Jeb Stuart Magruder

Jeb Stuart Magruder - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Jeb Stuart Magruder

Jeb Stuart Magruder (November 5, 1934 – May 11, 2014) was an American businessman and high-level political operative in the Republican Party who served time in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal.

This profile of Jeb Stuart Magruder covers Early Life and Family Background, Marriage and Family Life, Business Ventures, White House staff and Committee to Re-elect the President.

He served President Richard Nixon in various capacities, including acting as special assistant to the President for domestic policy development, and later as deputy director of the president's 1972 re-election campaign, Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP). In August 1973, Magruder pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to wiretap, obstruct justice and defraud the United States. He served seven months in federal prison.

Magruder later attended Princeton Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He spoke publicly about ethics and his role in the Watergate scandal. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he gave interviews in which he changed his accounts of actions by various participants in the Watergate coverup, including claiming that Nixon ordered the break-ins.

Early Life and Family Background of Jeb Stuart Magruder

Jeb Stuart Magruder was born and grew up in the Fort Wadsworth section of Staten Island, New York, the son of middle-class printing company owner Donald Dilworth Magruder and his wife, Edith Woolverton Magruder.

Magruder's paternal family had roots in southern Maryland, and his ancestors sided with the Confederacy during the American Civil War. His great-grandfather smuggled shoes for the Confederacy during the conflict, and Magruder's father, a Civil War buff and horseman, named Magruder after Confederate general and cavalry officer J.E.B. Stuart. "My father's political views were much those of a conservative Southerner, including his views on race," Magruder wrote in his autobiography.

Magruder's grandfather Robert Magruder moved from Baltimore to Staten Island in 1899, eventually becoming president of Johnson Shipyard Corporation in Mariner's Harbor. In 1921, but he was indicted for bank fraud related to the construction of World War I cargo ships. He was later convicted and spent six months in prison, depleting the family's financial resources.

Magruder's father served in World War I in France with the 27th Infantry Division and returned to work for his father's shipyard corporation as well as a printing company he had started with his brother. He married Edith Woolverton in 1923. Magruder was the second of their two children, born in November 1934 after his brother, Don, was born in June 1930.

Magruder attended public schools on Staten Island. He was an honor student at Curtis High School and excelled in tennis and swimming.

After two years at Williams College, where he joined Phi Delta Theta and competed on the swimming team, Magruder took a leave of absence to serve in the U.S. Army. But he was kicked out of Officer Candidate School of the United States Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, only weeks before graduation for going AWOL by skipping a study hall to take the daughter of a colonel out in a new Chevrolet. He was then stationed in South Korea. He returned to Williams in the fall of 1956 and earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1958.

Magruder started at IBM after college, but dropped out of its training program after only a few days. He moved to San Francisco, got a sales job with the Crown Zellerbach Corporation, and began dating Gail Barnes Nicholas, then a student at the University of California at Berkeley. Magruder and Nicholas, the daughter of a prominent attorney from Los Angeles, were married in Los Angeles on October 17, 1959. Around the same time, Crown Zellerbach transferred Magruder to Kansas City to sell the company's paper products throughout Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.

Marriage and Family Life of Jeb Stuart Magruder

Magruder married Gail Barnes Nicholas on October 17, 1959, in Los Angeles. The couple had four children. They were divorced in 1984.

Magruder married Patricia Newton on February 28, 1987, in Columbus, Ohio. They were divorced in May 2003.

Business Ventures

Magruder became involved in Kansas City as a campaign manager for the Republican Party during the 1960 election campaign, working as chairman of an urban ward.

He moved to Chicago in 1961 to attend the University of Chicago's night MBA program and took a job as the manager of the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton's local office. In Chicago, he again was involved with politics and the Republican Party. Magruder served as a ward chairman for Donald Rumsfeld's 1962 Illinois's 13th congressional district United States House of Representatives Republican primary campaign. Rumsfeld won the primary and the seat in Congress.

In 1962 Magruder moved from Booz Allen Hamilton to Jewel, a regional grocery firm. During his nearly four years with them, he was promoted to merchandise manager.

Magruder became involved with the Illinois organization of the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign in late 1963, but became disillusioned with Goldwater's political views. He worked briefly as campaign manager for Richard Ogilvie's 1966 campaign for president of the Cook County Board of Supervisors. The political workload, combined with work pressures, caused Magruder to end employment with Jewel.

In mid-1966, he returned to California, to begin a job with the Broadway Stores. In mid-1967, he served as Southern California coordinator for the Richard Nixon presidential campaign. He left early in 1968 due to internal organizational problems.

Magruder entered partnership during early 1969 with two other entrepreneurs to start two new businesses, and became president and chief executive officer of these firms.

White House staff

Magruder was appointed to the White House staff in 1969, as special assistant to the president, and moved with his family to Washington, D.C. Magruder was recruited to the White House staff by Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, who gave Magruder the task of helping "organize a more effective White House public relations program." In 1970, he moved to the Office of Communications, serving as deputy director under Communications Director Herbert G. Klein.

In that role, Magruder authored an October 17, 1969, memorandum to Haldeman entitled "The Shotgun versus the Rifle" which suggested that the Nixon administration take systematic action against media outlets perceived as unfavorable rather than complain to individual editors and reporters after stories that annoyed the president and his deputies: "I suggested that we might begin an unofficial monitoring system of the media through the FCC to see if unfair coverage could be documented; we might have the Justice Department's antitrust division look into possible violations among various news empires; we might have the IRS investigate the networks and newspapers most hostile to us; we might play favorites with the media, as I noted, the Kennedy Administration had; finally, we might have the Republican National Committee set up a major letter-writing program." Magruder later cast the memo as an attempt to dissuade Haldeman from pressing the White House communications staff to continually hector the press for perceived unfair coverage.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeb_Stuart_Magruder), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.