'Life Lessons' From a White House Plumber

DATE September 17, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Egil "Bud" Krogh, the first official of the Nixon
administration to plead guilty to Watergate crimes, on his new
book, "Integrity," and how it relates to Washington today
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest, Egil "Bud" Krogh, was the
first official of the Nixon administration to plead guilty to crimes
associated with the Watergate scandal. While working at the White House in
1971, Krogh headed the secret investigative unit that was known as "the
plumbers" because they were supposed to stop leaks of sensitive information.
While Krogh was in charge the plumbers broken into the office of Daniel
Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Fielding. This was after Ellsberg had
leaked The Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Krogh eventually pleaded
guilty to conspiring to violate Dr. Fielding's rights. Krogh served six
months in jail and was disbarred, though he later regained his law license and
returned to practice in Seattle.

Krogh says he's written about his experiences after more than 30 years because
he believes officials in Washington today need to think more about their duty
to the public and less about blind loyalty to their superiors. Daniel
Ellsberg wrote a forward to Krogh's book in which he says, "I would be glad if
every public servant were to read and learn from this memoir." Bud Krogh's new
book is called "Integrity." He spoke with our frequent guest host Dave Davies.

DAVE DAVIES, host:

Well, Bud Krogh, welcome to FRESH AIR. Tell us how you came to work at the
Nixon White House.

Mr. EGIL "BUD" KROGH: Well, it came about because of, really, a long family
friendship with John Ehrlichman and his family. After the election in 1968,
John had served as tour director on that campaign. He came to Seattle, where
I was working in his law firm at the time. I'd been there about three months
since getting out of law school. He came into my office and he put his feet
up on my desk and said, `Well, do you like your work here?' And I said, `Yes,
sir, I do.' And he said, `Well, I've been appointed counsel to the president
in the new administration, and would you consider leaving the law firm and
coming to Washington, DC, to be staff assistant to the counsel to the
president?' `Yes!' That's about how long it took me from the question to say
`yes.' And right after that meeting, he said, `You've got about three days,'
and three days later I found myself in New York City working in Richard
Nixon's transition office in preparation for his new term, working out of the
Hotel Pierre.

DAVIES: And soon you're at the White House at age 29. Heady stuff.

Mr. KROGH: That's correct. It was pretty heady stuff, that's correct.

DAVIES: You'd done a tour in the Navy and law school so you had some life
experience under your belt. And I know that you worked on a number of
different policy areas, including crime in the District of Columbia and the
international drug trade, but in July of '71 John Ehrlichman called you into
the office and as a particularly sensitive assignment. What did he want you
to do?

Mr. KROGH: Well, he gave me a large file, a bucket file, that had "Pentagon
Papers" on the file, and he said, `The president is going to set up a special
investigations unit to find out everything that we can find out about why The
Pentagon Papers, which had been classified top secret--it was a history of the
Vietnam War up through the Johnson administration--why those papers were
released to The New York Times. He told me that the president viewed this as
a matter of the highest national security importance. He told me that Dr.
Henry Kissinger was going to assign David Young, one of his special
assistants, to the unit to sort of be the co-director with me, and that I was
to put that unit together right away.

And Mr. Ehrlichman told me, he said, `We want you to pursue this with utmost
zeal. This is something that the president feels very strongly about and he
would like you, before you get started, to read the first chapter in his book
"Six Crises" on his investigation of Alger Hiss.'

DAVIES: So you read the chapter on Alger Hiss, who was this State Department
official who was convicted as a Soviet spy that Nixon had investigated. What
did you make of Nixon's insisting that you read this chapter?

Mr. KROGH: Well, I took from his assignment to read that chapter on "Six
Crises" about Alger Hiss that we were to pursue this investigation as
thoroughly and as comprehensively as we possibly could, as he had pursued the
investigation of Alger Hiss, who subsequently was convicted for perjury. I
also derived from reading that chapter that the president viewed the release
of The Pentagon Papers as really a national security crisis, as he had viewed
his investigation of Alger Hiss as bearing directly on the nation's security.
So I took both of those messages away from reading the chapter.

DAVIES: You know, one of the fascinating things about your story is that, I
mean, you didn't get direct instructions from Nixon at this point, but because
Nixon secretly recorded so many of his conversations and because the Watergate
scandal revealed them to the public, you were able later to go back and review
what Nixon himself said about this assignment.

Mr. KROGH: That's right.

DAVIES: What did you learn?

