COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Jeb Stuart Magruder, a Watergate conspirator-turned-minister who claimed in later years to have heard President Richard Nixon order the infamous break-in, has died. He was 79.

Magruder died Sunday in Danbury, Conn., Hull Funeral Service director Jeff Hull said Friday.

Magruder, a businessman when he began working for the Republican president, later became a minister, serving in California, Ohio and Kentucky. He also served as a church fundraising consultant.

He spent seven months in prison for lying about the involvement of Nixon's re-election committee in the 1972 break-in at Washington's Watergate complex, which eventually led to the president's resignation.

In a 2008 interview, Magruder said he was at peace with his place in history. The interview came after he pleaded guilty to reckless operation of a motor vehicle after a 2007 car crash.

"I don't worry about Watergate, I don't worry about news articles," Magruder said. "I go to the court, I'm going to be in the paper -- I know that."

Magruder, who moved to suburban Columbus in 2003, served as Nixon's deputy campaign director, as an aide to Nixon Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and as deputy communications director at the White House.

Magruder said in 2003 that he was meeting with John Mitchell, the former attorney general running Nixon's re-election campaign, when he heard the president tell Mitchell to go ahead with the plan to break into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building.

Magruder previously had gone no further than saying that Mitchell approved the plan to get into the Democrats' office and bug the telephone of the party chairman, Larry O'Brien.

He said he met with Mitchell on March 30, 1972, and discussed a break-in plan by G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent who was finance counsel at the re-election committee. Mitchell asked Magruder to call Haldeman to see "if this is really necessary."

Haldeman said it was, Magruder said, and then asked to speak to Mitchell. The two men talked, and then "the president gets on the line," Magruder said.

Magruder said he could hear Nixon tell Mitchell, "John, ... we need to get the information on Larry O'Brien, and the only way we can do that is through Liddy's plan. And you need to do that."

Historians dismiss the notion as unlikely, saying there was no evidence Nixon directly ordered the break-in.

Magruder, who was born in New York City on Nov. 5, 1934, held sales and management jobs at several companies, including paper company Crown Zellerbach and Jewel Food Stores. He also became active in Republican politics.

He received a master's degree in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1981, then worked at a Presbyterian church in California; First Community Church in suburban Columbus; and First Presbyterian Church, a 200-year-old parish, in Lexington, Ken.

But he could never fully leave the scandal behind.

In 1988, Dana Rinehart, then Columbus mayor, appointed Magruder head of a city ethics commission and put him in charge of leading a year-long honesty campaign. An ethics commission "headed by none other than (are you ready America?) Jeb Stuart Magruder," Time magazine quipped.

At Dallas-based RSI-Ketchum, a church fundraising consulting group, Magruder shielded his Watergate reputation at first but later opened up because of interest in it, said Jim Keith, the company's former senior vice president.

"He finally grew where he was open enough to be able to talk with them about it," said Keith, who is now retired in Dallas.

In his 1974 book, An American Life: One Man's Road to Watergate, Magruder blamed his role in the scandal on ambition and losing sight of a moral compass.

"Instead of applying our private morality to public affairs, we accepted the President's standards of political behavior, and the results were tragic for him and for us," he wrote.

A Section on 05/17/2014