Egil "Bud" Krogh Jr., a lawyer and Nixon aide who co-chaired the secret White House "Plumbers" unit and was sentenced to prison after approving a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, died Jan. 18 at a hospital in Washington. He was 80.
Krogh, a key player in the Watergate affair that brought down Richard M. Nixon's presidency, had suffered a stroke in 2015, said his son Peter Krogh, who did not give a precise cause of death.
A former deputy assistant to the president and undersecretary of transportation, Krogh was the first member of the Nixon administration sentenced to prison for his conduct in the White House. He later called the Ellsberg episode "a meltdown in personal integrity" and spent years teaching and lecturing about ethics, atoning for his crimes and teaching others how to avoid what he described as a historic error in judgment.
"If you compromise your integrity, you allow a little piece of your soul to slip through your hands," he wrote in a memoir, "Integrity" (2007), with his son Matthew Krogh. "Integrity, like trust, is all too easy to lose, and all too difficult to restore."
In the eyes of Krogh and many presidential historians, the 1971 break-in at the Beverly Hills, Calif., offices of Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg's former psychiatrist, paved the way for a more notorious burglary at the Watergate complex in Washington nearly 10 months later, when two of Krogh's former associates helped organize a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters.
While the Fielding break-in was widely considered a shocking abuse of presidential power, it was all the more unexpected given the involvement of Krogh, an Eagle Scout and retired Navy communications officer who was considered "the White House Mr. Clean, so straight an arrow that his friends mockingly called him 'Evil Krogh,' " wrote Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Watergate book "All the President's Men."
Krogh was only 29 when he joined the White House, having worked with family friend John D. Ehrlichman at a Seattle law firm. When Ehrlichman became Nixon's White House counsel (and later domestic policy chief) after the 1968 election, Krogh followed him to Washington.
His work dramatically shifted after June 13, 1971, when the New York Times published excerpts of the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War that had been leaked by Ellsberg. Its release spurred the White House to create the Special Investigations Unit, later nicknamed the "Plumbers" because they aimed to plug the leak of classified information and generating advantageous leaks of their own.
Egil Krogh Jr. was born in Chicago on Aug. 3, 1939. His sisters nicknamed him Buddy as a boy, leading him to go by Bud for most of his life.