Mr. KROGH: Well, I went back afterwards and I read the transcripts and in
some cases listened to the tapes of the actual conversations where he was
describing how he wanted this investigation to go forward, and he said he
wanted somebody who was, I think he would say, just as ruthless as he was, who
was willing to set everything aside and focus on this directly. He also said
that he wanted someone who was a real SOB. And I didn't know that he had said
that at the time. I wasn't in the meetings where those words were used.

And I always pondered later, you know, `why me?' Why would he pick me to be
the head of that unit, because he had other candidates on the White House
staff who, I think in retrospect, were probably a lot more suited for that
kind of assignment. I think he picked me, in part, because he knew I was very
loyal to him and to John Ehrlichman. I was pretty diligent at the work that I
did, and he felt that I would carry it out.

DAVIES: Now, this outfit was called the Special Investigations Unit. We now
know it as the plumbers, right?

Mr. KROGH: Yes.

DAVIES: Those who fix leaks.

Mr. KROGH: And we got that name because David Young was talking with his
mother-in-law--he was my co-director of the White House plumbers--and she
asked him what he was working on and he said, `Well, you know we're involved
in plugging leaks here in the White House.' And she said something, and I
paraphrase, `Oh how nice. Well, we have a carpenter in the family. Now we
have a plumber.' And he thought that was quite funny and he made a little sign
up that had plumbers on it and put it on the wall just to the right of our
door in our office, and that's how we became known as the plumbers.

DAVIES: So G. Gordon Liddy comes to work at the unit. Now, he is a
legendary figure of Watergate. I mean, could you see the guy that we later
came to know as Gordon Liddy in that early experience? I mean, he comes
across as, you know, fanatically dedicated, ruthless. Did you...

Mr. KROGH: Yes.

DAVIES: ...see him that way?

Mr. KROGH: I did not. At the time that I hired Gordon, brought him to the
White House, I saw him as a man who was a dedicated supporter of Richard
Nixon. Conservative in his views, that's true, but did not sense the
ruthlessness or even maybe the sort of the fanatical intensity that he
exhibited later on. I saw him as an extremely able person, a very good
writer, by the way, who wrote some memoranda when he was on the White House
Special Investigations Unit about the FBI that were classic, that were just
viewed as right on in terms of describing the problems that the administration
was having with the Bureau at the time. Those memoranda got to the president,
who read them. And one of them, I know, Ehrlichman called me up and said,
`Well, that memorandum from Mr. Liddy came back with A-pluses all over it.'
So I wasn't really aware, I think, of the potential for fanaticism that I
think came out later.

DAVIES: My guest is Egil Bud Krogh. He was written a new book reflecting on
the lessons of his experiences in the Watergate scandal. It's called
"Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House."

Now, there was the leak of The Pentagon Papers, which infuriated Nixon. And
then there was another leak that involved a, you know, a potential American
proposal in Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviets that got printed
in The New York Times that sent Nixon over the top. And, you know, your job
in this unit, at that point it seemed, was to do, arguably a legitimate
government function, which was to figure out who was, you know, divulging, you
know, official classified information improperly. Did you think at this point
that you were going to be getting into anything illegal or improper?

Mr. KROGH: No. No, I didn't. And there was a meeting with the president on
July 24th, 1971 about that leak of the United States fallback position in the
negotiations with the Soviets in the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks that
were then going on in Helsinki, and I was in my office on a Saturday morning,
and John Ehrlichman called me up and said, `The president wants to see us
immediately. Drop whatever you're doing and come on over.' So I went over to
the West Wing and we walked into the Oval Office, and the president was pacing
behind his chair and slamming his fist into his hand and he looked about as
angry as I'd ever seen him. And his concern was that this release of the
fallback position in the SALT talks was going to jeopardize his ability to get
a good deal for the United States in those negotiations.

And I think it was a proper exercise of governmental authority to try to find
out who was involved in that and try to stop those leaks from occurring in the
future. And he conflated that the SALT leak investigation and The Pentagon
Papers and said during that meeting that this was national security and this
will not be allowed, and we will just not allow it. And made me feel, to some
degree personally responsible for trying to find out why those leaks had
occurred and to stop them from happening in the future.

DAVIES: So you set about arranging for polygraph examinations of various
government officials who are suspected of perhaps having provided information
to the media. But at some point, the notion of getting the confidential files
of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist emerges. Where did that idea come from?

