Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (10 page)

“There are all kinds of investigations,” Ehrlichman replied. “Jack works for ITT, and they’ll be combing the files over there at the money factory.”

“Jack has his own consulting firm,” I corrected, “but it works mostly for ITT.”

“Well, then, they’ll look over
there,”
he said impatiently. “I just don’t want them sniffing over here.”

“Look, John,” said Haldeman, “suppose some bright guy on the committee knows Gleason did some fund raising in 1970. And suppose they ask for the records just to check on whether ITT corrupted the Attorney General way back then. Jack can’t even say who he raised the money for. What’s he going to tell them?”

I searched for legal positions that Gleason might hold them off with, but I could see the box Haldeman was building: Town House hadn’t been registered as a political committee, but it should have been; even if Gleason admitted that, he would have to explain where the records were. “Well, if it gets that far,” I said, “he can argue that he doesn’t know where the records are, which is true.”

“If it gets that far,” Ehrlichman said quickly, “it’s already on our doorstep. If he tries to take the Fifth then, they probably won’t let him. Even if they do, it won’t matter. He’ll have led them to the thicket. If he’s going to take the Fifth, he should do it before he opens his mouth.”

“The ITT people won’t like that, John,” I said. “They might fire him.”

“ITT’s used to it,” said Ehrlichman, “and they don’t have to run for election. Besides, Jack can take care of himself.” If ITT fired Gleason, he was telling me, it would draw the investigation toward itself closer. The White House was prepared to let Jack lose his job, on this one anyway.

I tried a different tack. “Look, Gleason’s lawyer is a good friend, but he’s not likely to do something like this on my say-so. I don’t have a lot of ammunition.”

Ehrlichman answered, though I was looking at Haldeman. “John, that’s the sort of dilemma a counsel to the President gets his inspirations for.” He shifted in his chair, he had finished what he had to say.

I drove up to Capitol Hill, went to Vice-President Agnew’s sparsely furnished office in the New Senate Office Building, and sent word to the committee’s hearing room for Edward P. Taptich, Gleason’s lawyer. Without using Haldeman’s or Ehrlichman’s name, I told him what I wanted. It was an unpleasant conversation. He went to the committee room to confer with Gleason. When he returned with Gleason’s answer I called Haldeman, and Ehrlichman came on the phone also. Sitting in Agnew’s chair talking, I knew they might have fired me if they had known Taptich was in the room with me. He nodded as I repeated his arguments.

“Bob,” I said, “it’s a pretty firm no. My lawyer friend does not feel he would be properly advising his client to tell him to take the Fifth, and Gleason doesn’t want to take the heat unless he has to.”

“Goddammit, he has to,” Haldeman said. “He doesn’t know…”

“And, besides, Bob,” I was anxious to get to some good news, “my friend Ed thinks there’s no problem. He’s going to object to
any
question they ask about anything except Gleason’s work for ITT in San Diego, the convention stuff. He’ll say that anything else is not germane to the Kleindienst confirmation hearings. That will probably happen on some warm-up question before anything troublesome gets introduced.”

“What happens,” Ehrlichman pressed, “if he loses the objection?”

“Well, I don’t think that will happen, because of Brother Eastland’s sense of fairness. But if it does, Ed will make a speech about how he refuses to let his client be subjected to a hearing that has no boundaries and goes fishing into the man’s political background. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll ask for a recess on account of his laryngitis, and we’ll call you.”

“This is too important to go in praying,” said Ehrlichman. “I think maybe you should have a word with Gleason yourself.”

“I can’t call him out of the hearing room, John,” I said. “He’s sitting down there now, about to go on. Look, I think we’ve got a ninety-five percent chance of getting by, which will leave us a hell of a lot better off than taking the Fifth. We won’t lose too much anyway by trying it the way Ed’s got it planned. Besides, I’m sure they’re not going to budge. They think it’s their hot seat.”

“Okay, John,” Haldeman said. “I hope you’re smiling when I see you next.”

