Learning Ethics the Hard Way: a Review of Integrity by Egil Bud Krogh With Matthew Krogh

• Citation: Vol. 31 No. 6 Pg. 8
• Publication year: 2008
• Pages: 8
• Year: 2008
• topic: Business of Law

Wyoming Bar Journal 2008.

Vol. 31, No. 6, 8. Learning Ethics the Hard Way: A Review of Integrity by Egil Bud Krogh with Matthew Krogh

Wyoming Bar Journal
Issue: December, 2008

Author: Gregory C. Dyekman

Learning Ethics the Hard Way: A Review of "Integrity" by Egil "Bud" Krogh with Matthew Krogh

It's a little hard to believe that it was more than 35 years ago that the Watergate Scandal rocked the foundations of our government, creating an atmosphere of distrust and cynicism from which our country has never recovered. Some will remember the name Egil Krogh as the first Nixon administration official to plead guilty and be sentenced to prison for his role as head of a Special Investigations Unit known as "The Plumbers."

Krogh was 32 and fresh out of law school after some time in the military when John Ehrlichman asked him to join the Nixon administration in Washington, D.C. He worked on a number of issues, including drug enforcement and gun control, but it was his appointment to head up a special group formed to stop leaks of confidential government information that led to his undoing. A series of leaks to the press infuriated President Nixon to the point that he demanded that action be taken to stop them. His ideas included subjecting hundreds of government employees to lie detector tests (though those tests were not actually administered). The special investigations unit (SIU) included Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who ultimately came up with the idea to burglarize the office of a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills whose patient, Daniel Ellsberg, was an employee of the Rand Institute...