Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (22 page)

“He, uh, he’s done some rather unethical things that have come to light already,” I said, trying to pick up on the President’s new mood.

“Keep a log on all that,” Haldeman said tersely. The hostile side of his personality fit the President’s like a glove.

“Oh, we are,” I agreed, hesitating, “on these. Yeah.”

“Because afterwards that is a guy...” said Haldeman.

“We’re going after him,” the President overlapped.

“...that is a guy we’ve got to ruin,” said Haldeman.

The President’s brooding anger caught me off guard. It was a Richard Nixon I had seen in the action memos that reached my desk, but that I had never heard personally. I tried to curry favor with him by joining in with the tenor of the conversation. “One of the things I’ve tried to do,” I said, “is just keep notes on lots of people who are emerging as less than our friends.” I figured he would like that even though my notes were only mental.

“Great,” he said.

“Because,” I went on, repeating what he had just said, “this is going to be over someday and there is going to be—we shouldn’t forget the way some of them have treated us.”

The President leaned forward and gazed at me intently. “I want the most, I want the most comprehensive notes on all those who have tried to do us in,” he instructed firmly. He punctuated his phrases by pointing his finger in the air. “Because they didn’t have to do it.”

“That’s right,” I agreed.

“They didn’t have to do it,” he repeated. He paused and looked off for a moment as if genuinely puzzled about why his opponents harassed him. Then he began thinking aloud. “I mean, if the thing had been clo—, uh, they had a very close election, everybody on the other side would understand this game. But now they are doing this quite deliberately. And they are asking for it, and they are going to get it! And this, this,” he went on and abruptly stopped. The wave of anger passed over, and the President became suddenly composed again. He started in a new direction. “We have not used the power in the first four years, as you know.” He looked at me for a response.

“That’s right,” I agreed.

“We have never used it. We haven’t used the Bureau, and we haven’t used the Justice Department, but things are going to change now. And they are going to change,” he added to Haldeman for emphasis, “and they’re going to get it, right?” Haldeman nodded his approval, and the President glanced at me.

“That’s an exciting prospect,” I remarked flatly, mustering my hostility toward those who threatened the cover-up. I was trying to sound like a vicious prize fighter and doing a poor job, but I seemed to be pleasing the President. I was taking each apple he handed me, polishing it, and passing it back.

I felt the anger in the room subside. We turned to remaining problems. Congressman Wright Patman’s planned bearings on the Watergate money transactions posed the biggest obstacle, I informed the President. Maurice Stans had been calling me regularly to express his fears about being called before Patman’s committee.

The President recognized the gravity of this possibility. He informed Haldeman that we would have to lean on Jerry Ford to block the hearings. “This is the big play,” he observed intently. “I’m getting into this thing, so that he, he’s got to know that it comes from the top and that he’s got to get at this and screw this thing up while he can, right?”

His subordinates agreed, and we discussed ways to enlist Ford’s aid. When our orders had been made clear, business talk ended and the conversation again meandered. The President lectured me on the intricacies of the Hiss case. It was pitch dark when the meeting ended on a discussion of
Inside Australia
, a John Gunther book I was reading.
4
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My relationship with the President had changed dramatically. He had taken me into his confidence beyond my wildest expectations. I appraised my performance and chastised myself for having seemed naive and guppylike at times, but I knew I was learning. We would make it through the election, I calculated, and then maybe the whole Watergate mess would evaporate in the light of the President’s renewed power.

As would be the pattern, I felt at my toughest and most hopeful after receiving a boost from Haldeman or the President himself. Away from them, however, disturbing events cropped up that fed my doubts about the ultimate success of the cover-up. Almost always they concerned the payment of money to the Watergate defendants.

Herb Kalmbach called a few days after my meeting with the President. He was no longer the nervous but willing soldier, the inventive amateur spy. He was literally wasted. There was no energy in his voice. I knew why. Herb was being investigated by the FBI for his activities as paymaster for Donald Segretti, Dwight Chapin’s campaign saboteur, at the same time he was raising and distributing the hush money. The pressures had taken their toll.

“I’m dropping out, John,” he told me. “I’ve cleared it with Mitchell and Ehrlichman. I’ve had it. I’m coming to Washington, and I’d like to see you and LaRue.” Herb was the first casualty of the cover-up, and he was bringing the money issue back to my desk like a bad penny.

“I want to give you fellows my final accounting,” Herb told me and LaRue as we all took seats in my office, which by now had become a site for cover-up meetings.

“Herb, I don’t think we need any accounting,” I said, anxious not to hear the details.

“I know I don’t need one,” seconded LaRue. At Mitchell’s request, Fred was about to assume Kalmbach’s duties. He was somber, but less so than Kalmbach.

“Well, I want to clear the decks,” Herb insisted. He reached into his back pocket for his billfold, opened it before us, reached with one finger into a hidden compartment, and extracted a tiny accounting sheet. Herb unfolded the paper and squinted unsuccessfully at his own microscopic writing. Then he put on his heavy, dark-framed reading glasses and read off the figures in detail. He had delivered some $220,000 in cash, mostly to Howard Hunt. “That’s it,” he said finally.

I looked at LaRue, who took his pipe from his mouth and said nothing. He shook his head slowly and seemed as staggered as I at the sum.

