Vietnam, Nixon, The "Plumbers," & The Pentagon Papers

May 9, 2025

May 11th, 1973: 

On this day, a federal judge dismissed all charges against Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who'd leaked the Vietnam War Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Prosecutors had discovered that convicted Watergate conspirators Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy—who’d planned and directed the DNC headquarters break-in that started the scandal—had earlier also broken into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. As White House “plumbers” tasked by Nixon's administration with “fixing leaks,” their goal had been to steal mental health treatment records that could damage Ellsberg's credibility and weaken his defense against the DOJ’s charges of espionage.

At the time of that burglary, both Hunt and Liddy were employed in the White House by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor (see my April blog post for more on Ehrlichman and his possible involvement with the acting FBI director destroying evidence of “dirty tricks” by Nixon’s re-election committee).

Citing government misconduct, the judge dismisses all charges against Ellsberg. And the news of this break-in further fans the firestorm that Watergate had become.  

This 1973 episode is just another example of how intertwined Nixon’s political fate was with the Vietnam War. Last week was the 50th anniversary of its end. And I was reminded that to really understand how Nixon won his first term, we need to remember how divided the nation, how volatile it was in 1968—when so many young people were taking to the streets to protest a draft that sent them to fight a war they didn't believe in.

During that campaign, Nixon had played to conservative Americans angered by those demonstrations. He promised a return to law and order, to govern with no tolerance for troublemakers—which he did once elected with heavy-handed policing and FBI surveillance.

Then, rather than bringing an “honorable end” to the war as he’d promised, he stubbornly escalated it, declaring America “will not be humiliated.” He called students who shut down college campuses with their sit-ins “ungrateful bums.” Which put a flamethrower to a nation already a tinderbox, leading to Kent State and the National Guard firing into a crowd of college students in May 1970, killing four and injuring nine.

That terrible tragedy spawned even more protests nationwide, including the New York City “Hard Hat Riots,” where construction workers, incensed by “spoiled, unpatriotic long hairs,” pick up crowbars and attack the students—egged on by Wall Street onlookers.

Despite those horrific events and growing reports of serious campaign misdeeds by Nixon's re-election campaign, 60% of Americans in the fall of 1972 believe Nixon's claim that Watergate was “absurd fiction,” a media hit job.

They re-elect him. Largely because of that blue-collar voting bloc Nixon courted, which he dubs the “long-suffering, hard-working Silent Majority.” He’d exploited their grievances and sense of being displaced by the Civil Rights Movement, Women's Lib, and draft-dodging “peacenik hippies,” promising to make them important again. Traditionally Democrats, they switched party and voted for Nixon in overwhelming numbers, despite the fact most young men dying in Vietnam were their sons.