Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (16 page)

As much as I wanted to tell Ehrlichman everything I knew, I did not tell him about my conversation with Strachan or Liddy’s remarks about Strachan. The implications were so gruesome that I believed he should hear those facts from Haldeman or the President. I thought I had already crossed the boundaries of what I should know. At the end of the Liddy tale, I wanted to broach the Ellsberg break-in. It was already on the White House grapevine, a possible threat. I knew I ought to raise the matter with Ehrlichman directly, but I could only bring myself to do so obliquely.

“By the way, John, it looks like the Watergate thing is not the only potential problem we might have at the White House from Liddy. There’s also the thing out in California.”

Ehrlichman’s mouth pursed in a tight circle, his lower lip protruding. I took this as a sign of surprise that I would know of the Ellsberg break-in. He said nothing and looked out over his glasses. I noted his lack of denial and wondered what bells might be sounding off, what strategies were forming behind the impassive eyes.

“I talked to Chuck,” I said, anxious to move on. “He swears his innocence. He says Hunt is a figure from his distant past.”

“Yeah, I’m not surprised.”

“I don’t know whether he mentioned this to you, John, but he wants to meet with the two of us later this afternoon. It sounded urgent.”

“Okay. Why don’t the two of you come back about four-thirty? I’ve got to send my care package off to Florida.”

I went back to my office, called Colson about the meeting, and took care of some routine business. Magruder stuck his head in the door once while I was on the phone, waved, and ran off. He was making the rounds. I called Fielding in and asked him about Hunt’s employment records. He reported a hopeless tangle in the personnel office. Clerks were still sorting papers, but the gist of the confusion thus far was doubt that Hunt had ever gone off the payroll. I took this information back to Ehrlichman’s office, where I found Colson in a state of vigorously renewed ignorance about Hunt.

Ehrlichman listened to Colson for a while and then knitted his brow mischievously. “Well, where is Mr. Hunt?” he queried with heavy sarcasm.

“I don’t have the foggiest notion where he is,” Chuck shot back.

“Do you know where Mr. Hunt is?” Ehrlichman asked, turning to me.

“Of course not. I don’t have any idea where he is.”

He paused and thought heavily. “Well, don’t you think Mr. Liddy might talk to him about getting out of the country? Don’t you think that would be a good idea?”

Silence.

“Why don’t you call Liddy and tell him to pass that message to Mr. Hunt?” he asked, looking at me. Such questions, from Ehrlichman, were commands. He seldom gave orders any other way. So I went to the phone in Ehrlichman’s office while the two of them continued their conversation.

“Gordon,” I said after fumbling with the phone long enough to reach him, “I have a request that Howard Hunt ought to be out of the country.”

“Yes, sir,” Liddy snapped. “I understand. That’ll be passed on immediately.”

I rejoined the meeting, but second thoughts quickly began to plague me again. That order would come back to haunt us, I thought.

“You know, I don’t think that was a very smart thing we just did,” I said. “Because this guy is obviously a part of what all’s happened. I don’t know what all the details are yet, and you don’t know, but he’s gonna be questioned.”

Chuck agreed. Second thoughts are contagious.

“Yeah, I guess it was a bad idea,” said Ehrlichman. “Why don’t you call back and retract that suggestion?”

Back to the phone. “Gordon, what I just said about Hunt. Retract that.”

“I’m not sure I can.”

“What do you mean?”

“The order’s already been passed.”

“Well, do your best.”

“Right. I’ll do my best.”

Debate resumed on Hunt’s status at the White House. Colson was voluble.

“I’ve heard all that,” I said, “but it’s not clear at all from the personnel records, Chuck. Fielding’s been down there, and it looks like he’s still on the payroll, for God’s sake!”

“He can’t be!” said Chuck. “He’s not been working for me for months!”

Ehrlichman finally waded into the conversation. “I’ll resolve this. Let’s bring Kehrli [the staff secretary] up here with all the records.”

“Well, let’s bring Clawson up here, too,” said Colson. Ken W. Clawson was the deputy White House director of communications. “He tells me some reporters are on to the Hunt business. They’re bugging him about what Hunt did at the White House, and he doesn’t know what to tell them.”

