Lead prosecutor of Watergate break-in who at first did not grasp its magnitude

Earl J. Silbert was in bed when the telephone rang early on June 17, 1972, rousing him from his sleep. A colleague was calling to inform Silbert, then the principal assistant US attorney for the District of Columbia, of the strange events that had transpired hours earlier at the Watergate complex, on the banks of the Potomac River. Five men wearing business suits had been arrested in an attempt to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. One of them was James W. Mccord Jr, the security chief for President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and a former CIA employee.

‘‘It was going to be a hot case,’’

Silbert recalled years later. ‘‘The only thing open was how hot was hot going to be.’’

By his own account, Silbert did not immediately grasp the case’s magnitude when, as the first prosecutor in the matter of the Watergate affair, he set out to obtain indictments of the five burglars and two key co-conspirators, former White House aides G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt. He said he regarded the break-in as too clumsy to be the work of anyone but underlings, and too foolish to have been approved by anyone of real power. ‘‘You always assume – and maybe that was a mistake – an underlying rationality,’’ he said in 1975.

In the two years after the Watergate burglary, the investigation started by Silbert and carried forward by special prosecutors, inquiries by congressional panels, and newspaper reporting revealed a pattern of corruption and coverup reaching deep into the White House. On August 9, 1974, confronted by overwhelming evidence of his role in the wrongdoing, Nixon became the first US president in history to resign.

After Watergate, Silbert served for five years as US attorney for the District of Columbia and later established a private practice in Washington. But he remained forever associated with the case that began that summer morning in 1972, when he was a 36-year-old federal prosecutor known for his polished manner as ‘‘Earl the Pearl’’.

During the Watergate prosecution and in the years since, Silbert’s critics have argued that he fell severely short by leading an investigation that focused narrowly on Liddy, Hunt and the burglars instead of pursuing higher-ranking Nixon associates who eventually went to prison for their role in the Watergate affair.

They included, among others, former attorney-general John N. Mitchell, former White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and former domestic affairs adviser John D. Ehrlichman.

Defenders of Silbert insist that his goal was to conduct the prosecution in an apolitical manner and that he performed ably under impossible conditions – including the interference of acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III, who thwarted the Watergate investigation by furnishing information about the inquiry to John W. Dean III, the Nixon White House counsel who later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.

Silbert, his two co-counsels, Seymour Glanzer and Donald E. Campbell, as well as investigators, obtained indictments of the burglars in September 1972 and won convictions in January 1973 of Mccord and Liddy.

Hunt and four burglars all pleaded guilty. Mccord later helped blow open the Watergate investigation by asserting in a letter to the judge in the Watergate case, John J. Sirica, and in testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee that perjury had occurred in the trial and that he had been told White House officials including Mitchell and Dean were complicit in the Watergate bugging scheme.

Silbert said his strategy was to first obtain indictments of the burglars and their immediate supervisors. Those indictments – and the convictions, plea deals and immunity to follow – would help investigators close in on higher-ranking conspirators. ‘‘There is an unwritten rule in the Justice Department,’’ he told Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. ‘‘The higher up you go, the more you have to have them by the balls.’’

Campbell told The Post after Silbert’s death that ‘‘everything Earl did was to perfection. His whole goal was we follow the evidence and we go from there’’. Meanwhile, FBI agent Angelo J. Lano recalled, ‘‘we were getting lies from everyone’’.

Asked about Silbert’s handling of the Watergate investigation, journalist and historian Garrett Graff, author of the 2022 book Watergate: A New History, said that ‘‘I think to this day we don’t have a good sense of what kinds of internal pressures Earl Silbert was under,’’ and to what degree any shortcomings of the prosecution were due to his ‘‘not wanting to know the answers versus being told not to find the answers’’.

Earl Judah Silbert was born in Boston in 1936. His mother was a social worker and homemaker. His father, a lawyer, had served briefly as a Republican member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. The younger Silbert was a Democrat.

Silbert received a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard University in 1957, and a law degree in 1960. He began his legal career in the Justice Department and worked in private practice after stepping down as US attorney in 1979. His clients included Kenneth L. Lay, the Enron founder who was convicted in 2006 on conspiracy and fraud charges related to the energy firm’s collapse.

Silbert’s survivors include his wife of 52 years, the former Patricia Allott, two daughters and a sister.

In recent years, Silbert worked on a forthcoming memoir, The Missing Watergate Story. He recalled in the book that the Watergate prosecution made him a lightning rod not only in public, but also at home. His wife, who had worked on the campaign of George S. Mcgovern, Nixon’s Democratic opponent in the 1972 election, ‘‘loathed’’ Nixon, Silbert wrote, and ‘‘was convinced he was involved from the start’’.

‘‘She frequently proclaimed him guilty, and my stock response – ‘Show me the evidence’ – infuriated her. I sympathised. Sharing a home with one of the few people in the country who had inside information on the most-talked-about mystery of the day – and revealed none of it – could only have been maddening.’’

One evening his wife became so frustrated by his reticence that ‘‘she lost all patience and emptied her glass of port on to my legal pad’’.

‘‘I couldn’t win anywhere,’’ Silbert wrote. ‘‘But that was the job.’’ – Washington Post