Herbert L. “Bart” Porter, the director of scheduling for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) (see May 1971), gives a statement to the FBI about his knowledge of the Watergate burglary. Porter reluctantly does as his boss and friend, Jeb Magruder, has instructed him to, and lies to the agents. Magruder had assured Porter that White House and CREEP aide G. Gordon Liddy is solely responsible for the burglary, and that no one else—certainly not Magruder—knows anything about the incidspect, Porter calls Magruder a “master seducer” who used their friendship to help him dodge responsibility for his actions. Magruder criticized Liddy for being a loose cannon, and for spending huge sums of campaign money on “dirty tricks” without higher authorization. According to Magruder, Watergate was jeopardizing the campaign, and needed to be brought into focus. “Call it what you might,” Porter will write, “‘an embellishment of the truth,’ ‘a little white lie,’ or ‘a substitute of one perfectly legal activity for another legal activity’—I did not like any part of it.” But Porter believes Magruder’s protestations of innocence and non-involvement. When the FBI asks Porter about the purpose of money that had passed through his hands from Hugh Sloan, CREEP’s treasurer, to Liddy, Porter answers as instructed: for political intelligence-gathering. Porter believes that his ‘little white lie’ is the end of his involvement in the Watergate investigation, a belief that is quite wrong. [Harper’s, 10/1974]