In January of last year, still flushed with the thrill of stage-managing Richard Nixon's triumphal second Inauguration, Jeb Stuart Magruder had to take care of what he hoped was one last nuisance left over from the previous year. Putting a handsome, confident face on whatever anxiety he may have felt, he appeared in Judge John Sirica's Washington courtroom and testified falsely as a witness for the prosecution at the trial of the Watergate burglars. Shortly afterward, he hopped a plane to California to explore launching his own elective career for secretary of state.
Last week Magruder, 39, was back before Sirica, this time as a confessed felon. On June 4, the very day of the California state G.O.P. primary he might have won if the Watergate cover-up and his personal game plan had worked, Magruder will go to jail. The ten-month minimum sentence for his part in the scandal was stiffer than he expected after more than a year of cooperation with the prosecutors. His pretty wife Gail could not hold back the tears, but Magruder kept his composure as he read a prepared statement to an impassive Sirica:
"I know what I have done, and your honor knows what I have done . . . Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass. I found myself on a path that had not been intended for me by my parents or my principles or by my own ethical instincts. It has led me to this courtroom."
To take advantage of Magruder's renewed notoriety, the New York City publishing house Atheneum rushed into print with his memoirs, An American Life: One Man's Road to Watergate, which were originally scheduled for release in mid-July. When Magruder surrenders next week to federal marshals who will escort him to a minimum-security prison in Allen wood, Pa., the 338-page volume will be on sale for $10 in book stores along the East Coast.
Written for a reported $100,000 advance with the help of Freelance Writer Patrick Anderson, Magruder's book contains only an occasional hint of the abject contrition that marked his final statement to the bench, and it offers little fresh evidence about the evolution of the Watergate crimes. He guesses Nixon was involved all along in the coverup: "Based on my knowledge of how the White House operated, I would suspect that once the burglars were arrested, Nixon immediately demanded and got the full story, and that thereafter he kept in close personal touch with the cover-up operation." But he does not know for certain. It is nonetheless a remarkable book, affording damning and often unintended insights into the author's character and the atmosphere of the Administration in which he worked.
Magruder begins with two chapters on his childhood and youth. He reveals that he grew up in a family overshadowed by scandal: his grandfather's career as a New York shipyard executive was ruined in the early 1920s when he was convicted and jailed for misapplication of $300,000 in bank funds.