Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (7 page)

By the next day the violence had subsided, and the recriminations began. Critics of the Administration denounced the mass arrest of some ten thousand demonstrators, who later won a court ruling that the arrest methods were illegal. The President announced that he was proud of the government response, and I ushered Chief Wilson and the generals of the Mayday command into his office to receive congratulations.

The Mayday demonstration was at once gruesome and sporting for the officials involved on the inside. It was one of a series of crises that year, many of which served to slowly advance the importance of the counsel’s office. When Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of murder for his part in the mass killing of civilians in the Vietnam village of My Lai, we called all over Washington to order delivery of documents on military law, inundated ourselves, talked with other experts, and became instant experts on the procedures of military courts. (For both legal and political reasons, spelled out at great length, I recommended that the President stay away from the case while Calley’s lawyers appealed, but I was overruled by Ehrlichman and the President.) When the commander of an American vessel caused a scandal by handing a desperate Lithuanian detector back to the Russian ship from which he had escaped, we found ourselves informing the President of what was happening and why. When the Pentagon Papers sent the whole Administration into an uproar, we dove into constitutional law and offered discouraging opinions on the chances of enjoining newspapers from publishing them. Through it all our law firm performed well, and our intelligence specialty inched us upward. But there was one crisis in the intelligence field that did not help my stature in the White House.

One day in July 1971, Jack Caulfield bolted into my office, his face flushed. I was alarmed; Jack was not easily moved to fear. Usually, Caulfield strolled casually into my office and waited patiently, rocking on the balls of his feet like a schoolboy about to tattle. As he waited, I would sense him trying to read my mail upside down. When I acknowledged him, he would hand over a deadpan report on some salacious item he had picked up from his sources. Jack labored over the prose of his memos and his feelings were easily hurt, so I would praise his report and give him another assignment. Fielding and I would often crack up over an entertaining gem such as Special Agent XXX, but we liked Caulfield. He was Jack Anderson on our side.

“Jesus Christ, John!” he shouted, without waiting for my greeting. “You’ve got to help me. This guy Colson is crazy! He wants me to firebomb a goddam building, and I can’t do it.”

“Now, wait a minute, Jack,” I said. I shut the door and told my secretary to hold my calls. “Calm down and tell me from the beginning.”

“Colson’s been pestering me for weeks to get this guy Halperin’s Vietnam papers out of the Brookings Institution.” (There had been reports that Morton H. Halperin and Daniel Ellsberg had secret documents that would extend the Pentagon Papers into the Nixon years, and we were all climbing the walls about it, especially Henry Kissinger.) “Well, I told Colson I might be able to get them.” He paused. “Listen, John, I didn’t take this assignment until Colson assured me it was okay with Ehrlichman. Tony, my man, went over to case the place. It’s a big gray building on Mass Avenue. You know where it is?”

“Yeah.” I knew that “Tony” was one of Jack’s operatives, but I didn’t find out his last name, Ulasewicz, until years later. Jack always said his last name was something I didn’t “need-to-know,” in spy jargon.

“Well, Tony cased the place, and he finally figured he could buy one of the security guards to get us in the building. And he found out Halperin’s papers are in this big vault safe upstairs. The security on that vault is tough. It didn’t take long to figure out this wouldn’t be any easy job. We’d have to get past the alarm system and crack the safe somehow.” I sensed that Jack was getting a buzz off the story in spite of himself.

“I told this to Colson,” he
continued. “I told him this thing is impossible! I figured Chuck would forget it. But he didn’t. Chuck says, ‘I don’t want to hear excuses! Start a fire if you need to! That’ll take care of the alarms. You can go in behind the firemen. I’m not going to think of everything for you. That’s your business!’”

His eyes were wide. “Now, John, I’m no chicken, but this is insane. Tony can’t go in there with a bunch of firemen. There are so many holes in this thing we’d never get away with it. You’ve got to get me out of this.”

