American Experience

John Ehrlichman on "plugging the leaks"

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Budd Krogh was chosen by the President to try and stanch leaks in the government. And we had Krogh come out to San Clemente and the President sat down with him and talked to him face to face and told him what he had in mind. That there were serious leaks, that the departments were not doing their job in watching their people to make sure they weren't leaking to the press. And that he wanted Krogh to assemble a group of people in the White House to energize the various departments to do a better job at plugging leaks. And that was basically his franchise. It evolved into something very different. That was the so called plumbers who were in the business of stopping leaks. It evolved into a kind of operational unit when Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy and some other people were recruited. And eventually were sent off to California to investigate Daniel Ellsberg because the FBI was not doing so. The FBI was not doing so because J. Edgar Hoover was a very close friend of Daniel Ellsberg's father, Ellsberg's father-in-law, who was a man named Marx. And every time the middle level people in the FBI started to focus on Marx, Hoover prevented it. In fact, [he] disciplined one of the fairly high ranking guys who insisted on going after Marx and sent him off to Missoula, Montana or some place. So the attorney general was very frustrated. The assistant attorney general in charge of this investigation came to the White House and said I can't get the FBI to do anything. So that was the origin of the plumbers going off to California to break into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office.

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