The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (51 page)

Hush money remained a
viable option; the cash just had to come from a source other than CIA. In his Senate and House testimony, Dean suggested that the Agency’s rebuffs had sent him scurrying back to Mitchell for a new plan of action, and that Mitchell obliged during a meeting in the former attorney general’s law office on Wednesday, June 28, with Mardian and LaRue also present. Dean’s executive session testimony before the Senate, previously unpublished, quoted Mitchell as saying: “I think we are going to have to get Kalmbach involved in this.”
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Herb Kalmbach was one of the greatest fund-raisers in American history. In Nixon’s ’68 campaign, he reportedly raised $6 million (more than $30 million in current figures). After turning down an offer to serve as undersecretary of commerce, Kalmbach returned to Newport Beach, California, where, on the strength of his White House connections, he quietly fattened his private law practice. But he never completely left Washington, and its underside, behind. Using leftover campaign funds, Kalmbach served in 1969–70 as the paymaster for Anthony Ulasewicz, a former NYPD detective whom Ehrlichman and Dean had assigned various unsavory chores, including a probe of Senator Edward Kennedy’s sex life. Mitchell’s dealings with Kalmbach were rare. They had met in ’68, but seen each other only seldom thereafter; it was only coincidence, born of geography and dire necessity, that the former attorney general had dialed Kalmbach when Martha Mitchell, crying and bleeding at the Newporter Inn, required immediate assistance.
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During the June 28 meeting, according to Dean, Mitchell again saw Kalmbach as his savior. Dean testified that Mitchell instructed him to enlist the fund-raising genius on behalf of the Watergate burglars. The Kalmbach gambit was the third scheme for obstructing the FBI probe that Dean attributed to his former mentor. When Dean appeared before the full Senate committee, nine days after his executive session, he introduced a number of new elements to strengthen his charge about Mitchell and Kalmbach. “After some discussion which I cannot recall with any specificity at this time,” Dean said, pressing an uncharacteristic claim of forgetfulness, Mitchell “asked me to get the approval of Haldeman and Ehrlichman to use Mr. Herbert Kalmbach to raise the necessary money.” Then the witness recalled, for the first time, that Mitchell’s damning instruction went unheard by the other men present, Mardian and LaRue:

Before I departed the meeting, I remembered [
sic
] that Mr. Mitchell, in an aside for my ears only, told me that the White House, in particular Ehrlichman, should be very interested and anxious to accommodate the needs of these men.
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A master manipulator, Dean made sure Haldeman and Ehrlichman believed the Kalmbach gambit was the brainchild of a very desperate John Mitchell. Ehrlichman recalled Dean telling him that Mitchell “felt very strongly” the arrested men needed competent attorneys, and that Dean added: “I am going to see if we can get Herb Kalmbach wound up to raise some attorneys’ fees for John Mitchell, who says we really have got to do it…. If [Kalmbach] checks with you, back me up on this.”
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That night, at Dean’s request, Kalmbach caught a red-eye flight to Washington. The next day Dean steered the older man away from a prearranged meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel into outdoor Lafayette Park, in the shadow of the White House, and instructed him to gesture broadly as they talked—in case they were being watched. “We would like to have you raise funds for the legal defense of these defendants and for the support of their families,” Dean announced. He never explained who “we” were. Further instructions, Dean said, would come from himself and Fred LaRue. Kalmbach asked why a public defense fund couldn’t be established; not enough time, Dean said.
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That was all Kalmbach, hungry for “tough and dangerous” assignments, needed to hear. Over the next three months—taking his orders from Dean and LaRue, and employing the stealthy services of Tony Ulasewicz, who devised a system of phone contacts, code names, and blind drops at airports—Kalmbach steered some $220,000 to the burglars’ lawyers and Mrs. Howard Hunt. A month into the intrigue, however, Kalmbach grew queasy; he wondered if Dean actually had the authority to order such a dicey operation. The master fund-raiser demanded a meeting with John Ehrlichman, and got it July 26. Pressing for assurance his was a “proper” assignment, Kalmbach later recalled that Ehrlichman looked him straight in the eye and said: “Herb, John Dean does have the authority, it is proper, and you are to go forward.” But Kalmbach was not reassured for long; by mid-September 1972, he dropped out for good. Dean would have to find a new source for the burglars’ hush money.
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It didn’t take the
special prosecutors long to spot the holes in Dean’s story of how Kalmbach got roped into the cover-up. For starters, Dean claimed that Mitchell proposed the idea during a meeting in his law office on June 28; but the former attorney general was out of town that day and totally incommunicado, consumed by the Martha Mitchell nightmare then reaching its dénouement at the Westchester Country Club.

