Even Harvard Law School can’t teach someone to have good instincts, which are probably what saved Bert Rein’s career in 1972. Then a political appointee in the Nixon administration’s State Department and a veteran of Nixon’s 1968 campaign, Rein had been summoned to the headquarters of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President to discuss his role in the campaign — a likely stepping-stone to the directorship of a federal agency if Nixon won.
“I happened to be there when Howard Hunt was roaming the halls,” he said, and after meeting the former CIA agent who would gain notoriety as one of Nixon’s “plumbers” during the Watergate scandal, “I thought, ‘Do you really want to be here?’ There was something about it. I thought, ‘This is not a good place to be.’ At the time I thought, ‘I’m giving up a hell of a lot.’ Now, looking back, it was the best decision I ever made. It probably kept me out of jail.”
