American Experience

John Ehrlichman on the role of John Caulfield

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Well there was an ex-cop named John Caulfield who had been one of Richard Nixon's bodyguards when he lived in New York and came to Washington, worked at the Treasury Department after Nixon became President. Caulfield very much wanted to get into the private detective business, the security business. And so at some point, as we were approaching the '72 election, he came to me with a plan for the development of an intelligence operation. And I looked at it. It was done up in a little folder and so on. And did nothing with it. I didn't see that it was germane to anything that I knew anything about that was going to happen in connection with the '72 election, so I just tossed it into the to-be-filed basket. It developed later that Caulfield took this to Gordon Liddy and other people at the Committee to Re-elect The President. And it probably was the seminal origin of all that business of Gordon Liddy and Operation Gemstone and eventually the break-in at the Democratic headquarters. But it sort of bears the same relationship to the Mississippi River that, I mean that Watergate, that one of those little lakes in Minnesota has to the Mississippi River. It's kind of up there at the headwater someplace.

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