Robert Mardian: Robert Mardian, the attorney for Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President whose conviction of conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Watergate scandal was overturned on appeal, has died of lung cancer at his holiday home in California. He was 82.
Mardian, a former assistant attorney general, consistently denied he was involved in Nixon administration attempts to cover up its involvement in the break-in and attempted bugging of the US Democratic headquarters office at the Watergate complex in June 1972.
He was assigned to handle the legal issues growing out of the break-in. He testified during his 1974 trial, but said he did not know about the break-in before it happened. He also testified that former attorney general John Mitchell admitted approving a $250,000 budget for G Gordon Liddy, who led the team of burglars.
Mardian testified he was golfing on the west coast when he learned of the break-in. He was sentenced to 10 months to three years on a single count of conspiracy. In the same trial, Mitchell and White House aides John Ehrlichman and HR Haldeman were also convicted. Mardian had tried to avoid testifying at the trial on the grounds of attorney-client privilege.
Upon the verdict, the Washington Post reported that he "seemed stunned . . . Mardian seemed devastated by the jury verdict against him and sat glued to his seat in the courtroom until it was almost empty".
He left public life in late 1972 and, except for his trial in 1974 and an appearance at Mitchell's funeral in 1988, he had mostly stayed out of the spotlight.
Mardian was a powerful figure in Washington, described at the time as "one of the most visible and vocal spokesmen for law and order" in Nixon's administration. At the justice department, he was in charge of reviving the internal security division, which tapped phones of reporters and launched investigations of alleged subversives. He also led the inquiry of the leak and publication of the top-secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers.
Mardian told the senate select Watergate committee in 1973 that four days after the Watergate burglary, Liddy told him that he was acting on the "express authority of the president of the United States with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency". That was the first time, Mardian said, that he learned of the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to a number of newspapers; the federal investigation of that leak is generally regarded as the start of the Nixon administration's abuses of power.
Mardian told the Senate committee he learned the day after the Watergate break-in that there was a budget for "dirty tricks and black advance", but he did not understand that "black advance" meant an attempt to disrupt the advance operations of political opponents.
Mardian was born in Pasadena, California, in 1923, the youngest son of Armenian immigrants. He attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, but his studies were interrupted by the second World War. After the war, he graduated from the University of Southern California Law School in 1949. He joined a private law practice in Pasadena, later joining Wesco Financial Corp, and was executive vice- president and general counsel for a subsidiary from 1962 to 1969.
In 1970, he was appointed by Nixon as executive director of the cabinet committee on education and in 1970, was confirmed by the senate as an assistant attorney general.
He left government work in November 1972, moving to Phoenix to join his brothers in the family business. He retired in 2002.
Survivors include his wife of 60 years, Dorothy, three sons and 10 grandchildren.
Robert Mardian: born October 23rd, 1923; died July 17th, 2006