Ron Ziegler, the press secretary to President Richard Nixon who dismissed the Watergate break-in as "a third-rate burglary," died Monday of a heart attack in Coronado, Calif. He was 63.

As the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters snowballed into a scandal that caused the 37th president to resign two years and two months later, Ziegler remained the ultimate Nixon loyalist.

As a fierce defender of the administration, Ziegler was criticized by reporters even before the Watergate burglary for being evasive and misleading. As Watergate unfolded, his relationship with the press corps became increasingly hostile.

"If my answers sound confusing, I think they are confusing because the questions are confusing and the situation is confusing -- and I'm not in a position to clarify it," he said at a White House press briefing on the Watergate affair in 1974.

Ziegler routinely dismissed as inaccurate reports by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they tied the scandal to top officials in the administration.

But the day after Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman and White House counsel John Dean resigned, Ziegler publicly apologized to Woodward and Bernstein.

"We would all have to say that mistakes were made in terms of comments. I was overenthusiastic in my comments about the Post, particularly if you look at them in the context of developments that have taken place," he said. "When we are wrong, we are wrong, as we were in that case."

He started to add, "But … ," and was cut off by a reporter who said, "Don't take it back, Ron."

Years after the scandal, he said that much of the information in his White House press briefings during Watergate was unintentionally false.

Still, he said, "I was right. It was a third-rate burglary. Who knew it was going to be anything more than that?"

His criticisms of Woodward and Bernstein's reporting on the Watergate scandal were vociferous. But in an e-book published last year in Salon.com, Ziegler was one of four people identified by Dean as potentially having been "Deep Throat," the chain-smoking insider who met the reporters in dark corners late at night to slip them secrets. The reporters have never revealed their source's identity.

Dean said Monday night it was his admiration for Ziegler's honesty that partly led him to suspect him as Deep Throat.

"He had this remarkable memory, which served him well," Dean said. "He also had an impossible job after Haldeman and Ehrlichman departed. He became Nixon's sounding board, and nothing could have been more difficult in those dark days."

Ziegler denied that he was the most infamous leak in American political history.

In 1978, he told an audience at Gonzaga University that he was one of the Watergate victims, because he "was not told what the facts were."

Obituaries Ron Ziegler, 63; Press Secretary Remained Loyal to Nixon Throughout Watergate February 11, 2003|Jessica Garrison | Times Staff Writer

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