Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (24 page)

“Henry, I just want you to know one thing,” I said soothingly. “You don’t have anything to worry about. I don’t know about everybody else, but I know you’re not going to lose your job.”

“Well, goddam, I’m glad to hear that.” I felt a breath of uncertain relief wafting through the line. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I just talked to the people over here. Things are all scrambled up here too. But you’re solid. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Thanks, John. But I still don’t like this. You’ve got a lot of good people upset over here. Is Dick going to get canned?”

“I don’t know about that. It’s too early to tell. I doubt it. But you’re the only one I’ve checked on.” I signed off. I had chalked up points with both Haldeman and Petersen.

Mo and I flew off to Palm Springs in a second attempt to mix a honeymoon with a little work. Donald Segretti had wound up his elusive travels hiding in the California desert, and I was to obtain a comprehensive report on his activities for Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who now wanted to surface Segretti in the afterglow of the election and then quickly bury him. Otherwise, I planned to bask in the sun for a couple of weeks and forget Watergate. The story had vanished from the newspapers, which were full of the historic landslide.

Segretti came from seclusion to our villa in the Eldorado, an exclusive Palm Springs country club. He was glad to see someone from “the outside world,” a bit sheepish about all the worry he had caused but puckish as always. “John, the best idea you had for me was the train trip across the country,” he reminisced. “I really enjoyed that. I looked out the window the whole way. But the worst was coming out here to the desert. I ended up in a sleeping bag every night, and every morning I would wake up with the dew soaked through the sleeping bag and all in my clothes. It was miserable. Ugh!” He scrunched up his nose in disgust and then broke into a grin. His ordeal had paid off, and now it was over.

Don and I sat in front of a tape recorder for several hours as I elicited a description of his campaign activities and his relationship with Chapin, Strachan, and Kalmbach. When we finished, he went off and Mo and I settled down to enjoy our honeymoon.

It didn’t last long. One of Ehrlichman’s assistants called soon after from Key Biscayne to say that Haldeman and Ehrlichman wanted to listen to the tape. Immediately. To Mo’s amazed disappointment, we found ourselves in Florida the next day.

Haldeman and Ehrlichman sat through a complete rendition of the recording. “It could have been a lot worse,” said Bob as I was packing up the equipment. “In fact, it’s not nearly as bad as I imagined. As far as I’m concerned, we could air that thing on CBS tonight and get it over with. Most people think that a lot worse things than that went on.”

Haldeman was looking on the bright side, but Ehrlichman was handling the case. “John, the President has decided Chapin has to go,” he said bluntly. “He doesn’t want this stuff hanging over his head in the second term, and as long as Dwight stays at the White House he’s a lightning rod for bad press.”

“I’m too close to Dwight to make an objective judgment,” Haldeman added painfully, appearing embarrassed not to support his man more forcefully.

I went back to my room, my mind stuck on the decision Ehrlichman and the President had made about Chapin. It seemed callous and unfair. No one, I knew, was more loyal personally to Richard Nixon than Chapin, who virtually worshiped the President. And no one would be more at a loss outside the White House. The high point in Chapin’s life had been making the arrangements for the China trip, and now he was on the way out. I had seen and been party to many callous decisions, but Chapin was different to me. He was a friend, and he had done only what was expected of him. His errors were minor. Somehow the decision to can him brought home a fact of life at the White House: everyone is expendable.

Mo accepted the demise of our second honeymoon stoically, and our spirits brightened when Haldeman arranged for us to ride back to Washington with the President aboard Air Force One. On the flight, the First Lady got down on all fours to play with the dogs, and the President himself came back and introduced himself to Mo. She was thrilled that the newly reelected leader of the Western world had taken the time to say nice things to her, and I was proud. The President cuffed me playfully, but a bit painfully, about the ears.

“We’re going to keep your husband damn busy,” he told Mo.

“I hope not too busy,” Mo remarked.

“You may wish you hadn’t married him,” the President teased.

She smiled. “I’m not worried.”

