Chief Watergate eavesdropper, lookout
Alfred C. Baldwin III, a former FBI agent who served as the chief eavesdropper and lookout for the Watergate burglars, but then became a key government witness in the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, died Jan. 15, 2020 at a care center in New Paltz, N.Y. He was 83.
Like Watergate conspirator James McCord Jr., whose death in 2017 was not widely reported for two years, Baldwin did not want his death publicized. Both men’s deaths were first reported by Londonbased writer and filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan, who noted Baldwin’s passing in the updated paperback edition of his book “The Watergate Burglars,” which came out on Tuesday.
His death was independently confirmed by his friend and longtime lawyer, Robert C. Mirto, who said Baldwin had cancer.
A gregarious Marine Corps veteran from a prominent Connecticut family, Baldwin reinvented himself as a schoolteacher and lawyer in the years after Watergate, working as a state prosecutor in Hartford for nearly a decade until his retirement in 1997. But he remained best known as a supporting player in the cast of petty crooks, dirty tricksters, FBI veterans and former spies involved in the plot to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters in
Washington.
“You’d think after 25 years, it would be over,” he told the Hartford Courant in 1997, after he was subpoenaed as part of a defamation lawsuit against Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy. “There are other things in life.”
When McCord and four others broke into the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972, Baldwin was watching from across the street, keeping an eye on the DNC’s sixth-floor headquarters from his room at a Howard Johnson hotel. He became the only member of the burglary team not charged with a crime, agreeing to cooperate with federal investigators in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
According to a 1992 report in The Washington Post, Baldwin’s testimony gave prosecutors enough evidence to indict the five burglars as well as two other conspirators, White House operatives Howard Hunt and Liddy. “He gave us some very valuable evidence,” prosecutor Earl Silbert said in an oral history. “He became a critical government witness.”
Before testifying at trials and congressional hearings, Baldwin also went public with his story, helping to show that the break-in was far more than a “third-rate burglary,” as Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler initially called it.
Agreeing to an exclusive interview with Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson, he implicated Nixon associates and gave a vivid,
richly detailed account of the burglary scheme —– while also making one request of Nelson, asking the journalist to describe him in print as “a husky ex-Marine” in a bid to impress a girl he was seeing. Nelson obliged.
Published in October 1972 and picked up by newspapers across the country, the interview and accompanying articles became “perhaps the most important Watergate story so far, because it was so tangible, it had an eyewitness, and it brought Watergate to the very door of the White House,” wrote David Halberstam in his media history “The Powers That Be.”
Baldwin publicly revealed that the June breakin was actually the second Watergate burglary, occurring after McCord and his team bugged two phones at the Democratic office over Memorial Day weekend. One was believed to belong
to DNC chairman Larry O’Brien, although the listening device never worked. The other belonged to R. Spencer Oliver, the executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen.
Over the next three weeks, Baldwin monitored some 200 conversations on Oliver’s phone, taking notes that were passed to McCord and shared with Nixon campaign officials.
Alfred Carleton Baldwin III was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 23, 1936. He rarely spoke about his early life before being interviewed for “The Puzzle of Watergate,” a biography by Jean Ellen Wilson that was self-published in 2020 after a falling-out with Baldwin, who did not authorize the final version, according to the author’s postscript.
Baldwin remained puzzled by Watergate details for years, no less than many of the historians and journalists who covered the scandal. He became convinced that the operation was a “well-planned” setup, according to the biography, concluding that McCord and other CIA veterans had intentionally set out to remove Nixon from office, motivated by distrust of a president who was moving toward detente with communist China and the Soviet Union.
Whatever the motivation for the Watergate scheme, he was convinced that the country had failed to learn from the scandal. He said he was once asked by a college student if he had any advice that resulted from his experience in the episode. “Yeah,” he said, “don’t trust anyone but your parents.”