Wright Patman - Watergate Inquiry

Watergate Inquiry

Wright Patman's eponymous committee played an important role in the early days of the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down President Richard Nixon. The Patman Committee investigated the hundred dollar bills found on the Watergate "plumbers" upon their arrest, suspecting they could directly link them to CREEP, the president's re-election committee. This investigative course was on the money, as it ultimately proved to be Nixon's undoing in the sense that the money trail, as revealed in the Washington Post, helped plant the basis for the establishment of the Ervin Senate Select Committee on Watergate in April, 1973. (In the final analysis, however, the most universally adopted reason for seeking Nixon's impeachment was his obstruction of justice occurring in the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, asking his aides to seek C.I.A. intervention through Director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters to stop the initial Watergate investigation, begun days after the break-in on orders of newly appointed F.B.I. Director L. Patrick Gray, for its supposed threat to national security in uncovering "the whole Bay of Pigs thing"--a Nixon reference which H. R. Haldeman, party to the June 23 conversation with Nixon, later equated in his book, The Ends of Power, published in February, 1978 in the wake of the House Select Committee's investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy, with Nixon's code phrase for the Kennedy assassination, though Haldeman later recanted the statement before he died.

The revelation of the existence of the White House taping system occurred during testimony to the Ervin Committee by Alexander Butterfield in July, 1973. The Patman Committee's 1972 investigation was stymied on pressure from the White House, in part led by Congressman Gerald R. Ford, within a year to become Vice-President, appointed to the position by President Nixon after Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign after pleading nolo contendere to charges of having received bribes during his stint as Governor of Maryland prior to 1969.

Many speculated at the time that Agnew was deliberately being tossed by Nixon onto the fire as a sacrificial lamb in an attempt to calm the furor surfacing from the previous summer's Senate Select Committee hearings on Watergate which had been nationally televised. Conversely, however, by nominating the moderate Gerald Ford as his new Vice-President, Nixon spread that much more the flames of discontent with his method of governing, resulting in the Articles of Impeachment returned by the House Judiciary Committee in late July 1974, prompting Nixon's decision to resign, effective at noon August 9.