Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (59 page)

“Oh, hell, I know that,” Neal said sheepishly. “That’s why I’m throwing you some curves. I want the jury to watch you struggle and then refuse to answer things you’re not sure of—it makes you look good. Besides, I can slip the dollar amounts in with questions. You still don’t understand how we prosecutors work. You just keep going.”

Mo arrived at the prosecutors’ office for a brief visit. I wanted to talk about the growing distance between us. She didn’t.

“How is it, testifying?” she asked.

“Not as bad as I expected. I don’t even miss the crutch of a few Scotch-and-waters to sleep the night before. I was nervous at first, but it went away quickly. You know the anticipation is always worse than the real thing.”

“I sat beside Jo Haldeman
and her daughter in the courtroom today,” Mo said. “She’s taking notes like mad.”

“That’s interesting. Bob is taking notes also. The defendants are probably sharing one copy of the transcript to keep their costs down. Haldeman’s note-taking will give him his own transcript. He’s like a damn machine, isn’t he?”

“I know, I saw him taking them, too,” Mo noted. “He looked over at me while you were testifying and started staring real hard and mean at me, and I just stared back. Finally I stared him down!” she added gleefully, which made me chuckle, too.

“You going to come to court tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t like this very much. It’s kind of boring, and I feel sorry for all those defendants. I think Mitchell looks pathetic, and Ken Parkinson looks lost. If you don’t mind I’d really rather not come tomorrow.”

“Sure, I understand.” She’s escaping, I thought. I couldn’t blame her. “I’ll call you after court from Holabird
and tell you what happened. You may want to come toward the end of the week, because they’re going to start playing some of the tapes.”

“I’d like to hear them,” she said. When she did she was shocked. She told me we sounded like a bunch of Mafia gangsters.

October 17, 1974

Neal led me through an account of the taped conversation between Colson and Howard Hunt right after the election, during which Hunt had escalated his money demands. Mitchell had acknowledged that I played the tape for him—it was the tape he’d listened to at the Metropolitan Club
—but said he couldn’t remember what was on it, and that, in any case, he hadn’t done anything about it. Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman had said they didn’t remember that I had played the tape for them at Camp David
. They couldn’t afford to—the tape destroyed their defense that they had authorized payments for humanitarian purposes only. Mitchell admitted there might be something sinister about the payments, but he swore he had nothing to do with them. The perennial factions were still at war.

I spelled out every admissible detail I could remember. It was a major crunch point in my testimony; either I or the three of them were lying. I looked at Haldeman and Ehrlichman as I described the Camp David
meeting. Haldeman listened impassively. Ehrlichman frowned and squinted his eyes into a hate-filled look. If stares could kill, my testimony would have ended abruptly. He was trying to unsettle me, but I found I was able to look right back at him.

John Wilson
was working especially hard to bait Judge Sirica into making errors. The two men had been friends and colleagues for decades, but Sirica finally had enough. He put his old friend in his place gruffly. The air crackled with hostility, and soon Sirica called the lawyers to the bench for a conference.

As always, the bailiff led me out of the witness box so that I wouldn’t overhear the private discussion. When I returned, all the lawyers had left the bench except the slow-moving Wilson. Judge Sirica stopped him and whispered off the record, “Hey, I didn’t mean anything personal when I called you down, you know.”

Wilson looked up and smiled warmly. “Aw, John, I understand,” he said. “You’ve got to do that in this trial.”

Everyone was doing some acting. I watched Wilson hobble back to Haldeman’s table on his stiff, arthritic legs.

October 25, 1974

“Now, Mr. Dean, how many days have you been on the stand, approximately?” asked Judge Sirica when the cross-examination finally wound down.

I was so elated at the thought of getting off the stand that my mind went blank. I had answered all those terrible questions with reputations and prison terms at stake, and now I couldn’t even count up my days in the courtroom. My confusion worsened. “Nine days, your honor.” I had guessed wrong. It had been eight.