“I never tried to get Mr. Kalmbach into raising money,” Mitchell testified at his trial, a position he reasserted in 1988: “I didn’t have anything to do with Kalmbach…. Why would I fish Kalmbach out of all of the people that were around Stans raising money?” Conversely, Mitchell suggested, it would have been quite natural for Dean—who admitted he “often” worked with Kalmbach in Nixon’s first term—to look to him for fund-raising assistance. Mitchell’s claim of estrangement from the hush-money business was no last-minute confection manufactured for a jury’s consumption. Kalmbach himself confirmed as much. In April 1988—in the only interviews he ever gave—Kalmbach told author Len Colodny: “I never met with John Mitchell at all. Mitchell never asked me to raise money.”
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Mitchell’s absence from Washington during the week of June 26 created serious problems for the WSPF prosecutors, even beyond the question—important as it was—of who enlisted Kalmbach. For example, Dean had also claimed, in testimony before the grand jury, to have “kept Mitchell informed” about the three meetings with General Walters of CIA; yet Dean’s logs showed no calls to or from Mitchell, in New York or anywhere else, on any of the days on which Dean met with Walters. These discrepancies between Dean’s testimony and the evidence embodied in Mitchell’s logs were material and glaring. The special prosecutors couldn’t just throw Dean on the stand and expect the defense lawyers at
U.S. v. Mitchell
to ignore them; they had to be ironed out—eliminated. In a previously unpublished draft memorandum prepared in July 1974, WSPF lawyer George Frampton—the same man who helped Magruder rework his testimony—summarized the difficulty he faced with Dean.
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Dean’s Senate and grand jury testimony leaves the impression (which is explicit in the Senate) that his approach to Mitchell about using Kalmbach came only
after
it became clear CIA would not cooperate. However, Mitchell’s logs and schedule suggest that the two possibilities—use of Kalmbach and use of CIA—were probably discussed at the same time, and that
Dean exercised somewhat more discretion himself to forge ahead with getting Kalmbach into the picture than he has admitted
…. Our case will probably have to be based on the
theory
that Mitchell asked Dean on Saturday, June 24, to explore both the CIA and Kalmbach possibilities; or that Mitchell’s logs are incomplete.
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The Frampton memo is a “smoking gun” in its own right: irrefutable evidence of what the Watergate special prosecutors knew, and when they knew it, about their star witness, Dean, and his false testimony against the prosecution’s prime target, Mitchell. The changes to Dean’s story that emerged during his testimony at
U.S. v. Mitchell
reflected the prosecutors’ handiwork. Now Mitchell’s muttered remark about Haldeman and Ehrlichman having a special interest in the payment of hush money, the “aside” meant solely for Dean’s ears, came not on June 28, as Dean originally asserted, but on Saturday, June 24, in the meeting at which Mitchell and Mardian had supposedly encouraged Dean to try the CIA route. In this latest iteration, Mitchell’s “aside” was aimed at getting Haldeman and Ehrlichman to consider
both
the Kalmbach
and
CIA options. To disguise this testimonial sleight of hand, Dean now remembered, for the first time, that when he brought Mitchell’s idea to Ehrlichman—
mere messenger!
—the latter had instructed Dean to “hold on it with Kalmbach” and “explore [further] with CIA.”

While prepared to discard previous testimony, amend dates, and change the substance of alleged conversations with his colleagues, Dean was unwilling to abandon his twin claims to have “kept Mitchell informed” about the trio of meetings with Walters and to have received from Mitchell the final order to set Kalmbach in motion. To acknowledge that he kept Mitchell in the dark about the Walters meetings, or that he enjoyed no communication with Mitchell prior to Kalmbach’s red-eye flight, would have amounted to a public concession by Dean of that which the Frampton memo, privately, made plain: that the witness exercised “more discretion” in the hush money business “than he has admitted.”

Thus Dean clung to the fiction that he visited Mitchell’s office on June 28 and spoke with him, even though the former attorney general was in transit from Westchester.
How was that possible?
The conversation, Dean explained at
U.S. v. Mitchell
, was conducted via telephone, with Dean seated in Mitchell’s office and Mitchell at some unspecified location, on the other end of the call. “That happened from time to time,” Dean said with a straight face. “We had meetings in his office when he wasn’t there.” It was in this imaginary call that Dean “reported” to Mitchell the unhelpful response of General Walters, then asked, in language theretofore unrecalled: “Should we go back and try the Kalmbach angle?” Yes, Mitchell supposedly replied, telling Dean to contact Kalmbach, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman, and make it happen.
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Unfortunately for the former attorney general, and for history, Dean’s deceptions at
U.S. v. Mitchell
fooled only those who mattered most: the judge, the jury, and the news media. The defense knew better and so did the WSPF lawyers. The Frampton memo, for example, noted “significant discrepancies between Dean’s anticipated trial testimony [and] that of other Government witnesses or evidence.” Another internal WSPF memorandum, prepared in February 1974 and also previously unpublished, demolished the myth, promulgated by Senator Ervin, among others, that Dean’s testimony before the Senate Watergate committee was “corroborated in all significant respects by the taped recordings” of President Nixon. The WSPF memo bore the title: “Material Discrepancies Between the Senate Select Committee Testimony of John Dean and the Tapes of Dean’s Meetings with the President.”
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Dean was a problem the WSPF lawyers inherited. The original prosecutors, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert, concluded, according to previously unpublished internal memoranda, that Dean not only stood “at the center of the criminality” in Watergate, but had withheld crucial evidence in his plea-bargaining sessions, engaging in “a gradual escalation as to who is culpable.” Initially, Dean’s attorney boasted his client could “deliver Mitchell” and “deliver Magruder” two weeks later, when Magruder began cooperating with prosecutors, offering up himself, Mitchell,
and
Dean, the latter began implicating Haldeman and Ehrlichman—and, eventually, the president. Silbert and his team smarted when they discovered that Dean had “withheld the incriminating role he played with regard to Walters” and neglected to inform them about Kalmbach. Dean’s lawyer later claimed the omissions were “inadvertent.”
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