Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [224]
Nixon had railed about this in late June 1971, seated in the Oval Office at the mahogany desk that had once been Woodrow Wilson’s. With him was his aide Charles Colson. ‘I don’t give a damn how it is done,’ Colson recalled the President saying, ‘do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further unauthorized disclosures; I don’t want to be told why it can’t be done … I want to know who is behind this … I want results. I want it done, whatever the cost.’
They did do it, and the cost, when it all came out two years later, would be monstrous. Nixon’s frustration over Edgar’s failings, or what the President saw as failings, was the first step on the road that led to the loss of his presidency.
Two young men, Egil Krogh and David Young, were installed in a warren of underground offices in the Executive Office Building next to the White House. They had a conference room, a special alarm system, a three-way combination safe and ‘sterile’ phones. And since their job was to plug leaks, Young indulged a whimsical impulse. He fixed a sign on the door that read ‘Mr Young – Plumber.’ As Plumbers they were to be remembered.
The cast of characters is now well known. The chain of command went from Nixon to Ehrlichman to Krogh and Young, with Colson and the President’s Counsel, John Dean, putting in their nickel’s worth. In the field, assigned to do the White House’s dirty work, were Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy. Hunt was a fifty-two-year-old career CIA officer who had, technically, retired from the Agency and gone freelance. Liddy had served as an Assistant District Attorney in New York, then as a special assistant in the Nixon Treasury Department, since leaving the FBI in 1962.
Liddy was obsessed, by his own account, with guns, violence and the elemental power of the human will. He liked to discuss the more exotic ways of killing, and reportedly claimed he had killed a man while serving in the FBI. A former FBI official described Liddy as both ‘wild man’ and ‘superklutz,’ qualities that made him well suited for work in the Nixon White House in 1971. Krogh took him on board, at $26,000 a year, to coordinate field operations for the President’s Plumbers. Liddy had entered a world of conspiracies.
His predecessor, John Caulfield, had worked on such projects as setting up an apartment rigged with bugging devices, for the seduction of a woman who might provide seamy information on Senator Edward Kennedy. Charles Colson had recently urged Caulfield to set fire to the Brookings Institution, as a cover for the theft of documents related to the Ellsberg case.
While that scheme was abandoned, an equally crazy one was not. On the night of September 4, 1971, under the command of Liddy and Hunt, three Cuban exiles broke into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. His files, the Plumbers hoped, would produce evidence of conspiracy in the Pentagon Papers case along with sex material with which to smear Ellsberg. According to Ehrlichman, the President knew of the planned break-in in advance, as he had known of the plot to firebomb the Brookings Institution.
The operation against Ellsberg failed. The Cuban hired hands ransacked the psychiatrist’s records only to emerge empty-handed. Their fruitless crime would one day become a major part of the Watergate scandal and lead to jail sentences for almost everyone involved. In the fall of 1971, however, it remained a dark secret. Any outsider who learned it would gain extraordinary power over the President. And Edgar had the secret.
He knew because, in his anger about Edgar’s ‘foot-dragging’ over Ellsberg, Nixon had told him. ‘It was obvious,’ Ehrlichman told the Senate Watergate Committee, ‘that the President had, at Mr Krogh’s request, shaken up the Director