Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (30 page)

The President heard me out, seemed to waver, but reverted to his idea of a report—one without the affidavits I wanted in order to protect myself. I decided to try a new approach: if I couldn’t sell him on my version of the Dean Report, I would try to make him see that his version would prove unpalatable because I would have to include enough facts to invite disastrous scrutiny. We were jousting subtly so that neither of us would have to acknowledge that there was an argument between us. As a preview of his kind of Dean Report, I conducted him on a tour through the origins of the break-in. He interrupted me when I was recounting the discussions in Mitchell’s office of the campaign intelligence plan.

“You heard discussion of that, but you didn’t hear any discussion of bugging, did you, in that, your meetings?” He paused. “Or did you?”

He’s testing me, I thought; he knows about those discussions, he wants to see how I would handle them. I looked nervously at the floor. “Yeah, I did. That’s what, ah, distressed me quite a bit.”

“Oh, you did,” the President said quietly.

“Uh-huh.”

“Who raised it? Liddy?”

“That’s right.”

“Liddy at that point said we ought to do some bugging?” the President asked.

“Right. Mitchell just sat there and puffed on his pipe and said nothing. He didn’t agree to it, and I, at the end of the meeting—”

“Well, you won’t need to say in your statement about the bugging.”

“No,” I said, backing off. I realized that this tack had failed to move him off the Dean Report.

Haldeman interrupted the meeting with some routine business and phone calls. When he left, the President rambled on about other subjects. He struck me as quite lonely. The White House was nearly empty. The President was by himself, the business routine suspended for the weekend. He seemed just to want someone to talk to. Finally he returned to Watergate and brought up the counter-scandal idea, asking my progress in discovering wiretaps that had been ordered by his predecessors. For starters, he thought we should leak a story about how President Johnson had ordered him bugged in 1968.

“You need it very much,” he said firmly. “I want it.” Then he leaned back and brought up my report again. “Now, you were saying where this thing leads, I mean in terms of the vulnerabilities and so forth. It’s your view the vulnerabilities are basically Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman, indirectly, possibly directly. And, of course, the second level is, as far as the White House is concerned, Chapin.” He looked at me. I hoped he was getting the message about how bad an idea the Dean Report would be.

“And I’d say Dean, to a degree.” I was telling him again about my own vulnerability.

“You?” asked the President incredulously. “Why?”

“Well, because I’ve been all over this thing like a blanket,” I replied, dismayed that this message never seemed to sink in.

“I know, I know,” said the President irritably, waving his hand as if to shoo the thought away. “But you know all about it, but you didn’t, you were in it after the deed was done.”

“That’s correct, that I had no foreknowledge—” I replied, but the President cut me off before I could make another run at the cover-up.

“Here’s the whole point. Here’s the whole point,” he said emphatically, shaking a forefinger. “My point is that your problem is, you...” His concentration faded. He stopped. Then he returned with force. “You have no problem. All the others that have participated in the goddamned thing, and therefore are potentially subject to criminal liability... You’re not. That’s the difference.”

“That’s right,” I agreed, although I was thinking just the opposite. I couldn’t bring myself to contradict his strong assertion.

There was a long, uneasy pause, before the President resumed ticking off the Watergate liabilities. He brought up Magruder, then Strachan. I told him that Strachan had pushed Magruder for intelligence “on sort of a tickler basis.” After a discussion of how interwoven all the testimony might become if we tried to have just one “higher-up,” like Magruder, take responsibility for the break-in, the President looked at me directly and rejected the idea. “Can’t do that,” he declared.

“No,” I agreed. I knew it would be impossible to get one person to take the fall without implicating others. That was the fundamental weakness of the entire cover-up.

“I think what you’ve got to do, to the extent that you can, John, is cut her off at the pass.” The President was quite intense again, making cutting motions through the air with a flat palm. “And you cut off at the pass. Liddy and his bunch just did that as part of their job.”

“They were out on a lark,” I echoed, picking up the standard cover-up line.

The President now seemed to be back on the idea of a Dean Report that would cut things off at Liddy. I decided to try to work in certain grisly things that could come out if I got into specifics. I mentioned Ehrlichman and the Ellsberg break-in. The President asserted that he had never heard about it, but then immediately assumed the attitude that Howard Hunt had done the deed. I didn’t for a moment believe his show of ignorance. I already suspected he often held things back from me.

