At that early stage in the Watergate cover-up, the White House understood that Wright Patman posed more of a threat than The Washington Post and other news media. Patman's thesis was simple: an investigation into the source of the brand-new hundred-dollar bills found on the team of men arrested inside the Watergate office complex, where they were re-installing a wiretap on the telephones in the Democratic National Committee headquarters, would lead directly to Nixon's re-election committee. This illicit financing (it had been arranged by Maurice Stans, finance director of the re-election campaign, and G. Gordon Liddy, a campaign counsel) eventually did lead to the unraveling of Watergate. Nixon's concern about the link between the Watergate break-in and the money was so great that one week after the Watergate burglary, he ordered the CIA to stop the FBI's investigation into the source of the money; his order, recorded in a June 23, 1972, tape that the Supreme Court forced him to release in early August of 1974, was the famed "smoking gun" disclosure that effectively ended his presidency. As of the fall of 1972, it was clear that Nixon had no intention of allowing Patman to subpoena witnesses, such as Stans, and perhaps learn the truth. Gerald Ford's role in stopping Patman was pivotal.
That Ford would cooperate was assumed, in the view of the men close to Nixon. Alexander P. Butterfield, the former Air Force colonel who, as a personal aide to Nixon, spent hundreds of hours in the Oval Office, said in a recent interview, "Nixon had Ford totally under his thumb. He was the tool of the Nixon Administration—like a puppy dog. They used him when they had to—wind him up and he'd go 'Arf, Arf.'" Butterfield was fired by Ford in 1975 as administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, a move that he believes was punishment for his revelation of the existence of the White House tape recordings to the Senate Watergate Committee in July of 1973.
