Of course, Nixon had no interest in reassessing his administration’s secrecy, only in protecting it against any further breaches. For him the operative question was, how had Jack Anderson obtained access to a cache of top secret documents? To find out who was responsible, he brought in the White House “plumbers.” Supervised by John Ehrlichman and including former CIA agent Howard Hunt and former FBI man Gordon Liddy, the Special Investigations Unit’s mission was to carry out politically sensitive investigations for the president.
