Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Leonard Garment, Nixon Advisor, Dies at 89

Leonard Garment, the special counsel to U.S. President Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal, has died, the New York Times reported on Monday. He was 89.

Leonard Garment Image by wikipedia

Garment’s daughter, Ann Garment, confirmed the death to the newspaper. She said he died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan.

Garment, a Jewish lawyer and jazz fan, met Nixon in the early 1960s and were partners at a law firm. Garment played a major role in organizing Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, and, a year later, became his special counsel at the White House.

When the Watergate scandal broke, Garment played a central role in discouraging Nixon from destroying White House tapes and pushed unsuccessfully for the president’s early resignation in 1973, the Times reported.

Garment later recommended to Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, that the former president be pardoned.

Garment later went on to serve as assistant to President Ford, who named him U.S. representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, where he served until 1977.

He was also counselor to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, working with Ambassador Daniel Moynihan, from 1975 to 1976.

For more go to Haaretz

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.