Jeb Stuart Magruder, Watergate figure, 79

Jeb Stuart Magruder, 79, a Watergate conspirator turned minister, who claimed in later years to have heard President Richard M. Nixon order the infamous break-in, died Sunday in Danbury, Conn.

Mr. 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 fund-raising 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 AP 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 following 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."

In 2003, in a PBS documentary and an AP interview, Mr. Magruber said that he was meeting with John Mitchell, the former attorney general running the Nixon 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.

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

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

But Mr. Magruder stuck to his guns in the 2008 AP interview, saying historians had it wrong.

After Watergate, he became a born-again Christian, an experience he described in his 1978 biography, From Power to Peace.

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

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