John D. Ehrlichman | Biography

John Ehrlichman was born on March 20, 1925, in Tacoma, Washington. After graduating from UCLA in 1948, he attended Stanford Law School and graduated in 1951. Ehrlichman earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and another medal for his service during World War II. He practiced law privately from 1952 to 1968, and then joined the White House staff as counsel to President Richard M. Nixon before becoming the president's assistant for domestic affairs in 1970. Despite his significant contributions to welfare reform and school desegregation, Ehrlichman's involvement in the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals was what brought him to the attention of the Senate, the judicial system, and the American public.

On June 13, 1971, The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, classified and highly sensitive documents detailing the United States' activities in Vietnam. The documents had been stolen and leaked to the media by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst and Robert Russo. Publication of the documents increased President Nixon's concern about security in his administration, and he established the Special Investigations Unit. The Unit, comprised largely of former CIA agents, was known in the White House as the "Plumbers," because the president had created it to "stop security leaks and to investigate other sensitive security matters." Ehrlichman was tapped to supervise the Unit, and he chose Egil Krogh, Jr. to head it. Under Krogh's supervision, on September 3, 1971, the unit broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist looking for information damaging to Ellsberg. The break-in was exposed during the criminal trial of Ellsberg and Russo for leaking the documents, at which time Ehrlichman denied authorizing it. He told the FBI that he had only learned of the entry after the fact and had ordered that it not be repeated. Krogh took full responsibility for the burglary and resigned. He later maintained, however, that the idea to target Ellsberg had originated with Ehrlichman. The illegal conduct of the executive branch in this and other instances led the presiding judge to dismiss the charges against Ellsberg and Russo.

On June 17, 1972, a group of five men broke into the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel suite of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters; two men associated with the burglary, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, had been Plumbers. A report of the burglary was published two days later by The Washington Post, the opening installment in what would be a huge investigative undertaking by the newspaper. As details of the operation surfaced, the White House began to cover up its illegal activities. Its success at doing so became less effective with time, and on April 30, 1973, Ehrlichman and Nixon's other top staffer, H. R. Haldeman, resigned. John W. Dean III, another top presidential advisor, implicated Ehrlichman in the cover-up, and Ehrlichman was later convicted of conspiracy in the break-in of the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist and perjury in the Watergate investigation. He was sentenced to four to eight years but served only 18 months. Ehrlichman wrote Witness to Power: The Nixon Years, as well as four novels. He died February 14, 1999.