Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (36 page)

“Yeah, I figured. I’m preparing myself for that. And, you know, Haldeman and Ehrlichman actually
want
me to sink Mitchell and Magruder.”

“That’s good,” said Charlie. “They’re finally wising up.”

“Maybe so. But I can still think of a lot of better ways to spend a day than testifying at that grand jury. What about the cover-up? You think they’ll get into that?”

“They didn’t ask about it, and I’m sure as hell not going to go down there and tell them what they should be looking for,” Charlie said sternly. “I’m not going to volunteer anything to them. Not yet, anyway.”

As he would on many subsequent occasions, Charlie began prowling about the room, firing questions at an imaginary Mitchell on an imaginary witness stand. He was playing prosecutor. “I could smoke this guy out. I’d love to cross-examine him and turn that old stone face into jelly,” Charlie said, rubbing his hands together.

Charlie’s delight at the idea of skewering Mitchell was painful enough to me, but an increasingly troublesome thought began nagging me when I went home at night. Two days later, I raised it with Charlie. “I want to say something to you,” I said hesitantly, “and I hope you won’t take this the wrong way. But listen, a lot of goddam lawyers have done what I’m afraid you’re doing. You’re going to fall right into the cover-up trap if you don’t start thinking about the implications of this. You know, all these lawyers came into this thing with no worries, and then they started protecting their clients and protecting the President. And the first thing you know they slipped into the cover-up. I’m thinking of guys like Parkinson and Paul O’Brien and Mardian. And me too. We’ve got to be careful about that.”

Charlie stopped pacing, folded his arms, and stared down at me. “Listen, son. You don’t have to worry about
me!”
he exploded. “I can take care of my own ass. I’m in charge of worrying about yours. Now, let me tell you what I’ve done, which may handle your concerns. I’ve made an arrangement for you to meet with the prosecutors. I’ve touched on the highlights of your testimony, but only you can really tell them what you know. These facts are damn complex, and they can best judge your credibility by hearing them directly from you. They know I’ll never spin them, so they’ve agreed to an arrangement whereby you can talk to them off the record. They won’t use anything you say against you, even if they should still prosecute you later. And they’ve agreed not to report these meetings to either Petersen or anybody else, because of your concern that it would get straight back to the White House. I think it’s a fair deal. These guys may change their minds about wanting to prosecute you after they hear your story. I don’t know, so don’t get encouraged, but I think it’s worth a try.” Charlie had gradually calmed down during his monologue. “Now,” he said intently, as if he had said all there was to say, “are you ready to go down there and layout the facts?”

“I think so, Charlie.” I gulped. He was putting it to me faster than I had expected. “But I don’t like it. You know damn well I can’t tell them about the break-in without nailing Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, me, and God knows who else on the cover-up. I don’t want to volunteer that stuff.”

“You
don’t know,” Charlie said condescendingly. “Maybe you can stay out of the cover-up. Frankly, I don’t give a damn. It’s your ass or theirs. Whose do you want to save?”

“Mine,
of course, but...”

“Do you think they’re going to protect you when the shit hits the fan?”

“No, but I know damn well they won’t if they think I stuck the knife in them when I didn’t have to.”

“You have to, unless you want to keep lying and covering up. You want to do that?”

“No.”

“Are you ready to meet with the prosecutors?”

“Yes. Only one thing, though. I think I should first tell Haldeman I’m going to do it.”

“Why do you want to do that, for God’s sake?”

“Because,”
I replied irritably. “For one thing, I owe it to him. Not to Ehrlichman, but to Bob.”

“Okay. That’s your choice. Do it if you want to.”

The first “off the record” meeting was scheduled for Sunday, April 8. I procrastinated and waffled on what story I would offer Haldeman until the last minute, when I was already waiting for the prosecutors in Charlie’s office. Then I finally called him in San Clemente. “Bob, uh, the reason I called, uh, to talk to you, is that I think I’ve got to tell you that my lawyer thinks I should meet with the prosecutors myself. He’s had some meetings with them, and he really wants me to meet with them directly. They’re after Mitchell and Magruder, and they’re also after me.”

“When does he want you to do that?” Haldeman asked immediately. He was edgy and tense.

“Right away, uh, as soon as possible,” I said.

There was silence on the line. I was praying silently that Haldeman wouldn’t order me not to.

“Well, listen, John,” Haldeman said, “we’re on our way back. We’ll be in Washington this afternoon. In fact, I’m on my way to the plane right now. And I think we ought to talk about this when we get back.”

“Well, Bob, I, I, you know, I can understand that,” I stammered, “but I may have to tell my lawyer what I’m going to do here. That’s why I’m calling this morning.”

“I want to talk to you about talking to the prosecutors,” Haldeman said firmly. “Just remember that once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s going to be very tough to get it back in.”

“I understand,” I said quietly, avoiding a direct answer. I feared he was zeroing in on what my message really was.

“Look, John, I’ve got to go,” Haldeman said briskly. “You’ve caught me on the way to the plane. Be careful, okay? I’ll talk to you when we get back.”

“Right.” I hung up with relief.

The prosecutors arrived in the early afternoon. Earl Silbert, whom I had known for years, gave me a sincere and friendly greeting.

He was my age, and cautiously ambitious. He wanted to be United States attorney in Washington. I had met Glanzer briefly in Henry Petersen’s office when we were discussing the CIA aspects of Watergate. I had never seen Don Campbell, the least experienced member of the team, who seemed to be mostly a spectator.

Charlie reviewed the ground rules: no notes, nothing could be later used against me, no discussions of my dealings with the President. Considering the fact that I was a target of a grand-jury investigation, everyone was extremely cordial and relaxed. Charlie moved things along. “Well, let’s get on with it,” he said and turned to me. “Tell these gentlemen what happened and how the Watergate bugging was planned. They don’t understand that they’ve got the wrong man as a target for their investigation. Give them an education.”

