Bob Woodward - The Last of the Presidents Men

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ALSO BY BOB WOODWARD

The Price of Politics

Obamas Wars

The War Within: A Secret White House History, 20062008

State of Denial

The Secret Man ( with a Reporters Assessment by Carl Bernstein )

Plan of Attack

Bush at War

Maestro: Greenspans Fed and the American Boom

Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate

The Choice

The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House

The Commanders

Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 19811987

Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi

The Brethren ( with Scott Armstrong )

The Final Days ( with Carl Bernstein )

All the Presidents Men ( with Carl Bernstein )

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Copyright 2015 by Bob Woodward

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2015

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Interior design by Joy OMeara

Jacket design by Jackie Seow

Jacket photographs: (Front) Courtesy of Alexander Butterfield

Library of Congress Control Number 2015947987

ISBN 978-1-5011-1644-5

ISBN 978-1-5011-1646-9 (ebook)

In memory of Ben Bradlee

Evelyn M. Duffy has assisted me on three previous books, one on President George W. Bush, and two on President Obama. This is the fourth in the last eight years. She dove into this book on President Nixon with determination and ingenuity. The one characteristic, above all others, you want in an assistant is a capacity for hard work. It is a central feature of her character.

She is relentless, focused and driven by a natural curiosity and deep sense of fairness. She reads, absorbs, comprehends and interprets rapidly. A simple question will yield a one-to-five-page memo.

Evelyn transcribed my first long interview with Alexander Butterfield and immediately alerted me to the possibility and importance of getting the story and documents from the last of Nixons men. She was intimately involved in planning our approach. She made two solo trips to La Jolla and spent days interviewing Butterfield and reviewing files and documents.

We discussed the importance of getting a fourth wind on this project. She supplied that fourth wind. I can pay her no greater compliment. Even after we had emptied Butterfields memory and records and sifted through the boxes, she saw the necessity to go back againto review, check and dig deeper.

She helped me with some initial drafts of sections, and edited everything many, many times. She spent days at the Nixon Library in California searching for a few specific needles in one of the largest archival haystacks in America. This became not just a project but a passion. Her stamina to address the unanswered questions is unmatched. I enjoyed watching her relish the inner workings of this strange White House, the twists and turns of the Nixon inner sanctum.

When we started together in 2007, she would carefully make discreet suggestions. Now she says we have to do certain things and challenges me, directly but in her friendly, genuine way. I immediatelyor laterrealize she is right. And she understands the lessons of Nixon, his presidency and Butterfield, who became our witnesshers as much as mine.

The Last of the Presidents Men contains scanned physical documents displayed in the ebook as full page images. On the page following each document the publisher has included a reflowable text transcription of the typewritten and handwritten text.

Near the end of July 2014 I flew to California to meet with Alexander P. Butterfield, the former aide to President Richard Nixon who disclosed the secret White House taping system 41 years earlier.

The tapes provided the proof of Nixons direct role in the cover-up of Watergate, other crimes and government abuses. Without that evidence, Nixon certainly would have been able to stay in office.

Theres more to the story of Nixon, Butterfield told me.

He picked me up at the airport in his Cadillac and we drove to his condominium two blocks from the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla. For 20 years before joining the Nixon White House staff, he had been one of the Air Forces most accomplished pilots. He drove confidently and fast.

At age 88, Butterfield, 6-foot-2 with salt white hair, walked with a slight stoop. But he was energetic and vital. He chatted comfortably, and he was dressed neatly in freshly pressed slacks and shirt.

He pulled into his space beneath his building and put a key in the elevator, which slowly took us to his second-floor penthouse. We got off the elevator and entered his bachelor residence of five large rooms.

I quickly scanned the open-plan living area with its modern furnishings and a dark, heavy-wood circular table used as much for work as dining.

What really snapped me to attention were 20 boxes and piles of documents and files he had agreed to bring out of storage for my assistant, Evelyn Duffy, and me to read and copy. Here, after all these decades, was a vast new archive, unknown until now.

One of Butterfields jobs in the Nixon White House had been to prevent departing staffers from leaving with official documents. But when he left in 1973, he carted off literally thousands of documents from the White House. Many are originals. Though Butterfield is normally very neat and organizedeven fastidiousthe arrival of new boxes and files from storage had created an unusual disorder.

I immediately began dipping into the boxes and opening files. They contained everything from routine chronologies to bizarre memos outlining Nixons orders. Included were some previously undisclosed Top Secret exchanges with Henry Kissinger, Nixons national security adviser, and a few highly classified bulletins of the CIA.

Some were neatly organized, including copies on onionskin paper of all memos Butterfield wrote. These were in a monthly file about two inches thick for each of the 50 months he was in the White Housea virtual diary. Other files were scattered about the five rooms, cluttering his bedroom, office and study. Closets contained more boxes, books, folders and dossierssome from the White House and others from his time in the Air Force. One tall stack of boxes was housed in an unused shower stall.