Herbert Kalmbach, President Richard Nixon's personal attorney who paid hush money to Watergate burglars and later served prison time for breaking campaign-finance laws and selling ambassadorships, has died. He was 95.
He died Sept. 15 in Newport Beach, Calif., according to a death notice published in the Los Angeles Times on Friday.
A longtime fundraiser for and friend of the president, Kalmbach became Nixon's lawyer after turning down an offer to become undersecretary of commerce in the first Nixon administration.
As the 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel developed into a political scandal that would take down Nixon, Kalmbach emerged as a shadowy figure who controlled millions of dollars in campaign money.
He was a witness at the nationally broadcast Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, where he told of raising and distributing more than $200,000 to the burglars on the orders of White House counsel John Dean.
During a 1974 federal prosecution of five defendants, Judge John Sirica said the payments were "to hush up these people," while Kalmbach, a cooperating witness, insisted that the money was for "attorney fees and family support."
He told the Watergate committee about following White House orders to give hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to men he'd not previously met, in covert meetings in hotel and bank lobbies. Asked by Sen. Herman Talmadge of Georgia if he knew what the purpose of the money was, Kalmbach replied, "I did not."
He also dispensed funds to pay Donald Segretti for "dirty tricks" meant to discredit Democratic candidates in a 1970 election,
