“I WASN’T DISCOURAGED by the failure of the Fielding job to produce results,” Gordon Liddy would later explain. “In that line of work there are as many dry holes as there are in the oil business.”
Liddy and Hunt soon learned that Daniel Ellsberg was scheduled to come to Washington in September to accept an award from a peace organization. There would be a big ceremony in a hotel ballroom, with lots of media. This sparked a new idea in room 16.
First, they’d bring up some of their Cuban agents from Miami. “We’ll make waiters out of them,” Hunt proposed.
Posing as waitstaff at the award dinner, the agents would slip LSD into Ellsberg’s soup. “Enough to befuddle him,” Liddy added, “make him appear a near burnt-out drug case.” By the time the guest of honor stood to make his acceptance speech, he’d be completely zonked.
White House Counsel Charles Colson approved the plan. Hunt went to a CIA doctor for the drugs.
On September 23, the night of the ceremony, more than a thousand people sat at tables in the hotel ballroom. The waiters carried in food, and Ellsberg ate. When he was called to the podium, everyone stood and clapped.
Ellsberg’s voice seemed to shake.
“Brothers and sisters,” he began, “I prepared notes appropriate to a very depressed crowd. But I had a feeling from the moment I stepped into this room tonight that this is a celebration.”
The crowd cheered and stomped their feet.
And Ellsberg launched into his speech. He was emotional, but otherwise fine. By the time Hunt had procured the LSD, it had been too late to get his Cuban contacts hired as waiters at the hotel.
The Plumbers went back to the drawing board.
* * *
A week later, Ellsberg landed at night in Los Angeles and rented a green Mustang convertible. He tossed his jacket in the backseat, and drove with the top down and the radio blaring. His first stop was a friend’s house, a woman who was training to be a hairdresser. Ellsberg sat at a kitchen chair while she snipped his curly, graying hair.
In the morning he drove to the Los Angeles Federal Building, where Tony Russo was scheduled to appear in court. After six weeks behind bars, Russo was finally released by the judge. Russo and Ellsberg embraced in the courtroom, then talked to the press outside.
“I realized how many men had died because those pages had been stamped top secret and because generations of bureaucrats like me kept them secret,” Ellsberg said. “I realized that I had to reveal this information even if I had to go to prison for the rest of my life.”
That was looking increasingly possible. In late December, the grand jury added new charges to the Ellsberg indictment. He now faced a total of 115 years behind bars. Tony Russo was also charged with theft and espionage, and was looking at a sentence of up to thirty-five years.
Russo, like Ellsberg, was unrepentant.
“Dan and I are charged with ‘conspiracy to defraud the United States.’” he told reporters. “But the whole point of the Pentagon Papers is the incredible extent to which the government has defrauded the people of America.”
* * *
In February 1972, Richard Nixon stunned the world with a weeklong trip to China. Cameras followed him as he met with Chinese leaders and walked on the Great Wall. This visit, the first by an American president, led to a thaw in the years of icy hostility between two of the world’s most powerful nations. It was the greatest triumph of Nixon’s presidency. And yet there was little time to savor the moment. Almost as soon as Nixon got back home, North Vietnam launched a massive offensive in the South. There were just seventy thousand Americans left in Vietnam. South Vietnam had an enormous military, but the forces were spread out and ineffective.
America’s longtime ally was nearing collapse. Nixon saw this as a grave threat to American prestige—and to his own.
“Both Haldeman and Henry seem to have an idea—which I think is mistaken—that even if we fail in Vietnam we can still survive politically,” the president wrote in his diary. “I have no illusions whatever on that score.” The important thing, Nixon decided, was to avoid disaster in Vietnam until after the presidential election in November.
“That’s why we’ve got to blast the living bejeezus out of North Vietnam,” Kissinger advised.
The president agreed. Lyndon Johnson had halted the bombing of North Vietnam four years before. It was time to start it up again. The only question, in Nixon’s mind, was the scale of the attack.
“I still think we ought to take the dikes out now,” Nixon said on April 25, referring to a long-discussed plan of leveling the walls holding back the Red River in North Vietnam. “Will that drown people?”
“That will drown about two hundred thousand people,” Kissinger replied.
“Well, no, no, no. I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?”
“That, I think, would just be too much.”
“The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?” Nixon asked. “I just want you to think big, Henry, for Chrissakes.”
The president was just talking tough, just pumping himself up. That’s the generous view, anyway. But he was serious about taking the violence to a new level.
“The only place where you and I disagree,” he told Kissinger in early May, “is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians, and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.”
Kissinger’s response was revealing. “I’m concerned about the civilians,” he said, “because I don’t want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.”
* * *
“This period was one of the most intense, frightening, and meaningful times of my life,” Patricia Ellsberg later said of the months leading up to the trial. “I was terrified that my husband would be physically harmed or sent to prison for the rest of his life.”
Both possibilities were very real.
The Plumbers were set to strike again on May 3, when Ellsberg was scheduled to appear at a Vietnam War protest at the Capitol Building. “If heads are knocked, that’s all right,” Charles Colson told the team. “That’s Ellsberg’s problem.”
Hunt and Liddy contacted Bernard Barker in Miami. Barker flew north with a crew of eight, including Felipe DeDiego from the Fielding operation. In a Washington hotel, Hunt told Barker the idea was to disrupt Ellsberg’s talk, and to physically attack him.
“Our mission is to hit him,” Bernard Barker briefed his fellow operatives, “to call him a traitor and punch him in the nose.”
On the drizzly afternoon of May 3, about five hundred protesters gathered outside the Capitol. As a speaker railed against the never-ending war, Barker’s team mingled, not exactly blending in—they were the only ones in suits. Ellsberg made his way to the mic and started talking.
“Traitor!”
“Communist!”
Ellsberg heard the shouts. He saw some pushing and shoving. He went on with his talk.
Barker’s men, unable to get close to Ellsberg, tore down antiwar signs and swung fists at anyone with long hair. The police broke up the ruckus and no arrests were made. That night, in his hotel room with Hunt and Liddy, Barker bragged he’d punched a hippie hard enough to hurt his hand.
For the Plumbers it was another failure. They were quick to move on. All three got into a car and drove around Washington, Hunt and Liddy pointing out locations of potential “entry operations,” as Liddy called them. The Plumbers were moving beyond Ellsberg. Their focus now included helping President Nixon’s reelection campaign. One priority was installing listening devices in the campaign office of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.
But the next entry operation, Liddy explained, would be at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), located in an upscale office and apartment complex called Watergate.
* * *
On the afternoon of May 8, Richard Nixon announced that American planes had begun striking industrial targets in and around Hanoi. The Navy was placing mines in North Vietnam’s Haiphong harbor. If North Vietnam agreed to a cease-fire and returned the American prisoners of war, Nixon said, he would end the bombing and withdraw the remaining American troops.
May 1972. Warehouse and shipping areas in Haiphong, North Vietnam, after being bombed by U.S. warplanes.
As usual in times of military crisis, the public rallied around the president. Nixon’s approval rating rose to nearly 60 percent.
Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg were in Los Angeles, preparing for trial, when they heard the news. “I remember feeling,” Ellsberg recalled, “and telling Patricia, that it was the darkest day of my life.”
His depression deepened as he sat in the courtroom, watching the jury selection process. Listening to lawyers from both sides question potential jurors, it became obvious to Ellsberg that none of these people knew much about the documents he’d risked everything to expose. They’d heard of the Pentagon Papers, but hadn’t taken the time to read them. The war in Vietnam went on. The bombing was escalating again.
Ellsberg leaned to a member of his defense team and moaned, “For this I’m going to do ninety-nine years?”