I wasn’t, either, flying at thirty-five thousand feet with the President. But I soon would be.

Chapter Six: Closing In

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, six days after the election, I was back in my office, still a bit depressed about the vacation that had been cut short. The papers were busily forecasting Nixon’s second term—the negotiations that would be required to end the Vietnam War, détente with China and the Soviet Union. There were long profiles on the President’s career and cameos of the First Family. On the outside everything was glowing. I was forcing myself sourly through my mail when Chuck Colson called.

“John, can you come down right away? I’ve got something to tell you.” He sounded excited and happy. I hoped for some good news as I walked down the hall to his office.

He was leaning back in his chair with a big smile on his face. “Hiya, John. Come on in and sit down. I want to tell you about a conversation I just had with Howard Hunt.”

It was not a name I liked to hear. I sighed and raised my eyebrows. “You talked to Hunt?”

“Yeah, I really had to,” Chuck said, “because the poor guy’s been calling and I’ve been refusing his calls all this time, and I figured I had to talk to him now that the election’s over.”

“What did he have to say? I hope you didn’t promise him a job.”

Chuck ignored the parry. “Well, he had a lot to say, but I’ll tell you one thing he said. He said I had nothing to do with Watergate.” Chuck paused, the smile turned sheepish. “In fact, I felt I had to tape the conversation for my own protection, and I did. Holly’s typing it up right now, and I’m going to send it down to you, but you can hear it now if you want to.”

“Sure.”

I listened apprehensively. The tones were clear as the men exchanged pleasantries. Colson told Hunt straightaway that he didn’t know anything about Watergate, that he had stayed out of it at the White House so that he could be an enthusiastic, honest, and favorable character witness at Hunt’s trial. “This way the less details I know of what’s going on in some ways the better.” Old hear-no-evil Colson, I thought. I can’t blame him. Hunt didn’t deny it. Chuck looked up with satisfaction. “Hear that?”

But Hunt was shrewder than that. He bore in on Colson, demanding a meeting. Chuck’s breathy voice sounded exasperated as he turned down the requests, but Hunt pressed on to say what was really bothering him.

HUNT: Well, the reason I called you was to make, to get back to to the beginning here, is because commitments that were made to all of us at the onset have not been kept. And there’s a great deal of unease and concern on the part of the seven defendants and, I’m quite sure, me least of all. But there’s a great deal of financial expense that has not been covered and what we’ve been getting has been coming in very minor dribs and drabs. And Parkinson, who’s been the go-between with my attorney, doesn’t seem to be very effective. And we’re now reaching a point of which—

COLSON: Okay. Don’t tell me any more. Because I understand, and—

HUNT: These people have really got to—this is a long-haul thing and the stakes are very high. And I thought that you would want to know that this thing must not break apart for foolish reasons.

COLSON: Oh, no, everybody—

HUNT: While we get third, fourth-hand reassurances, the “ready” is still not available. That’s the basic problem.

COLSON: Okay. You told me everything I need to know, and I can—the less I know really of what happened, the more, more help I can be to you.

HUNT: All right. Now, we’ve set a deadline now for close of business on the twenty-fifth of November for the resolution on the liquidation of everything that’s outstanding. And this, they’re now talking about promises from July and August. It has just been an apparent unconcem. Of course, we can understand some hesitancy prior to the election, but there doesn’t seem to be any of that now...

Hunt continued to make demands, skirting Chuck’s protests. As he upped the ante, he destroyed the thin hope I’d clung to that Watergate would go away. It would get worse, I saw, and it could go on forever. I had suppressed this worry by my faith in the President’s immense powers. But Hunt was out there watching his life being destroyed, and he was going to cost the White House plenty. The bottom of my stomach fell out, as it does when I look down from the top of a skyscraper.

I had trouble concentrating on the rest of the tape. “Say no more,” Chuck kept telling Hunt, steering him back to safer subjects. Finally he got Hunt to say that Colson had “absolutely nothing to do with” Watergate.

