Title Card: Enemies

NARRATOR: On June 12, 1971, the White House staff prepared for a wedding in the Rose Garden. The president's elder daughter, Tricia, was to be married to a young law student Edward Cox. Rain threatened the ceremony and Nixon spent much of the afternoon on the phone to Air Force weathermen. Finally, there was a prediction of a 15-minute break in the weather.

Pres. NIXON: I got to get dressed. You know, I got to get -- let's see, all my things, my hair done.

ART LINKLETTER, TV Personality: [at wedding reception] I saw the president more relaxed and more happy and more like a typical American father than I've seen him in a long, long time.

Fifth REPORTER: He looked like he was doing a great job out on the dance floor, too.

Mr. LINKLETTER: Yes. And he doesn't dance all that often, you know.

NARRATOR: "It was a day that all of us will remember," Nixon later wrote, "because we were beautifully and simply happy." The next morning, Nixon picked up The New York Times. In the left corner was an account of Tricia's wedding. Across the page was another headline, the first installment of what came to be called the "Pentagon Papers," a secret Defense Department study which revealed past government deception about the war in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department employee who had turned against the war, had given the top secret documents to the press.

DANIEL ELLSBERG, former Defense Department Employee: I can no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public.

NARRATOR: Although the Pentagon Papers contained nothing about the Nixon policy in Vietnam, it was a leak of enormous magnitude. The president and Henry Kissinger saw it as a disturbing precedent and a threat to there secret diplomacy.

MR. COLSON: There was panic in the White House and I remember being in meetings with Henry Kissinger that day, in which he said, "This could cause the collapse of American foreign policy. This could undermine our initiatives with China and the Soviet Union." And don't forget that, at that time, people did not know that we were negotiating secretly with the Chinese. They did not also know that we were conducting secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese to end the war in Vietnam. And so, a lot of things were going on that we knew, but the public didn't.

NARRATOR: Just five weeks later, the Times published another leak, this one potentially damaging to Nixon's foreign policy. It revealed U.S. negotiating tactics in upcoming arms talks with the Soviets and it seemed to confirm Nixon's worst fears about the press.

Mr. KROGH: I had seen him angry in meetings in the past, but I had never experienced this kind of fury, where he was basically walking around the room, slamming his fist in his hand, saying that, "This cannot be tolerated, we cannot let this go on."

Mr. COLSON: Nixon became obsessive about the press coverage. We had a daily news summary that was prepared by a young man in the White House. By the time I got to the White House, the president had already read it and had marked on the columns, "John Chancellor last night said this. Respond today. Call up so-and-so. Look at this. You can't trust these people. Newsweek has done it to us again." I'd get Nixon's news summary with all these comments down the side. And so, you had the idea when you went to work in the morning, you were going to war with the press.

NARRATOR: A sense of being under siege pervaded the White House, fueled by the leaks, the constant anti-war demonstrations and intensifying criticism in the press. In this atmosphere of "us versus them," Colson's office began an ever-expanding list of Nixon's critics, the "enemies list."

Its object was to "screw our political enemies." Reporters and politicians, educators and entertainers were barred from the White House. Some were targeted for tax audits, others were trailed by private detectives.

Mr. COLSON: And it was very shortly thereafter that Nixon authorized the "plumbers" and the creation of a special group to stop leaks and they began to take extra-legal steps and put into motion the mechanism which ultimately resulted in the downfall of the administration.

NARRATOR: In a White House memo regarding the "neutralization" of Daniel Ellsberg, the plumbers discussed how they might "destroy his public image and credibility." In search of damaging information about Ellsberg's private life, they arranged a break-in at the office of his psychiatrist.

Mr. KROGH: They apparently broke a window on the way in and, realizing that it could no longer be viewed as a covert operation, changed courses and decided to make it look as if it had been entered by a burglar looking for drugs or some other substances. Basically, they smashed up the office, took pictures of the damage. I was shocked at these pictures, went to see John Ehrlichman and he was, if anything, more shocked than I was and said, "Shut it down as of now."

NARRATOR: The plumbers were eventually disbanded, but some of the agents were reassigned to work behind the scenes for the newly-formed Committee to Re-Elect the President. Reelection had become Nixon's consuming concern. From the first day of his presidency, he had fought to hold onto his silent majority and had shaped his domestic policies, in part, to win their votes. But those voters were slipping away. Unemployment and inflation were up, racial divisions had deepened and still, week after week, the dead came home from Vietnam. Nixon's popularity had fallen so low that he had begun to fear he would not even be re-nominated in 1972.