“Okay,” said Ehrlichman.

“While they’re coming over,” said Colson, with a forced nonchalance, “I want to tell you something else, uh, that we should take care of. And that is that apparently Howard Hunt had a safe here in the White House up in his office.”

Ehrlichman became more animated than I’d seen him all day. He leaned forward. “You mean to tell me he even has an
office
here?” His voice rose in bewilderment. He was clearly enjoying demonstrating his ignorance of Hunt’s activities as superior to Colson’s. Ehrlichman’s shock was so well performed I almost laughed to release tension.

Chuck was exasperated. “We just never shut down that office,” he explained hopelessly. “No one ever paid any attention to it. It was good office space—I’m surprised our people didn’t move in on it.”

A little more jousting on this point, and then the conversation focused on the question of how to get into Hunt’s safe.

Bruce Kehrli came in, glanced at the assembled faces, and drew a deep breath. He was carrying a bunch of file folders.

“Well,” asked Ehrlichman, “what is the status of Mr. Hunt?”

Kehrli was befuddled. He didn’t know what to say. He mumbled personnel-office jargon during several intricate sentences, and then managed to conclude that the picture was unclear.

Chuck looked straight at him. “Hunt was off my payroll.”

“Okay,” said Kehrli.

“I guess,” Ehrlichman said, “if Chuck says he is off the payroll, he’s off the payroll.”

One decision made. Kehrli made a note on his pad, and Clawson entered.

Ehrlichman asked Kehrli to wait while Clawson’s press problem was addressed. It was generally agreed to stress the classified nature of Hunt’s activities to forestall further inquiry. He had worked on “declassification” projects involving sensitive materials and on “drug intelligence matters.” Clawson went off to enlighten the reporters on this point, and to add that Hunt had worked only sporadically at the White House. His work had terminated at some time in the past; old records were being dusted off to determine exactly when.

As soon as Clawson had departed, Ehrlichman addressed Kehrli. “Listen, Bruce, we understand there’s a safe in Hunt’s office. How can you get into that safe to find out what’s in it?”

“We have a procedure where we can have the GSA [General Services Administration] open those safes,” Kehrli replied.

“Well, why don’t you get that safe opened?” asked Ehrlichman.

“Dean should take possession of the contents,” Chuck chimed in quickly.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Ehrlichman said, and added, “and Dean should be present when the safe is opened.”

“Okay,” said Kehrli, turning to me. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

I hurried back to my office. This is just like the Town House records, I thought. Give the hot stuff to the counsel’s office. Double protection—executive privilege and the attorney-client relationship. But I felt no resentment at the notion of having it dumped on me. I was rather curious, in fact, about what Hunt had in his safe.

Jane handed me a note when I walked in the door: “Meeting. Six P.M. Mitchell’s Watergate apartment.” “You’re pretty busy today,” she quipped.

Indeed I was. I had dealt with John Mitchell for more than three years as a trusted subordinate, but I had never been invited to his apartment. Swelling with my sudden new intimacy, I rushed off to the Watergate apartment building. It was next door to the Watergate office building, which we would soon dub the “scene of the crime.”

Fred LaRue greeted me at the door, wearing his normal warm smile. He was a younger, thinner-looking copy of John Mitchell, which made some sort of poetic sense, because LaRue served as Mitchell’s alter ego. A millionaire oil man from Mississippi, he had been serving in the Administration out of curiosity mingled with a sincere desire to be of help. He had no ambitions that I could discern, nor any enemies. LaRue had begun as a dollar-a-year consultant at the White House and had taken a pay cut to join Mitchell at the Reelection Committee. At the endless government meetings, Fred would melt invisibly into the back of the room and smoke his pipe. He held no title. The standard interpretation was that his full-time job was to be Mitchell’s friend—a vital service, since Mitchell had little use for the senior officials around him.

Fred led me to the den on the second floor of Mitchell’s elegant apartment, where Magruder, Mardian, and Mitchell were already in a discussion. Mitchell rose to greet me.