Mr. KROGH: That idea about getting the information from Dr. Lewis Fielding,
who was Dr. Ellsberg's psychiatrist, was proposed by E. Howard Hunt, and we
had asked the CIA for a psychological profile on Dr. Ellsberg, which, when it
came back, I think all of us felt that it was very short and not very useful
in telling us what the likelihood was that he would release other top secret
information if he had access to it. And so in that context--like, we need to
know everything about this individual and also to get information that E.
Howard Hunt was going to be using with Chuck Coulson to use to discredit Dr.
Ellsberg--Hunt did recommend that we carry out a covert operation. Now I
asked him what that meant, and they said, `Well,'--now we're talking to both
E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy--`this will involve entry operation into his
office, where we will photograph those records,' but the idea originated with
Howard Hunt.

DAVIES: So, an entry operation--I love this antiseptic terms...

Mr. KROGH: You know, you're exactly right on that, Dave, because you use the
terms to mask what's really going on, which is you're recommending a burglary,
maybe second degree under the laws of the state of California, in a way by
using terms that don't go directly at what you're doing, somehow you're
camouflaging what your intent really is.

DAVIES: And it's interesting here that we're talking about getting
information that--it doesn't really sound like it has to do with stopping
leaks as arguably a political mission, which is to discredit Ellsberg, who is
an administration critic, right?

Mr. KROGH: That's correct, and I think that's really one of real the
fundamental flaws in the reasoning of that group, of the plumbers group, is
that they extended this idea of national security to include political
security, because information that could be used to discredit Daniel Ellsberg
arguably does not affect the national security. It might affect the ability
of the president to continue to carry out his policies in Vietnam, to end the
war in Vietnam on his terms, but that's a very tenuous relationship to the
national security efforts.

But I don't believe at that time that that group, or maybe even the president,
really could make that clear a distinction between what was in a politically
motivated and driven activity and that which was driven by a national security
imperative. And that's the big problem, when you can't really be clear and
distinguish those two.

DAVIES: This does become a fateful moment in the story, because here you are,
31 years old. You're a trained lawyer and someone's talking about an entry
operation, which is, you know, breaking and entering. At this point did you
think--and you know, you were in charge of this unit, along with this other
official, David Young--did you think, `We just can't do this. Is this is
improper'? What was your thoughts--what were you thinking of?

Mr. KROGH: In retrospect, I wish I had been able to see the full
consequences of what we were doing, that this was something that could have a
fatal effect on the administration if ever disclosed. But I was so hard-wired
into the mission to find out what was Ellsberg's motivations--why he did it,
how can we stop this from happening in the future, were there other people
involved?--I did not stop to ask the legal question. And you would have
thought of those four people in the Special Investigation Unit, three of us
were lawyers, gone to good law schools, that would have been the first thing
we should have done. We didn't do that. We basically asked the sort of the
practical questions. You know, `Who can do this? When can they do it? How
much is it going to cost us to do it?' You know, all the practical questions,
but we didn't go to the legal question--`is this legal?'--or do any analysis
of that. We didn't ask the ethical question. We didn't ask any of the
questions that real integrity would have required us to ask.

GROSS: We're listening to Egil "Bud" Krogh, speaking with our frequent guest
host Dave Davies. Krogh's new memoir is called "Integrity." More about his
role in the Watergate scandal after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Let's get back to the interview our frequent guest host Dave Davies
recorded with Egil "Bud" Krogh. In his new memoir, "Integrity," Krogh writes
about his experiences in the Nixon White House, breaking the law to try to
stop leaks.

DAVIES: So at some point this notion of breaking into the psychiatrist of
Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked The Pentagon Papers and was a thorn in Richard
Nixon's side, this operation actually moved forward. Tell us about the actual
break-in. You weren't there, but what did these gentlemen actually do?

Mr. KROGH: Well, over the Labor Day weekend of 1971, E. Howard Hunt and
Gordon Liddy, with a team of Cuban-Americans with whom Mr. Hunt had worked
during the Bay of Pigs and at other times when Mr. Hunt was a member of the
CIA, they went to California, they went to Beverly Hills. They conducted a
break-in. On the way into the building they broke a window, so when they got
into the building and went up to the floor where Dr. Fielding had his office,
they did break into that office. They searched for the files with the
expectation that they would be able to photograph those files. And then,
because a window had been broken, they decided on the spot to make it look as
if somebody had broken in to steal drugs, and they pretty much trashed the
office of Dr. Fielding, and then they took pictures of it.

