Powerful figure in the Nixon regime

Irish Times; Jul 29, 2006

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