Watergate conspirator, Jeb Stuart Magruder dies at 79

Watergate conspirator, Jeb Stuart Magruder dies at 79

Jeb Stuart Magruder, a former White House aide who served seven months in federal prison for confessing to his role in the 1972 Watergate break-in, has died.

Jeb Stuart Magruder, a former White House aide who served seven months in federal prison for confessing to his role in the 1972 Watergate break-in, has died. The Watergate scandal ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

Jeb Stuart died May 11 in Danbury, Connecticut, from complications of a stroke. Jeffrey H. Hull of the Hull Funeral Home in Danbury confirmed his death.

Magruder, the head of two small Los Angeles cosmetics companies and the Southern California coordinator for the 1968 Nixon campaign, was appointed as a special assistant to the president in 1969 to manage White House public relations operations. He served as deputy director of the Committee for the re-election of the President in 1972. After that, he served as director of the president’s inaugural committee.

In April 1973, he quit his job as director of policy planning at the Commerce Department for confessing to the Senate investigators that he and White House counsel John W. Dean III had prior knowledge of the bugging of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington in 1972.

Granted limited immunity for his cooperation with prosecutors, Mr. Magruder testified that former Attorney General John N. Mitchell had approved the Watergate break-in, a claim which Mitchell denied. He claimed that Mitchell had conceded to get into the Democrats’ office and bug the telephone of the party chairman, Larry O’Brien.

In May 1974, Magruder was sentenced to 10 months to four years in a federal minimum security prison camp.

In 2003, he claimed in the PBS documentary Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History and in an Associated Press story that Nixon had personally ordered the Watergate break-in.

Magruder said he had heard Nixon tell Mitchell over the phone to proceed with the plan to break into Democratic National Committee headquarters and bug the telephone of Lawrence O’Brien.

Magruder was author of An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate, a book he wrote in 1974 and From Power to Peace, a 1978 book about his Christian faith.

Magruder is survived by his children, Whitney, Justin, Tracy and Stuart; and nine grandchildren.

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