Taptich went to the hearings and I waited. He objected when Senator Kennedy asked Gleason what job he had received when the Nixon Administration took office. Eastland sustained the objection. When Senator John V. Tunney, another committee member, got wind of my presence in the building and asked about my conversations with Gleason, Taptich objected, and was again sustained after a long argument. He was home free. Two years later, when Town House came to light, Gleason and another White House aide pleaded guilty to Campaign Act violations and received suspended sentences while Herbert Kalmbach went to jail for selling ambassadorships. The prosecutors sat on a possible indictment against Bob Haldeman.

I had survived my first minor role on the front lines of a cover-up and had risen in the confidence of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Looking back, I wonder that I failed to see the signs of worse to come. At the time, I was relieved to have passed. The ITT scandal at last melted to the back pages of the papers, and Kleindienst was confirmed. When the White House returned to normal, I started planning another of the foreign junkets I took frequently now that I had decided to leave the Administration. Fielding and I abandoned our crisis regimen of sandwiches at our desks and resumed leisurely lunches at the mess.

“Well, Johnny,” Fred said as we walked slowly back from lunch one day in mid-May, “I read back in January where Jeane Dixon predicted Nixon would have a serious scandal this year but would survive it. It’s amazing, she was right. We’ve had it, and the President was untouched.” I agreed.

We were all wrong, of course. The machinery had long been cranking through the White House toward a scandal that would grind down the President himself. And I was part of the machinery.

Chapter Three: The Tickler

THE WHITE HOUSE APPARATUS went into motion each morning at about seven. Bud Krogh had indeed been late when I encountered him on my first day. The daily staff meeting, chaired jointly by John Ehrlichman and George Shultz, began at 7:30. Usually by seven a sleepy-eyed handful of those who attended this meeting would be in the mess munching cereal and silently reading their news summaries to prepare for the day. Ehrlichman was a regular breakfast-clubber. He sat at a small table near the wall with the newspaper in
his face, sometimes lifting one eye to see who else was there, and departing at about 7:25 for the Roosevelt Room to preside.

At 8:15 Ehrlichman and Shultz adjourned their meeting and walked down the hall to the more important session in Haldeman’s office, where they were joined by Henry Kissinger, Chuck Colson, Bryce Harlow (later it was MacGregor, then Timmons), Peter M. Flanigan, an assistant to the President, and Ron Ziegler. “The 8:15” flushed up matters the President’s top-level aides thought he should be thinking about that day, for Haldeman would go from the 8:15 to the President’s office.

After a few months at my job, I suggested to Higby that it seemed appropriate for the counsel to attend the 8:15. Haldeman did not agree but said I could, if I wished, attend the 7:30. For several weeks I dragged my body out of bed at 5:45 to make it to the mess by seven, and then on to the Roosevelt Room. I listened to the discussion of proposed supplemental foreign-assistance appropriations; Shultz’s professorial analysis of the need for a forty-five-day extension of the no-strike period in a railway labor-management dispute; a speechwriter’s report on what the President might say upon signing legislation giving the Blue Lake lands back to the Taos Pueblo Indians. All routine business not involving the counsel’s office. Quietly I stopped attending, and no one missed me. The meetings were simply a mechanical technique to make sure that what the President wanted was being done. However, they were not as strict or severe a method as the tickler.

The discipline of Haldeman’s tickler was unrelenting. I had felt it with my first assignment, the action memorandum on
Scanlan’s
Monthly,
with its due date “Wednesday, August 5, 1970, at 2:00 P.M.” That one I had answered on time, but subsequently I spent too much time preparing my answers to a few action memoranda, let the due dates slide by, and discovered the consequences. First a secretary in the staff secretary’s office called my secretary, asking where the answer was, and when the explanation was found unsatisfactory a very bitchy Larry Higby called to say, “What’s the matter, Dean, can’t you meet a deadline? Do you think you’re someone special?” When I explained I was working on the response, