New Revelations on Nixon and Watergate

Watergate remains the biggest political scandal of the Twentieth Century, culminating in President Nixon’s resignation and the conviction of two dozen members of his administration.  In the intervening fifty years, much additional information has come to light, including several batches of internal prosecutorial documents surfacing in just the past eight years and the 2018 unsealing of the “Road Map,” the grand jury transmittal to the House Judiciary Committee, which was the basis for their calling for Nixon’s impeachment.

The seminar will cover the chronology of the Watergate scandal, what the Nixon Tapes say and do not say about President Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up, and whether a Senate impeachment trial would have cleared Nixon of wrongdoing. The seminar leaders and the participants will debate the extent to which a media monoculture, national-security apparatus hostile to the President, and a politicised special prosecution damaged due process and tarnished American constitutionalism.

The three presenters are prominent authorities on the Nixon administration, have written a series of books and essays on the subject matter, and bring fresh perspectives to a significant political event.

This seminar will begin at 5pm on Friday, March 24th 2023 and conclude at 530pm on Sunday, March 26th 2023 (with Sunday morning off) at a location in Palo Alto (to be sent to participants). Meals will be provided. Please make your own arrangements for accommodation.

This seminar is reserved for students and young professionals. 

READINGS

Will be sent to registered participants. 

Participants will also receive autographed copies of the presenters’ most recent books at the conclusion of the Retreat:

·  The Nixon Tapes: 1973. Edited and annotated by Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter (Hughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)

·  The President’s Man, The Memoirs of Nixon’s Trusted Aide. Dwight Chapin (Harper Collins, 2022)

·  The Nixon Conspiracy, Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President.  Geoff Shepard (Bombardier Books, 2021)

FEES

To secure your place, please send a $100 nonrefundable deposit to the Zephyr Institute, via PayPal or check (instructions here).

FACULTY

Dwight Lee Chapin was a field worker on Richard Nixon’s 1962 gubernatorial campaign while he was still in college. From 1967-68, Chapin worked as the Personal Aide to former Vice President Richard Nixon during his presidential campaign. After Nixon’s election victory, Chapin became Special Assistant to the President, serving as Appointments Secretary. He held that position from 1969 until he became Deputy Assistant to the President in 1971. Chapin was named one of the “Ten Outstanding Young Men” by the Jaycees in 1972 for his contribution to President Nixon’s visit to China. Chapin remained in his role as Deputy Assistant until he left the White House Staff in March 1973. His in-depth memoirs about his time with Nixon, The President’s Man, was published in February 2022. He remained active in politics and worked on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns and George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. Chapin later went on to work as a business consultant, mentor, and public speaker. Currently retired, he resides in Riverside, Connecticut with his wife Terry. They are blessed with five children between them and fifteen grandchildren.

Luke A. Nichter is a Professor of History and James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is a noted expert on Richard Nixon's 3,432 hours of secret White House tapes. Luke is a New York Times bestselling author or editor of seven books, including Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Postwar Atlantic World, The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War, and his next book project, tentatively titled The Making of the President, 1968: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and the Election that Changed America, will be published by Yale University Press in the fall of 2023. He also is the co-editor, with Douglas Brinkley, of The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 and The Nixon Tapes: 1973. Luke is a former founding Executive Producer of C-SPAN's American History TV, a presidential appointee on the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and was recently appointed by the Archivist of the United States to serve on the Federal FOIA Advisory Committee.

Geoff Shepard came to Washington as a White House Fellow in 1969, after graduating from Harvard Law School. He then worked on President Nixon’s White House staff for five years, including serving as deputy counsel on his Watergate defense team. He testified as a government chain-of-custody witness in the Plumbers Trial and was subpoenaed for the same purpose in the Cover-up Trial. He possesses a “clearance letter” from the special prosecutor, stating he was never the object of an investigation by that office. Geoff has spent much of the past fifteen year researching and writing about the Watergate scandal. He has published three books, authored dozens of essays and made over fifty presentations challenging Watergate’s conventional narrative. Much of his work is based on recently uncovered internal files of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, including their infamous “Road Map” that was the basis for the grand jury naming Nixon a cover-up co-conspirator and for the House Judiciary Committee urging his impeachment. Learn more from his website at: www.ShepardOnWatergate.com

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This event has been made possible by a generous grant from the Apgar Foundation.