We had been playing cat and mouse with each other for nearly an hour; I was the mouse, but I was becoming a little braver. Haldeman came in, and the President announced that he had to get some kind of report to Ervin quickly “so that I appear at least to be making a statement.” He looked at me, then at Haldeman, and summarized the meeting for Haldeman as I listened closely. “Now, I’d simply say,” the President began in a practice speech to Senator Ervin, “‘Now, look, I required from every member of my staff a sworn statement. Here’s one from here. Here’s one from here, here, here.”’ The President was handing out imaginary statements. I was elated. My message had gotten through after all.

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s great.”

“The sworn statement, Bob, is much better, rather than giving a statement by Dean,” the President told Haldeman.

“That’s right,” I said.

Haldeman nodded and the meeting broke up. I went back to my office. I had headed the President off for the moment, but I knew he was waffling. Once Ehrlichman talked with him again, I figured, he would be back on the Dean Report. I fiddled away the afternoon until Mo called to remind me of a dinner engagement we had that night with Dick Kleindienst. We couldn’t back out. Kleindienst was thinking of joining John Connally’s law firm in Washington, and he was entertaining one of Connally’s law partners. Mo and I went to the dinner, but I was silent most of the evening.

Kleindienst sensed my mood and commiserated with me about the rash of bad publicity I’d received. As we were preparing to leave, he pulled me aside. “I know it’s tough being out front like you are, John,” he said in a friendly tone, “but you’ve got to hold together. And think before you do anything. If things get to you, you can always come talk to me. Remember that.”

“Thanks, Dick,” I replied, thinking I must be telegraphing my instability. “I’d like to do that, but I don’t think we should talk right now.”

Marney Kleindienst, Dick’s wife, had always been very kind and supportive of me. As we were saying goodbye at her door, she cracked an innocent joke to try to cheer me up. “John,” she laughed, “if they send you to prison, I’ll bake cookies for you and come visit you every week.”

A look of terror must have crossed my face. Marney, Dick, and Mo were halfway through a tension-breaking laugh when they noticed. I tried to force a smile, but I had no control over my facial muscles.

When Marney sensed how badly she had hurt me, she went ashen. “Wait here a minute,” she said anxiously. She went off and quickly returned with a folded cloth in her hand. “Here, John,” she said, “this will help your spirits.”

I thanked her, but did not stop to look at the cloth. Mo hustled me out the door as if I were a mental patient.

“What’s that?” she asked as we headed for the car.

I unfolded the cloth and discovered a hand-made art poster with a huge red caption: “KEEP ME GOING, LORD.” Under it, a big red fireball was rolling down a green mountainside. I gaped at Mo; she gaped at me.

I shrugged. “Think this would look nice in my prison cell?”

“Really, John,” she said, disgusted with my sarcasm. We rode home in silence.

After a miserable Sunday, I went to the office on Monday, March 19. Paul O’Brien came in, looking edgy, his normal wit and swagger notably missing.

“John, I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all weekend.”

“I’ve been available.”

“Well, I don’t know why I couldn’t get you.” He seemed flustered.

“What’s on your mind?”

“I’ve got some pretty heavy stuff here that’s not such good news,” he said. I braced myself. I was used to bad news from O’Brien, but he usually delivered it lightheartedly. “Bittman called me last Friday and asked me to meet personally with Hunt. So I went over there. And Howard Hunt’s not a very happy man.” He paused.

“What’s new about that?”

“Well, hang on. I think you’re going to find a lot new. Hunt said he was going to meet with Colson too, but I’m not so sure that’s going to happen. I think Colson may send his law partner. Anyway, what Hunt was pressing me on was this. He said sentencing is coming up for him. And he’s got to get his life in order pretty damn quick. He said, ‘I get sentenced next Friday, and by Wednesday I want to have this whole matter resolved of these payments.’ I asked him what the problem was. And Hunt said, ‘Well, I’ve got to get things in hand well in advance of my sentencing.’ And then he said what he really had in mind. He said, ‘I’ve got a message I want you to deliver over at the White House, if you can.’ And I told him I thought I could.”

O’Brien is dragging this out, I thought. Here comes the money again. I quit looking at him and stared out the window. I could see myself banging back and forth between Mitchell and Ehrlichman again like a clapper in a bell.

“And I’ve come with Howard Hunt’s message for you, John,” O’Brien continued. “He said, ‘You tell John Dean that I need seventy two thousand dollars for support and fifty thousand for attorney’s fees—”

“Why me?” I shouted as my head shot around toward O’Brien. “Why the hell did he send the goddam message to me?”

