After 50 Years, Restricted Watergate Records Now Open

Written by Dan Linke

Images selected and captioned by Will Clements

Watergate records that the U.S. Congress legislated to be closed for 50 years at the conclusion of the House Judiciary Committee Watergate Inquiry in 1974 are now open for review at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, with two-thirds of the records digitally available online.

The records are part of the papers of John Doar, the lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee that investigated and drew up the articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon.  The committee adopted the three articles of impeachment in late July 1974, and their report was due to be submitted to the House of Representatives on August 8.  Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974 to avoid an impeachment trial in the Senate.

The records document both the Watergate impeachment inquiry itself, as well as the committee’s organizational work, including how the staff would be hired and organized; the procedures to ensure the security and confidentiality of its work; and how and what it would communicate with the media.

Most importantly, they contain drafts and memoranda related to the Articles of Impeachment, committee hearing transcripts held between January and July 1974, and memoranda and correspondence documenting the chronological sequence of events and communications. 

Matthew Zipf, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, has begun examining the records. “Doar’s files are an important part of American political history,” he notes.

“Some of the documents here give us new insights into the operating procedures and constitutional thought of the inquiry. Others restore human texture. To read through the phone logs and Christmas cards is to understand how the inquiry’s political workings were embedded in a set of rich friendships, some of which lasted for decades.”

–Matthew Zipf, University of Chicago

I also observed that these records reveal the precise, clear-minded legal thinking of John Doar, whose reputation for scrupulousness can also be found throughout the documents, reflecting the man I came to know when I worked with him when he donated his papers to Princeton. 

Doar was a Republican first hired by the Eisenhower administration to work in the Dept. of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.  He stayed on during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations  where he was a key figure in many of that era’s civil rights notable events, including the Freedom Riders of 1961; the enrollment of James Meredith at the segregated University of Mississippi in 1962; and the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches of 1965.

Public Policy Archivist Will Clements oversaw the digitization project which involved digitizing approximately 29 of the 40 record center cartons. The other 11 boxes contain printed government documents readily available elsewhere in both paper and electronic form. The digitized materials represent about 600 folders totaling almost 6 terabytes of images.  Aside from these Watergate records, the bulk of the Doar papers opened for research in 2018.