THE WHITE HOUSE PLUMBERS

A slender but thoughtful memoir by one of the foot soldiers of Watergate.

Coming on the heels of Dwight Chapin’s The President’s Man, one-time White House staffer Egil Krogh delivers a more rueful remembrance assisted by his son. Krogh, who served a short prison term for his role in Watergate, spent years afterward wrestling with the bad choices he made in committing crimes that sent him to jail and drove Nixon from the White House. The usual ingredients were there: youth, ambition, and a desire to serve a president and country in “an emergency context”—namely, the release of the Pentagon Papers, which Nixon insiders considered threat enough to national security to burglarize Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Not long after, having assembled a crew including G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt (who brought in a merry band of Cuban “plumbers” from the Bay of Pigs days), Krogh oversaw the burglary of the psychiatrist’s office. Though the unit operated under the grand rubric the Special Investigations Unit, it was oddly amateurish. There are a couple of ironies involved, too, one a ploy to get the FBI to approve lie-detector tests on suspected leakers, a petition denied by FBI executive Mark Felt, later revealed as “Deep Throat.” The author allows that his “absolute loyalty to President Nixon, both personally and to his view of the national security threat, had skewed my perspective.” Refreshingly, however, he doesn’t try to explain himself away (as does Chapin) but instead writes that it was his term in federal prison that afforded him the opportunity to reflect on “why we so often choose courses of action that inflict harm on those we would help.” It’s good that he does so, since, as he notes, Nixon never accepted guilt for Watergate and the cover-up that ended his presidency. The author’s story is in development for a miniseries on HBO.

A reflective, long-overdue apologia for misguided service to a corrupt leader.