Investigations and litigation around issues like the incarceration of juveniles with adults in adult prisons or efforts to give tax exempt status to private segregated academies so they didnt have to pay taxes. Issues like that. Expanding childcare, Getting Better conditions for migrant workers, that is the kind of work we were doing and thats what i started doing when i graduated and went right to cambridge to work for her. Tell us about the call. This is a funny series of actions. I was visiting bill in arkansas i think right after christmas, either right before or after. Bills phone rang and he got a all from john doerr. John said, i have been asked to put together a team of lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee to investigate whether there are grounds for impeachment of resident nixon, and i have a list of people and you are at the top of the list if you would like to come to work. Bill said, im going to run for congress. I cant. Bill said, who else is on your list . John said, mike conway and illary rodham. Bill said, hillary is standing right here. Nd he handed me phone. The phone. John asked me if i wanted to go to work in washington for the impeachment inquiry staff. I said yes, im very honored to be asked. Sometime after the first of the year i left my job and moved to washington and went to work for john. How long did you think this was going to last . I dont know that i ought like that. When you are young and starting out, how long did the job take . I didnt know what the job was. I had no timetable at all. Was there any concern on the future president s part you are doing this to affect his ability to run . No. No. First of all, he was running for congress, a race that he lost. If he had not been running for congress, i believe it would have been very likely he would have said yes. A chance to work with john doerr on a historic assignment like this and you are a young out of law school lawyer, hard to say no to that. Bill never gave it a Second Thought about my doing it. Did he talk to about this . I have no idea. In january, you arrived. Joe thinks it was january 19. It doesnt matter. When you arrived, you are among the first . Those of us from yale who ere going to be the youngest lawyers on the team my memory is we all got there at about the same time. That is what i remember. T was a startup law firm. It had to be put together. There were a group of Senior Lawyers that john knew or knew of that he had recruited. Then there were us. There werent very many lawyers in the middle. Between people like john doerr and richard gill, people like that had a lot of experience experience already in the law, some of them government. And then us newly minted lawyers. This may surprise people, there was an effort to make this a single committee. There were people chosen by the minority staff. One of those that admit you right off the bat was i think there was a serious effort that mostly succeeded. Peter and the majority hired john and the minority hired bert jenner, who started this massive law irm. Both were experienced lawyers. They had done really complicated cases, either civil rights or business or of the challenges lawyers face. Bill weld was there very early. He was one of the first people i met and got to know and worked with. It was a great team. I think we all felt like we were on the same team. I never have the feeling there was the majority and the minority staff. Obviously they were hired by different members, but we worked very hard to overcome any sense of separation. People looking back will say there was a certain inevitability about what happened. When you started out, you were supposed to look for grounds for impeachment. John wasnt asking for there are several aspects that i hope historians and per and citizens, particularly young people, understand. There are three big challenges he wanted us to meet. One of them was, what are the grounds for impeachment . There had been andrew johnson, there had been a number of judges who had been impeached. The team looking at that, and i was a small part of that doing the research, that team was looking all the ay back to Early English precedents since the founders took the idea from the common law. There was the issue of how do you proceed . How do you set up an appropriate process to consider all of these issues . And then the third was what are the facts and how do we understand the facts . So there was a team working on grounds for impeachment, how you described what high crimes and misdemeanors were. How it needed to relate to abuse of office and power if t were in keeping with the precedents, such as they were. Then there was the process standard that i worked on a lot. What do we do, how do we do it, and what is our role compared to the role of the committee . And finally the facts. This was a method used in the Justice Department and probably in his law practice n wisconsin. They were statements of information. They were not characterized as evidence, because we concluded it wasnt our job to make a prosecutorial case and present the evidence that supported that case, but rather to present the facts to the committee and then the committee would form their own conclusions. We had these little notecards and we were supposed to put one fact on a note card. So for