“My advice to you is this,” said the judge, with a kindly expression. “You get off this stand as fast as you can, and get out of this courtroom before some lawyer thinks of a question to ask you.” Then he actually smiled.

“Is the witness now excused, as I understand it, from testifying in this trial?” Neal asked as casually as possible.

“No! No!” shouted Wilson
, jumping to his feet.

Sirica nodded soberly. “He is subject to being recalled.”

“Recalled,” Wilson echoed.

I walked away with my happiness slightly smudged by Wilson’s proviso. Back to Holabird
.

November 1, 1974

“Listen, son, I want you to quit moping around out there and get to work on that motion to reduce your sentence. I think you’ve got old Sirica softened up now, and I want to give him a strong dose of the Dean vitamin before he changes his mind.”

“Charlie,” I sighed, staring at two other prisoners walking by the phone, “I’ve already tried. I’ve written three or four drafts, and none of them is worth a damn. You’re going to have to do it yourself. I can’t write it. That’s what this place does to me. I sit down and start feeling sorry for myself, so I read. I can’t do anything else.”

Charlie grunted as I spoke, but he had worked his mustard up again by the time I finished. “It will be done by a master of the art, then,” he declared. “I’ll play Sirica like an organ. That’s what you pay me for.”

November 12, 1974

Colson made an arrangement with the deputy at my door and brought Herb Kalmbach in to see me. I put my book down nervously. I knew that Herb was upset about the testimony he had given that day. He looked it. Here was one of the most likable men I’d ever met. He was wearing pajamas, a bathrobe, and slippers, and the long bags under his eyes made him look like the saddest basset hound I’d ever seen.

“What happened today, Herb?” I asked. “Pretty rough?”

“Well, John, I don’t know,” Herb sighed. “All of a sudden it hit me, and I didn’t even know where it came from. I was talking about one of the times I had gone out to raise more money, and the prosecutor asked me about that meeting with John Ehrlichman, you know. And I testified how I had looked him in the eye and said, ‘You know me and my wife, Barbara, and I know you and your family, John. And I know you wouldn’t tell me to do this if it wasn’t important.’ And I looked at Ehrlichman in the courtroom today just like I did when he told me it was okay, and then I started to go on. And suddenly the tears just started coming up, and I just couldn’t keep going. The judge had to have a break for me. And I was so embarrassed. My God, I’ve never done anything like that before—”

“Herb, you don’t need to be embarrassed about that,” I interrupted softly. “It’s the most natural thing in the world. Hell, I start crying in here sometimes just reading a book. You know all our emotions are much closer to the edge in here.”

“Yeah, I know,” Herb sighed. “But that’s different. I don’t know why it had to happen in front of my friends and all those reporters and the judge and everybody. I couldn’t stop myself from doing the last thing in the world I wanted to do.”

“Herb, it was probably what you most wanted to do,” said Chuck. “And you shouldn’t feel ashamed of it. Believe me.”

Herb cradled his face in his hand and started shaking his head. Just talking about it was upsetting him again. Chuck and I felt lumps rising ourselves. We looked at each other helplessly and then tried to cheer Herb up by changing the subject.

November 13, 1974

“Hey, Jim, what happened with Herb yesterday?” It was the next morning.

“Herb?” Neal’s face lit up. He started pacing his office, rubbing his hands together joyously, like a brand-new father. “John, it was beautiful!” he drawled, his eyes rolling in ecstasy. “Beautiful! If I had asked somebody to put on that performance in the courtroom, I couldn’t possibly have gotten away with it! I’d have been rightly criticized. I’ll tell you, it was something. That jury was so moved by Kalmbach’s testimony they’ll never forget it! They’ll never forget the way he nailed Ehrlichman! It was the best damn piece of testimony we’ve had in the trial. Better than anything you ever did on the stand, Mean John Dean!”

My jaw dropped at Jim’s wild delight. “Well, that’s good, I guess,” I commented quietly.

