The Daily Background

The NYT today carries an op-ed by former deputy assistant to president Nixon Egil Krogh (pictured above, right with Nixon and Elvis), who recounted some of the illegal activities he carried out on behalf of that Administration, for which he eventually served prison time. Krogh, who retold the story of a secret meeting where he and others, including Gordon Liddy, a veteran of the Nixon and Bush Administrations, plotted break-ins:

Two months earlier, The New York Times had published the classified Pentagon Papers, which had been provided by Daniel Ellsberg. President Nixon had told me he viewed the leak as a matter of critical importance to national security. He ordered me and the others, a group that would come to be called the “plumbers,” to find out how the leak had happened and keep it from happening again.

Mr. Hunt urged us to carry out a “covert operation” to get a “mother lode” of information about Mr. Ells-berg’s mental state, to discredit him, by breaking into the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Mr. Liddy told us the F.B.I. had frequently carried out such covert operations — a euphemism for burglaries — in national security investigations, that he had even done some himself.

I listened intently. At no time did I or anyone else there question whether the operation was necessary, legal or moral. Convinced that we were responding legitimately to a national security crisis, we focused instead on the operational details: who would do what, when and where.

Krogh continues on to explain that he and his cohorts in the Nixon Administration had convinced themselves that what they were doing was legal and necessary, since it was done under the guise of protecting national security. Of course, it was none of these things. Krogh ends his op-ed by writing the following:

In early 2001, after President Bush was inaugurated, I sent the new White House staff a memo explaining the importance of never losing their personal integrity. In a section addressed specifically to the White House lawyers, I said that integrity required them to constantly ask, is it legal? And I recommended that they rely on well-established legal precedent and not some hazy, loose notion of what phrases like “national security” and “commander in chief” could be tortured into meaning. I wonder if they received my message.

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