
Shepard said the man who orchestrated the break-in was G. Gordon Liddy, who was hired to prepare what’s called a campaign intelligence plan.
“[A campaign intelligence plan] is a spy program. Every campaign has one. Today they would call it opposition research. You have to learn everything you can about your opponent: where his or her money comes from, what their campaign issues are, any suspicious activities in his or her background. You build a negative file. The trouble was Gordon urged a criminal activity to gather this information,” Shepard said.
Gordon was recruited to lead the effort by White House counsel John Dean, who Shepard said is the “unpunished archvillain.”
“John Dean is the unpunished archvillain because John Dean caused the problem by hiring Gordon and he ran the cover up after the burglars were arrested,” Shepard said. “There really was a cover up. John Dean ran it. I saw an oral history from the lead FBI agent the other day and he said that he credited John Dean with 95 percent of the illegal activities during the cover up. So Dean’s running the cover up, he’s not telling everybody he’s breaking the law. He’s suborning, he’s encouraging people to lie to the grand jury. He’s distributing government information improperly to defense counsel. He’s embezzling money to pay for his own honeymoon. He’s destroying evidence taken out of Howard Hunt’s safe.”
“But then, when his cover up collapsed, and the cover up should have failed, when those burglars were arrested, the question was who else knew you guys were going in. Jeb Magruder knew. John Mitchell may or may not have known. John Dean may or may not have known. He’s very careful in his public statements and when he says ‘nobody knew,’ what he means is nobody knew the exact date of their proposed break-in,” Shepard added.
Shepard said out of the 65 total cases brought by the Watergate special prosecutors, only two were won by the defense team.
“We got wiped out. There were 65 cases brought by the special prosecutors. They won all but two of them. All of the top people and Nixon resign in disgrace, 25 members of his administration are convicted and go to jail, and there things stood for the next 40 years. Just 10 years ago, a whole bunch of documents started to surface that tell a completely different tale and that’s what my book is about,” Shepard said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Images “Geoff Shepard” and “The Nixon Conspiracy” by Geoff Shepard.
