The death went unreported by local and national news organizations at the time. It was apparently first reported by London-based writer and filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan in his book “Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate, and the CIA,” published last year. The news of the death surfaced again March 31 on the website Kennedys and King.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed his death on its online Nationwide Gravesite Locator. (McCord was buried in Indiantown Gap National Cemetery in Annville, Pennsylvania.) The Washington Post said the cause was pancreatic cancer, quoting McCord’s death certificate, which the newspaper said it had obtained from the Berks County Register of Wills office in Reading, Pennsylvania.
In the large cast of liars, schemers, money launderers, character assassins and other scoundrels who devised “dirty tricks” to damage President Richard Nixon’s political opponents, it was McCord, a retired spy with a shadowy past, who broke the silence of a shaky Oval Office conspiracy. It had been held together with hush money, fears of prison and, if all else failed, promises of presidential clemency.
On June 17, 1972, four expatriate Cubans and McCord, chief of security for the Nixon re-election campaign and a leader of the White House “plumbers” unit assigned to plug information leaks, broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington to fix problematic listening devices that they had planted weeks earlier.
But a night watchman alerted the police, and they were caught, odd burglars in business suits carrying cameras and walkie-talkies. E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent, and G. Gordon Liddy, the re-election committee’s general counsel, who ran the break-in from a nearby hotel room, fled but were soon arrested. McCord revealed at an arraignment that he had once worked for the CIA, and the unraveling began.
For months, even as Nixon was re-elected, White House aides tried to fend off reports suggesting ties between the president’s men and the burglars. But in January 1973, McCord and the burglars pleaded guilty, and Hunt and Liddy were convicted in a federal trial, all seven on charges of burglary, wiretapping and conspiracy.
At sentencing later, Judge John J. Sirica read a letter from McCord charging that witnesses had committed perjury and implying that the White House had covered up its connection to the break-in and pressured the burglars to plead guilty and remain silent. In later statements to the judge, McCord implicated senior presidential aides in bribery, threats and promises of clemency to secure silence.
“Saying his family feared for his life if he told the truth, he indicated his reluctance to go to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Justice Department and his desire to tell his story to the court,” Sirica, the senior jurist of U.S. District Court in Washington, wrote in an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in 1979. “The trickle of information he provided soon became a flood no plumber could stop.”
Disclosures by investigators and conspirators of a White House taping system that had recorded incriminating conversations between the president and his aides led to the brink of impeachment and Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974. Dozens of conspirators went to prison, but Nixon was pardoned by his successor, President Gerald Ford, and died in 1994.
For aiding prosecutors, McCord had his one-to-five-year sentence cut to less than four months.
“I have no regrets in telling the truth,” he said on entering prison camp at Allenwood, Pennsylvania, in 1975. “I think in the long run it’s been extremely beneficial to the country to have become aware of what occurred.”
James Walter McCord Jr. was born in Waurika, Oklahoma, on Jan. 26, 1924. Much about his background and early life is unknown. His CIA work fell under national security restrictions, he often provided false or no information about himself, and his records were full of gaps and contradictions.
He is believed to have grown up in Texas, served in the Army Air Forces during World War II and attended George Washington University. By 1948 he was an FBI employee, and in 1951 he joined the CIA. As a CIA operative he apparently played a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and developed ties with Cuban exiles, including those who joined the plumbers unit.
A sturdy, balding man with hollow cheeks and a military bearing, McCord became a senior security official in the CIA and worked in planning for national emergencies. After retiring in 1970, he founded his own security firm, McCord Associates, in Rockville, Maryland, taught at nearby Montgomery College and was an officer in the Air Force Reserve. He was hired by the Committee to Re-Elect the President in early 1972.
McCord and his wife, Sarah Ruth McCord, had three children: a son, Michael, and two daughters, Carol Anne and Nancy. Sarah McCord died in 2014. Complete information about his survivors was not available.
After his conviction, McCord electrified the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings with testimony on the scope of the conspiracy. But he “respectfully” declined to give information about his own history. Leaving prison, he returned to Rockville, changed his firm’s name to Security International and later established a solar energy company in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Like many Watergate figures, he wrote a memoir, “A Piece of Tape — the Watergate Story: Fact and Fiction” (1974). The title referred to tape he used to keep door locks open during the Watergate break-in to facilitate a retreat. But it was a night watchman’s discovery of the tape that led to the burglars’ arrest.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.