Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House

This is absolutely jaw-dropping and gripping nonfiction. It's an extraordinary perspective on the white collar true crime that went down in Nixon's White House, the ill-conceived and totally botched incident now known as the "plumbers." This is history and memoir at its best. Great book!

good reading

As the news headlines scream daily about the current US president and his team, this book is a timely and important read. Powerful and very thought-provoking

I really recommend this book. It is a good historical perspective as well as a wonderful story of a life lived with integrity and redemption. Triumph and perseverance in what seem to be devastating experiences.

Excellent

Interesting and well documented.

At a time when we are governed by an administration that whole-heartedly believes "the ends justify the means", it is crucial to step back and look at history; to see where that motto has failed again and again. Bud Krogh writes an insightful and extremely timely account of his time in the White House under Nixon and his direction of the "Plumbers"--created to seal up real (or perceived) leaks that were threatening our national security.After the 2000 elections, Krogh wrote an open memo, published in the Christian Science Monitor, to Bush's new staff--VP Cheney, Secretary of Treasury Paul O'Neill and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--all of whom Krogh had worked with under Nixon in the 1970s. He said as he watched them raise their right hands and swear to uphold the Constitution, it brought back a flood of memories for him when he stood before Nixon and swore to the same oath."As I pondered what the new Bush staff would encounter, I realized that I might be able to help by writing a memo to them about one of the central ideas that I had not understood as well as I should have when I was on the White House staff...the absolute imperative to maintain one's sense of integrity in the face of enormous pressures to get results at any cost."Krogh explains how a good person, raised in the right way, given all the advantages of a young American male, could end up pleading guilty to depriving another of his civil rights and going to prison. Loyalty to his superiors, including Nixon, overshadowed his oath to uphold the Constitution and that lead him to orchestrate the illegal break-in of Dr. Louis Fielding's Psychiatric office in California for the express purpose of stealing Daniel Ellsberg's personal file to try to discredit him. Ellsberg had leaked the "Pentagon Papers" to the press and Nixon believed this to be a serious national security threat.History has remembered Watergate as the downfall of Nixon's administration, but through Krogh's easy-to-read narrative of the events leading up to Watergate, we find that the break-in and burglary of Dr. Fielding's office was the "seminal event in the chain of events that led to Nixon's resignation".Obviously, Krogh's letter to the Bush staff has gone largely unheeded as we learn almost daily about unwarranted wiretapping; holding prisoners without cause; torture at Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay; Rove; Libby; the list goes on and on.Who was it that said "those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."?At the end of his book, Krogh has created a model called the "integrity zone"; steps that each individual in public or private life can take to ascertain whether the path they have chosen is one of integrity or convenience. With three questions: Is it whole and complete? Is it Right? Is it good? one can quickly figure out if they're standing on solid ground or standing at the edge of a slippery slope. After the events of 9/11, if the Bush administration had stopped to ask those questions, we may well be living in a vastly different world than the one we live in today.For anyone who is concerned about today's political environment and interested in where we've come from and how we got here, this is a must read. I think Krogh is an appropriate person to get this message across. It speaks volumes about who Bud Krogh is as a man of integrity that Daniel Ellsberg wrote the forward and calls him a friend today.

I had the privilege of being in several of Bud's classes when he was teaching at Golden Gate University in San Francisco in 1980 and 1981 and hearing many of the same stories told in this book when they were fresher. They were made more poignant in that he was, at that time, applying for reinstatement to the bar in the state of Washington. His sharing of the story of how he came to the decision to turn himself in while on a trip to Williamsburg made a very deep impression on me. I continue to be reminded that even good, moral people can make errors in judgment, and there is a special kind of redemption in doing the right thing. The lessons of that kind of integrity are described well in this book, and should be taken to heart by all people who are in positions of trust and responsibility.

Fascinating book for those who remember Watergate. How good people got caught up in vortex that led to their downfall.

Essential to complete the whole picture of Watergate. Krogh and Dean were the only ones pledging guilty for their acts, instead of their bosses who served jail always considering themselves innocents