example, i remember we were working on this and john said go right to the beginning, who is Richard Nixon . How did he get where he is . A fact would be Richard Milhouse nixon was born on you have his date of birth, then in whittier, california. He would say no, those are two pieces of information. So you would have one card for the year he was born and one card for where he was born. Apparently in johns practice he would use these cards to find patterns. If you didnt have enough of the facts he couldnt deduce the patterns. So we learned thats why we had these little cards. They attempted some method in the library to organize and sort them. Computers were not in common use, and i think john preferred his system anyway. We spent a lot of time doing these cards. And looking for anything that could be a piece of information that might go into the presentation we would make to the committee. Is it true they used knitting needles as a way of sorting these cards . I think it was a shortlived experiment. You took the fact, which was predominantly handwritten. At least the ones i did were handwritten. Then it was transferred onto a punch card. Then punchcard had certain holes in them. The idea was it was so primitive that if you took a knitting needle and had a stack of these cars and were looking for his childhood experiences or the committee to elect the president , you would take a knitting needle and pick up the cards that had a hole in a certain place. I think its a lot easier if you just kept the cards in front of you and shuffled them around. I would see the Senior Lawyer talking about that. What is the significance of this piece of information and how does it fit and what does it tell us . When both of you arrived john said on a friday, please produce a memo that is ground or impeachment by tuesday. I wont ask you monday. It would take the lawyers a long time. How did you approach this problem . Im sure you didnt study this. No. But bill weld was absolutely right. We never had a weekend. We worked 1618hour days. We would leave the building to go to dinner but then go right back. This first assignment was just the beginning of what would be the most intense effort one could imagine. The grounds for impeachment that were part of the research i contributed to the procedures, is this a trial . The trial is really in the enate. What is at the house does and how do we set up ourselves to serve the house . I worked with joe woods on what the procedures are. There is a picture of me sitting at the table with john doerr and woods appearing before one of the subcommittees of the Judiciary Committee to present ideas about process. Help people understand what the difference between the committee and the grand jury. Yes. Well, a grand jury is first and foremost part of the executive ranch of our government, grand jury in a federal matter is convened by u. S. Attorney or by the Justice Department for the purpose of presenting evidence to determine whether the grand jury will bring in information or indictment against whoever the target of the potential prosecution might be. Proceedings are supposed to be absolutely secret. The person being questioned does not go in with a lawyer. You go in by yourself and you are there with whoever the prosecutor has, investigators, fbi. Then there is a grand jury made up of citizens from the rea. The Judiciary Committee as is part of the congress, and the congress has the Sole Authority to determine impeachment. The house brings the articles of impeachment if they so decide, the senate conducts the trial. For us, we were asked, and this probably came from others on the committee to recognize they were the authority. It wasnt our job to present an article of impeachment. It was our job to present the legal standards in whatever process we agreed upon. Then it was up to the committee to determine whether it would move forward. To what extent were you involved in the debate whether the president s lawyer should be in the proceedings . I was not involved in that. I knew about it. That was really among the Senior Lawyers and the house members. My memory is they were very expansive in permitting sinclair to be privy to information to be part of the process. But i dont know any more details. Did you have to do any research on i dont recall doing that, because we were in a position to negotiate. Remember, the Watergate Committee had already subpoenaed and obtained a wealth of information. Part of the process is to work out an agreement with the Watergate Committee to share what they have already gotten either voluntarily or through subpoena. That included the tapes to a reat extent. I dont recall us, but i dont have perfect knowledge. I dont recall us having to subpoena. We had to work out agreements and maybe as part of that there was a subpoena that either had to be issued or quashed. I dont recall. I know this was a long time ago. You are in your 20s and part of a group that is trying to figure out an issue that this country hadnt looked at for a century. Some people started out thinking and Impeachable Offense is a crime, then he changed his mind. Can you remember how the research for did this . I think similar to bill weld. Once i had done the research, it seemed clear to me that the president was not above the law, the president did