The White House Plumbers
Daniel Ellsberg was an analyst for the RAND Corporation and then for the US Government, in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara. He spent two years working in Vietnam under the State Department and in 1967 returned to Rand, where his work included contributing to a Pentagon-funded study of the Vietnam situation, a history which later became known as the Pentagon Papers. Through his work Ellsberg came to oppose the war, later writing that rather than being a civil war with the United States backing one side, it was and had always been a war of foreign aggression, beginning with the French, and continued by the United States.
After Ellsberg copied the Pentagon Papers and leaked them to the press the public came to learn of the massive deceptions from the government over the conduct of the war. The release of the documents, which the Supreme Court ruled could not be suppressed by the Nixon administration, revealed that as far back as the Kennedy administration the government was aware that the war was virtually unwinnable by the South Vietnamese. The Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations had kept this belief from the American people and the Johnson administration had, “…systematically lied not only to the public but also to Congress…” regarding the conduct of the war.
Nixon was outraged at the leaks and ordered members of his staff, with offices in the White House, to find the means to discredit Ellsberg, though he was but one of several contributors to the documents. The staff members took to calling themselves the White House Plumbers and began to find ways to carry out Nixon’s orders. One of their earliest operations was to plan a burglary, thus they conspired to commit a felony while in the West Wing of the White House. They planned to burglarize the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Los Angeles, Dr. Henry Fielding.
The break-in was reported back to the White House as being unsuccessful in that Ellsberg’s file could not be located. Dr. Fielding told authorities in Los Angeles that he found Ellsberg’s file on the floor of his office, and that the file had been rifled through. When Nixon aide John Ehrlichman informed the President that an “operation” had taken place and aborted he cautioned the President that it was something that was, “…better that you don’t know about.” In his personal notes, Ehrlichman recorded the “operation” as Hunt/Liddy Special Project Number 1. This referred to the two men with offices in the White House, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.
Hunt and Liddy did not take or copy Ellsberg’s file when they entered Fielding’s office with three other men recruited from the CIA because it did not contain the type of information which would have sufficiently discredited or embarrassed Ellsberg. Hunt believed that such information may have existed in a separate file kept at Fielding’s home. Hunt and Liddy proposed a second burglary, this one of Fielding’s home, to search for any additional records. Hunt and Liddy created a plan for this “second operation” and presented it to Ehrlichman, who decided not to approve its execution, considering it to be too risky.