Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (34 page)

I walked deeper into the woods, thinking about the Fifth Amendment. It made you sound so damn guilty. PRESIDENTIAL COUNSEL TAKES FIFTH. It was worse than the headline from the Gray hearing: DEAN PROBABLY LIED. The thought started my blood boiling anew. Goddam that Pat Gray, up there lying to get confirmed, calling me a liar to help himself. I shouldn’t have let him get away with it. One thing I had not done was to lie and—

“Excuse me, sir, are you lost?” a voice from nowhere said, startling me. I turned. It was a young Navy enlisted man, wearing a heavy Camp David parka, with the Presidential emblem on his jacket and deck cap.

“No, not really, just out for some air. In fact, I might have just found my way.”

“Fine, sir, have a pleasant walk.” He vanished as my thoughts finally beaded down the path I knew I had to explore. The path of telling the truth if I was called upon to testify. Whatever else happened in the days, weeks, and months ahead, I was not going to lie for anybody, even the President. Despite what I’d done for him, I would not take that step. I might go down the drain as Watergate burst its dams, but I would hang on to one piece of myself at least.

By the time I reached the lodge, Mo was playing pool by herself, so I joined her. I decided I would not write the phony report. I would have my secretary type up an innocuous portion so that I could tell Haldeman and Ehrlichman I was working on it. What I would do would be to start preparing an honest report to the President. I had given him the highlights on March 21; now I’d give him the bloody details. Then no one could say I had lied to the President. To the contrary, I’d have told him what had gone on. In fact, the truth might persuade him, once he saw it written down.

Early Sunday afternoon I began making notes. When I sat back and read what I’d written, I realized I was sticking the problem on everybody but myself. I was coming out as nothing but the simple tool of higher-ups. I was protecting myself, passing blame to others. I asked myself whether I should open up more and include my own involvement.

I thought for some time and decided that it was time I started calculating my moves carefully. It was foolish to believe that Ehrlichman or Haldeman or Mitchell or Magruder would admit to anything wrong. If my notes should fall into the wrong hands, I would have confessed my own involvement in the cover-up. There was something else that bothered me. While I could admit in my own mind what I had done, it still hurt to admit it openly, and putting it on paper made it open. This hurdle was one of the most difficult to jump.

My newfound tranquillity vanished instantly with a phone call from Ron Ziegler late Sunday afternoon. Ron told me the
Los Angeles Times
was going to run a front-page story in the morning alleging that Dean and Magruder had had advance knowledge of the Watergate break-in.

“Ron, that’s a goddam, outrageous lie. It’s not true. I’m speaking for myself, not Magruder.”

“I’m not interested in Magruder, and I’ve already denied the story. The President wants to put out something in the moming. He knows it’s not true. So you think about what he should do, and I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“Listen, Ron, if they print that story I’ll have the first solid libel case to come out of all this Watergate crap. And I’m not feeling very much like sitting back and taking it quietly.”

“Well, the
Washington Post
will be running the same story, so you’d better get busy.”

I told Mo and began pacing around the sitting room. “Mo, I’m going to get a lawyer to put the papers who print the story on notice that it’s libelous. And someday, when this is all sorted out, I’ll sue the bastards.”

“Why don’t you call Bob McCandless and see if he’ll represent you?” Robert McCandless was my former brother-in-law.

“No, I’ve got someone in mind who knows the libel law better than Bob, Tommy Hogan.
5
*
He was a classmate of mine at Georgetown Law. I’ll call him.” I tracked him down through the White House switch board and explained the situation to him. His response went right to the point.

“John, only one question. Can you prove the story is false? Not that I doubt your word, but you want my advice, don’t you?” he asked, a trifle embarrassed at questioning my denial.

“Tommy, ultimately I can. Immediately, I can’t. That’s why I just want to put the papers on notice. Since this conversation is privileged, I want to tell you something else. The shit is about to hit the fan, and the whole town is going to smell bad very soon. We need to have a long talk, and one of the things I’d like to talk to you about is hiring a criminal lawyer. I’d like to have some suggestions of people that you know who are really good.”

“Okay, I’ve got to get moving to get these papers on notice. I’ll report back to you later on how it goes.”

Haldeman called the morning of the
Los Angeles Times
/
Washington Post
story. He was pleased by the libel notice and told me the President would be announcing his full confidence in me. He said Magruder was on his own. The White House would not comment. “We’ve also been kicking around the idea of the President announcing that you’re ready and willing to go before the Watergate grand jury and testify about all this,” Bob said. “What’s your reaction?”

“Well, Bob, I’ve been thinking exactly the same thing. But here’s the problem as I see it: first of all, my testimony will sink Mitchell and Magruder, who have obviously perjured themselves before the grand jury.”

“So what?” said Haldeman.

So. The President had decided to cut Mitchell and Magruder loose. They were now expendable because they threatened his own position. And I had a second thought: I was also expendable. Or did Haldeman think I might go before the grand jury and lie? “One thing I’ve got to tell you, Bob. If I am going to go before the grand jury I’m going to tell it exactly the way things happened.”

“Well, we’ve been protecting Mitchell and Magruder too long. And it got us in this damn mess.”

“There’s another problem with going to the grand jury, Bob. What if they ask me how I have come to have this knowledge and why didn’t I report it earlier? That’s likely to lead them right into the activities that happened post-June seventeenth.”

“Like?” he asked.