have certain authorities, certain standing. It didnt require their be a crime charged in order for there to be an Impeachable Offense. What that was was often keyed to what we think of as criminal behavior. Obstruction of justice is a crime. Whether a president is charged with obstruction of justice or not, the obstruction investigation can represent abuse of power that rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, and that would be the basis on the articles f impeachment. Do you remember thinking about the standards of evidence, probable cause, beyond a reasonable doubt . The constitution didnt say anything about that. Thats why i think john doerr was very careful in what he eventually presented to the committee. I think he believed that the whole enterprise really turned on there being sufficient evidence, not necessarily to the level of beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminal matter, but certainly enough to be persuasive, clear and convincing. Because this was in effect the charging mechanism. If there had been a trial then i think he would have had to pivot toward a more explicit reliance beyond a reasonable doubt, because that would be how the public would perceive it. There was no real guidelines for that. What did that mean and who got to determine it . At the end of the day, the articles were passed. Some kim out by the house, the trial was held by the senate and they had the right under the constitution to impose their own understanding of what an Impeachable Offense was. The debate some of the the fencesitters had was should you vote for an article of impeachment if you dont think the senate will vote to remove . I think that is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is if you are persuaded that the president has abused power, committed a high crime or misdemeanor, then it is up to the proof that has to be resented in a trial to determine whether 2 3 of the senate agrees with that. Remember, the senators could bring whatever assessment they wanted to this determination. You couldnt secondguess that. You couldnt preempt that. It had to be left to them. What were the surprises for you . It hadnt happened in a president ial setting for over 100 years. There was a lot wrong with what was done to andrew johnson. He was hardly a paragon of political rectitude. It is more than it should have been in our assessment. A proceeding based on politics, not on evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors. However one defined that. O 100 years later you have a crime, the break in of watergate. You have a vigorous investigation through the Watergate Committee. We were trying to impose an understanding of the law and history combined with a process that would be viewed as fair providing due process to the president , if articles of impeachment were decided. We try to rely on precedent as much as we could, but we are making it up based on our best understanding of the law as we researched it. Secrecy is important. Totally. Doerr enforce secrecy . First of all r, there were no cell phones, that makes a big difference. I think by force of character, he made it clear to all of us, we didnt know where this was going to end up. I didnt come to it with any preconceived notion that this was going to be easy, we are going to lay the stuff out and the house will be impeached and he is convicted in the senate. I certainly didnt do that. I dont know anybody who did. Because it was such a historic experience, we all felt the weight of that responsibility, and john made very clear that we would be betraying our duty as lawyers and our historic obligation if we talked. When we would occasionally go out for lunch, the building where we were working would be staked out by reporters who would be yelling at us. I remember Sam Donaldson had a loud yell. He got to know the names of the lawyers. He would say hillary, come here and talk to me. We would just walk by. I remember when i appeared at one of the hearings with doerr and joe woods, before i went over there. I had done so much of the work and i appreciated it. Dont make facial expressions, dont betray any opinion, we are just there to make a presentation to the members to have committee. Of the committee. It was a matter of honor that we would maintain the secrecy that was so critical for this whole investigation. There were a lot of leaks, but they werent from the staff. No, they were not. Not from the staff. How many women were with you . I dont know, i want to say i can call the name and see the faces of five. There might have been more but those are the ones i nteracted with the most. I think on joe woods team on his task force, you had david haynes, john davidson. After mr. Woods leaves in may, is that when you moved to bernies team . Or did bernie take over . Do you remember what happened when mr. Woods left . No, i really cant remember. I remember working closely with joe, working with john on the grounds of foreign impeachment along with bill weld. I shared an office with a young lawyer who was in Johns Law Firm in wisconsin whose name was john bell. He was very focused on aggregating sure and recording the statements of information. I dont remember. I do remember starting in early summer, maybe through bernie, i began listening to tapes and began to listen