Geoffrey Carroll Shepard (born November 7, 1944) is an American lawyer, author and lecturer.
Geoffrey Carroll Shepard (born November 7, 1944) is an American lawyer, author and lecturer.
Geoff Shepard was born in Santa Barbara, California, and grew up in Southern California. His graduating class from the Irvine Elementary School in 1958 consisted of only thirty-two students. He graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach in 1962. He went on to Whittier College and was a member of the debate team, student body president and recipient of the Richard Nixon scholarship – which was awarded by Nixon himself at a luncheon in 1965 and had been partially funded by Nixon. [1]
Shepard received his JD from Harvard Law School, with honors, in 1969, where he was ranked in the top fifth of his class.
Upon graduation, Shepard was selected a 1969–1970 White House Fellow, one of fifteen young Americans chosen to spend that year studying the Executive Branch. He worked at the Treasury Department, as Special Assistant to the Secretary. [2]
In September 1970 Shepard was hired by John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, onto his Domestic Council staff. That staff, the counterpart to the National Security Council staff under Henry Kissinger, worked with the President on domestic issues of national importance. Shepard's immediate superior was Egil Krogh, later to become notorious as the head of the White House Plumbers. Shepard succeeded Krogh as Associate Director for General Government in 1972 and was re-appointed to that position by President Gerald R. Ford in 1974. He left the White House staff in 1975, having authored hundreds of policy memoranda for presidents Nixon and Ford and their senior staff.
During the unfolding of the Watergate scandal, Shepard also functioned as principal deputy to J. Fred Buzhardt, President Nixon's Watergate defense counsel. [2] In that capacity, he helped to transcribe the White House tapes, [1] was placed in charge of the Document Rooms holding the seized files of John Dean, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman and worked with Bryce Harlow and Dean Burch in their roles as White House Counselors. [2]
Geoff Shepard began his career as a lawyer in the insurance industry when he joined the Insurance Company of North America (INA) in 1977, where he became senior vice president and associate general counsel. INA merged with Connecticut General to form CIGNA in 1982, where Shepard was corporate secretary and then chief counsel of its property/casualty group.
Shepard joined the Reliance Insurance Group in 1991 as Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Reliance Insurance Company, a position he held through 1994, when he joined AXA-Equitable Company as President of the Corporate Division of Karr Barth Associates, its largest agency. Shepard retired from AXA-Equitable in 2011.
Shepard's first book, The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President, was published by Penguin Sentinel in 2008. [1]
Beginning in 2010, Shepard began arranging and producing a documentary series, "Nixon Legacy Forums," videotaped discussions of Nixon staff members discussing various Nixon Administration policy initiatives. The forums are co-sponsored by the Richard Nixon Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration. [3] Many also have been broadcast on C-SPAN's American History Channel. Links to almost three dozen of the forums on which Shepard has worked can be found on his website. [4] [5]
In August 2015, Shepard's second book The Real Watergate Scandal was published by Regnery Publishing. [6]
He taught a course at Temple University in Philadelphia in 2019, "Watergate Revisited, An Insider’s View." He did nine hours of Watergate interviews with Hugh Hewitt in 2020, "Watergate, Knowns and Unknowns." In October 2021, Shepard's third book, The Nixon Conspiracy, Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, was published by Bombardier Books.
Geoff and his wife, Saundra, live in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania. They have two adult sons.
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The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the administration of President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon's resignation. The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration's persistent attempts to cover up its involvement in the June 17, 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Washington, D.C., Watergate Office Building.
All the President's Men is a 1974 non-fiction book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two of the journalists who investigated the June 1972 break-in at the Watergate Office Building and the resultant political scandal for The Washington Post. The book chronicles the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein from Woodward's initial report on the Watergate break-in through the resignations of Nixon Administration officials H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman in April 1973, and the revelation of the Oval Office Watergate tapes by Alexander Butterfield three months later. It relates the events behind the major stories the duo wrote for the Post, naming some sources who had previously refused to be identified for their initial articles, notably Hugh Sloan. It also gives detailed accounts of Woodward's secret meetings with his source Deep Throat, whose identity was kept hidden for over 30 years. Gene Roberts, the former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times, has called the work of Woodward and Bernstein "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time."
Harry Robbins "Bob" Haldeman was an American political aide and businessman, best known for his service as White House Chief of Staff to President Richard Nixon and his consequent involvement in the Watergate scandal.
The Committee for the Re-election of the President, abbreviated CRP, but often mocked by the acronym CREEP, was, officially, a fundraising organization of United States President Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign during the Watergate scandal. In addition to fundraising, the organization also engaged in political sabotage against Nixon's opponents, the various Democratic politicians running in the election.