I went over the highlights of his own involvement in the cover-up. Bob asked me to repeat several items. It was evident he was taking detailed notes.
6
*
He was eliciting information from me as to what my testimony would be. I understood why: my testimony would implicate Ehrlichman and him, among others, in the obstruction of justice. He wanted to be prepared for the worst.

It was a painful conversation for both of us. We were walking tight ropes, suspicious of each other, but not overtly hostile. I wanted Haldeman to know I would not lie for him, if questioned, but I played down my conviction that I would be called to testify about the origins of the break-in, and that such questioning would lead into the cover-up. I could hear the prosecutor saying, “Now, Mr. Dean, tell us if you had any conversations with Mr. Liddy after June seventeenth.” My answer would open the door to the cover-up. I raised my cover-up testimony with Haldeman only as a possibility, because I was not willing to tell him directly that I would turn against him—and therefore against the President.

Fortunately, Haldeman was still concentrating on events before the break-in. He was concerned that my testimony might sink Mitchell and Magruder, and that they might turn on people within the White House to save themselves. “What did Magruder and Mitchell testify to before the grand jury that your testimony might contradict?” he asked.

“I don’t know for certain,” I replied. “Jeb’s story, for example, changes from day to day. But if he sees himself going down in flames, I suspect he’ll reach out to grab everybody he can hang on to.”

“Why don’t you call up Magruder, go over the facts with him, get him down on record as to exactly what did happen, and tape him?”

“Well, I don’t have any device to do that.”

“Call up the Signal Corps. They’ll fix up a machine for you.”

I thanked him for the suggestion. I decided I would think about it. Before he signed off, however, he asked about my report. I told him I had gotten diverted by the newspaper story. He urged me to get at it and in a hurry. Later that morning, the President announced his support for me. Not a word was said about my going to the grand jury.

I told Mo about Bob’s suggestion of taping Magruder, and she said, “I don’t think that’s very nice.”

“Well, I want to get Jeb on record that I didn’t have any advance knowledge. There’s no telling what Jeb would say someday about my involvement in this. Everybody at the White House tapes people: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler, Strachan, Higby, Colson, and probably two dozen more I don’t even know about.”

“I still don’t think that makes it sound very good,” she said.

“I know. I’ve never done it before, but I think it’s necessary now. What I’m going to do is get that dictating machine that’s over there in the office and bring it here to the cabin. I’d be embarrassed to death if somebody walked in on me while I was using it.”

After getting the dictating machine, setting it up on the coffee table, and testing it with a call to my office to see if I could hold the microphone to the receiver, I called Jeb. It was a difficult conversation under any circumstances, but Mo’s making fun of my trembling hands made it worse. I managed, however, to get Jeb to admit that I had had no advance knowledge. I tried the same procedure with Liddy’s lawyer, and later with Mitchell, but I was not very good at getting the information I needed.

As usual, I felt exhausted when I arose the next morning. While showering, I thought again about hiring a criminal lawyer. If I hired a lawyer for myself, went to the prosecutors and told them everything I knew—except about the President—I’d really be dumping on Mitchell and Haldeman. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn about Ehrlichman. But as for me, I’d be a squealer, and just to save myself. Then I rationalized that if I hired a lawyer to assess my liabilities, I could also be assessing them for others. That was it: then I could determine what was best to do next for everybody. The contrivance made me feel less a squealer, but I still could not make a decision.

Tommy Hogan called and we talked about criminal lawyers. One name he suggested struck me in particular: Charles Shaffer. I had met Charlie once, on a duck-hunting trip to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, many years earlier. He had once been an assistant United States attorney in the New York Southern District; later he had been selected by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to come to the Department of Justice. Shaffer was tough, experienced, and well respected. Tom seemed to sense my uneasiness, that I was on the verge of some sort of decision, and asked if he should contact Shaffer.

“No,” I told him. “Let me call you when I get back to Washington. I’m really not sure I want to do it yet, Tommy.”

On March 28, 1973, after I had been at Camp David for five days, Haldeman called to summon me down from the mountain. It was a call that would bring me face to face with the human consequences of the decision I had made not to lie; Haldeman wanted me to meet with Mitchell and Magruder, who were coming over to his office that afternoon to talk about my testimony. I protested. They knew that my testimony would be about those early meetings in Mitchell’s office. Bob insisted, “You can’t hide up there on that mountain forever.”

An hour and a half later I was in his office. Mitchell and Magruder had just left him; they were down the hall in Dwight Chapin’s abandoned office, waiting for me. Again I protested having to meet with them.

“I don’t want to get involved with this,” Haldeman said flatly. He was seated at his conference table, tilting his chair back slightly, and he seemed different. It was not the Bob Haldeman who had always treated me with a degree of warmth, had often quipped when things were tense, and had never borne down on me as he did on other subordinates. Now he had detached himself from me. “I want you to work this out with Mitchell and Magruder,” he said. “They tell me you all agreed on this”—the testimony we would give if it came to that— “a long time ago.”

“What?”

“That’s what they say. I’m not involved in this and I don’t want to be involved in it, but I want you to go down there and talk with them.” He brought his chair to the floor, and stood.

John Mitchell’s face looked long and gray as he pulled slowly on his pipe. Magruder, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands, spoke for both of them. He was desperate, his voice jumpy. “John,” he said, “ remember we met over there at Mr. Mitchell’s office to discuss my grand-jury testimony on those meetings? You agreed you would testify the way we had. That Liddy had come to those meetings to talk about the election laws. In fact, you suggested that idea. And also that the second meeting was canceled. Bob says that isn’t the way you remember it now, but that’s what you told us.”