RELATED VIDEO CNN's Bob Cain takes a look back at Ehrlichman's life and the political scandal that landed him in prison Windows Media 28K 80K

February 15, 1999
Web posted at: 11:35 a.m. EST (1635 GMT)

In this story: Twisting slowly in the wind Ehrlichman convicted 'Nixon blew it' RELATED STORIES, SITES

ATLANTA (CNN) -- John Ehrlichman, President Nixon's top domestic affairs adviser who served 18 months in prison on a Watergate conspiracy conviction, died Sunday in a nursing home, friends said Monday. He was 73.

The cause of death was complications from diabetes, said Mark Barnett, executive director of American International Television, who shot a never-aired documentary on Ehrlichman called "In the Eye of the Storm."

Another Watergate felon, Washington radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy, said Ehrlichman had been undergoing dialysis treatment for some time.

Ehrlichman and Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, were known as the "Berlin Wall" because they constituted a sort of palace guard that shielded the reclusive Nixon from unwelcome encounters.

Ehrlichman, right, was former President Nixon's domestic policy adviser

Twisting slowly in the wind

Early on June 17, 1972, burglars with ties to Nixon's re-election campaign broke into the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building in Washington. They were trying to replace a faulty telephone bugging device installed during an earlier break-in. This time around, they got caught by a security guard.

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."

But by April of 1973, as the cover-up began to unravel and pressure mounted, Nixon held a tearful meeting at his presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, with his two intimate and powerful advisers -- the iron-willed Haldeman and the self-controlled Ehrlichman.

By that time, Nixon's counsel, John W. Dean III, had implicated them in the Watergate cover-up. Nixon hoped that the sacrifice would staunch the scandal and spare him.

The next day, Nixon fired Dean, and accepted the resignation of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst.

Ehrlichman convicted

Nixon won re-election that fall, but when he was forced by the Supreme Court to surrender the tape that showed his own early involvement in the cover-up, his impeachment became inevitable. A few days later, on August 9, 1974, he became the first and only president to resign.

Ehrlichman was convicted of obstruction of justice, conspiracy and perjury -- based on his false testimony to a Senate committee and the break-in at a Beverly Hills office of the psychiatrist who had treated Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon aide who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.

Ehrlichman served 18 months of his four- to eight-year term at Swift Trail Camp, a minimum-security federal prison south of Safford, Arizona. Haldeman also served 18 months in prison and died in 1993.

"I knew John Ehrlichman well," Liddy said Monday. "He was a good and decent man. He went to jail, in my opinion, in large measure because of perjury at his trial by John Dean. I shall miss him and pray for him."

'Nixon blew it'

After his release, Ehrlichman lived for a number of years in New Mexico where he began a new career as a writer and commentator. He wrote three novels, "The Company," "The Whole Truth" and "The China Card," and co-authored "The Rigby File." Ehrlichman also wrote a memoir, "Witness to Power: The Nixon Years."

In a 1981 interview with CNN, Ehrlichman referred to the man he served in the White House as "a very pathetic figure in American history."

"His only goal in life was to be president ... and he blew it," Ehrlichman said.

Ehrlichman moved to Atlanta in the 1980s, where he worked for a quality control firm. He later became ill and retired.

He died Sunday at Grace Community Assisted Living Center, a nursing home.

He is survived by his mother, Lillian, his wife, Karen Hilliard, four sons and two daughters.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.