White House Plumbers
Watergate scandal |
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People |
The White House Plumbers, sometimes simply called the Plumbers, the Room 16 Project, or more officially, the White House Special Investigations Unit, was a covert
Name
On Thanksgiving, 1971, David Young arrived home from his planning at the Special Investigative Unit, when his grandmother asked him, "What do you do at the White House?", he replied, "I am helping the president stop some leaks", purposely playing off on information leak versus water leak. She exclaimed, "Oh, you're a plumber!" Young, E. Howard Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy then put up a sign on their office with the title "The Plumbers", but it was taken down as their operations were intended to be top secret. Still, the name stuck for the group.[4]
Members
The Plumbers came to include several Watergate figures including
Some authors[who?] believe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer John Paisley was a member of the Plumbers. Paisley was assigned to the CIA's Office of Security, of which Nixon campaign security coordinator and Watergate burglar James McCord was once a member. On August 9, 1971, Young's memo indicates he met with Paisley and OS Director Howard Osborn, in which Paisley provided a list of objectives for the Special Investigations Unit.[6]
Operations
The Plumbers' first task was the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's Los Angeles psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding, in an effort to uncover evidence to discredit Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The operation was reportedly unsuccessful in finding Ellsberg's file and was thus reported to the White House. However, Fielding himself stated the file was in his office; he found it on the floor on the morning after the burglary and quite clearly, someone had gone through it.[7] In a September 1971 conversation, John Ehrlichman advised Nixon, "We had one little operation; it's been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don't know about."[8] Eventually, the case against Ellsberg was dismissed due to government misconduct.[9]
Aside from the Fielding burglary, there are few other activities the Plumbers were known to have been engaged in. Hunt reportedly looked into the
After the California break-in, Liddy—who was general counsel, a member of the finance committee of the
Notes
- ^ "The Plumbers". The New York Times. July 22, 1973. Retrieved October 12, 2022.
- Bob Haldeman, all about Daniel Ellsberg. Kissinger's comments were recorded, of course, on the hidden White House taping system, and four years later, a portion of that tape was listened to by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, which was then investigating the internal White House police unit known as the Plumbers.
- ^ Garment, Suzanne (April 13, 2018). "Cohen Makes Nixon's Fixers Look Like Amateurs". Real Clear Politics. Retrieved December 14, 2018.
- ISBN 978-0-670-02536-7.
- ^ a b Liddy. Will, pp. 147–149.
- ^ Jim Hougan. Secret Agenda, pp. 38–40.
- ^ Jim Hougan. Secret Agenda, p. 47.
- Simon and Schuster1999, page 28. Retrieved January 14, 2021.
- ^ Network, The Learning (2012-05-11). "May 11, 1973 | Charges Dropped Against Pentagon Papers Leakers". The Learning Network. Retrieved 2022-05-14.
- ISBN 978-0-670-02536-7.
References
- Hougan, Jim (1984). Secret Agenda. Random House. ISBN 0-394-51428-9.
- Liddy, G. Gordon (1980). Will. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-88014-6.
External links
- The Watergate Files presented by The Gerald R. Ford Museum & Library
- G. Gordon Liddy deposition in Maureen K. Dean and John W. Dean v. St. Martin's Press et al., United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Case No. 92 1807 (HHG), December 6, 1996.[dead link]