Alexander Butterfield
American military officer and government official (1926–2026)
Alexander Porter Butterfield (April 6, 1926 – March 9, 2026) was an American Air Force officer, public official and businessman. From 1969 to 1973, Butterfield served as deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon. On July 13, 1973, during the Watergate investigation, he revealed the existence of Nixon's White House taping system. Butterfield was the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration from 1973 to 1975.
Early life and Air Force career
Butterfield was born on April 6, 1926, in Pensacola, Florida, to Susan Armistead Alexander Butterfield and United States Navy pilot (later Rear Admiral) Horace B. Butterfield. He grew up in Coronado, California, and left home in 1943. Butterfield enrolled in college at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became a friend of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. He left the university to join the United States Air Force in 1948.
Initially, Butterfield was stationed at Las Vegas Air Force Base (now Nellis Air Force Base) as a fighter-gunnery instructor before being transferred to the 86th Fighter Wing in Munich, West Germany, in November 1951, where he was a member of the Skyblazers jet fighter acrobatic team. He later served as the operations officer of a fighter-interceptor squadron in Knoxville, Tennessee, before being promoted to commander of a fighter squadron at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Alexander Butterfield” is american military officer and government official (1926–2026). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Alexander, Butterfield and American, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american military officer and government official (1926–2026)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1668455. VIAF identifies the subject as 68142856. The Library of Congress control number is n93069939. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926, 2026, 1969 and 1973.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Alexander Butterfield”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Alexander Butterfield primary sources, Alexander Butterfield archive and Alexander research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Alexander Butterfield”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Alexander Butterfield” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.