Wiggins died of cardiac arrest on March 2, 2000, in Las Vegas, Nevada, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
(meta data) TITLE: Charles Wiggins, 72, Dies; Led Nixon's Defense in Hearings - The New York Times (meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.nytimes.com/by/eric-pace (meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2000-03-08T00:00:00-05:00 Skip to contentSkip to site indexU.S.Log InToday's PaperU.S.|Charles Wiggins, 72, Dies; Led Nixon's Defense in Hearings Supported by # Charles Wiggins, 72, Dies; Led Nixon's Defense in Hearings By Eric Pace Judge Charles E. Wiggins, a Republican congressman from California who was influential in the Watergate hearings and switched from defending President Richard M. Nixon to supporting impeachment, died on Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 72 and had lived in Las Vegas. The cause was cardiac arrest, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Wiggins was elected to the House in 1967 from a district in Southern California and served until 1978 when he retired to resume practicing law. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was a senior judge at the time of his death. As a congressman, Mr. Wiggins was considered one of Nixon's staunchest defenders. Along with two other members of the House Judiciary Committee, he led the president's defense when the Watergate hearings began in the summer of 1974. The strategy was to construe the evidence as narrowly as possible, require ironclad proof and propose benign explanations of information damaging to the president. At the time, The New York Times described Mr. Wiggins as ''a silky Southern Californian who would feel at home in the pages of a Ross Macdonald detective novel.'' In weeks of closed Judiciary Committee hearings and in six days of televised debate in July, Mr. Wiggins argued that none of the evidence linked Nixon directly to a crime. But his view changed abruptly on Aug. 5, 1974 when Nixon conceded that he had helped conceal the Watergate break-in. The next morning, a front-page headline on The New York Times noted Mr. Wiggins's change of heart: ''Wiggins for Impeachment; Others in G.O.P. Join Him.'' The Times reported that ''Representative Charles E. Wiggins, President Nixon's strongest defender during the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment proceedings, and many other influential House Republicans'' had announced that ''they would vote for impeachment,'' and that Mr. Wiggins and members of the House Republican leadership had expressed what The Times called ''a deep sense of disillusionment.'' In a statement outlining his new position, Mr. Wiggins said there was no longer any doubt that the president had agreed to a ''plan of action'' to obstruct the Watergate investigation. ''These facts standing alone are legally sufficient in my opinion to sustain at least one count against the president of conspiracy to obstruct justice,'' he said. Because of that, Mr. Wiggins said, he had reached the ''painful conclusion'' that it was in the national interest for Nixon to resign. Nixon did so on Aug. 9, 1974. Afterward, Mr. Wiggins wrote that it had been the right decision. ''Such a conclusion was a sad and personally wrenching one for me to reach, because I regarded -- and still do regard -- myself as a friend of the president and his family and one still willing, proudly, to claim his achievements,'' Mr. Wiggins wrote. One of his best-known rulings as a judge was in 1994, in Holmes v. California National Guard, which upheld the Pentagon's ''don't ask, don't tell'' policy. Under the policy, the military may not inquire into a soldier's sex life unless there is clear evidence of homosexual conduct, but gays who volunteer the information can be discharged. In 1998, when Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the consequences of perjury, seeking to stoke support for impeaching President Clinton on that charge, Judge Wiggins told the committee, ''I'd recommend you not vote for impeachment.'' He said the evidence against Mr. Clinton was vague. Charles Edward Wiggins was born in El Monte, Calif., and received a bachelor's degree in 1953 from the University of Southern California and a law degree from there in 1956. He practiced law in California and in Washington and served as mayor of El Monte from 1964 to 1966. Mr. Wiggins married Yvonne L. Boots in 1946. She died in 1971. Judge Wiggins is survived by his second wife, the former Betty J. Koontz, whom he married in 1972; two sons, Steve, of Aspen, Colo., and Scott, of Seattle; two stepsons, Gary Burnett of Henderson, Nev., and Craig Burnett of Santa Rosa, Calif.; a stepdaughter, Darla Colton of Scottsdale, Ariz.; a sister, Lynn Burdick of Las Vegas; and 10 grandchildren. We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports, and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com. A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 24 of the National edition with the headline: Charles Wiggins, 72, Dies; Led Nixon's Defense in Hearings. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe ## Site Index ### news ### opinion ### arts ### living ### more ### Subscribe
train17058
Charles E. Wiggins
Death.