to the tapes of president nixon talking to his staff members, talking to henry kissinger, talking to his filipino valet. I particularly remember what we call the tape of tapes, which was Richard Nixon taping himself listening to tapes. I was one of several people whose job it was to try to, in so far as possible, to perfect the transcription. We would sit with the headphones on, listening, trying to make out words, some of the transcription had already occurred but some of it was garbled and was not at all clear. But the tape of tapes was a big revelation to me. I had no idea he would be taping himself, listening to tapes and coming up with rationalizations so he would call somebody into the room and say, i want to play this for you. Now when i said that, here is what i meant. It was a shocking experience. What do you think you concluded that the then president was involved in a coverup . For me it was listening to the tapes and the socalled tape of tapes. It was a textbook example of trying to get stories straight and getting other people to get their stories straight. I tried hard not to have an opinion during the winter and pring. Then we would hear from john and bernie and others how they were piecing together the facts. That they had had us accumulate. There were facts that were particularly telling. This has been written about numerous times, but when nix on threw the nixon threw the ash tray. I think that fact had an impact on members of the house committee. Because when you are given information that you expect but doesnt come out the way you wanted it to, so you pick up an ashtray and out of frustration and anger, disappointment, you throw it. I had a feeling that in ingpoint was placed with Everything Else for the lawyers. Hat was a turning point. Ither he didnt know and had been manipulated by staff or he did know and he was trying to cover it up. Thats how it came across. The day before article one was passed by a bipartisan congressmen went on an attack against a congressman. You dont have enough this effects. And you cant impeach a president without specifics. That night, the staff worked tirelessly to put together every charge. Did you participate in that . I recall that. That was a necessary transitioning away from presenting the statements of information. I think the other Senior Lawyers were very aware they didnt want to get ahead of the committee, which i think was the right position for them to be in. When the committee was saying, i cant wade through all of this. You are going to have to tell me what it means. If youre are looking at article one, you have to tell me what are the pieces of information that either supported or disprove it. Hats when we had to pivot into producing a much more detailed case. Do you remember the work done . I do. I do. I dont know whether john knew him or marshall knew him. I dont remember that. He was brought on board to provide some historical erspective and analysis. I cant say i worked with him, he produced his own material, but i was available to do whatever needed to be done. I wanted to ask you a few ore questions, if i may. Do you remember working with fred . Very closely. Fred is a meticulous awyer. He had a very clear view about how to gather facts, how to evaluate them and present them. He worked incredibly hard. He was somebody i admired and valued as a colleague. Did you do any research on the abuse of powers issue . I dont know. I probably pitched in on everything but i cant remember. Where were you when the articles were being passed . I think i was in the office. I think thats where i was. [laughter] was it a surprise . Was it a surprise . By the time they were voted on t wasnt a surprise. I think his Committee Staff had a fair idea of who is going to vote. What was your reaction to the Supreme Court case u. S. V. Nixon. About the tapes . I thought the outcome was really required because tapes were done in the course of his official role as president. I think having to turn them over and having to get them catalogued and be available for the public was the right ecision. Just three more questions. Then well be done. What do you remember of president nixons resignation . I was not at all happy or jubilant about him resigning. I thought it was a very sad chapter in our history. I thought the actual departure was a poignant painful moment for him and his family. As well as the country. So i watched it on tv like everyone else did. It was an unfortunate sad outcome. What was it like to meet the president later . I met him when bill was in the white house. I dont recall meeting him efore. I havent thought hard about that. He had been to russia. He called the white house and asked if he could come by and brief bill about his trip to russia. Bill was fascinated by the idea. Because despite his resignation and buse of power, he was an incredibly experienced intelligent person who knew a lot about the world. So chelsea and i and bill, he was brought into the white house and brought up the elevator to the second floor, because bill is going to meet him in his private study. He came at night, as i recall, but maybe just right after he got back from russia. Chelsea will and i greeted him, welcomed him back to the white house. He obviously thought about what he had wanted to say. When he saw me, he