David R. Young, 89, Is Dead; Nixon Aide Helped Steer the ‘Plumbers’

He took part in White House machinations to stop leaks of classified information by overseeing an investigative unit that resorted to burglary. He then cooperated with Watergate investigators.

David R. Young, a White House national security official who helped lead the infamous “Plumbers” burglary team during the Nixon administration but who escaped punishment by cooperating with investigators of the Watergate scandal, died on Dec. 24 at his home in Oxford, England. He was 89.

His death, from heart failure, was confirmed on Monday by his son David K. Young.

A promising New York lawyer with strong Republican credentials, Mr. Young joined the Nixon administration in 1970 as a special assistant to Henry A. Kissinger, the president’s national security adviser. A year later, he was assigned to work with Egil Krogh Jr., as twinned deputies to John D. Ehrlichman, Mr. Nixon’s chief domestic affairs adviser.

Mr. Ehrlichman created the Plumbers, a special investigating unit, in 1971 in response to a series of damaging unauthorized disclosures of classified documents to the press, including the Pentagon Papers, the secret 7,000-page study of duplicity over the Vietnam War by successive American presidents. He named Mr. Young and Mr. Krogh to jointly oversee the Plumbers; its mission, to plug such leaks.

Topping the list of suspected leakers was Daniel Ellsberg. A former Pentagon military analyst, he had accompanied combat patrols in Vietnam for 18 months before experiencing a profound antiwar epiphany that prompted him to disclose the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Publication of the documents in 1971 led to a landmark Supreme Court case that upheld freedom of the press.

The episode enraged Mr. Nixon and triggered retaliations against Mr. Ellsberg. He was charged with espionage and other crimes, but the charges were dismissed by a judge on grounds of government misconduct.

In the White House unit’s most notorious job, two “plumbers,” E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, broke into the Beverly Hills, Calif., office of Mr. Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, searching for mental health records to use against Mr. Ellsberg in a smear campaign. The burglary, authorized by Mr. Ehrlichman and planned by Mr. Young and Mr. Krogh, turned up nothing on Mr. Ellsberg.

Other Nixon-approved illegal retaliations included unauthorized wiretaps and the creation of a presidential “enemies list” of people to be harassed with tax audits and criminal inquiries. But the lid blew off the conspiracy after five members of the Plumbers were arrested in 1972 during a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington. (Who ordered the break-in has never been definitively established.)

As investigators uncovered the wide dimensions of the conspiracy over the next two years, many details, including evidence of the involvement of the president himself, were confirmed in testimony by the White House counsel, John W. Dean III, and by recorded conversations in a secret Oval Office taping system that Mr. Nixon had ordered installed to bug visitors, associates and himself. In the face of all-but-certain impeachment and removal from office, President Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974.

More than 40 administration officials and others were eventually convicted of crimes and sent to prison. But Mr. Young had been granted limited immunity from prosecution, first to testify before the Senate Watergate Committee, and later with the approval of U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica, who oversaw the trials, to testify in court against Mr. Ehrlichman and other conspirators.

When it was all over, Vice President Gerald R. Ford assumed the presidency and granted a full pardon to Mr. Nixon, who retreated to private life. Mr. Young, who was freed from federal prosecution himself for his cooperation, moved his family to England, where he finished his doctoral studies, lectured at Oxford University and founded an international consultancy that thrived for decades.

“We kept our heads down,” Mr. Young told The Times in 1984, “and the British press never bothered us. People here don’t know or care that much about Watergate.”

David Reginald Young was born in Jersey City, N.J., on Nov. 10, 1936, the eldest of three sons of Francis Herbert and Winifred Ann (Brady) Young. The family later moved to Fishkill, N.Y., where David and his brothers, Roland and Parry, grew up. Their father worked for the Texas Company, a predecessor of Texaco, and their mother was a real estate broker.

David Young received a bachelor’s degree in 1959 from Wheaton College, a private evangelical Christian school in Wheaton, Ill. After two years in the Army, he earned a master’s degree in jurisprudence from Oxford in 1963, and a law degree from Cornell University in 1964.

He began his career in 1965 at the New York headquarters of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, one of the nation’s oldest law firms. In 1968, with the Milbank firm’s support, he was named treasurer of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s third and final unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. During the race, Mr. Young became acquainted with Mr. Kissinger, who was then advising Mr. Rockefeller. A year later, Mr. Young began his political career as Mr. Kissinger’s national security aide in the Nixon administration.

In 1969, Mr. Young married Suannah Lee Kelly. In addition to his son David, his wife survives him along with three other children, Catherine and Jonathan Young and Christina McCormick; his brothers, Roland and Parry; and eight grandchildren. Another son, Bradden, died in 2014.

Moving to England after the Watergate scandal, Mr. Young returned to Oxford University and in 1981 completed work for a Ph.D. in international relations. In 1975, he founded Oxford Analytica, an international consulting firm that drew on academics, former news correspondents and other contacts to provide its clients with daily assessments of political and economic conditions in countries abroad.

Mr. Young, who retired from consulting work in 2015, had homes in Oxfordshire, England, and, in recent years, in Washington.

In 2007, with the hindsight of three decades, Egil Krogh, who, with Mr. Young, had directed the burglary at the office of Mr. Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist, wrote a commentary for The Times on the lessons of Watergate. “The premise of our action,” he wrote, “was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it.”

But after serving four and a half months in prison, Mr. Krogh said, “I finally realized that what had gone wrong in the Nixon White House was a meltdown in personal integrity. Without it, we failed to understand the constitutional limits on presidential power and comply with statutory law.”

Ash Wu contributed reporting.

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