Geoff Shepard | Watergate

Learn the inside story of the Watergate scandal.

This lecture is part of a series on American Political Scandals from the time of the Founding to today. Political scandals have occurred throughout American history. But has our view of corruption changed? And have modern ways of dealing with corruption worked?

Geoff Shepard is an author and lawyer. He earned his B.A. from Whittier College and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. In 1969, he was selected to be a White House Fellow and assigned to the Treasury Department, where he worked under Paul Volcker, then undersecretary for monetary affairs. He then joined John Ehrlichman’s Domestic Council staff at the Nixon White House, where he served for five years. He also worked on President Nixon’s Watergate defense team, where he was principal deputy to the President’s lead lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt. In that capacity, he helped transcribe the White House tapes and ran the document rooms holding the seized files of H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Dean. Mr. Shepard is the author of The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down.

Hillsdale College is an independent institution of higher learning founded in 1844 by men and women “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings” resulting from civil and religious liberty and “believing that the diffusion of learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.” It pursues the stated object of the founders: “to furnish all persons who wish, irrespective of nation, color, or sex, a literary, scientific, [and] theological education” outstanding among American colleges “and to combine with this such moral and social instruction as will best develop the minds and improve the hearts of its pupils.” As a nonsectarian Christian institution, Hillsdale College maintains “by precept and example” the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith.

The College also considers itself a trustee of our Western philosophical and theological inheritance tracing to Athens and Jerusalem, a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experiment of self-government under law.

By training the young in the liberal arts, Hillsdale College prepares students to become leaders worthy of that legacy. By encouraging the scholarship of its faculty, it contributes to the preservation of that legacy for future generations. By publicly defending that legacy, it enlists the aid of other friends of free civilization and thus secures the conditions of its own survival and independence.