Saturday, May 17, 2014
Associated Press
COLUMBUS
Jeb Stuart Magruder, a Watergate conspirator-turned-minister who claimed in later years to have heard President Richard Nixon order the infamous break-in, has died. He was 79.
Magruder died May 11 in Danbury, Conn., Hull Funeral Service director Jeff Hull said Friday.
Magruder, a businessman when he began working for the Republican president, later became a minister, serving in California, Ohio and Kentucky. He also served as a church fundraising consultant.
He spent seven months in prison for lying about the involvement of Nixon’s re-election committee in the 1972 break-in at Washington’s Watergate complex, which eventually led to the president’s resignation.
In a 2008 interview, Magruder told The Associated Press he was at peace with his place in history. The interview came after he pleaded guilty to reckless operation of a motor vehicle after a 2007 car crash.
“I don’t worry about Watergate; I don’t worry about news articles,” Magruder said. “I go to the court, I’m going to be in the paper — I know that.”
Magruder, who moved to suburban Columbus in 2003, served as Nixon’s deputy campaign director, an aide to Nixon Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and deputy communications director at the White House.
Magruder said in 2003 that he was meeting with John Mitchell, the former attorney general running the Nixon re-election campaign, when he heard the president tell Mitchell to go ahead with the plan to break into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building.
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 chairman, Larry O’Brien.
He made his claims in a PBS documentary and an Associated Press interview.
Historians dismiss the notion as unlikely, saying there was no evidence Nixon directly ordered the break-in.
He became a born-again Christian after Watergate, an experience he described in his 1978 biography, “From Power to Peace.SDRq