And they came back, after the operation. They were relieved that, obviously,
they were not caught and in fact, Gordon Liddy called me to tell me that they
had gotten out of the office without getting caught. And they came back to
Washington, DC, where they showed me the pictures of the damage that had been
inflicted on the office, and I was just appalled. Because the exact
instructions that we had given them was that this was to be a covert
operation. In fact, in the memorandum to Mr. Ehrlichman in recommending this
operation, we said, `We recommend that a covert operation be undertaken to
examine all of the files still held by Dr. Ellsberg's psychiatrist.' And he
had put his initial E after approval and underneath said, `Under your
assurance it is not traceable.' And when I saw those photographs of what had
been done in the office, I was extremely upset about it and took them over to
show John Ehrlichman who told me, he said, `That's far beyond anything I
authorized. Shut it down.' And we did.

DAVIES: And one of the odd little details--they left some film in a camera,
right, of Liddy and Hunt in California that ended up in the hands of the CIA,
didn't it?

Mr. KROGH: That's correct. They left film in a camera that they had used
out there, and the CIA developed that film, which eventually found its way
over to the Department of Justice and to the, I believe, the assistant
attorney general of criminal division, who was sort of puzzled by, `What is
this photograph of Gordon Liddy standing in front of a parking place with Dr.
Fielding's name on it?' And so there were a number of things that were done
that suggested that perhaps the highest degree of competence might not have
been in effect at the time.

DAVIES: He's standing in front of a parking space with the target's name on
it?

Mr. KROGH: Yes, that's right.

DAVIES: Well, you know, it's interesting because when you think about
Nixon's, you know, fist-pounding obsession with Ellsberg and his belief that
he was a traitor on the order of Alger Hiss. You talked to him, you know,
years after all this. Do you think he was ever--did he ever think he was
wrong? Or did he believe that Ellsberg was a conspirator who got away?

Mr. KROGH: You mean, did Richard Nixon...

DAVIES: Nixon, yeah.

Mr. KROGH: You know, I never felt that President Nixon felt that he was
wrong about that. And, in fact, in his memoirs, "RN," he did say that he it
was a tragic miscarriage of justice that Daniel Ellsberg was released and that
I went to prison. I don't think that that is a miscarriage of justice. I
mean, those of us who were involved obviously committed a serious crime, and
the legal consequences had to be paid.

And I think that, when you really look at the offense that was brought against
Dr. Ellsberg, it's hard for me to see how he would have been convicted.
Because I don't think that the espionage case could ever have been made. And
even on the theft charge, I think that the evidence was pretty week. And of
course, when the judge in the Ellsberg-Russo case did learn about the
misconduct of the government, that fact plus other things led to the dismissal
of all charges against Ellsberg.

But I never sensed in conversations I had with Mr. Nixon after he resigned
that he felt that Ellsberg was a good person or that he had done the right
thing. I never sensed any change of heart there.

DAVIES: How did your association with the plumbers unit come to an end?

Mr. KROGH: Well, it came to an end just a few months after the break-in in
September where another leak occurred, and there was a recommendation that had
been made to David Young and to me that a wiretap be placed, without a
warrant, on one of the individuals who was a suspect in that other leak. And
as I looked at the facts as I understood them, I just didn't feel that it
deserved a wiretap, and John Ehrlichman, who learned that David Young and I
had a disagreement on that, called me up and he said, `Well, I think David's
right on this and you're relieved of any more duties with the Special
Investigation Unit. David will carry on from here.' So as of December of
1971, I had been removed from the plumbers' activities.

GROSS: Bud Krogh, speaking with our frequent guest host Dave Davies. We'll
hear more of their interview in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross,
and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back the interview our
frequent guest host Dave Davies recorded with Egil Bud Krogh, the first
official of the Nixon administration to plead guilty to crimes associated with
the Watergate scandal. He headed the secret unit that was known as the
plumbers because it was their job to stop leaks of sensitive information.
While Krogh was in charge, the plumbers broke in to the office of Daniel
Ellsberg's psychiatrist after Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers to The New
York Times. The illegal activity Krogh was involved in was in 1971, before
Nixon's re-election campaign. Krogh has written a new memoir called
"Integrity."

DAVIES: It was in June of '72, and I think you were in St. Louis when you
read the newspaper that burglars had been arrested at the Watergate complex.
And these folks were pretty quickly tied to the White House. What did you
think when you read that news?

