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Nixon administration official finds promise in the healing power of integrity

Former “Plumber” Bud Krogh on “The Break-In That History Forgot” and his quest for redemption

By Maia Eisen

Egil “Bud” Krogh’s story begins with a report on the progress of the war.

In 1971, Bellevue native Krogh was a 29-year-old attorney working as a deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon. That Summer, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the “Pentagon Papers”—a confidential and critical Defense Department update on the Vietnam War—to the media.

Nixon was anxious to control PR damage over the unfavorable report’s release, and to limit loss of support for an already unpopular war. The president ordered Krogh and select White House insiders—a group that would come to be known as the “Plumbers”—to contain the damage, in effect, to plug the leak.

In August of 1971, Krogh met secretly with former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, and National Security Council staffer David Young Jr. Hunt proposed a covert operation to discredit Ellsberg: Operatives would break in to the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, to gather information about Ellsberg’s mental fitness.

With the tacit authorization of his boss, presidential counsel (and fellow Washingtonian) John Ehrlichman (Ehrlichman used the word “untraceable” in his response), Krogh approved the break-in of Fielding’s Beverly Hills, California office.

The burglary was carried out on September 3, 1971. In a June, 2007 New York Times Op-Ed piece, Krogh described the Fielding office burglary as a tipping point, the moment when the Nixon White House “crossed the Rubicon into the realm of lawbreakers,” leading “inexorably to Watergate and its subsequent cover-up.”

In late 1973, Krogh pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy for depriving Dr. Fielding of his fourth amendment rights barring unwarranted search and seizure. Krogh was sentenced to two-to-six years in prison, and served four-and-a-half months.

An epiphany and a new mission

Bud Krogh has written a book: Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House (Public Affairs, 2007). How could a Plumber, one of “the President’s Men,” become an expert on that subject? For Krogh, the journey to integrity, and even redemption, began with a 1973 family vacation.

While under indictment, Krogh took his family to visit Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Surrounded by patriotic images and the historical traditions of freedom they evoked, Krogh came to a realization: He could not justify his actions. In the name of national security, he had violated an American’s right to be free from unwarranted government intrusion. He would refuse an offered pardon, refuse to plea bargain, and refuse to blame others. Krogh would plead guilty, and, despite his fear of prison, would accept the consequences of his behavior, recognizing that those consequences would include jail time and disbarment.

Over the last thirty years, Bud Krogh has thought a lot about integrity. He has studied the subject from many perspectives, trying to understand how his life, which had seemed so promising when he joined the White House staff as a young man, had spun so badly out of control. Integrity is filled with insider stories from the Nixon years, told with the wisdom of hindsight as cautionary tales.

“I tried to write the kind of book that I wished I could have read before I went to work at the White House in 1968,” says Krogh. His goal as an author was to make the ideas universal to all aspects of personal and professional life, not just government.

Krogh began developing his theories in detail six years ago as he watched new Bush White House staff being sworn in. He could see his 29-year-old self in their faces; full of excitement and innocence. Feeling a need to alert them to “the enormous pressures to get results at any cost” that could challenge their integrity, he wrote a “Memo to Bush White House staff” published in the Christian Science Monitor in February, 2001.

“I feel sort of a mission,” says Krogh, “to try to impart to young people who are going into these incredible jobs, these incredible opportunities, to say ‘you’ve got to protect yourself, and only you can do that.’ Loyalty to your own values is the key thing.”

Nixon, Elvis, and the drive for redemption

Two photos hang above Krogh’s desk. One is of perhaps the oddest White House meeting ever: Krogh escorted Elvis Presley to the Oval Office one day in 1971 when the “King” showed up unannounced to meet with President Nixon. The second commemorates what Krogh unflinchingly describes as “the greatest day of my life:” his 1980 readmission to the Washington State Bar.

For his book—co-written with son Matthew—Krogh has developed a conceptual model for ethical evaluation. His “Integrity Zone” is based on the premise that “every individual has an intrinsic integrity, an inner awareness of what is right and good, commonly called ‘conscience.’” The model posits three fundamental questions for principled decision-making:

Is it whole and complete? Do I have all the information I need?
Is it right? Is my decision in line with core values like truth, fairness, respect, responsibility, compassion?
Is it good? Will this decision benefit others?

