John Ehrlichman - Political Life

Political Life

Ehrlichman worked on Nixon's unsuccessful 1960 presidential campaign, and his unsuccessful 1962 California gubernatorial campaign. He was an advance man for Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign.

Following Nixon's victory, Ehrlichman became the White House Counsel (later replaced by John Dean). He held this post for about a year before he became the Chief Domestic Advisor for Nixon. It was then that he became a member of the inner circle of Nixon's closest advisors. He and a close friend, H. R. Haldeman, whom he met at UCLA, were referred to jointly as "The Berlin Wall" by White House staffers because of their German family names and their penchant for isolating Nixon from other advisors and anyone seeking an audience with him. Ehrlichman created "The Plumbers", the group at the center of the Watergate scandal, and appointed his assistant Egil Krogh to oversee its covert operations, focusing on stopping leaks of confidential information after the release of The Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Henry Paulson was John Ehrlichman's assistant in 1972 and 1973.

After the start of the Watergate investigations in 1972, Ehrlichman lobbied for an intentional delay in the embattled confirmation of L. Patrick Gray as Director of the F.B.I. He argued that the confirmation hearings were deflecting media attention from Watergate and that it would be better for Gray to be left "twisting, slowly, slowly in the wind." The quote served as the embodiment of one of Ehrlichman's main functions during his years in the White House, to seek and destroy Nixon's enemies at virtually any cost, a function that would overshadow his domestic efforts in a White House consumed with foreign policy.

White House Counsel John Dean cited the "Berlin Wall" of Ehrlichman and Haldeman as one of the reasons for his growing sense of alienation in the White House. This alienation led him to believe he was to become the Watergate scapegoat and then to eventually cooperate with Watergate prosecutors. On April 30, 1973, Nixon fired Dean and demanded the resignations of both Ehrlichman and Haldeman. Both men complied.

Ehrlichman was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury and other charges on January 1, 1975 (along with John N. Mitchell and Haldeman). All three men were initially sentenced to between two and a half and eight years in prison. In 1977, the sentences were commuted to one to four years. Unlike his co-defendants, Ehrlichman voluntarily entered prison before his appeals were exhausted. He was released from the Federal Correctional Institution, Safford, after serving a total of 18 months. Having been convicted of a felony, he was disbarred from the practice of law.