Jim looked at me, did a double take, and slowed down his hand rubbing. “No, but I understand, and I feel sorry for poor old Herb,” he said, shaking his head. “I feel sorry for him. He’s had it tough.” Then Jim lit up again. “But, by God, he’s a hell of a witness!”

November 27, 1974

“You know, I liked poor old John Mitchell until today,” Neal observed during the day’s recess in the trial. “That son-of-a-bitch lied and lied and lied! He lied to me, personally! I can understand him lying about you and Magruder and all the testimony, but I would think he’d have the common decency not to lie to me!”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, last spring he told me it was Mardian who told Magruder he should have a little fire to destroy that bunch of documents from the Reelection Committee. But today he testified that no such statement was ever made by anybody. Goddammit, he crossed me up! I liked him until he did that, and now I’m going to crucify the bastard!”

Jim was psyching himself up to cross-examine Mitchell, and he didn’t seem to notice that Rick Ben-Veniste
had come in.

“Listen, Jim,” Rick broke in at the first opportunity, “you’ve got to hit Mitchell in the cross on the fact that Pappas
gave him fifty thousand dollars.”

“Are you serious?” I asked Rick. I had informed the prosecutors, and the tapes had confirmed, that Pappas
had been frequently mentioned as a potential source of cover-up money, but I didn’t know they had followed it up.

“Why do I want to use that?” Jim asked skeptically. He was all steamed up for his own charge at Mitchell, and he seemed irritated at the idea of a last-minute line of attack.

“Just listen, and I’ll tell you.”

“I don’t have time now, Rick. I’ve got to get ready for Mitchell.” He didn’t want to lose what was dangling in front of him.

“At least let me explain it to you, so you’ll understand,” Rick insisted. “You can kill Mitchell with this. Pappas
gave him fifty thousand dollars in October, and—”

“Why?” Jim interrupted.

“Mitchell says for his apartment in New York.”

“So?”

“Well, he never used it for his apartment. He put it in a bank account at the Chase Manhattan. The account jumped from one thousand to fifty-one thousand, and it’s still that way now.”

“I don’t see what that proves,” Jim said tartly.

“It shows Mitchell was collecting funds to pay the Watergate defendants. Or at least you can make it show that in conjunction with other testimony.”

“Bullshit,” Jim snorted. “It doesn’t prove that to me, and I’m not inclined to use it. Write it up and have Tony bring it in to me.” Rick nodded and went off to find Tony Passaretti
, an investigator for the Special Prosecutor’s office.

Rick left, and several other assistants filed in. Jim dispatched them with assignments like a drill sergeant, sprinkling his orders with tirades against Judge Sirica. “As if I didn’t have enough problems, now the judge is acting like he just walked into the courtroom off the street. Just as I think he’s beginning to understand what’s going on, he starts asking Mitchell the dumbest damn questions you ever heard. I couldn’t believe it! Like he broke in and told Mitchell he really wanted to know why all this money had been paid to the defendants. So Mitchell looks up at him real sincere and says, ‘Your honor, I’ve been wondering the same thing.’ The shrewd bastard. Shit, I damn near exploded. What does the judge think we’ve been proving for the last month! I really don’t understand Sirica sometimes.”

“That must be some kind of press play by the judge,” observed Judy Denny
, one of the staff lawyers who had come in for orders.

Tony Passaretti
came in. “Here’s what I’ve got on Pappas
, Jim,” he said politely, handing over a yellow pad full of notes.

Jim scanned it. “I don’t think I can use this, Tony.”

Tony shrugged. “Well, here’s a copy of the Pappas
check,” he said. “But there’s no deposit slip at the bank. The account just shows a jump all of a sudden. Those guys at the Chase have been jerking us around, Jim. And old Pappas
is playing games with us.”

“Yeah, I see,” said Jim. “But this isn’t enough for tomorrow. Maybe Mitchell did borrow it to buy his damn apartment. Just because he didn’t need the money is no proof this had anything to do with Watergate.”