J. Fred Buzhardt

Joseph Fred Buzhardt Jr (February 21, 1924 – December 16, 1978) was an American attorney and public servant. He is best known for serving as special White House Counsel to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Previously he had served as General Counsel of the Department of Defense and as a legislative aide to Senator Strom Thurmond.

Early life Buzhardt was born in Greenwood, South Carolina, to Joseph Fred Buzhardt Sr., and Edna Hardin Buzhardt. The family later moved to McCormick, South Carolina, and Buzhardt graduated from McCormick High School with honors. Buzhardt was one of only 35 people, 26 of whom were family, in attendance at Thurmond's wedding to Moore in December 1968.

Buzhardt stayed active in Republican party politics in South Carolina, serving as Marshall Parker's campaign manager for the latter's unsuccessful bid for US senator in 1968. Alexander Haig, President Nixon's new White House Chief of Staff following the resignation of H. R. Haldeman, told Buzhardt that his role at the White House would be temporary, and so he retained his title at the Defense Department. His first task as special counsel was to investigate former White House Counsel John Dean. Dean, whom the president had fired the previous week, was cooperating with investigators and was believed to possess classified documents. Buzhardt, through his contacts in the intelligence community, determined that the documents were related to the Huston Plan, an illegal proposed expansion of domestic surveillance.

It was Buzhardt who inadvertently tipped off Senate Watergate Committee investigators about the existence of the White House tapes. Nixon and Haig, who were aware of the sound-activated taping system in the Oval Office, had given to Buzhardt, who was not aware of it, detailed accounts of Nixon's meetings with Dean, including verbatim quotes. Buzhardt, in turn, conveyed the material to Fred Thompson, then minority counsel to the Watergate Committee. As recounted by Scott Armstrong, the majority staff discovered the transcript and questioned former White House aide Alexander Butterfield about its provenance. The questions led directly to Butterfield's July 16, 1973 disclosure of the taping system to the committee and then the public. Thompson, informed of the disclosure, in turn, warned Buzhardt, who then learned of it, for the first time, in that indirect way. Buzhardt would spend hundreds of hours listening to the tapes to determine their contents before the tapes were conveyed to investigators.

After Butterfield's revelation of the taping system, Buzhardt was active in resisting efforts by the Watergate special prosecutor to obtain them. That November, after Nixon agreed to surrender some tapes, it became Buzhardt's task to inform U.S. District Judge John Sirica, who had issued the subpoenas for the tapes, that one of them contained an 18 minute erased gap. The tape in question contained a conversation between the president and H. R. Haldeman from June 20, 1972, just a few days after the Watergate break-in.

Later life In a widely reported interview published in 1975, Buzhardt inquired whether the public would prefer "a competent scoundrel or an honest boob" as president, and he lamented that invasive media coverage inhibited good governance. Although Buzhardt denied it, Washington Post columnist David S. Broder interpreted the remark as a thinly veiled attack on Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor.

Buzhardt's papers are at Clemson University.