Butterfield tells the Senate: every Oval Office word since 1971 has been on tape

By the summer of 1973, the Senate Watergate hearings had already heard from White House aides about hush money and cover-ups, but investigators still lacked hard proof of what Nixon knew. On July 13, 1973, a little-known White House deputy assistant named Alexander Butterfield answered a question from Senate committee staff with an admission nobody expected: every conversation in the Oval Office had been recorded since February 1971. Three days later, on July 16, he repeated the revelation in televised public testimony. The system had captured 3,432 hours of tape. Within weeks, the case stopped being about a break-in and became a fight over what was on those reels…