In the Integrity Zone model, Krogh identifies internal and external threats to one’s moral compass. He speaks from his own experience with the Plumbers, detailing impediments to good decision-making like misplaced loyalty, vanity, ambition, arrogance, high-stakes pressure, secrecy, and an irrationally adversarial climate.

Krogh has seen the pressures of workplace groupthink lead to lapses in ethical judgment on the most public of scales. He’s also seen the power of integrity to heal. Krogh observes that when you live your life from a position of the highest integrity, those you fear can become your allies, those who hold anger and hatred against you can find release from it. And when you’re down, people rise to help from every corner.

He relates a story about his first days of incarceration at the Montgomery County Jail in Rockville, Maryland. Krogh shared a temporary holding cell with a man with a badly bruised face.

“[F]irst guy I was in jail with,” begins Krogh, “the first day, he said to me ‘Krogh…I know all about you. You’re a stand up guy. Now I’m going to teach you how to live in jail.’” His fellow prisoner had followed Krogh’s case on television, and proceeded to instruct him in the rules for navigating his new world.

“[W]hat it was telling me was,” says Krogh, “when you are trying to align yourself with the highest degree of right, that will carry you through any experience.”

The power to take responsibility

Krogh emphasizes an inspirational message: It’s possible to move past mistakes, “even whoppers like mine.”

For Krogh, moving past what he himself calls a “massive breakdown in integrity” has been a journey, but not without its moments of catharsis. Several years ago, he attended a Seattle presentation by author and motivational speaker Marianne Williamson, who was talking about how to respond to missteps.

During a break, Krogh told Williamson how much he had appreciated her message, and identified himself. She asked him to share his story with the audience.
“I didn’t speak more than two minutes,” says Krogh. “I just said, ‘I was involved in this stuff years ago in the Nixon White House; we went after people in ways that were really wrong; I feel really bad about it; and I’d just like to say I’m sorry to all you about what happened.’

“[S]omething happened in that room,” he continues. “A number of people came up to me. One woman, in particular, was crying, and she said, ‘I can’t tell you for how long I have kept this anger in me about what you all did. I think this is the first time I’ve ever been able to release it. I let it go.’ And that really got to me.”
The dedication to Krogh’s book echoes that: “To those who deserved better, this book is offered as an apology, an explanation, and a way to keep integrity in the forefront of decision-making.”

Building a model to prevent history repeating

Krogh took Williamson’s instruction to “tell people about [your mistake]” to heart. He decided to write his memoirs three years ago, motivated in part by examples of questionable judgment he witnessed in business and government.

He compares the success-at-any-cost culture of the Nixon White House to examples of late-1990’s corporate avarice, in particular the Enron collapse. Krogh notes “how similar the pressures on the trading floor to make huge amounts of money were to those on me to do what I felt the president wanted for national security purposes.”

Current administration actions have also troubled Krogh. “The book is not really a polemic,” he notes. But his concern regarding the National Security Administration’s recent warrantless wire-tapping program stems from his own experience. In Integrity, Krogh poses questions he wishes he had asked himself when he was involved with the Plumbers: “[Can] national security…ever justify actions that contradict a nation’s core values? What sort of security is that, and what price is being paid for it, if it undermines the character of the state it is supposed to secure?”

Krogh also laments recent White House communications regarding torture and an expanded definition of the commander-in-chief’s role. He cites Nixon’s remark during the David Frost television interviews that “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Krogh calls the notion of limitless presidential authority “a very dangerous and pernicious idea.”

“Once you start setting aside the law,” he concludes, “it’s a slippery slope.”

Ultimately, Krogh wrote Integrity to complete his own healing. Looking at his past—in often excruciating detail—has helped Krogh find release from it. Perhaps more importantly, he has worked to shape his experience into a model to help others make ethical decisions.

Integrity does have the power to heal wounds. Just ask Daniel Ellsberg. He wrote the forward to Krogh’s book, and is someone Bud Krogh counts as a friend. ■

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