The other day here, I linked to a letter from Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman to cartoonist Garry Trudeau. This brought the following message from the fine comic book creator, Paul Chadwick…
I know you're a fellow Watergate aficionado so you might find this interesting.
After resigning, Ehrlichman moved his family back to Bellevue, Washington, where his daughter Jody became a classmate of mine. Nevertheless, I was startled to find this villain from my newspapers appear as a guest speaker in my American History class. To talk about Watergate? No. To recount his experiences as a navigator on American bombers flying missions over Germany in WWII.
He was so charmingly self-deprecating, casting himself not as a war hero but as a terrified kid struggling to do his job, that I couldn't help liking the guy. His modesty, intelligence and depth messed with my political cosmology. It made me a follower of his subsequent tribulations, if not exactly a fan.
After all, he actually put into writing — checking a box next to "approve", if I recall correctly! — his go-ahead for Liddy's crew to burgle the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for private agonies with which to destroy the whistleblower. A dirtier political trick is hard to imagine.
I remember that after his divorce, Ehrlichman gave up on his legal appeals and simply reported to prison. He wrote novels, producing a decent Washington potboiler, The Company, that was made into a TV miniseries with Jason Robards playing a Nixon-like President Richard Monckton. I recall the scene where Monckton laughs with raspy glee at his mechanically elevating desk on Air Force One, supposedly installed by LBJ. I wonder if that bit was true.
Ehrlichman also, I recall, wrote an article for an art collector's magazine about art in the Nixon White House. He recounted an anecdote about being seated next to painter Andrew Wyeth at a state dinner. He boned up on Wyeth's work in order to make conversation. But Wyeth had learned Ehrlichman practiced Land Use law before working for Nixon, and spent the dinner discussing a zoning dispute in which the artist was entangled.
He eventually remarried, tried to syndicate a radio commentary (I never heard it, and I was seeking it out), and Wikipedia tells me he worked for an Atlanta hazardous materials firm. It also has this tidbit:
Shortly before his death, Ehrlichman teamed with novelist Tom Clancy to write, produce, and co-host a three hour Watergate documentary, John Ehrlichman: In the Eye of the Storm. The finished, but never broadcast, documentary, associated papers, and videotape elements (including an interview Ehrlichman did with Bob Woodward as part of the project) is housed at the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Now that apologia would be a treat for us Watergate geeks.
Google results seem to suggest that Ehrlichman's immortality rests on his poetic comment on the Oval Office tapes about how it would be a good distraction from the widening Watergate scandal to let FBI director-appointee L. Patrick Gray's confirmation hearing drag on — that they should leave Gray "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind." Fair enough, but that line came first from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, describing a hanged man.
A well-read fellow, Ehrlichman.
Well, nobody ever said he was stupid…although he may have seemed so when he appeared at the Watergate hearings and tried to justify some of the things he tried to justify. In all my readings, Ehrlichman always came off as a smart, efficient fellow who played the Washington game precisely the way he believed it was supposed to be played, and certainly the way Nixon wanted it to be played. In many ways, he went to prison because someone had to, and even Nixon's greatest enemies weren't about to put him behind bars. I do think the man broke the law and I have no problem believing the theories that he specifically ordered the infamous Watergate break-in.
But in his post-prison appearances, he did come across as a bright, sympathetic guy…at least when he wasn't trying to justify past behavior. His Watergate book, Witness to Power, was a mixed bag. He dumped on Nixon but must have known a lot more than he included. At least it felt like he was attacking his former boss just enough to sell books, not enough to give historians a true, unfiltered peek into the Nixon White House. I never read his roman à clef novel but I made it through much of the mini-series made from it and thought it was just dreadful with Robards struggling to portray Nixon without portraying Nixon. Richard Monckton? Yeah, that couldn't possibly be the same guy, could it?
Thanks, Paul. I've only had the opportunity to meet two Watergate figures. One, on a couple of occasions, has been John Dean who struck me as the smartest of the bunch — the one who figured out first that the jig was up and it was time to make a clean breast of it and turn state's evidence. The other was Charles Colson. I met him soon after he got into his Christian Fellowship line of work and sat horrified through a lunch where he talked about how much money there was to be made off anything that could be properly marketed to that audience. I'll have to write about that lunch one of these days.