John Ehrlichman

John Ehrlichman was a senior White House aide whose involvement in the White House Plumbers and the Watergate cover-up emerged through a succession of records, sources, and reversals. At first, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein thought he might be one of the few high officials safely separated from the scandal. Later reporting connected his office to secret operations and a camouflaged telephone; sources described his role in approving or delaying covert work; and Deep Throat attributed to him an effort to ensure that damaging files disappeared. Ehrlichman denied specifically approving or ordering illegal acts, but resigned on April 30, 1973, and was indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice in 1974.

White House Role and the Plumbers

Ehrlichman occupied a position that crossed the boundary between domestic White House responsibilities and covert intelligence work. Kathleen Chenow, secretary to the White House Plumbers, identified the group as Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy, David Young, and Egil Krogh. Its stated work was investigating leaks to the news media, and it reported to Ehrlichman. The Plumbers had offices in the basement of the Executive Office Building, across from the White House. Chenow was technically Young’s secretary; Young had been loaned to Ehrlichman’s staff from Henry Kissinger’s office, and regularly reported the group’s progress to Ehrlichman. Krogh was one of Ehrlichman’s principal deputies.

Chenow’s account tied that operation to an unusual telephone installation. A line had been placed in room 16 of the Executive Office Building under a false or misleading listing in the name of Kathleen Chenow, although she was the Plumbers’ secretary. The telephone company official responsible for White House service confirmed that Ehrlichman’s office had ordered the phone and arranged a billing system he regarded as unprecedented in his twenty-five years on the job. White House sources told the reporters that John Campbell had managed Ehrlichman’s office and that the phone would not have been installed without Ehrlichman’s approval. Ehrlichman’s office did not comment when asked about the story. The report’s importance lay not only in the concealed line but in what its arrangements suggested: the leak investigators’ work was connected to an office at the center of the White House.

The purpose of the Plumbers’ work also widened beyond a single inquiry. Chenow said the administration had first sought to compare the version of the Pentagon Papers published by The New York Times with the original documents, then tried to discover how the papers had reached the press. The search expanded to leaks from the State Department, including reviews of embassy cables and efforts to trace whose desks they had crossed. Her testimony supplied the reporters with an on-the-record description of the group, its members, its work, and its reporting line to Ehrlichman. She also said prosecutors had asked about Charles Colson, Hunt, Liddy, and Young, but had not asked her about Ehrlichman.

Conflicting Accounts of Covert Work

The evidence about Ehrlichman’s role did not arrive as a single settled account. After the Watergate break-in, John Mitchell conducted what he called an investigation for about ten days and, according to Deep Throat, discovered things that astonished even him. Deep Throat said Hunt was assigned to help Mitchell gather information, then was abruptly pulled off the assignment, fired, and told to leave town permanently by Ehrlichman. Woodward reacted with shock and skepticism: Ehrlichman was understood to handle legislation, domestic concepts, and crises, while political operations were associated with Mitchell and H. R. Haldeman. Deep Throat would not elaborate, leaving Woodward uncertain how much weight to place on the claim.

Other reporting initially appeared to point away from Ehrlichman. On television, he characterized allegations of a Republican political espionage and sabotage program as charges lacking proof. He said he knew of no such campaign by Republicans inside or outside the administration and that no one in the White House had known in advance about Watergate. He distinguished the Watergate bugging, which he acknowledged involved a crime, from political activity such as discovering an opponent’s schedule, which he presented as an old feature of American politics. Woodward and Bernstein judged him perhaps the only senior aide clean enough on Watergate to appear before television cameras. They reasoned that Haldeman could not be sent out after reporting had linked his aide Dwight Chapin to Donald Segretti, and briefly wondered whether Deep Throat had been wrong about Ehrlichman ordering Hunt away.

That interpretation was challenged by testimony the reporters later obtained from a witness who knew Hunt. The witness recalled Hunt complaining that Ehrlichman was an amateur because he held up a budget for secret intelligence-type work, delaying an operation for two or three weeks. Hunt, the witness said, praised Colson for understanding the necessity of such work and promptly approving and advancing the budget. The account did not make every disputed operation or its legality clear, but it complicated Ehrlichman’s public posture: the criticism portrayed him not as wholly outside covert activity, but as an official who could hold up and constrain it, while another aide facilitated it.