O’Brien gave me a helpless look. “I don’t know, John. I asked him the same question, and he just said, ‘You tell Dean I need the money by the close of business Wednesday. And if I don’t get it, I’m going to have to reconsider my options. And I’ll have some seamy things to say about what I did for John Ehrlichman while I was at the White House.’ And that’s the message.”

“You’re shitting me! He sent that message to me?”

“He sure did.”

I sat back and grabbed my forehead with my left hand, pressing my temples between my thumb and forefinger. Hunt was dragging me directly into his extortion loop. He must have learned that I was the one who had carried the money messages before, and now he figured he had a hold on me for more. I could see Hunt extorting me, milking me, for the rest of our lives. This was it. I knew it. I felt a sickening fear, and then a boiling anger at Hunt.

I stood up and started pacing. “Listen, Paul. There’s no sense bringing that message to me, because I’m not going to do a goddam thing with it. I’m out of the money business! Ever since that three-fifty went over, I’m out of it. And I plan to stay out of it. And Hunt can shove it up his ass!”

O’Brien seemed taken aback by my reaction, which was out of character. He tried to soften the blow. “Well, look. I don’t think it’s a message directed at you, John,” he said softly. “I think it’s a message he wants passed on.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to pass it on. Both of us, as you well know, are up to our teeth in an obstruction of justice. You and I have been passing these fucking messages back and forth, and now we’re in trouble. And someday we could face an awful lot of problems. And I don’t want to compound mine any more. This thing has gotten bad enough for me. I’m out of it.”

“I know we’ve got problems, John,” O’Brien said. He seemed unhappy that I had mentioned his criminal liability. “Listen, I’m just passing the message along. I don’t like it, either.” He waited a moment for me to calm down. “Well, what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, what the hell should I do?”

“As far as I’m concerned, you can take this back to Mitchell. This is out of my ball park. I don’t want anything to do with it, Paul. And I’m not inclined to pass it on to Ehrlichman.” I hesitated. “But I may have to mention it to him. I just don’t know.”

This last comment cracked the door a little bit, enough for O’Brien to feel he might not have to carry the whole weight. We lamented a bit about how we had both gotten into this monster as message carriers and then been eaten up by it, and O’Brien left.

I went home early, canceled out on a going-away party that night for Chuck Colson, and pulled out the Scotch bottle. I had no idea what I was going to do. I was going to do something.

Chapter Seven: Breaking Point

I SLEPT LATE THE NEXT MORNING, March 20. I stayed home to avoid the office and debated with myself how I could get out of this thing—deal with Hunt’s extortion and protect the President at the same time. The President. I felt myself rising instinctively in salute. I thought of aircraft carriers, battles, strong men reverent at the mention of his name, a communications network that flashed each utterance around the world. This was my life’s nourishment. I felt tall for having made it so close to the shadow of the Presidency. Then I contemplated the crimes and the cover-up meetings, the blackmail, and I shriveled to a midget. Alice in Wonderland.

Strategy, I told myself; we needed a strategy, and that was what I was good at. Somebody would have to walk the plank to end this; somebody would have to fall on his sword for the President. I thought of a dozen appropriate phrases, but none of them had the romantic ring I remembered from my college literature courses. Mitchell and Magruder. They were the logical candidates. They had authorized the break-in, and that was what everyone—the press, the prosecutors, the politicians, everybody—wanted to hear about. After nine months, the hot torch of skepticism had finally burned through our story that Liddy had done it on his own. Even the President could no longer lie about it convincingly, and it was eroding his power. Mitchell. That would be convincing. The first Attorney General ever to go to prison. It would end it. No one would show the slightest interest in a cover-up; no one had. Would Mitchell go it alone? I doubted it. And Mitchell had hooks in Ehrlichman, in the cover-up, in me.

I sank even lower. But what if Mitchell did take the blame for the break-in? A public orgy. Sackcloth in some quarters, glee in others. The Watergate case cracked and ended. But what would that do for Howard Hunt? Nothing. He would still demand clemency from the President and money from me, and from Ehrlichman, and from the whole cover-up network. It was a spider web. To save the President, we would all have to go together. En masse. What were the chances of that? Nearly zero. Only the President had the slightest chance of making it happen, and he seemed miles from any such decision. It could ruin him. Was I ready to do my part? Go to jail? Yes, I thought. Then, no. There had to be another way. My thoughts, I realized, were no longer measured or rational. Every breath I drew in seemed cold, and the chill latched on to my thoughts and dragged them down into my stomach, then around up my spine. My cool, my detached calculation, was dissolving in fear. I went to the office.