He was pleading and stammering by the end, and there was a short silence as my head reeled. “Goddammit, Jack,” I said finally, “this is what you get for messing around with Colson.” I couldn’t resist the dig. “You just sit tight and don’t do anything until you hear from me.” I was trying to sound calmly in command. “And whatever you do, don’t talk to Colson.”

“I won’t go near him, John,” he said. His face portrayed fear, relief, embarrassment, gratitude, and uncertainty that I would be able to save him.

I stared out the window and wondered if the President’s mind was as cluttered as mine when he stared out his window. Garbage and tension, I thought. I knew I had to get out of this thing. It was out-and-out street crime. I saw fat burglars wearing stocking masks slipping behind firemen and felt a rush of revulsion. And now I was trapped. Caulfield was on
my
staff, and I knew the plan before the fact. In order to escape, I would have to stop it. I suppressed a dart of anger at Caulfield, and then at Colson, before focusing on strategy. I thought about going straight to Colson, but rejected the idea. He was too fired up about Halperin’s papers and too forceful. He might pull out all the stops to break me down. He was powerful, and he might squeeze me to choose between this break-in and my job as counsel. Then I thought of Ehrlichman.

Ehrlichman was in San Clemente with the President. By now I could get him directly on the phone, although I did so sparingly. “John,” I said, “something’s come up here that requires your firm hand.” I was trying to make light of it. “I can’t talk to you about it on the phone, so I’d really like to come out there and see you for a few minutes, if you can work me in tomorrow. It’ll only take a few minutes.” He could tell I was rattled, and I worried about it; being rattled was not an admired state in the White House.

“Okay,” he said evenly. Ehrlichman did not waste words.

That afternoon I flew to San Clemente on the C-135, a courier flight, and Bob Mardian sat beside me. I asked him why he was going out to San Clemente, and he replied that he had to speak directly with the President about a matter so sensitive he couldn’t tell me a thing. (He was worried, I learned later, that J. Edgar Hoover might blackmail the Administration with his knowledge of the President’s special wiretaps against newsmen and employees suspected of leaking.) I was impressed and bested, since I could say only that I had to speak directly with Ehrlichman on a matter so sensitive I couldn’t tell Mardian a thing. We chatted and played gin rummy. Mardian, an old Arizona colleague of Dick Kleindienst and Senator Barry Goldwater, was considered tough as nails in the Administration. His shiny dome and huge hands were his most striking features. He had little sense of humor, but he tried hard to be sociable.

On the following morning I had the first of what would be many encounters that revealed John Ehrlichman to be unflappable. I was quite exercised in his office, giving him a speech about an outright break-in, which was hardly a run-of-the-mill affair. I kept waiting for him to interrupt me with some sort of question or exclamation, but he never did. He just sat there, staring out over the top of his half-rimmed glasses like a professor. The only sign of interest he gave was an occasional slight twitch of an eyebrow. Meanwhile, I offered every practical argument I could think of against the scheme: criminal statutes that would be violated, the likelihood that Halperin had other copies, the security around the safe, the exposure of Caulfield, on and on.

“Yep, okay,” he said finally, nodding. “I’ll take care of it.”

He picked up the phone and called Colson. “Chuck, that Brookings thing. We don’t want it anymore. I’m telling Dean to turn Caulfield off. Right. Goodbye.”

I felt a great weight lift off me, and I admired the ease with which Ehrlichman had removed it. I also admired the skill with which he had handled me. He showed no hint of a reaction—no surprise, no argument, no demonstration of his
knowledge. Impulsive reactions could be telling, and Ehrlichman had protective instincts. I wondered then if this thing had been ordered by the President. Years later, I learned that the President had angrily demanded Halperin’s papers, had ordered “everybody to rifle” the files, if necessary.

Back in Washington, I was visited by Bud Krogh, who had by now taken command of the Plumbers’ Unit. As part of his mandate to stop leaks, he wanted to harass the Brookings Institution in any way he could, and he was checking in with me. He told me the counsel’s office should play some role in the “declassification” program of the Plumbers. He seemed almost apologetic, and I sensed he was slightly embarrassed at being chosen to head an intelligence operation that should logically have been mine. It was an uneasy conversation, with much nonverbal communication, and Bud was finally moved to offer an explanation: “John, I guess there are some people around here who think you have some little old lady in you.”