Chuck lit his pipe, looking pleased. “Well, I guess this establishes once and for all that I had nothing to do with this crazy goddam break-in.”

I glanced at him. We had been on opposite ends of a seesaw during the last minutes, Chuck up, me down. As with everyone who was thinking, writing, or worrying about Watergate, Chuck’s attention was riveted on what had happened before the break-in—who knew about it in advance, who authorized it and paid for it. I was worried about what had happened afterward, and I knew the tape was deadly. I looked at Colson gravely. “Chuck, I don’t think you ought to have that tape typed up.”

Colson’s smile vanished. We both knew Hunt was a time bomb. We had just heard the ticking. Chuck liked to pretend he knew nothing of the cover-up and had succeeded in keeping himself out as best he could. “I understand, John,” he said evenly. “Look, why don’t you just take the tape for now? It’s in your area. But don’t lose it, dammit, ‘cause I want it back. I want this on record. Okay?”

“Sure, Chuck. I’ll get it back for you.” I was surprised. The tape exonerated him from one crime and implicated him in another. Neither of us could know that Colson could be indicted on the basis of that conversation with Hunt, and both of us still wanted to think of ourselves as mere messengers.

In my office, I stewed about how I would bring this unwelcome news to the attention of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell. I stared at the Dictabelt record for a long time, turning it over in my hands, trying to figure out what to do with it. Finally I decided to make a copy for myself in case Chuck did ask for it back. I didn’t want anyone to hear it, even my secretary, so I made a crude copy by playing the belt onto a recording machine.

I arranged to meet Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and the next day I was in a White House limousine on my way to Camp David, where everybody was busily consumed with plans for the second term. Walter Minnick, a lawyer on Krogh’s staff, rode with me and described the reorganization that was being mapped out at Camp David. The executive branch would be controlled from the White House. Working for Ehrlichman, Minnick was trying to find a way to implement the plan without having to go to the Congress for approval. I was peeved, though not surprised, that Ehrlichman had excluded me from the legal work, but Minnick was assuming that I knew the details, and I did not disabuse him. The top Administration appointees were being helicoptered to Camp David, one after another, to be briefed about the President’s new tough terms of service. They could keep their jobs only if they agreed to live by the cardinal rule—the White House was to call all the shots.

It all made sense, I was thinking; the flow of power into the White House had been a gradual process during the first term—in fact, during the last forty years. It was tested and proven. Minnick had been part of the pattern in the first term. He and Krogh had run the government’s anti-narcotics campaign from the White House, once Ehrlichman had wrested control from Mitchell.

The only time I’d met Minnick before was at an odd meeting a few months earlier when Krogh had called me in and treated me to a mysterious denial that the White House narcotics office had been involved in the assassination of drug traffickers in Latin America. I had puzzled over what this bit of theater meant. No such story had appeared in print, and none ever did. But the episode piqued my curiosity about the drug program. Krogh had described to me how, when he was bored with his desk work, he had carried bars of gold bullion through Asia’s “Golden Triangle” in CIA planes and bargained with drug chieftains. There were rumors of bombing poppy fields, and once Bud had asked my office to resolve a dispute among the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Bureau of Narcotics over the legality of kidnapping drug traffickers abroad. If the goal was worthy, the means were secondary, the thinking went, and there was a firm conviction that agencies outside the White House could not be trusted.

Gordon Liddy had received his White House indoctrination in this very drug program, and he had read the signs clearly. Years later I would learn that the remarkable intelligence force he had described in Mitchell’s office was only a part of his dream to build a clandestine police force for the White House. He and Hunt had recruited hundreds of operatives—most had had CIA training—and had promised them service after the election.

As I rode along, I was thinking that the reorganization seemed a quantum leap in the trend toward centralization, but it was obviously also Ehrlichman’s consummate power play. He would become, in effect, chief executive of domestic affairs, because Nixon did not interest himself much in such matters and ordinarily deferred to Ehrlichman’s judgment.