I took a deep breath and began telling the story from the beginning, moving quickly. I was blowing the whistle gently, using buzz words about “demonstration intelligence” and “campaign coordination,” trying not to make it sound as bad as I knew it was. Charlie stopped me.

“Okay, that’s enough. Now listen,” he said to me, pacing the room. “This is not the Dean Report you’re giving these men, with all that self-serving bullshit.” He stopped in front of me, hands on hips, glowering at me. The prosecutors couldn’t yet understand his reference to the Dean Report, but they seemed to enjoy Charlie’s show of pushing me. I did not. “I want you to tell these guys the ugly realities of life,” Charlie thundered. “Don’t waste their time telling them what a nice guy you are, because they don’t feel that way about you. So unless you want them to indict you, lay it out. Understand?”

He had embarrassed me, but I knew he was right. I started going into greater detail, giving a more realistic picture of what had occurred. The prosecutors listened in silence and showed no reaction. I assumed this was how prosecutors behaved. They broke in with only a few questions, one of which rocked me.

“John, are you sure your account of that second meeting is the end of it?” Silbert interrupted. “Since this conversation is off the record, I’ll tell you why I’m trying to make sure. Liddy’s been talking to us privately. Now, nobody knows about that, but your story is going to have to square with his. You understand?”

Jesus Christ, I thought. Liddy’s talking. I couldn’t believe it. He had been the rock of the cover-up. If he slipped off the mountain, it was all over. I started to blurt out what Liddy knew, but checked myself. I didn’t know how far he had broken. “What did he say, Earl?”

“You know I can’t get into that, John,” Silbert said firmly. “His conversations are as privileged as yours.”

Charlie rescued me. “Goddam, Earl, that’s great,” he declared. “I don’t care what Liddy says. If he tells the truth, you’ll know my man wasn’t in on this.” He turned to me. “You just keep on going with your story, John.”
2
*

I did. I had been going at it almost two hours when the phone rang. “It’s for you,” Charlie said. “You can take it outside.”

“That’s okay,” I said, assuming it was Mo. I reached for the phone.

“Mr. Dean, this is the White House operator. You have a call coming through from Air Force One.” Before I could recover enough to tell her to hold until I got to another phone, the Signal Corps operator was giving me the standard military reminder that the call was not on a secured line. Then Higby came on.

“John, this is Larry, do you read me?”

“That’s affirmative,” I answered in Air Force One lingo.

“Be in Wisdom’s office at sixteen hundred hours, for a meeting with Wisdom and Welcome.”

“Okay, Larry, I’ll be there.”

“Over and out.”

I stood at Charlie’s desk for a moment thinking about the call. It was a mixed blessing. I would surely be confronted by Ehrlichman (Wisdom) and Haldeman (Welcome) about my meeting with the prosecutors. That was ominous. On the other hand, that meeting would enable me to end this one before we got into the cover-up.

“That was a call from Air Force One,” I told the curious group. “Haldeman and Ehrlichman want to meet with me at four, so I think we should break this up for now. It’ll take me a while to drive all the way back to town.”

“Air Force One?” asked Glanzer. “They called you from the air?”

“Yeah.”

“How does that work?” he asked, seeming impressed as much by the technology as by the source of the call.

“Well, they send it over the Army’s ground-to-air channels and then route the signal through the White House switchboard,” I replied casually.

“Do they know we’re here?” Silbert asked.

“No, they don’t even know where I am.” I was thinking, however, that I should stop leaving my number with the switchboard, just in case. I didn’t want anyone to stumble on a record of my visits to Charlie.

We agreed to resume the next evening, and I arrived back at the White House just as Haldeman and Ehrlichman were coming in from Andrews Air Force Base. The three of us walked into Ehrlichman’s suite, chatting idly about the weather and President Thieu’s visit. All of us seemed to have inexhaustible reserves of outward calm, I thought. Haldeman must have reported my call instantly. I wondered if I had the guts to tell them I had just met with the prosecutors in spite of his wish to talk to me first. I hoped I could dodge the question if it arose.

Ehrlichman flicked on the lights in his office, picked up the Sunday
New York Times
,
and shook his head at the front-page story about how Colson had taken and passed a lie-detector test on Watergate.

“What do you think about Chuck taking a lie-detector test?” I asked.

“Not much,” Haldeman said sourly.

“Well,” added Ehrlichman, “I think Chuck’s more than a match for any lie-detector machine.”

“Maybe so,” I said, “but if this idea catches on, we might all have to take those tests.”

Ehrlichman tilted his head back and looked down at me over his glasses. “Maybe,” he intoned slowly. I took his response as a sign of
unruffled
displeasure at me for raising disquieting possibilities. Haldeman said nothing and flopped down in a chair, with one leg draped over the arm.

I decided to take the initiative in the conversation in an effort to keep them from grilling me about the prosecutors. “Well, I think you all ought to know that my lawyer’s been having these conversations with the prosecutors, and he says they’re primarily interested in what happened before June seventeenth.”

“Primarily?” asked Ehrlichman. “What does ‘primarily’ mean?”

“Well, they want to find out who authorized the break-in, and they’ll do anything to find out. I think they’re on the trail. One of the things my lawyer has already found out is that Liddy has apparently been doing some talking.”

“Really?” said Ehrlichman.

“Yeah. Apparently he’s been giving them some little explanations off the record, unbeknownst even to his lawyer. I don’t know what he’s said.”

“Very interesting,” Ehrlichman replied, nodding. His face went blank for an instant, registering surprise; then it returned to normal.