“Thanks for dropping by,” he said warmly, with a handshake.

“How about a drink?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got a little stomach problem from Manila, and I’m on the wagon.” I cast a desperate, longing glance at their drinks and made a useless effort to recall when I had needed one more. But I wanted to have my wits about me in case the meeting introduced some new disaster. I was shellshocked and nervous.

Within a minute or so, Magruder said he had to leave. He looked remarkably chipper, as if his earlier ashen fear had been only a dream. “Well, I guess I’ll leave this crisis to you gentlemen,” he said. “I’m almost late.” He came over to me and whispered his secret. “I’ve got a tennis date, John. Guess who?”

“I give up, Jeb. Who?”

“The Veep,” meaning Vice-President Agnew. He grinned and waved good-bye. I flinched, wondering if I seemed as ostentatiously juvenile in boasting of my place near the throne. No, I decided. I had the same feelings, but I was more reserved about them. I headed for a vacant spot on the sofa. Magruder’s lighthearted departure left me uncertain about what approach was being taken. Mitchell must have sensed this, for he offered me a drink again. This time I accepted. As Mitchell fixed my Scotch, Mardian and LaRue resumed their discussion of another Reelection Committee press release on James McCord. They were taking the same posture toward him that Colson had taken toward Hunt. This struck me as standard press work. The discussion soon lapsed, and an uncomfortable silence ensued. I sensed an uneasiness as to how I would fit into the conversation.

“When did you get back?” I asked Mitchell, to break the ice.

“Just a little while ago, and I’m a little wiped out. That’s the last time I’m going to fly all the way across the country in that damned little Gulfstream jet.” He took his jacket off and sat down.

“I’ve just been talking with the President,” he said. “I couldn’t think of any news to cheer the President up with, but he didn’t seem to need it. He was taking it much better than I thought he would. Hell, he tried to cheer me up.”

There was a pause. No one would speak until Mitchell relinquished the floor, and no one knew what to say, anyway.

Mitchell went off in thought and then came back to me. “What’s happening over at the place where you work, anyway?”

“Well, Ehrlichman’s taken charge of—”

“That’s terrific,” Mitchell interrupted upon hearing Ehrlichman’s name. “That’s the worst news I’ve heard all day.” The laconic bite in his voice set half the tone for one of the biggest problems I saw down the road for myself. Ehrlichman set the other half.

I felt awkward. John Mitchell was the President’s campaign manager and his close personal friend. I was sure he had some criminal responsibility for the Watergate break-in. Any such revelation could be the death blow to the President’s reelection, let alone a disgrace to Mitchell’s whole life. Mitchell was already in a pressure-cooker, the strain told on his face, and the thought of Ehrlichman made it worse for him. I felt fonder of Mitchell than of any of the bosses in the White House, and I wanted to help. Still, my superiors were in the White House, and I had learned never to breach their confidences. I didn’t believe I should tell Mitchell precisely what was going on in the White House. That was someone else’s role, not mine, but I knew Mitchell could expect precious little help. I went back and forth in my mind about how to deal with Mitchell. The guilt I felt for having sent Liddy to Mitchell made my dilemma worse. I knew he must be harboring the same dark thoughts toward me for recommending Liddy to him as I was having toward Krogh for recommending Liddy to me.

Fortunately, the matter was largely avoided. The telephone kept ringing. Mitchell’s wife, Martha, was still in California, and she was raising hell. LaRue, the only man other than Mitchell who was capable of dealing with Mrs. Mitchell when she was on the rampage, tried gamely for the first few calls, but Mitchell was forced to take over. Call after call—from Committee employees who were with Martha, then from friends of the Mitchell’s, and then from UPI reporter Helen Thomas, who called to advise Mitchell of the hysterical outbursts Martha was giving her on the phone. From Mitchell’s end of the conversations, I heard talk of doctors, sedation, and alcohol. The pathos and despair of the scene were so immediate they cut through everything else. I knew Mitchell had more to contend with than Watergate, so I excused myself during a break in the calls.