Mr. KROGH: Oh, when I first saw that story, I was actually walking through
the walkway between the Chase Hotel and the Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis,
and I went up to the news kiosk and I saw the story and I just stopped and I
read it and it was just--my heart just dropped. I thought, `Oh no, what have
they done?' And then as I read it and, of course, as the information came out
over the next few days, realized that Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt had been
involved, at the Committee to Re-Elect, and had mounted this operation against
the offices of the Democratic National Committee. And I just felt very, very
unhappy, deeply unhappy about this because I sensed that, you know, they had
worked for me the year before as part of the Special Investigations Unit, the
White House plumbers, where they had to have gotten the idea that, under
certain circumstances, the White House would accept covert activity and then
both of them went to work directly--I mean, G. Gordon Liddy, for the
Committee to Re-Elect and E. Howard Hunt more tangentially, but then they
felt that they could move forward with an operation against the DNC, the
Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington,
DC.

And when I saw that story I just--I mean obviously I put it together and was
just deeply distressed by it.

DAVIES: Now, you ended up speaking with John Dean, the counsel to the
president, and it seems that he quickly sensed that there would be an
ever-widening investigation and that any, you know, improper activities in the
administration might come under scrutiny, including the ones you had been
involved in the year before. I mean, in effect, you were, at that point,
instructed to slam the lid, keep things quiet, right? Make sure you don't
talk to anybody.

Mr. KROGH: Yeah. That's correct. And when I came back from my trip to St.
Louis--I'd been out there for a couple of weeks--and I met with John and I
could sense that this was a beginning of an effort to sort of keep the lid on
the investigation of the Watergate that would lead to other exposures,
including the one in 1971 of the plumbers' activities. And basically what I
got from John, who was given, I think, the most thankless job anyone has ever
been given on the White House staff, that we were not to disclose those
activities, we were not to talk about it, anything that the president had
described or defined as a national security issue was not to be discussed.
And that's the instruction that I got from John when I came back.

DAVIES: And you were interviewed by attorneys from the special prosecutor's
office, right?

Mr. KROGH: Well, this was before the special prosecutor had been set up.

DAVIES: OK.

Mr. KROGH: At that point, this was in August, the investigation was carried
forward by the office of the US attorney. Earl Silbert was the US attorney at
that time and he had assigned one of his assistants to question me about what
I knew about Watergate, which was virtually nothing. I mean, I read about it
in the paper like everybody else did. And when I went into that interview, I
had been told beforehand by John Dean that no national security questions
would be posed.

And in sitting there in that room in the Department of Justice--this was not
before a grand jury, it was just an interview with the US assistant attorney.
Still a very serious interview and I was put under oath and was asked a
question that I felt basically was going to open up a whole area of national
security concerns about the plumbers, and that question was, did I know
anything about travel of Mr. Liddy to California? And I believe at that time
he had that picture that had been taken by E. Howard Hunt and left in the
camera that had gotten to the CIA and I felt that I had three choices. That I
could say I did not know about any travel, which would have been a false
declaration, which it proved to be. Or I did know about it, in which case he
would have continued to ask questions that would have gotten me into that
area. Or I could have said, `I can't answer that question because it's
national security,' at which point he, the assistant US attorney, can go get
the clearance to ask that question, come back, put me under oath again and
require me to answer it or I would have been ruled in contempt.

And I sort of knew what those options were, and very unfortunately selected
the wrong one. I said I didn't know about that travel. And that ended the
inquiry at that point, and I felt impelled to do so because I was sworn to
keep those secrets. At least, I felt that I was obligated to keep those
secrets. But in retrospect, I think everyone would have been much better off
if I had been able to and answered truthfully.

GROSS: We're listening to Egil Bud Krogh, speaking with our frequent guest
host Dave Davies. Krogh's new memoir is called "Integrity." More after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Let's get back to the interview our frequent guest host Dave Davies
recorded with Egil Bud Krogh. In his new memoir, "Integrity," Krogh writes
about his experiences in the Nixon White House, breaking the law to try to
stop leaks.

DAVIES: The things you were involved in really weren't uncovered for a long
time, and you secured an appointment as a deputy secretary of transportation.
And then in May '73 you write that the ice cracked open and you fell through.
What exactly happened?

Mr. KROGH: Well, in May of 1973 I'd been under secretary for about three and
a half months. The story about the break-in in 1971 became public and
actually led to the dismissal of charges against Dr. Ellsberg and Anthony
Russo. And after resigning, I felt I needed to defend myself, which I did. I
felt that national security had been the motive for what we had done...

DAVIES: Now, now, just to be clear, were you charged with a crime at this
point?

Mr. KROGH: No. I was not...

DAVIES: Yeah.

