John
Ehrlichman, who had risen in four short years from being
the tour director for Nixon's campaign to being the
president's principal assistant for domestic affairs,
charted the grand design for gaining power over a major
investigative agency of the government-the Drug Enforcement
Administration-after Nixon's reelection, in 1972. The
former real estate lawyer from Seattle had, however,
seriously underestimated the countervailing powers within
the bureaucracy. In the wake of Watergate he could not
escape the flood of leaks from those he had sought previously
to control, and his decline was even more swift than
his rise to power. After being dismissed by the president
(along with H. R. Haldeman) in 1973, he was indicted
and convicted for perjury and conspiracy in both the
Watergate cover-up case and the Plumbers case. While
appealing his sentence, the former chief domestic-affairs
advisor to the president resided at an Indian reservation
in New Mexico and wrote a racy novel entitled The Company,
which depicted the power struggle that characterized
the Nixon administration. The novel was bought by Paramount
for a major film, and currently Ehrlichman is completing
a second novel about a domestic-affairs advisor to the
president.
Egil Krogh, Jr., Ehrlichman's
deputy and protege from Seattle, had skillfully orchestrated
the plans of the White House strategists, but he could
not survive the unmasking of the special-investigations
unit whose illegal activities he supervised. Although
he first attempted to shield the president and Ehrlichman,
he quickly saw that there was no way out except a full
confession. He therefore pleaded, guilty to a charge
of violating rights in the Plumbers case and served
four months in prison. His complete fall from power
became clear to Krogh when he found in prison that the
hygienist cleaning his teeth was a former drug trafficker
whom he had helped to send to prison. After being released
in August, 1974, he visited President Nixon in San Clemente.
The president asked him whether he had really known
in advance about the break-in at Dr. Ellsberg's psychiatrist's
office; Krogh assured the former president that he had
not in fact known. For a few weeks Krogh considered
writing a book on national security, but was unable
to find a foundation to sponsor this enterprise. He
did, finally, find a job as an administrative assistant
to Paul N. McCloskey, the liberal California Republican
in Congress. Later, in 1976, he joined the staff of
Swenson's Ice Cream Company, a San Francisco chain.
Krogh's staff on the Domestic
Council also disbanded. Edward L. Morgan, who had briefly
replaced Rossides at the Treasury Department, was indicted
and convicted for his part in backdating the president's
tax return; he spent several months in prison. Jeffrey
Donfeld, who had been recommended by the president to
head the enforcement division of the Interior Department,
was denied that position by the Civil Service Commission
after Ehrlichman resigned. Discouraged by the turn of
events in the American government, Donfeld visited Israel
at the time of the Yom Kippur war and then returned
to California to practice law at a corporate firm in
Century City. Walter Minnick, who had gone from the
Domestic Council to the Office of Management and Budget,
resigned from the government in 1974, also disillusioned
by what he saw. He moved to Boise, Idaho, where he took
an executive position in a construction firm. Geoffrey
Sheppard, Krogh's young assistant who supervised the
law-and-order programs after G. Gordon Liddy left the
Domestic Council, moved to the White House as speech
writer for the embattled president and stayed there
until the bitter end, when Nixon resigned. Sheppard
then returned to the state of Washington and joined
a law firm.
E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon
Liddy, who advised Krogh on ways to use the war on heroin
for other purposes, were both convicted for their part
in the Watergate burglary and are still in prison. Both
men are reportedly considering writing novels about
the political scene in Washington.
Nelson Gross, the former political
boss of Bergen County, New Jersey, who directed the
international narcotics program under Krogh's tutelage,
resigned from the government in 1973 when he was notified
that he was about to be indicted for election fraud.
He was subsequently tried and convicted for violating
the campaign laws. His success in bringing Timothy Leary
back from Afghanistan was all but forgotten. The Cabinet
Committee on International Narcotics Control, for which
in theory Gross worked, was quietly disbanded in 1972
and moved into a two-room suite of offices in the State
Department never to be heard from again.
