Leon Jaworski

Leon Jaworski (1905-1982), American lawyer and special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974). Jaworski played a key role in the legal battles that eventually forced Nixon to turn over audio tapes of conversations documenting Nixon's role in covering up White House involvement in the Watergate affair, which had begun with a burglary in June 1972 at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

Leon Jaworski was born in Waco, Texas. He earned an undergraduate law degree from Baylor University in 1925 and then became the youngest person ever admitted to the Texas bar. After receiving a master's degree in law from George Washington University in 1926, Jaworski joined a Texas law firm. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II (1939-1945) and helped to prosecute Nazi war criminals after the war. He was an assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy from 1962 to 1965. Jaworski served as president of the American Bar Association from 1971 to 1972.

Jaworski became the Watergate special prosecutor on November 1, 1973, in the wake of the so-called Saturday Night Massacre. The original prosecutor, Archibald Cox, had been dismissed and the office of special prosecutor abolished after Cox refused Nixon's offer to turn over written transcripts of tapes that had been subpoenaed. Public outrage over the dismissal led Nixon to obey a court order to turn over the tapes and to appoint Jaworski as the new special prosecutor. Of the nine tapes included in the court order, two were said by the White House to have never existed, and a third had a mysterious 18½-minute gap, which experts later determined to be the result of manual erasures. Nixon refused to comply with an April 1974 subpoena for additional tapes, instead releasing 1200 pages of edited transcripts of 42 taped conversations. Jaworski proceeded to obtain a subpoena for an additional 64 tapes, but Nixon again refused to turn over the recordings. Jaworski took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that the president had to surrender the evidence for use in the Watergate cover-up trial. The tapes provided evidence that Nixon had authorized the payment of “hush money” to the Watergate burglars to keep them from revealing White House involvement and had used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an effort to keep the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from thoroughly investigating the break-in. Jaworski oversaw the successful prosecution of individuals involved in the break-in and subsequent cover-up, as well as the prosecution of perpetrators of other “dirty tricks” against Nixon's enemies. Jaworski died in Whitely, Texas, in 1982 at the age of 77.

In April 1996, after more than two decades of bitter court battles that continued beyond Nixon's death in 1994, attorneys for the estate of the former president agreed to a slow but steady release of more than 3000 hours of secret Nixon White House tapes that had been kept in the National Archives and never made available to the public.