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Discussions in the Cabinet Room could also be recorded, although not automatically. The technology was relatively simple (see box page 10).
The three staff members present instantly realized the significance of Butterfield's revelation. They told Dash and the chief Republican counsel, Fred Thompson. Next morning when Chairman Ervin was informed, he called the news "quite astounding." Determined that this story must not leak to newsmen, as so many staff interviews had, Ervin ordered that not even the other Senators on the committee be immediately informed. Vice Chairman Baker learned of it Sunday morning only when Butterfield, seeking advice, asked to meet with him. Baker told Butterfield that he would have to testify publicly, but should inform White House Counsels Leonard Garment and J. Fred Buzhardt that he intended to do so.
Butterfield, 47, an efficient and bright administrator who had been a U.C.L.A. acquaintance of Haldeman's, advised the White House counsels of his intentions on Sunday. He was not told to invoke Executive privilege, probably because the Ervin staff already had his testimony. Ervin moved swiftly to get Butterfield's information out. On Monday morning the full committee was told about Butterfield's story. A staff attorney was ordered to call Butterfield and tell him that he would be put on television that afternoon. Butterfield, reached in a barbershop, objected, still concerned about national security and worried about missing the opening of a symposium in the Soviet Union on American aerospace products. When Ervin learned of this, he told his staff attorney: "You tell him that I order him to come and testify, and if we have to, we'll subpoena him and bring him in."
Thus a nervous but precise and wholly cooperative Butterfield became the Ervin committee's first mystery witness. He arrived without an attorney, not having had time even to obtain counsel to accompany him. Speaking in understated, undramatic terms, he told a sensational story of how Nixon had made it a practice to bug all presidential conversations. At no time, so far as he knew, Butterfield said, did Nixon seek to cut off the system or were his visitors or callers informed that their words were being taped.
Plant Theory. In a justifiably cynical Washington, speculation grew that somehow Butterfield was a White House plant, that Nixon wanted the information out because the tapes would clear him. Some White House staffers who claim to have heard the tapes—despite the contention of Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler that none of the White House counsels have reviewed the tapes—say that the recordings do just that. But Senator Baker caustically noted that if he were President and that were true, "I'd have been rolling it [the information] up to Capitol Hill in wheelbarrows."
Butterfield's explanation for revealing the presidential bugging appeared to be a self-protective afterthought. He said that he knew both Haldeman and an assistant, Lawrence Higby, had been quizzed by the committee staff, and he assumed that they must have been asked the same question and answered it honestly. He said he also assumed that the President planned eventually to use the tapes in his own defense.
TIME has learned that Haldeman was not directly asked about the existence of a recording