“Here, why don’t you take this?” said Herb, handing LaRue the tiny ledger sheet.

Fred took it, placed his glasses on his forehead, and frowned as he strained to read the minute print. Then he passed it back to Herb, saying he had no use for it.

“Well, let’s destroy it, then,” said Herb tightly, determined to rid himself of the burden. No one disagreed.

Herb reached for the clean ashtray on my desk, tore the note into small bits, and dropped them in. Then he took the matchbook lying beside my pack of Winstons and lit the shreds. The three of us silently watched the paper burn to ash.

“This,” said Herb, “will officially end my assignment.”

Fred stood up and said he had no idea where or how he would obtain the next batch of cash. On this note, he and Herb walked out of my office like pallbearers. Now Kalmbach was out; LaRue was in.

Such encounters deflated my confidence, but Haldeman usually pumped me back up. A few days after the Kalmbach ceremony, he saw me in the hall and invited me into his office for a chat. Bob had become very friendly and increasingly open. He had to make a few quick calls, so I wandered around his office examining his mementos. He had a beautiful tapestry from the China trip which I admired, but I soon returned to my favorite artifacts: the three dried bullfrog carcasses. They were gifts from Ehrlichman. As always, I picked up one of the mummified frogs to examine it. The bodies were shaped to depict various froglike activities—jumping, smiling, catching flies. I was absolutely mystified as to why Haldeman would have them on display or what Ehrlichman had in mind, although Higby had once said they had something to do with Haldeman’s skills as a former campaign advance man.

Haldeman finished his calls and motioned me over to the easy chairs in front of his roaring fireplace. “Listen, I wanted to talk to you about something that came up when we were with the President last week,” he began. “And that’s these plans for after the election. This is something that’s being held very closely, John, and I think you’ll understand why. I want you to make sure there’s no legal problem in doing it. We are going to ask for the resignation of every single Presidential appointee as soon as the election is over. Every single one of them. And we’re going to put our own people in there. Can you check it out for me?”

“Sure, Bob,” I replied, swallowing hard. I was astounded. They’re really going to do it, I was thinking—take control of the whole executive branch and pull the strings.

“Good,” he said. “One other thing. I’d like you to stay on after the election, at least until we get Watergate resolved.”

“I’ll stay,” I said, extending my commitment. My new status in the White House made it easier for me, but I knew I had no choice anyway. After the heavy publicity given to the “Dean investigation,” I knew I would be grilled by Congressional investigators the minute I set foot out of the White House sanctuary.

“I’ll get back to you on the resignations as soon as I search the law, Bob,” I continued, “but I want to check with you about these Patman hearings. It’s going to come to a head pretty soon. Patman’s got to get his committee to vote him subpoena power, and it’s a close question whether we have the votes to kill it. I’ve been talking to Bill Timmons
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and Stans and Petersen on this thing, and Mitchell is working on it, too. We think we can give our guys a leg to stand on by telling them that an investigation will cause a lot of publicity that will jeopardize the defendants’ rights in the Liddy trial. But that may not be enough. We really need to turn Patman off.”

“Call Connally,” said Haldeman. “He may know some way to stop Patman. And tell Timmons to keep on Jerry Ford’s ass. He knows he’s got to produce on this one.”

I left and called Connally, whom I’d met before he had been appointed Treasury Secretary. “The Govemor,” as some called him, had been one of the few high officials to dodge my conflict-of-interest clearance. He had taken a look at our standard questionnaire on financial holdings and decided to handle his own clearance.

“Governor, this is John Dean, over at the White House,” I said bravely.

“Oh, yeah, John,” he boomed warmly, as though I were an old friend. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I was talking to Bob Haldeman, and he suggested I might call you about these Patman hearings. We need to find something to help us reason with the Congressman from Texas about how these hearings are not a good idea here before the election.”

“Well, yes,” he replied. “I believe I can think of something. I understand from the grapevine down in Texas that Patman might have a couple of weak spots, and one of them is he might have some campaign contributions he would not want exposed. Now, I believe I heard the Congressman received some contributions from an oil lobbyist up here. I don’t believe Mr. Patman has reported them either.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. Connally was not a man who needed to be led by the nose. “Do you have any idea how we might establish that for the record?”

“No, John, I don’t believe I can help you there,” he said, obviously not wanting to carry the matter further himself. “Why don’t you just check into that and see what you come up with?”

“I will, Governor. Thank you.”

“Any time, my boy.”

Over the next several weeks, there was a good deal of activity to block the Patman investigation. I asked Ken Parkinson to check into the reported contributions of Patman and the other members of his committee. I was in touch with Mitchell, who told me he was working with “some Rockefeller people” to bring pressure on the New York members of the committee. I continued to urge Henry Petersen to write an official Justice Department letter objecting to the hearings on the grounds that the attendant publicity would endanger the rights of Liddy et al. Henry gave in finally, and soon all the Republican members of the committee began to make civil-liberty speeches about how they wouldn’t vote to investigate Watergate because they wanted Liddy to get a fair trial. This was supremely cynical. We were trying to make Liddy, Hunt, McCord, and the Cubans the scapegoats for all of Watergate at the same time that we were blocking Patman with boundless professions of concern for their civil liberties.