Egil Krogh looks back on some of the most dramatic times in American history.

In 1973, Egil “Bud” Krogh and his family were enjoying the grounds of a historic home in Willamsburg, Va., when he decided that the right thing for him to do was go to jail.

Two years earlier, Krogh had been a 29-year-old staffer for President Richard Nixon when he authorized a break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsberg, who was known for leaking the top-secret Pentagon Papers to the press.

Co-chair of the Special Investigation Unit established by Nixon to investigate security leaks, a group known as “the Plumbers,” Krogh was forced to resign his position as U.S. Undersecretary of Transportation in May 1973.

For the next few months, he defended his actions as necessary in the interest of national security. Then he changed his mind

“I had an epiphany in Williamsburg,” Krogh said. “I was under indictment in a federal court, yet able to come here and do what I want until convicted.”

He recalls thinking, “I can enjoy rights under the Constitution for what? To strip away the rights of another citizen with a search without warrant? The inconsistency in that became overwhelming.

“What you’re defending is conduct that this government and the Bill of Rights were set up specifically to prevent,” Krogh told himself. “To prevent government from being able to enter a person’s office (without warrant)… You’ve got to plead guilty.”

Krogh kicks off the Bainbridge Library Speakers Forum series with a talk on “Lessons from Watergate: An Insider’s Story,” at 4 p.m. Sept. 25 at Eagle Harbor Congregational Church. He will discuss his experiences, parallels to current issues and his views on maintaining personal integrity.

Once Krogh decided to plead guilty to his crimes, he asked special prosecutor Leon Jaworski to sentence him before he testified, because he didn’t want a reduced sentence for his testimony.

Kroogh also communicated to Nixon through the president’s son-in-law David Eisenhower that he didn’t want to be pardoned for his crime.

“’Don’t deprive me of the opportunity to pay the price for the crime that I committed,’” Krogh told Eisenhower.

How did a self-described “straight shooter” end up green-lighting a government break-in?

Born in Illinois, Krogh grew up on the East Coast and spent seventh and eighth grade at Lakeside in Seattle. He did a four-year stint as communications officer with the Navy on the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam.

After his tour ended, he studied law at the University of Washington from 1965-68, while clerking for the law firm of which John Ehrlichman was a partner.

Ehrlichman offered Krogh a job with the White House and a short five months after graduation, at age 29, Krogh found himself on President Nixon’s transition team and in D.C. by January 1969.

There, he worked on narcotics control and transportation and was deputy general counsel to the president and presidential liaison to the District of Columbia.

Then in June 1971, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers – top secret documents that detailed the U.S. government’s involvement in Vietnam from the 1940s to 1968 – which had been released without authorization by Daniel Ellsberg. The papers were considered to be a factor in the decline of public support for the war.

That event prompted Krogh’s being appointed to head “the Plumbers” to look into information leaks.

He brought in E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, figures later implicated in the Watergate break-in and bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.

Krogh’s first assignment was to discover if Ellsberg was likely to release other confidential information.

When he eventually okayed a “covert operation” to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Krogh said, it was “to see if the doctor had files (on if Ellsberg’s) mental state was such that he’d put other documents into the public which were related to the current Nixon administration?”

A secondary objective was finding information to discredit Ellsberg.

Following the Pentagon Papers, more leaks sprung up. The president’s fallback negotiating position for the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty was leaked to the press, compromising the president’s negotiating position.

“I was summoned to the Oval Office. (Nixon) wanted it to be found and for me to polygraph dozens of people,” Krogh said. “He was telling me I had the responsibility of finding out who was at the bottom of it.

“It created a crisis atmosphere that I was caught up in, over laid with ‘national security. The president said the work we were doing was critical to ‘national security,’ so we didn’t think through (our actions) as a matter of law or ethics.”

In his discussion, Krogh will focus on this breakdown of integrity – what causes it and how to avoid it.

A breakdown is likely to occur, he now believes, when you have the elements of misplaced loyalty, a “groupthink” environment that makes individuals unable to ask the hard questions and an overriding tenor of pressure.

In those situations, he says, the key is to step back and do a self-diagnosis and question yourself: Is what I’m doing “whole and complete”? Have I thought this through to the second, third and fourth order of consequence? Is it right? What will be the impact of the event? Is it legal and Constitutional? Is it good — that is, will it benefit some person in a positive way?

“When you’re in government or any activity, there’s an integrity of purpose,” Krogh said. “It’s an idea I wished I’d had when I started working at the White House, because I think we’d have had a better chance (of doing the right thing).”

The break-in of Fielding’s office “was the beginning of a breakdown of integrity in the White House,” he said.

Although Krogh only worked for the plumbers through Labor Day of 1971, he considers the covert operation the seminal event of what became the Watergate scandal.

“If we had said ‘No’ in 1971 that we don’t stand for this conduct, they would have been hard pressed in 1972 (to break into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate Hotel). I think it led inexorably to Nixon’s resignation.”

He sees parallels to his experience in current events, such as the Bybee memo, leaked to the press the summer of 2004.

John Dean, former counsel to President Nixon, described the Bybee memo in a column published on findlaw.com in January 2005, as defining “torture so narrowly that only activities resulting in ‘death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function’ qualify.

It also claims that Americans can defend themselves if criminally prosecuted for torture by relying on the criminal law defenses of necessity and/or self-defense, based on the horror of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Finally, the memo asserts that the criminal law prohibiting torture “may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations undertaken of enemy combatants pursuant to the President’s Commander-in-Chief powers.”

Krogh believes that memo led to the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“The memo lays the foundation for reasoning that works its way through…there’s tacit buy-in that starts at the the top. They have to bear some responsibility for what happened,” Krogh said. “These are issues that are with us today – the temptation to make decisions that haven’t been thought through.

“When people are threatened and frightened, that’s when abuse of power by those in government is most likely.”

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Egil has landed

The Bainbridge Library Speakers Forum series hosts Egil “Bud” Krogh, at 4 p.m. Sept. 25 at Eagle Harbor Congregational Church. Series tickets are $45 for all six talks, $60 patrons or $15 at the door. Send checks, payable to Bainbridge Library Speakers Forum, to Bainbridge Island Library. For more information, call Susan Bray at 842-4156.