William C. Sullivan, who cooperated
with the White House to replace J. Edgar Hoover as head
of the FBI and wound up instead (after being locked
out of his office by Hoover) as head of the Office of
National Narcotics Intelligence, was recruited by John
Dean to write a "Sullivan Report" on the illegal
activities of the FBI under other presidents. After
Dean defected from the White House in March, 1973, Sullivan
was quietly eased out of his office, which was then
folded into the new Drug Enforcement Administration.
Sullivan returned to New Hampshire, where he suffered
a serious heart attack in an automobile accident and
was therefore unable to testify before the various committees
investigating the excesses of the FBI under Hoover.
The White House strategists with whom Sullivan dealt,
Robert Mardian and John Dean, were both indicted and
convicted in the Watergate cover-up case.
Myles Ambrose, Nixon's first
drug czar, opted to retire from the government after
the public furor over the Collinsville raids by agents
of his Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement-and several
embarrassing leaks that appeared in the press about
his association with a Texas rancher who later ran afoul
of the law-even though there was no linkage between
these incidents and his retirement from federal service.
Ambrose returned to private law practice, although he
still occasionally plays basketball in the gymnasium
of the drug agency. Caulfield, who had originally proposed
the private detective firm planned for the White House
in 1971, was forced to resign from the Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms division of the Treasury Department. Ambrose's
office was also consolidated into the Drug Enforcement
Administration.
Donald J. Santarelli, the young
White House strategist who was appointed head of the
Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in 1972 was
unable to use its billion-dollar fund to assist any
of his former colleagues in the White House (except
for Police Chief Jerry Wilson, of Washington, D.C.,
who received a grant from LEAA to write a book on police).
After Santarelli made some unfavorable comments about
the Nixon White House, which were duly leaked to the
press by FBI agents, he was forced to resign. However,
he was retained as a consultant by LEAA to produce a
series of television programs about law enforcement.
The bureaucratic enemies of
the White House also were forced to resign from the
government. John Ingersoll, who resisted the White House
strategists until they reorganized his job away, became
the security director of the IBM World Trade Corporation
and took two of his chief assistants, Richard Callahan
and Tony Pohl, with him. Eugene Rossides, although he
continued to battle the Drug Enforcement Administration
long after he left office in the Treasury Department,
eventually found a new cause in Cyprus and became a
leading organizer of the movement to deprive Turkey
of any United States military aid (he had also attempted
this earlier under the aegis of the narcotics-control
program). Richard Helms, who had refused to assist in
the Watergate cover-up, was appointed ambassador to
Iran. And Richard G. Kleindienst, who had assisted Helms
in resisting the White House attempts to incorporate
CIA agents in the drug program, pleaded guilty to a
misdemeanor involving misinformation given to a Senate
committee, and then returned to private law practice
in Washington.
Dr. Jerome H. Jaffe, who in
1971 had been appointed by the president to head the
new Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention,
resigned from the government in 1973 after he found
that the in-group in the White House showed more interest
in public relations than in drug abuse. He was given
an appointment at the New York State Psychiatric Institute,
and subsequently commented in an article in Psychiatric
News, a publication of the American Psychiatric Association,
on the psychiatric flaws in the Nixon White House. His
special-action office was then moved to an annex of
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in
Maryland. The White House annex on Jackson Street that
he had shared with Myles Ambrose was ordered vacated
in October, 1973, to "make way for the energy crisis."
(The first energy czar, John Love, moved into the offices
on October 15, 1973.)
John Bartels, Ingersoll's successor,
resigned from the Drug Enforcement Administration under
pressure in 1975, and is currently working on libel
suits against his former subordinates for their leaks
and testimony, as well as on a book about the drug agency.
Before Bartels had assumed office in 1973, President
Nixon declared, "We have turned the corner [in
the war against drugs]." As Bartels should have
realized at the time, the heroin crusade ended with
Watergate.
|