Mr. KROGH: ...charged with a crime at this point. The indictment against me
did not occur until later in the summer of 1973, when I was indicted for false
declaration, which was what I had said to the assistant US attorney the year
before, in August of 1972. So the indictment followed about a year later.
Now, once I was indicted, my counsel advised me that, you know, `When you go
before these different hearings in the Congress or the grand jury, the only
course you can take is to please the Fifth Amendment. That will protect your
rights. Then we will be able to litigate this at trial and see if we can make
this defense stick.'

So through the summer and the fall I did take the Fifth Amendment several
times, an excruciatingly difficult thing to do. And then there was a hearing
before Judge Gerhard Gesell on a motion that I was entitled not to have to
disclose national security information, confidential information, and was
entitled to lie, if necessary, to keep that information from being disclosed
and...

DAVIES: So you were asserting, in a sense, that when you had lied to
prosecutors earlier, that you were engaged in a legitimate defense of national
security interests?

Mr. KROGH: Yes. That was the interest, that I had been entrusted with this
information. I was not to disclose it under any circumstances, and that would
include not disclosing it to an assistant US attorney, or to any other body
for that matter. And we made that argument before Judge Gesell, who basically
shredded it in his response and said it was incompatible with our system of
law and our system of government, and that had a huge effect on me.

DAVIES: And when did you decide to take a different course and plead guilty?

Mr. KROGH: Well, that hearing before Judge Gesell occurred in October in
1973. And about a month later, over the Thanksgiving holiday of 1973, I took
my family down to Williamsburg, Virginia, and I was out with my children and
my wife, Suzanne. We were out behind The House of Burgesses. And it was
about four in the afternoon and I had been really struggling with what was the
right course for me to take.

And it was one of those things where, I think, maybe I'd call it an epiphany.
Something very clear came to me and it was like, `Now, look at this. Your
kids are out there playing and you're able to drive down here on your own
recognizance, even though you're under indictment in Washington, DC, and
California. You're able to talk to reporters. You're able to go to the
church of your choice. You have all of these rights that you are actually
exercising right now. What are you defending?' Well, it became clear. I was
defending the right of someone in government under some questionable doctrine
of national security to strip away from another American citizen his right to
be free from an unwarranted search. How can you defend that and enjoy all
these rights without being the ultimate hypocrite? And it just came so
clearly: You can't.

And then the next thing that came to me was the conduct that you engaged in in
1971 strikes at the heart of what this government was designed to protect
against, which was the unwarranted intrusion of government into the lives of
its citizens. And those two ideas just came to me with such power and
clarity, I turned to Suzanne and said, `I've got to plead guilty and I've got
to do it right away.'

DAVIES: And then you take this remarkable course where you meet with the
special prosecutors, you enter a guilty plea and you agree to tell the truth
about anything else the government wants you to testify about. But you don't
want to testify until after you have been sentenced. Why?

Mr. KROGH: Well, when I went to see Leon Jaworski, who was then the special
prosecutor, with William Merrill, and my lawyer, Stephen Shulman, a great
lawyer, I told the special prosecutor--I said, `I want to plead guilty. I
think it's the right course. But this will be on the basis that you'll agree
that I will be sentenced by a court before I need to speak to a US attorney or
the grand jury or anyone else.' I said, `I can't tolerate the idea of trading
testimony for a lighter sentence or having some linkage between the two.' And
that's just sort of the way I'm wired. But on the other hand, I would be
asked to testify against people who were my friends and it just didn't seem
appropriate to somehow benefit from that, and I didn't know whether Mr.
Jaworski would accept the plea under those terms, but he called me back the
next day--called actually Steve Shulman back and said, `We've agreed to accept
Mr. Krogh's plea of guilty and we trust he will tell us the truth,' which I
did, later.

DAVIES: So you were sentenced and served six months in prison and were
disbarred from the legal profession and you did have to testify against other
Watergate figures, including John Ehrlichman, your long-time family friend and
father figure. What was that like?

Mr. KROGH: Oh, that was one of the hardest days of my life, was having to go
into a courtroom in the summer of 1974. I had been released from prison. I'd
been in both a maximum security jail for a while, then the Allenwood Prison
Camp. Then I had to testify in his trial in the Prettyman Courthouse there in
Washington, DC. And having to sit there in the docket as a witness and
testify to--acknowledging his signature and what he had written in that
memorandum, which, basically, I think, was testimony that helped to convict
him, was one of the most difficult thinks that I've ever had to do in my life.
Because I felt tremendously responsible as well for messing up that
investigation and putting something at his doorstep that I just wished had not
had happened.

DAVIES: Did you talk to Ehrlichman about it afterwards? How did he feel
about you testifying against him?