Reporting, Denial, and the Cover-Up

As the Chapin connection brought Watergate closer to the Oval Office, Ehrlichman became one of the White House’s public defenders. The administration disputed the Washington Post’s reporting, and Ehrlichman’s televised denial was followed by a White House counterattack that singled out the Post even though Time had developed similarly damaging information. The New York Times then published telephone records showing that Segretti’s telephone or credit card had been used for calls to the White House, Chapin’s home, and Hunt’s home and office. The records made it harder for the White House to dismiss the emerging connections as rumor. The episode exposed the gap between Ehrlichman’s public assurance that he knew of no Republican sabotage campaign and the accumulating evidence of contacts among White House and campaign figures.

A later account from Hugh Sloan placed Ehrlichman outside one particular moment of disclosure. When Woodward asked whether Ehrlichman had been the person who went into the Oval Office on March 21 to tell the President that there had been a cover-up worse than he knew, Sloan said it was not Ehrlichman. That answer did not erase the other claims about Ehrlichman’s role; it distinguished the question of who delivered that warning from the broader questions of who had authorized undercover activity or knew about payments. Another source told Bernstein that John Dean had acted on instructions from Haldeman or others after June 17, including in arranging hush money. In the reporters’ subsequent calls, White House colleagues acknowledged that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had authorized widespread undercover activities and knew of payments to the convicted conspirators, while maintaining that they had never specifically approved or ordered anything illegal.

Deep Throat gave Woodward a more specific account of the handling of Hunt’s files. He said that on June 28, at a meeting with Ehrlichman and Dean, Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray had been told the files were politically explosive and should never become public. Deep Throat further reported that Ehrlichman had told Dean to discard them in the river. Gray, however, kept the documents for about a week and then said he put them in a burn bag in his office. According to the same account, Gray was not explicitly ordered to destroy them but understood what Dean and Ehrlichman wanted. Dean’s associate likewise told Bernstein that Ehrlichman wanted the files permanently disposed of. The reported folders contained fabricated State Department cables intended to implicate John F. Kennedy in the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and a dossier of information Hunt had collected on Senator Edward Kennedy. The files connected the effort to conceal Watergate-related conduct with the earlier work of the White House Plumbers.

Resignation and Indictment

By the end of April 1973, the reporters had information that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were involved in the cover-up, and sources described an effort to make Dean bear responsibility. One associate said that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had been trying to persuade Dean to take the blame and convince the President to protect them; the associate added that the President had agreed and that the cover-up had been discussed at meetings attended by him. The account raised the stakes of the story beyond disputes over individual operations: it suggested that the White House was trying to shape responsibility at the highest level. The reporters did not publish the most sweeping allegation immediately, because their editors wanted specifics and a way to assess Dean’s account.

On April 30, the White House announced that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had resigned, Dean had been fired, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had also resigned. Ehrlichman’s resignation letter described him as a target of public attack and referred to rumors, charges, and media implications. That evening, Richard Nixon said he had accepted the resignations of two of his closest associates, called them among the finest public servants he had known, and accepted responsibility as the person at the top. The President also credited the grand jury, prosecutors, Judge John Sirica, and a vigorous free press with bringing facts to light. The contrast between Ehrlichman’s departure and Nixon’s public acceptance of responsibility did not settle the underlying questions of who had authorized which acts; it made the crisis and the administration’s competing accounts of accountability more visible.

The legal consequences continued after Ehrlichman left office. On March 1, 1974, the grand jury indicted him, Haldeman, Colson, Mitchell, Gordon Strachan, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson for conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Watergate cover-up. A second grand jury separately indicted Ehrlichman, Colson, Liddy, and three Cuban Americans in the conspiracy to burglarize the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The indictments extended the record beyond the Watergate break-in itself, placing Ehrlichman among officials charged in both the cover-up and another covert operation. His trajectory in the reporting is therefore defined by a repeated reversal: the official first presented as a plausible, comparatively untainted spokesman became linked by witnesses and documentary details to the machinery of secrecy, and ultimately stood among the former aides formally charged with obstructing justice.