Key Figure In Watergate Scandal Passes Away

Funeral services are pending for one of the key figures in the Watergate scandal that resulted in the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. The owner of a Connecticut funeral home says Jeb Stuart Magruder, the man who claimed to have heard Nixon order the Watergate break-in, died of complications from a stroke on May 11 at the age of 79. Magruder was a businessman who became Nixon's deputy campaign director and then served in the Republican president's administration. He spent seven months in prison for lying about the involvement of Nixon's re-election committee in the 1972 break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington. Magruder told the Associated Press and PBS in 2003 that he was meeting with John Mitchell, the former attorney general running the Nixon re-election campaign (known by the acronym "Creep" for "Commitee to Re-elect the President"), when he heard the president tell Mitchell to go ahead with the break-in. Magruder previously had gone no further than saying that Mitchell approved the plan to get into the Democrats’ office and bug the telephone of the party chair, Larry O’Brien. Magruder later became a minister serving in California, Ohio and Kentucky, and a church fundraising consultant. In 2003, he moved to suburban Columbus. That was the year he pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct after Grandview Heights police found him passed out on a sidewalk in the heart of the neighborhood. In 2007, he was hospitalized after police said he crashed on a Columbus highway after hitting a motorcycle and a truck with his Audi Sedan. Accident investigators concluded he had a stroke, and he was cited with failure to maintain an assured clear distance and failure to stop after an accident or collision. After pleading guilty to the reduced charge of reckless operation, Magruder was fined 300 dollars, placed on one year of probation and lost his driver’s license for a year. A 60-day jail sentence was suspended. The day after the plea, Magruder said he had no memory of the crash. In 1988, Buck Rinehart, then Columbus Mayor, appointed Magruder head of a city ethics commission and charged him to lead a yearlong honesty campaign. An ethics commission "headed by none other than (are you ready America?) Jeb Stuart Magruder," quipped Time magazine. In his 1974 book, "An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate," Magruder blamed his role in the scandal on ambition and losing sight of an ethical compass. "Instead of applying our private morality to public affairs, we accepted the President’s standards of political behavior, and the results were tragic for him and for us," he wrote.