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. He served 18 months in prison.
"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 III, 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.