“I will repeat again today that no one presently employed at the White House had any involvement, awareness or association with the Watergate case.” Just twenty-five years ago this month, with national elections less than three weeks away, President Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald L. Ziegler, sought with this declaration to clamp the lid on a burgeoning scandal.

Ziegler’s statement is a classic example of Watergate-ese. By saying “presently employed,” he carefully distanced the White House from the event that gave the scandal its name—a break-in on June 17, 1972, at the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in Washington’s Watergate complex. When reporters pressed on with questions about a recently revealed Republican campaign to disrupt Democratic primaries, Ziegler replied that “no one in the White House at any time directed activities of sabotage, spying, [or] espionage.” Here the key word was “directed.” The press secretary determinedly avoided “involved in.” Finally, all fine points of semantics aside, Ziegler’s statements were—as he himself was forced to concede six months later—not true anyway.

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