“Well, this tape is a beauty,” I sighed to Haldeman and Ehrlichman when we were alone in the President’s Laurel Lodge, an office he seldom used. It was almost bare except for an American flag and a Presidential flag on either side of an empty desk. There were two chairs and a sofa. “I’m kind of surprised Chuck even talked to Hunt, but you might as well hear straight from Hunt how much of a pain in the ass he’s going to be. I’m sorry about this recording. I had to do it myself, and I was interrupted by a lot of phone calls while I was doing it. You’ll hear some overlaps and repeats, but the gist is here.” I was apologizing. I knew how intolerant Haldeman was of any sort of mechanical imperfection. He’d made cracks about my recording of Segretti.

We listened in silence to Hunt’s ghostly voice foul the post-election euphoria. Ehrlichman doodled. Haldeman winced during the money talk, smirked at Colson’s energetic efforts to parry Hunt’s cover-up messages, and laughed aloud as Hunt called Mitchell a perjurer. Then I awaited my instructions. There was no jolly rehash, as there had been after the Segretti tape. No one was eager to discuss the money.

“Well, I can understand why Chuck let you have this tape,” Haldeman said finally. “It sure as hell’s self-serving for him. Colson’s no fool.”

“Yeah, I know,” I replied. “He’s proud of it.” Haldeman, like Colson, remained fixed on what had happened before the break-in.

Ehrlichman was closer to the point. “Why don’t you have our friend John Mitchell take care of Mr. Hunt’s problem? He’s got a lot of free time up there in New York making money.”

“I’m going up to New York this afternoon with Maury Stans,” I replied, “and I’ll play this for Mitchell. I don’t think he’s going to be too happy about it.”

“Well, he’s a resourceful man when he has to be,” said Ehrlichman. “Let us know how it comes out.”

The conversation ended. I had wanted instructions, some guidance. Haldeman and Ehrlichman wanted to make Howard Hunt go away with sheer willpower. If anything, Ehrlichman was even more curt than before as he tossed the albatross back to Mitchell. He was riding high and was totally absorbed in the reorganization; Hunt was a gnat buzzing in his ear.

“Well, I’ll leave it with you fellows,” Haldeman said brusquely, rising. “I’ve got to go talk to our noble Vice-President.”

As Haldeman headed for the door, Ehrlichman turned to me. “Your old friend Dick Kleindienst was up,” he said, referring to the Camp David shuttle.

“Is he going to stay on?”

Haldeman stopped at the door. “Yeah. We’re going to keep him on until some of this stuff is all cleared up. We’ll keep him another six to eight months.”

“I think that’s good,” I said to Haldeman, but I was talking to the door. He was gone.

I packed up the recorder, which was all I had in my attaché case, and Ehrlichman and I got ready to rejoin the others, who were waiting to make a move with Ehrlichman to let him know I would not be so easily left out of the reorganization scheme. “Say, John, I was talking to Walt Minnick on the way up here about the reorganization. It sounds pretty impressive.”

Ehrlichman raised his eyebrows slightly and nodded. I assumed he was not happily surprised that Minnick had told me about the project. “I think it will make the birds sing,” he said quietly.

“I do, too, but I think you’ve got some legal problems to deal with that belong in the counsel’s office.” I hinted at some of the technical points governing reorganizations of the executive branch. I was indirect. I was sending signals: this was my turf. I knew how to solve Ehrlichman’s problems, while Minnick was coming in cold.

“Yeah, I think you might be able to help,” Ehrlichman replied without enthusiasm.

“Okay,” I said, knowing that he had little choice so long as I was carrying his burdens on the cover-up. “What do you think we should tell the others out there about our little meeting in here?”

“Well, why don’t we tell them we were discussing the reorganization?” Ehrlichman replied. “Which we were.”

We returned to the group and gossiped some. I was satisfied when Ehrlichman suggested that Minnick consult me on the legal arrangements for the reorganization. I had the White House switchboard track down Maurice Stans in Washington and told him I’d missed the flight to New York we had planned on. He said he’d wait for me and we’d take a later plane, and I dashed off to my limousine.