Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (31 page)

As the President talked, I assembled the strands of my courage and asked him for a private meeting, the first time I had done so. “I would think, if it’s not inconvenient for you, sir, I would like to sort of draw all my thoughts together and have a, just make some notes to myself so I didn’t—”

“Could you do it tomorrow?” the President interrupted.

“Yes, sir,” I said. I had wanted more time to prepare, but I would take what I could. “Yes, sir.”

“Well, then, we could probably do it, say, around ten o’clock.”

“That would be fine, sir.”

I had gulped down my drink by the end of the phone call, and I kept up the pace afterward. I avoided Watergate conversation all evening, until Mo and I were going to bed. Then I told her I was going to lay it all out for the President the next day. And I also said that my fears about going to jail were real and growing, but she dismissed the idea and I didn’t press it.

The next morning I called Haldeman and told him what I was about to do: I was going to tell the President that the Dean Report was a bad idea, and I was going to tell him that the cover-up couldn’t go on. To my surprise, Haldeman didn’t protest at all. He wished me well.

As I was composing my thoughts for the meeting, Fred LaRue walked in. He sat down in the chair in front of me without taking his coat off. “John, what are you going to do about the message Hunt sent?” he asked.

“Nothing, Fred.”

“Well, what do you think I ought to do?”

“I think you ought to get your directions from Mitchell on that.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

I was far more nervous than I had been that first time I’d met the President at San Clemente, nearly three years ago. It seemed like a very long walk from my office to the Oval Office. I sat in the waiting room as Ehrlichman met with the President. I went in as he came out. Ehrlichman had left a chair directly in front of the President’s desk, on the blue rug. I sat down in it instead of in my usual chair off to the side.

The President seemed in remarkably good spirits. We exchanged pleasantries and comments on the morning’s news. I sat up on the edge of my chair. The President put his elbows on the arms of his chair and clasped his hands together, resting his chin on his fingers. He looked at me intently, studying me. I felt like an actor on stage for a big performance, with a bad case of butterflies.

“Uh, the reason I thought we ought to talk this moming,” I began, “is because in our conversations, uh, I have the impression that you don’t know everything I know.” This opening was partly true and partly false. Like a good staff man, I wanted to give the President “deniability,” just as I had been indoctrinated to do since my first day in the White House, even though most of what I was telling him now was not new. Also, I wanted to give him room to respond with shock and drastic action.

“That’s right,” said the President.

I warmed up to my first blast to grab his attention; I had settled on Moore’s “cancer” metaphor. “I think there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got,” I said. “We have a cancer within close to the Presidency—that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself. Uh, that’ll be clear as I explain, you know, some of the details of why it is. And it basically is because: one, we’re being blackmailed; two, people are going to start perjuring themselves...to protect other people and the like.” I had my hands out in front of me, ticking these vulnerabilities off on my fingers. Then I stopped. “And that is just... And there is no assurance...” I hesitated.

“That it won’t bust,” the President concluded for me.

“That it won’t bust.”

“True,” said the President, nodding, his chin still resting on his hands.

“So let me give you some of the basic facts,” I continued, and I began a long narrative on the origins of the break-in. I wanted to make absolutely certain he knew what I was building on, because he so often forgot from one day to the next what I had told him. My worries on this point diminished as I went along. The President was with me. I could almost feel his concentration. Each question he asked was acute, and he didn’t ask many. Most of his interruptions had to do with Haldeman’s vulnerability for the events before the break-in, which was understandable. Haldeman was so close to the President that his vulnerability was nearly indistinguishable from the President’s own. I picked up the pace of the story, encouraged by the President’s state of mind, and ran on to the day of the arrests.

“Now...” I drew a deep sigh. “What has happened post-June seventeenth? Well, I was under pretty clear instructions...” I succumbed to a short, nervous laugh. I was about to tell the President that the “Dean investigation” was a lie, which he knew, but it wasn’t easy to say “...uh, not to really investigate this. That this was something that just could have been disastrous on the election if it had all hell had broken loose. And I worked on a theory of containment.”

“Sure,” the President said.

“To try to hold it right where it was.” I was seeking his approval, and I got it.

“Right.”

“There is no doubt, I, uh, that I was, totally aware of what the Bureau was doing at all times. I was totally aware of what the grand jury was doing—”

“You mean...”

“I knew what witnesses were going to be called. I knew what they were going to be asked, and I had to. There just—”

“Why did Petersen play the game so straight with us?” asked the President suddenly. He had dropped his hands from his chin and was looking at me with genuine curiosity.

“Because Petersen is a soldier,” I replied. “He kept me informed. He told me when we had problems, where we had problems, and the like. He believes in-in you. He believes in this Administration. This Administration had made him. I don’t think he’s done anything improper, but he did make sure the investigation was narrowed down to the very, very…”

“Right,” the President overlapped, nodding.

“…fine...”

“Right.”

“...criminal things, which was a break for us. There is no doubt about it.”

“He honestly feels that he did an adequate job?” the President asked incredulously. I responded in a way that I hoped would get him off the subject of Petersen, who had nothing to do with the message I was trying to deliver. Besides, I was afraid he was about to start identifying with the investigators again, as he had done so often when he reminisced about the Hiss case.