The President called shortly after I arrived. He wanted to meet with Dick Moore
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and me about a letter we were preparing to send to the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was a miniature version of the Dean Report; we hoped to answer some of the questions Pat Gray had raised about my role in the Watergate investigation. I had struggled to write the letter in such a way that it would not raise more questions.

As Moore walked back to my office with me for a postmortem, I was thinking that the current draft placed me very close to perjury, and this awareness didn’t help my mood. Moore tried to cheer me up.

“John, you’re meeting an awful lot with the President these days, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yeah, I am.”

“Well, you know, this is pretty historic stuff. You’re in there with the President himself. Have you ever thought about taking notes on those meetings? You might be glad someday.”

I looked at him coldly. “Dick, frankly I wouldn’t even want to write down what’s going on in there right now.”

Moore looked startled at the idea that anything transpiring in the Oval Office wouldn’t wear golden wings in history. I noticed the discomfort my remark caused him and decided to let him know why I was so morose. Moore had recently come into the hush-money business as an extra White House courier to Mitchell.

“Look, Dick, things have gotten pretty bad the last few days,” I said. “Hunt sent a message to me yesterday that he’s going to blow it if he doesn’t get a hundred twenty thousand dollars by tomorrow. He sent it to me personally. And he said he’s going to shit all over Ehrlichman too. Said he’d have seamy things to say about what he did for Ehrlichman in the White House.”

“You mean like the Ellsberg thing?”

“Yeah, like the Ellsberg thing,” I replied, surprised. “How’d you know about that?”

“Oh, I picked it up around here.”

“Well, he could blow that and a lot of other things. Pretty picture, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s extortion. That’s what it is,” Moore said, shaking his head.

“I know, and I’m fed up with it. It keeps going on and on, and someday it’s going to blow. People are going to keep committing perjury. More and more people know about it. The money payments are chewing people up. It just keeps growing and growing. You know it’s bad, and I’m telling you it’s even worse than you know. Bigger and bigger.” I was gushing.

The white-haired Moore looked kind and grandfatherly. He shook his head slowly, sadly. “It’s like some sort of tumor, I guess. It’s like a cancer.”

“That’s right,” I said, struck by the image. “And the President’s got to do something to sever it. I tell you, I think he’s being ill-served by his aides. All of us. It can’t go on like this.”

Moore and I agreed we would have to think harder about how to extricate the President. Then he left. I sat down at my desk, freshly aware of how much bigger the stakes were than I felt equipped to handle. Hunt’s demands kept rearing up in my mind, and I decided I couldn’t simply sit on them. I would have to pass the message along to Ehrlichman at least.

I went over to his office and found him on his way to the Oval Office.

He was in a hurry. We stood in the middle of his office, and I told him about my meeting with O’Brien. The demands coming straight at me. The implied threat to Krogh. The direct threat to him.

“That’s interesting,” he replied simply, heading for the door.

I followed him, once more amazed by his composure, worried that he could see how totally I’d lost mine. But I didn’t really care. “Well, John, what are you going to do?” I asked as we walked down the West Wing stairs.

He turned to look at me over his glasses. “Have you raised this little sugarplum with Mitchell yet?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“How about Chuck? He’s supposed to be holding Mr. Hunt’s hand these days. What does he say?”

“I don’t know. O’Brien told me Hunt was sending the same message to Chuck, but I don’t think there’s a damn thing he can do.”

“Well, why don’t you have a little chat with Mitchell? And get back to me, okay?”

Ehrlichman turned down the hall toward the President’s office. I stopped. This man is made of iron, I thought. I was envious, then furious. I watched him stride down the hall, and then I headed toward the EOB.

I reached Mitchell at his New York apartment. “John, have you heard about our latest demand?” I asked, to make sure O’Brien or LaRue had filled him in.

“Yeah, I’ve heard,” Mitchell sighed.

I heard a noise on the line. My paranoia rose further. LaRue had warned me to take extreme care in speaking with Mitchell at home, because Martha had a habit of listening in on the extension. She might call the press. “Well, ah, John,” I said, “can I report any progress? Is the Greek bearing gifts?” I was referring to Tom Pappas.

“I can’t talk about it now,” said Mitchell. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Click. I stared at the phone. Same old back-and-forth. I was determined not to get back into it. Sure, I said to myself, but that’s what you said yesterday.

Bud Krogh walked in. He was the Undersecretary of Transportation, newly confirmed by the Senate, and he looked the part. He had a wardrobe full of new suits, and he had lost a great deal of weight from a vigorous jogging program. He sat down and began commiserating with me over all the bad press I was getting from the Gray hearings. He was trying to cheer me up, being very solicitous of my feelings.

