Georgia March Madness Meets Watergate: Egil Krogh’s Leadership Lessons

For many Georgia lawyers, March Madness has two meanings. It’s the month when our attention moves to the NCAA basketball tournament. It’s also the deadline for us to complete our prior year’s twelve hours of Continuing Legal Education (CLE) to maintain our Georgia Bar licenses. In March, many of us trudge downtown to sit through two days of tedious classes in order to meet our requirements.  

This past Friday, I had a different experience. I attended a sobering presentation on ethics delivered by Egil (Bud) Krogh, one of the White House officials convicted of conspiring to violate civil rights during the Watergate crisis.

Around forty years ago, Krogh was a 30-year old lawyer reporting to John Ehrlichmann, his mentor and one of President Richard Nixon’s senior advisers. Quickly, Krogh went from a rising star to a convicted felon. His path to prison, disgrace, and disbarment started when he compromised his conscience and values.

Ultimately, Krogh helped orchestrate the ransacking of a psychiatrist’s office in search of “evidence” regarding the physician’s patient, Daniel Ellsberg. Then and now, Bud Krogh struck me as a decent person, which made me wonder how he could have acted as he did. After hearing his speech, it’s easier to understand.

Krogh allowed his powerful superiors, including the President of the United States, to dictate his direction and override his own judgment and principles. He followed the lead of his mentors when they maintained that national security superseded rule of law.  Additionally, he operated in an environment where those at the top would not listen to – and did not want to hear – positions or point of views that were at odds with their own.  Finally, Krogh occupied an intoxicatingly powerful job. That’s the awful mix that led to his outrageous actions.

Today, we focus on distributing Codes of Conduct, policies, check-the-box learning, and other communications to prevent compliance and ethical disasters. Krogh’s message suggests we give greater emphasis to basic leadership and citizenship, not just rote standards. We’d all do well to remember and apply these principles:

• Use your values when you make workplace decisions. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t ignore your ethical compass.
• It’s hard to speak up. Leaders need to encourage people to raise objections and listen when they do. It’s dissent, not blind agreement with authority, which can avert disaster. At several junctures during Watergate, if someone had simply said this isn’t right, and others had reflected and acted, the magnitude of the disaster we, he, and others faced during that time could have been averted.
• Mentors matter – those who hire us, train us, and lead us also help us understand how to interpret and apply values. This is a key leadership responsibility.
• Strong leaders choose to have people around them who are self- confident, have strong values, and challenge potentially wrong-headed actions. Krogh used President Roosevelt as a good example of someone who expected his Chief of Staff, George Marshall, to speak his mind and disagree with bad decisions – in contrast to President Nixon, whose aides lacked those qualities.
• The real risk in not adhering to values. Failing to speak up can be far greater a risk than that which appears most immediate – the loss of influence in a job or, at worst, the actual loss of position.  

In March, or in any other month, ignoring Bud Krogh’s example would be madness, and lead to tragic lessons that many others, in similar situations, have faced over the past 40 years – and all of us have paid a price.

View our complete listing of Strategic HR and Leadership Development blogs.