John Daniel Ehrlichman was an American political aide who served as the White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon. Ehrlichman was an important influence on Nixon's domestic policy, coaching him on issues and enlisting his support for environmental initiatives.
Louis Patrick Gray III was Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from May 3, 1972 to April 27, 1973. During this time, the FBI was in charge of the initial investigation into the burglaries that sparked the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon. Gray was nominated as permanent Director by Nixon on February 15, 1973, but failed to win Senate confirmation. He resigned as Acting FBI director on April 27, 1973, after he admitted to destroying documents that had come from convicted Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt's safe—documents received on June 28, 1972, 11 days after the Watergate burglary, and given to Gray by White House counsel John Dean.
Deep Throat is the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information in 1972 to Bob Woodward, who shared it with Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein were reporters for The Washington Post, and Deep Throat provided key details about the involvement of U.S. president Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal. In 2005, 31 years after Nixon's resignation and 11 years after Nixon's death, a family attorney stated that former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat. By then, Felt was suffering from dementia and had previously denied being Deep Throat, but Woodward and Bernstein then confirmed the attorney's claim.
John Wesley Dean III is an American former attorney who served as White House Counsel for U.S. President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. Dean is known for his role in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal and his subsequent testimony to Congress as a witness. His guilty plea to a single felony in exchange for becoming a key witness for the prosecution ultimately resulted in a reduced sentence, which he served at Fort Holabird outside Baltimore, Maryland. After his plea, he was disbarred.
The White House Plumbers, sometimes simply called the Plumbers, the Room 16 Project, or more officially, the White House Special Investigations Unit, was a covert White House Special Investigations Unit, established within a week of the publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971, during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Its task was to stop and/or respond to the leaking of classified information, such as the Pentagon Papers, to the news media. The work of the unit "tapered off" after the bungled "Ellsberg break-in" but some of its former operatives branched into illegal activities while still employed at the White House together with managers of the Committee to Re-elect the President, including the Watergate break-in and the ensuing Watergate scandal. The group has been described as Nixon's "fixers".
Alexander Porter Butterfield is a retired United States Air Force officer, public servant, and businessman. He served as the deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973. He revealed the White House taping system's existence on July 13, 1973, during the Watergate investigation but had no other involvement in the scandal. From 1973 to 1975, he served as administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Senate Watergate Committee, known officially as the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, was a special committee established by the United States Senate, S.Res. 60, in 1973, to investigate the Watergate scandal, with the power to investigate the break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and any subsequent cover-up of criminal activity, as well as "all other illegal, improper, or unethical conduct occurring during the controversial 1972 presidential election, including political espionage and campaign finance practices".
Gordon Creighton Strachan is an American attorney and political staffer who served as an aide to H.R. Haldeman, the chief of staff for President Richard Nixon and a figure in the Watergate scandal.
Richard Gordon Kleindienst was an American lawyer, politician, and U.S. Attorney General during the early stages of Watergate political scandal.
Egil "Bud" Krogh Jr. was an American lawyer who became infamous as an official of the Nixon Administration and who was imprisoned for his part in the Watergate Affair. He was Senior Fellow on Ethics and Leadership at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and Counselor to the Director at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership.
The Watergate Seven has come to refer to two different groups of people, both of them in the context of the Watergate scandal. Firstly, it can refer to the five men caught on June 17, 1972, burglarizing the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate complex, along with their two handlers, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who were Nixon campaign aides. All seven were tried before Judge John Sirica in January 1973.
The Watergate scandal refers to the burglary and illegal wiretapping of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in the Watergate complex, by members of President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign and the subsequent cover-up of the break-in resulting in Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, as well as other abuses of power by the Nixon White House that were discovered during the course of the scandal.
Henry E. Petersen was an attorney and United States federal government official. He served as Assistant U.S. Attorney General during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He also engaged in ethically questionable communications with Nixon and his staff, providing inside information about the Watergate investigation prior to the appointment of the Special Prosecutor.
Operation Sandwedge was a proposed clandestine intelligence-gathering operation against the political enemies of U.S. President Richard Nixon's administration. The proposals were put together by Nixon's Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, domestic affairs assistant John Ehrlichman and staffer Jack Caulfield in 1971. Caulfield, a former police officer, created a plan to target the Democratic Party and the anti-Vietnam War movement, inspired by what he believed to be the Democratic Party's employment of a private investigation firm.
Blind Ambition is a four-part American miniseries that aired on CBS from May 20, 1979 to May 23, 1979 focusing on the Watergate coverup and based on the memoirs of former White House counsel John Dean and his wife Maureen.
The Moorer-Radford Affair was a political scandal involving members of Joint Chiefs of Staff who operated an espionage operation against President Richard Nixon's Cabinet, from 1970 to 1971.
