earances, placing harassing phone calls, and manufacturing false information then leaking it to the press. The goal of these tricks was to help eliminate the strongest candidates from the Democratic primaries.In New Hampshire the campaign of front runner, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine was ruined. False rumors were circulated to newspapers. The day before election s Muskie lashed out at the press. This damaged Muskie's even-tempered reputation and contributed to his failure to win the 1972 Democratic nomination for the president.Special Investigations UnitThe Special Investigations Unit, better known as the "plumbers unit," was created as a result of the Pentagon Papers being leaked to the New York Times in June of 1971. The Pentagon Papers were secret defense department documents on the American involvement in the Vietnam War. They revealed a pattern of government deception related to Vietnam. The Papers were leaked to the New York Times by Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, who worked on the staff of the National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. The Nixon administration responded by stopping publication of the papers and charging Ellsberg with espionage. The plumbers were to block news leaks and control public knowledge of Vietnam policy. President Richard Nixon ordered domestic policy advisor, John Erlichman, to streamline leak plugging by creating this plumbers unit. Erlichman's deputy, Egil Krogh, Jr. and David Young, a member of the National Security Council staff, hired former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt to run their illegal secret operation. Plumbers set wiretaps, opened mail, and conducted break-ins in order to gain information about leaking. They targeted political enemies of the Nixon administration for harassment. Ellsberg was at the top of that list. In September of 1971, the plumbers unit broke into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg's psychiatrist. They wanted to find de...