Bud knows about the Brookings break-in, I thought. I was upset that they thought of me as a little old lady, but I tried not to let on. Later, as if to prove myself again, I had Caulfield obtain the tax records of Brookings from the IRS as Bud had requested and sent them to him with a covering memo, noting that Brookings received many government contracts we might cut off. I also told him there were Nixon loyalists on the Brookings board whom we might use clandestinely. A week later I sent Bud another terse and self-serving memo, offering to help “turn off the spigot” of funds to Brookings, but he never called on me. Although I was never sorry about my action to stop the break-in, I was pained it might have harmed my reputation for toughness in the White House. Within my limits, I was tough, too, and it had served me well.

In the fall of 1971, my small law office reached a plateau. I had acquired additional office space next door, and the carpenters erected partitions there to accommodate another lawyer, two secretaries, and Jack Caulfield. Upstairs, on the second floor of the EOB, I commandeered another large office. With partitions, it had room for two lawyers and a secretary. Soon I would take over the remaining office in my own suite, occupied by a man whose wife was a friend of Mrs. Nixon. His job was to greet those friends of the President whom the President did not want to see, but he spent most of his time reading newspapers. It took months of delicate sessions with Haldeman’s staff and the personnel people to accomplish my goal. We had to find the man a nice job in another department, handling him gently. When the lateral arabesques were accomplished, I partitioned his office, redecorated, and brought two attorneys into the suite.

I was drained after nearly a year and a half’s constant work. Haldeman granted permission for a vacation, and I flew to London, Paris, the Riviera, Rome, Athens, and the Greek Isles. While basking in the high life and relaxation, I reviewed my career prospects. I was getting closer to the center of things, I thought, having arrived at the edge of the President’s inner circle. Yet I knew I had risen about as high as I could go. Ehrlichman would always have a foot on my shoulder, for he was in fact the President’s counsel; I was merely a successful staff lawyer.

When I returned, I decided to look for a job living abroad, with plenty of travel and a salary between $50,000 and $100,000. I took French lessons at Berlitz and entertained some offers. My experience in government would be useful later anyhow; another President would be looking for an Attorney General one day, and I could be a candidate. I went in to tell Haldeman I was leaving.

He was not pleased. “John, you wouldn’t have all those damn job offers if we hadn’t brought you to the White House in the first place. The same offers will be there after the election, probably more. You owe it to the President to stay through the election. Then you can leave if you want.”

Haldeman never invited argument, and I did not offer any. Pleased that he wanted me to stay, I accepted the notion of leaving government in the glory of the President’s reelection—for business, or perhaps even as ambassador to a small country. In the interim, my next step upward would be to play bit parts in the power struggles among those above me.

Soon after Hugo L. Black and John M. Harlan retired from the Supreme Court in the fall of 1971, Ehrlichman called me into his office. “I want you to help me out on a little project, John,” he said, almost idly. “The President has asked me to give him some recommendations on the Court vacancies. He’s not too happy with the Attorney General’s track record.”

I nodded routinely, but my mind was clicking with the implications of Ehrlichman’s attack on Mitchell. I had lived through the disastrous nominations of Clement F. Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell under Mitchell at Justice and knew he had been politically wounded by them, but I was stunned by the notion that he had fallen this far.

Ehrlichman noticed my double take. “You look surprised,” he remarked with a smile.

“Yeah, I am. I thought Mitchell had a lock on making Supreme Court nominations.”

“He used to.” After this had registered, Ehrlichman laid out his assignment for me. I was to review Mitchell’s favored candidates for the Court, accompanied by David Young, a young lawyer who had joined Ehrlichman’s staff after burning himself out working briefly for Henry Kissinger. The top man on Mitchell’s list, said Ehrlichman, was Representative Richard Poff of Virginia.