“It’s a lot worse than the Gray hearings, Bud,” I told him after we had talked awhile. “That’s peanuts. And while you’re here, I think I should tell you that you might be in jeopardy yourself. Hang on. This is rough. Howard Hunt’s blackmailing us, Bud. He’s holding us up for everything we’ve got, and then some. And his latest threat is that he’s going to blow the Ellsberg thing on Ehrlichman. If he does, I don’t see how you could get out of that. I’m sorry to lay that on you, but I thought you should know. This whole goddam mess is at the breaking point.”

Bud got up and walked over to my window. It was dark outside. He looked out for a couple of minutes and turned back to me. He looked more resigned, and less resistant, than I had expected. “What are the chances Hunt’s going to talk?” he asked.

“I have no idea. The whole thing’s up in the air right now, and I don’t really want to get into that. But you’ve got to understand something else. If there’s an investigator who’s worth his salt up on the Ervin Committee, there are going to be some rough problems.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, during the Watergate trial the Justice Department got a file on Hunt and Liddy from the CIA. And the file included some pictures, and they’re incredible pictures, Bud. Some of the goddam pictures are of Liddy standing out in front of this Dr. Fielding’s office in California. He’s standing there proud as a rooster. And any investigator who sees that picture is going to want to know what’s happening. And he’s going to plow right in and find out that Dr. Fielding is connected to Ellsberg and that there was a break-in at his office. Ehrlichman’s been trying to have me get those documents back from Justice and over to CIA so no one will run into them. But the CIA’s not about to take them. Those guys are playing this pretty damn smart, and they don’t want that stuff. And Henry Petersen can’t do anything with them, either, because he’s got this letter from Mansfield
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telling him to hold on to all the stuff. That’s another way the whole thing could unravel. And there are more. A lot of people seem to know about it.”

Bud looked at me stoically. “Listen, John, if the damn thing’s going to come out, it’s going to come out.” Bud had been a tough cookie at the White House; now he looked like Sir Thomas More facing the executioners bravely. “I’ll tell you something. I haven’t really had a good day since I went over there to Transportation. I’m troubled by my confirmation hearings up in the Senate. I think I may have crossed the line up there. I tell you, I thought about saying this was all national-security stuff, but I decided just to sort of dodge it. I don’t even like to read back over my testimony.”

He’s worried about perjury, too, I thought. I decided to get him off the subject. “How strong is Hunt’s hand on this, Bud? Did John approve this Ellsberg thing?”

“No,” he answered. “I don’t think John knew much about it.”

His reply caught me off guard. I suspected Bud might be trying to protect Ehrlichman, his mentor, and then I worried that Hunt might know even more “seamy things” about Ehrlichman. “Well, how in the hell did it happen, then?”

Bud glanced over toward the West Wing. “That one came right out of the Oval Office, John,” he said gravely.

“You’re kidding,” I said, sinking back in my chair. There was a pause.

“Goddammit, I hope this thing never comes out,” said Bud. “But if it does, I’m ready for it. I’ve talked to my wife about this whole thing, and we’re together. If the curtain comes down, I’ll just have to stand up. I tell you, I’m not eager for it, but sometimes I’d just as soon get it over with.”

“I’ve been feeling that way, too,” I said. “If this thing isn’t put to rest soon, the President’s going to have some big problems. I don’t think we’ve advised him very well on this whole mess.”

Bud and I rambled on and then parted as if we were leaving someone’s death bed. Fielding came in as I was leaving the office, and I gave him my pitch about how the cover-up was coming to a head. He seemed taken aback, as much by my attitude as by my words.

As I walked in the door of my house the phone rang. Pete Kinsey, one of my staff lawyers, who was over for dinner, answered it. “John! It’s the President!” he said, between a whisper and a shout. He almost dropped the telephone.

It was the first time the President had ever called me at home. As I went to take the call I motioned to Mo to bring me a drink.

“You are having rather long days these days, aren’t you?” he asked, almost tenderly. “I guess we all are.”

“I think they will continue to be longer,” I replied, surprised that I didn’t snap to my usual optimism for his benefit. My mind was sprinting ahead, trying to figure out why the President was calling me. Then, when he launched into a sales pitch on the Dean Report, I knew. Ehrlichman had gotten to him and charged him up about the report again. He’d probably also told Nixon that I seemed shaky. That would make sense. I had revealed my fears to a lot of people that day; such news would travel fast. This was a stroking call, mixed with a little pressure on the report.