Mr. KROGH: Well, I did talk with him about it afterwards. I think he was
very disappointed in, first of all, how the trial went, because he was
obviously convicted, but felt that I had let him down and had let other people
down in the way that I had run that operation. And I think, in retrospect,
that was true. I really did not exercise the degree of wisdom and competence
when I ran it, and I think John was pretty clear in letting me know that's
what he felt, too.

So that was one of the hard things--because the families, the Ehrlichman
family, the Krogh families had been very close for a very long time. And
interestingly enough, we still are. We're still very close. I mean, my son
and John's grandson are very close friends. And so the families have been
able to retain the friendship, but John was, I think, deeply disappointed
about how the action--first of all, how it went down in 1971, and then when I
had to testify against him in 1974.

DAVIES: Well...

Mr. KROGH: Very hard thing to do.

DAVIES: I feel we have to remind the audience that Ehrlichman, in this case,
did approve the break-in in writing. I mean, perhaps you could have done
differently, but he put his name on that sheet approving a break-in.

Mr. KROGH: Well, and again, just to give him his due on that, he approved a
covert operation, and he told me later, he said, `I did not envision that that
covert operation specifically included a break-in.' Now, I felt that the words
did cover that and I don't think he ever felt that they did. And so we've had
that disagreement until he passed on.

DAVIES: You write in this book that the operation which you headed, this unit
which broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, that that break-in brought
down the Nixon presidency. How do you conclude that?

Mr. KROGH: Well, I don't think it's a heroic reach of logic, but the way
that I see it is that--after there had been discussion early on in the Nixon
administration about illegal operations, burglaries, and mail openings and the
rest to respond to what was viewed as a threat from the radical movement in
the country, and that was part of something called the Houston Plan in 1970.
It had a shelf life of about five days. I was aware of that plan. In 1971,
that's when the plumbers' unit is set up to investigate all the aspects of The
Pentagon Papers, but the difference there is that an actual break-in, a
burglary, occurred. It was something that could not be undone. That was a
seminal event in the Nixon administration. Nine months later the Watergate
event occurs, basically engineered and carried out by two people who had
worked for the plumbers' unit in 1971.

I don't think that the Watergate event could have occurred if, in 1971, we had
made clear, we're not going to do any kind of covert operation. No illegal
operations. Anybody that does this is going to be prosecuted. Because the
individuals who went on, E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, to work the
Committee to Re-Elect would not have had that precedent.

DAVIES: You know, and yet, I mean, you know, I understand what you're saying,
that once a break-in occurred and was tolerated, you know, more serious
violations of law occurred. But I have to note that the guy at the top of
this administration, Richard Nixon, says in this conversation, which was
recorded on tape, later emerged--and this was I guess in July of '71--he is
then demanding a break-in at the Brookings Institution. He says, `Did they
get the Brookings Institution raided last night? No? Get it done. I it
done. I want the Brookings Institution safe cleaned out.' I mean, wasn't
this--with that kind of a mentality at the very top of the White House, wasn't
this going to happen anyway?

Mr. KROGH: It may well, Dave. That may well have happened anyway. And that
was the tone, that was the attitude, and it was set by the president. I
wasn't in that conversation where he gave that order to clean out the safe at
the Brookings Institution. And I might say that, you know, John Dean, at
great person risk, shut down that operation in the Brookings Institute. He
flew to California and told John Ehrlichman, `You can't this. I mean,
something terrible could happen. People can get killed doing something like
this.' And shut it down. But you're exactly right. The tone was set at the
top and that coursed through all the activities that we carried out. But
Richard Nixon did not specifically carry out the actions in 1971, but he did
set a tone that allowed them to go forward. I think that's correct.

GROSS: We're listening to Egil Bud Krogh speaking with our frequent guest
host Dave Davies. Krogh's new memoir is called "Integrity." More after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Let's get back to the interview our frequent guest host Dave Davies
recorded with Bud Krogh. In his new memoir, "Integrity," Krogh writes about
his experiences in the Nixon White House, breaking the law to try to stop
leaks.

DAVIES: You have reflected a lot on what integrity in government service
means, and that's a theme of this book. And it's interesting that you wrote
an open letter to the Bush administration in 2000 about maintaining integrity
in public office. Why then? I mean, why not in 1992 or in 1988? What made
you want to render advice at that point?

