Asked on one of the big cable news networks (CNN or MS-NBC) to comment on Ehrlichman's death, the Right's answer to Carville, G. Gordon Liddy, launched into a long, detailed justification of Nixon, blaming John Dean for Watergate -- only to be cut off the air in mid-sentence because his rehash was too long, boring, and "old news" ... Apparently, there are Nixon-loving, Reagan-worshipping Republicans who are even today doing the time-warp -- still bitter at the memory of Nixon's removal from office, as if it were only yesterday, and in vain fantasizing "payback" through Bill Clinton ... Ex-Nixon Adviser Ehrlichman Dies By TOM SALADINO .c The Associated Press ATLANTA (AP) -- Watergate figure John D. Ehrlichman confessed to being too loyal to President Nixon -- overriding his own judgments in order to do the president's bidding. ``I went and lied and I'm paying the price for that lack of willpower,'' Ehrlichman said in a taped statement filed in federal court in 1977 before he was granted parole for his Watergate crimes. ``If I had any advice for my kids, it would be never ... ever defer your moral judgments to anybody. ... That's something that's very personal. And it's what a man has to hang on to,'' said Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon's chief adviser on domestic affairs. Ehrlichman, who suffered from diabetes, died from natural causes at his home in Atlanta on Sunday, his son Tom said Monday. He was 73. ``I was never the person everybody saw in the Watergate hearings. But I have realized that I was never going to catch up with my image. It was set in concrete. It bothered me enormously for a while, what people thought of me,'' he told The Washington Post in 1979. ``I made myself stop caring because I knew I couldn't do a thing about it, and I knew it was going to tear me up if I tried,'' he said. Ehrlichman and Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, were virtually indistinguishable by the public. Both were close to Nixon and they became known as the ``Berlin Wall'' because they shielded the reclusive Nixon from unwelcome encounters. Ehrlichman coined a phrase that became part of the nation's political lexicon when he advised Nixon to allow L. Patrick Gray 3rd, then acting director of the FBI, to become the fall guy for Watergate and to leave him ``twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.'' The cover-up was the attempt to conceal from the public the White House involvement almost from the start in the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington on June 17, 1972. Although Ehrlichman admitted he knew about the break-in shortly after it happened, he maintained that he did what he was told and said he regretted not asking Nixon about his involvement. After the break-in, Nixon ``asked me to stay out of it and concentrate on domestic policy. So that's what I did until the following April,'' Ehrlichman told The Associated Press in January 1998. That was when Nixon asked Ehrlichman to find out what was going on with the Watergate investigation, Ehrlichman said. ``Everywhere that I went was a Richard Nixon footprint,'' he said. In April 1973, as the cover-up began to unravel and pressure mounted, Nixon held a tearful meeting at his presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. By that time, Nixon's counsel, John W. Dean 3rd, had implicated them in the Watergate cover-up. The next day, Nixon fired Dean, and accepted the resignations of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Nixon hoped that the sacrifices of his closest aides would stanch the scandal. When Nixon was forced by the Supreme Court to surrender the tape that showed his own involvement in the cover-up, his impeachment became inevitable and, on Aug. 9, 1974, he became the first and only president to resign. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. Ehrlichman went to prison in October 1976 and served 18 months of a four-to- eight-year term for obstruction of justice, conspiracy and perjury. His conviction grew out of his false testimony to a Senate committee investigating Watergate and for his role in the 1971 break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist who had treated Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon aide who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. His defense of the Fielding break-in led to one of the most famous exchanges at the Watergate hearings. Sen. Herman Talmadge of Georgia asked Ehrlichman if he recalled the ``famous principal of law ... that no matter how humble a man's cottage is, that even the King of England cannot enter without his consent?'' Replied Ehrlichman: ``I am afraid that has been considerably eroded over the years, has it not?'' Spectators applauded when Talmadge replied: ``Down in my country we still think it is a pretty legitimate principle of law.'' Herb Klein, director of communications in Nixon administration and now editor in chief of The Copley Newspapers, said: ``John Ehrlichman's arrogance in Watergate has become his legacy, but in fairness, he should be given credit for the fact that as President Nixon's top domestic adviser, he left a major record of school desegregation nationally and of progress toward welfare reform.'' John Whitaker, a member of Nixon's Domestic Council and a former undersecretary of the interior, said Ehrlichman was ``an honest broker of all the policy differences and brought them all before the president in very clarified style.'' Ehrlichman was born March 20, 1925, in Tacoma, Wash. He graduated from University of California, Los Angeles and got a law degree at Stanford University in 1951. During World War II, he was a lead navigator in the 8th Air Force where he earned the Air Medal clusters and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Before joining the White House, Ehrlichman was a partner in the Seattle law firm of Hullin, Ehrlichman, Roberts & Hodge from 1952 to 1968. After the scandal, he eventually moved to Atlanta, where he served as senior vice president of Law Environmental, an international engineering and environmental regulatory compliance firm. He is survived by his third wife, Karen Hilliard, four sons and two daughters and his mother, Lillian. Funeral services will be private.