I dispensed with Petersen, and quickly brought the President to the raw nerve—money: “All right, so arrangements were made through Mitchell, initiating it, in discussions that—I was present—that these guys had to be taken care of. Their attorneys’ fees had to be done. Kalmbach was brought in. Kalmbach raised some cash. Uh, they were obvi— uh, you know...” I was hesitating over whether I could be so blunt as to say that the defendants had clearly been going to blow if we didn’t pay them. The President interrupted me.

“They put that under the cover of a Cuban Committee or something, didn’t they?”

The question stunned me. The Cuban Committee was a technical part of only one of our payment schemes. A committee had been set up to collect defense funds for the Cuban defendants, and we had planned it; the committee would be flooded with anonymous cash. As it turned out, Hunt had preferred to have the money delivered directly to him and his wife, and the committee had never been used. If the President knew about such monetary details, I could not be revealing much to him. I acknowledged the existence of the Cuban Committee, and told him about the payments to Hunt’s wife.

“Maybe it’s too late to do anything about it,” he replied, “but I would certainly keep that cover for what it’s worth.” He laughed nervously.

“I’ll—”

“Keep the committee,” he repeated.

“After, after—well, that, that...” I was sputtering. The President’s cognizance of the committee, and his wish to keep it alive, punctured any hope that he would recoil in shock from whatever I might tell him. I tried to recover; if I couldn’t impress him with details of the cover-up, I’d hammer in the implications. “And that’s the most troublesome post-thing,” I went on, “because: one, Bob is involved in that; John is involved in that; I am involved in that; Mitchell is involved in that.”

I was counting on my fingers again. “And that is an obstruction of justice.”

The President sat back, as if I had breathed into his face. “In other words, the fact that, uh, you’re, you’re taking care of the witness.”

“That’s right,” I stated.

“How was Bob involved?” He was worried about Haldeman.

I described the transfer of the three-fifty fund and that Haldeman had approved the payments. Feeling that I was making progress, I mentioned the assurances of clemency that Caulfield had offered McCord. “As you know,” I said pointedly, “Colson has talked indirectly to Hunt about commutation.” I stopped to clear my throat. This was tough. I began to lose my nerve. “All these things are bad, in that they are problems. They are promises. They are commitments. They are the very sort of thing that the Senate is going to be looking most for. I don’t think they can find them, frankly.”

“Pretty hard,” the President said.

“Pretty hard,” I agreed. “Damn hard. It’s all cash.”

“Well, I mean, pretty hard as far as the witnesses are concerned.” Nixon was focusing on the issue of clemency, the single fact that only two or three witnesses, and they unlikely ones, could testify against him. I regretted that I had given him an opening to see the cover-up as solid and tried to regain momentum by getting back to Hunt’s money demands. “Now, the blackmail is continuing,” I said. I told him of the latest threats, including a threat directly to Ehrlichman. We rambled on about the Ellsberg break-in, until I intruded to tell the President that Hunt had been unstable since his wife’s death.

“Great sadness,” he said. He turned in his chair and looked off. “As a matter of fact, there was some discussion over there with somebody about Hunt’s problems after his wife died.” He cleared his throat. Both of us seemed to do so whenever we had to raise something particularly bothersome. “And I said, of course, commutation could be considered on the basis of his wife, and that’s the only discussion I ever had in that light.”

“Right,” I said. The President was confirming the Colson conversation to me and at the same time he was offering the humanitarian reasoning he would use in order to pardon Hunt.

I returned to the money. “Uh, Mitchell’s been working on raising some money, feeling he’s got, you know, he’s one of the ones with the most to lose. But there’s no denying the fact that the White House, and Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Dean are involved in some of the early money decisions.”

“How much money do you need?” the President asked suddenly, breaking off my recitation of criminal liability in the White House. He seemed impatient with that line.

I paused. I had no idea what kind of figure to put on the future blackmail, but I had to pick a number. “I would say these people are going to cost, uh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.”

“We could get that,” he declared firmly.

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled. The President was moving in the opposite direction from the horror I badly wanted him to express, and I was softening.

“If you need the money,” he continued, “I mean you could get the money. Let’s say...”

“Well, I think that we’re going to—”

“What I mean is you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.”

“Uh-huh.” I thought that the President was almost boasting about his ability to lay his hands on a million dollars of loose, untraceable cash.

“I mean it’s not easy, but it could be done,” he stated. He was leaning forward, his hands folded on his desk. “But the question is, who the hell would handle it?”

“That’s right,” I said. I brightened at the prospect of running through another litany of troubles.

“Any ideas on that?” He was asking for positive ideas on how to deliver money, I realized, not evidence of how the task had broken both Kalmbach and LaRue.

“Well, I would think that would be something that Mitchell ought to be charged with,” I replied. The President had turned me around—it was the first of many reversals—and I was back on track, the standard White House cover-up line addressed negatively, hostilely toward Mitchell. I ran down some of the problems LaRue was having in raising money. “People are going to ask what the money is for,” I said. “He’s working, he’s apparently talked to Tom Pappas.”

The President nodded. “I know.”

This comment, like the one concerning the Cuban Committee, set me back. Only four people knew about the Pappas contact: LaRue, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, and myself. I figured then that Ehrlichman had not been protecting Nixon from such details, since he seemed to know everything. The conversation sailed around the money issue before I brought myself to make another run at the President with still another weakness in the cover-up: Krogh was haunted because he’d perjured himself before the Senate committee that had confirmed him.

“What did he perjure himself on, John?”