use attempt to stonewall media revelations and succeeding investigations:
"Richard Milhous Nixon, the archetypal loser of America politics, transformed by the bizarre events of the 1972 campaign into the biggest winner in history, had been backed into a corner."
Hearings followed some major breaks in the administration's nearly yearlong attempt to short-circuit the investigation. Only a few weeks before, James W. McCord, a convicted Watergate conspirator, had written to its presiding judge, John J. Sirica, to assert that he had been under White House pressure to conceal facts. In the same period, one of Nixon's closest confidants, White House counsel John W. Dean III, was accused of lying by L. Patrick Gray III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The case had broken wide open.
More stunning revelations followed:
Out of the grand jury room and the committee offices there now tumbled story after story: Dean had promised to tell all . . . Jeb Stuart Macgruder, the number two man at the Committee for the Re-election of the President (C.R.P.), had confessed that he lied to the grand jury . . . John N. Mitchell, the former attorney general and campaign manager, had been fingered as the master plotter . . . Dean had implicated . . . the two ranking members of the White House Staff, H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman.
By April 30, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst (John Mitchell's replacement), were off the president's staff.
As sociologist and media historian Michael Schudson describes it, "the hearings provided captivating public drama through the summer of 1993, including two astonishing moments."
A lengthy and detailed recounting of events by John Dean implicated President Nixon in the Watergate cover-up. For the first time, following revelations by White House aide Alexander Butterfield, the public learned that President Nixon taped conversations in th...