The death last month of a key figure in the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s recalls how that episode of corruption and criminality was rooted here in the Twin Cities. Apart from Washington, D.C., where most of the events occurred starting in mid-June 1972, this area can be considered Ground Zero for Watergate.
The series of events that led to the demise of the Nixon presidency, culminating in his resignation from office 26 months later, began on the night of Friday, June 16, 1972, and into the wee hours of the next morning, June 17. That was when a group of five burglars, aided by two lookouts, broke into the national headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate office complex along the Potomac in the nation’s capital.
Their motives have been questioned for years, but it appears they were seeking, on this third illegal entry, “dirt” to be used in the President’s campaign for re-election that year, headed by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, known fittingly by the acronym CREEP. For schoolchildren and older students today, the break-in and ensuing events take up only a small segment of their textbooks on modern American history. But the 50-plus generation who lived through it still hold vivid recollections of the crisis.
The recent incident that brings it back to mind is the passing on March 9, 2026, of 99-year-old Alexander Butterfield, a White House aide who oversaw the installation of the covert taping system whose revelation ultimately led to the President’s downfall. That disclosure occurred when Butterfield, then heading the Federal Aviation Administration, grudgingly but accurately described the system to an astonished Senate investigation committee during a highly-watched televised proceeding.
The inculpatory remarks on those tapes corroborated the assertions of the President’s centrality in the series of events clumped together under the Watergate rubric, prompting his resignation on August 9, 1974, in the face of imminent impeachment. But all that would not have occurred but for the role played by Minnesota men.
Money Men
The Twin Cities and suburbs were not only the source from which the Watergate tentacles extended, but in some respects, where they started and ended.
The legendary Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the scandal bit by bit over the course of several months. A crucial key early in their investigation was a trip to Miami that Woodward made to check out a story about a $25,000 check from a wealthy Minnesota businessman, Kenneth Dahlberg, that ended up in a bank account controlled by one of the Watergate burglars.
Woodward’s discovery and disclosure of the Dahlberg donation is graphically depicted in the Academy Award-winning movie All the President’s Men, based on the best-selling book of the same title. The story was also recounted in recent television series exploring Watergate, including the Julia Roberts-Sean Penn vehicle Gaslit.
The break-in funding check had intrigue written all over it. The man it came from, Dahlberg, happened to be the Midwest finance chair for CREEP. Dahlberg, who died in 2012, was a decorated World War II hero who had started a highly successful company known as Miracle-Ear, a pioneer in hearing aids that still operates in downtown Minneapolis today. Dahlberg’s company was located for a time in Golden Valley, a relationship reflected in the street named Dahlberg Drive near the intersection of Highways 100 and 55.
Dahlberg also headed finances for Minnesota’s Third Congressional District for Republican Clark MacGregor, who represented most of western Hennepin County. After losing a race for the Senate in 1970 to Hubert Humphrey, MacGregor played a key role in the Watergate drama as the head of CREEP, succeeding former Attorney General John Mitchell. While the Minneapolis-born MacGregor served as a spokesman for the committee, many of his statements turned out to be misleading or false—what might be labeled “fake news” today.
Another Minnesota money man was Maurice Stans, a Shakopee native and Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon administration. Besides his cabinet role, he was a chief fundraiser for the Nixon team, which led him into legal trouble. He was tried for bribery alongside Treasury Secretary John Connally, though both were eventually acquitted.
Business Battles
Watergate ended here with a pair of courtroom business battles. The special counsel brought two criminal charges in Minnesota against prominent figures in the business community. In a criminal prosecution in Federal court in Minneapolis, Dwayne Andreas, head of the powerful grain company Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), was charged with campaign finance violations. The mogul was acquitted in a non-jury trial.
The Watergate counsel also failed in a financial criminal charge against Maplewood-based 3M for allegedly improper campaign donations made to the coffers of Hubert Humphrey. U.S. District Court Judge Donald Alsop in St. Paul dismissed the case because the company had previously entered an arrangement with the government dismissing other charges.
From Watergate’s inauspicious beginning—funded by a check from a businessman in Golden Valley—to its concluding finance-related litigation, Minneapolis and its surrounding communities experienced close links to the scandal that shook the nation more than 50 years ago.