said, i know youre working hard on health care, that is a big task. When he saw chelsea he said, my daughters went to sidwell, like you are. I think he had written a memo, but he and bill went off to talk about russia. And you went to his funeral . I did. I went to his funeral. One of the really few regrets i have about our eight years in the white house is i didnt go to pats nixons funeral. I think we were not well informed or understanding of the protocol. We had other things, and i think the schedulers and whoever was looking at this basically didnt appreciate the significance it should have had. I deeply regret not going to mrs. Nixons funeral, but we did go to president nixons funeral. President clinton gave a ulogy. Were you involved and how he described him . I dont recall. He probably talked to me about it. We probably bounced ideas off of each other. I may have seen a draft but i dont recall any specific advice i gave him. What was it like to be in that you were among people that you had studied. Ow did it make you feel . By that time i was much more familiar with the role of being first lady. And it was the right and proper thing to be at his uneral, to represent the country as we were all doing. I talked to a number of the former president s whom i knew, former first ladies, and it was a beautiful day. It was a very touching funeral memorial service. What should the country have learned from the houses role in impeachment in 1974 . I think it is such a serious undertaking. Do not pursue it for trivial partisan political purposes. If it does fall to you while you are in the house to examine abuses of power by the president , be as circumspect and careful as john doerr was. Restrain yourself from grandstanding and holding news conferences and playing to your base. This goes way beyond whose side they are on. Or ho is on your side. Who is on your side. Try to be faithful purveyors of the history and solemnity of the process. I guess that lesson wasnt learned. That lesson was not learned. Thats why i think its important to talk about how serious this is. It should not be done for political partisan urposes. Those who did it in the late 0s, those who talk about it now should go back and study the painstaking approach the impeachment staff took. And it was bipartisan. You had a bipartisan staff and had both democratic and republican members of the committee reaching the same conclusions, that there were grounds for impeachment. Thank you for your time today. Thank you, good to talk to you. This is American History tv on cspan 3. Each weekend we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. Our cspan campaign 2020 bus team is traveling across the country asking voters what issues should president ial candidates address . What i want the candidates to focus on this year, might not be popular, but gerrymandering. It has gotten so out of hand in states like texas and North Carolina where it feels like your vote doesnt matter. I really wish they would focus more on that. This year i really want the president ial candidates to talk about the Real Estate Industry. The Real Estate Industry has biffle so much control over the land in this country and there is like big real estate executives who are able to buy the land and i think we need more Community Control of things and the Real Estate Industry has a long, long history of being really kind of an oligark. Focus on how to fix the corruption of our system. Pass a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics and reverse citizens united. And Different Solutions regarding the corruption in our politics. The rampant money run through d. C. Restoring our democracy. I want the candidates to focus more on foreign policy. I would like to really hear about cutting back the military, going after the military industrial conflicts, because i really think that is something that would benefit our region because we have a lot of people that are forced into the military and then they never come back home. I also think that we need to cut spending in the military. Were at almost 1 trillion a year. And i also think it would help the Immigration Crisis because we need to stop the imperialist activities of overthrowing right wing, overthrowing people in central america, replacing them with right wing dictators and then ausing the migrant crisis. Former Massachusetts Governor bill welds recalls his time as a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee staff during the impeachment inquiry of president Richard Nixon in 1973 and 1974. The interview was from the president ial Library Oral History collection and was conducted in 2011. Mr. Weld was hired by Committee Republicans who were in the minority. He is currently running for the republican president ial nomination. Hi, im director of the Richard Nixon president ial library and museum in yorba linda, california. September 8, 2011. I have the honor and privilege to interview william weld. Thank you for joining us today. Please tell us how you came to be involved with the inquiry . I got a call in the fall of 1973, an associate at a law firm in boston. Asking me if i would be interested in interviewing for a job on the impeachment staff. At that point, it hadnt really gotten off the ground
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