Mr. KROGH: Well, I saw the new Bush White House staff get sworn in to their
jobs in the same room where I had been sworn in 30 years before, and I knew
some of the new staff people, or I knew some of the new people who were going
into the new Bush administration--Paul O'Neill in Treasury, and Don Rumsfeld
in the Defense Department. Of course, Dick Cheney was the vice president. I
felt, you know, I'd like to write to that staff a letter, a memorandum, that I
wished I could have read 33 years before when I was sworn in. So I did. I
wrote the memorandum. It was published in The Christian Science Monitor.

And what I focused on in that memo was your personal integrity is really the
most important thing to maintain. And I described the commissions that they
were going to be getting from the president to put on their walls, appointing
them to their positions and the language used as `reposing special trust in
your integrity.' It's their individual integrity, not that of the president or
the senior official. It's theirs. And that they need to maintain that during
the course of their service on the White House staff.

And then I gave them some questions to ask. In everything that you are
recommending, think it through. Ask the question: Is it whole and complete?
Have I considered all the consequences? I mentioned in the memo Patrick
Moynahan, who used to tell us on the White House staff, `Think everything
through before you send a memorandum in to the president' And then I said, you
know, `Ask the question, "Is it right?"' And those two need to be asked all
the time before you make a recommendation and before you make a decision.

DAVIES: How well do you think this administration has gotten?

Mr. KROGH: Well, I feel that in some areas that they have not gotten that
message, and I was pretty specific in the memo. Our advice to lawyers is to
use interpretations of the law that are generally well accepted, and not what
you can torture meanings, like words like "national security" and "commander
in chief" into meaning, and I do put out in the book my concern about a
memorandum that was written under the auspices of the Office of Legal Counsel
and the Department of Justice on the definition of "torture" and on the
authority of the commander in chief, which, you know, when I read it, and
understanding of the law, I felt, was fundamentally flawed. It ended up being
withdrawn two years after it was issued, but it had served as the foundation
for the interrogation protocols that eventually were put into effect at
Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Now, I felt that that was a collapse in
integrity and analytical integrity.

And I also mentioned the National Security Agency wiretapping program, where I
felt, if they are going to wiretap people, go get the legal authority from
Congress. And, after 9 /11, you know, it's been proven that they certainly
had the ability to get support from Congress for almost any kind of
investigative activity that they felt was appropriate. But don't just
freelance it and go do it on your own, as we had done in the plumbers' unit
with Richard Nixon. Go get the legal authority to do it. So I'm saddened to
see those decisions, and there is a stark difference of opinion about what
authority the president has under national security crises with this
administration and a lot of other people who have analyzed it.

DAVIES: You know, one of the interesting themes here is the tension between
integrity and loyalty. I mean, people get into politics by being loyal to the
candidate, loyal to the campaign. And then once in office, you know, are
often young people, as you were when you worked at the White House, in, you
know, important jobs, reporting to important people, and there's a natural
tendency to trust their judgment and give them their loyalty. And it's very,
very hard, I think, when someone gives you an assignment which is on the edge
of integrity for a young person to say, `Gosh, I'm not going to do that.' You
weren't able to do it. How do you empower a younger person to stand up in a
situation like that?

Mr. KROGH: Well, I think you need to give them the tools. One of the key
points that I try to make in the book is that when you walk into the White
House staff or you walk into any--a government agency or business or
profession you don't check your personal integrity at the door. You need to
take that in with you, and you need to be asking key questions repeatedly.
It's extremely difficult when you're personally loyal to someone--and in my
case, with John Ehrlichman, was loyal to him and his family, I'd know him
since I was 12 years old--to be able to step outside of that and said, `Now,
wait a second now. Is this really consistent with I feel is the right thing
to do?'

I'm not trying to say that this is easy, because campaigns are run on loyal
people who are willing to work absolutely incredible amounts of hours and put
in energy to get their candidate elected, but you cannot abandon your own
personal sense of what's right and wrong. In the final analysis, it can keep
you safe and make you successful, and, unfortunately, you know, young people,
it's hard for them just to quit out of opposition. They say, `Well, I can't
go there.' There have to be different strategies for how you can stay employed
and stay working and still remain true to your own fundamental set of values.
And that's what I try to do in the book, is to give some approaches, a model
for thinking things through so people can work effectively, stay loyal to
their principle, but also stay loyal to their own personal sense of integrity.

DAVIES: Well, Bud Krogh, thanks so much for speaking with us.

Mr. KROGH: Thank you very much for inviting me.

GROSS: Bud Krogh speaking with our frequent guest host Dave Davies. Krogh's
new memoir is called "Integrity."

If you want to catch up on interviews you've missed, you can download podcasts
of our show by going to our Web site, freshair.npr.org.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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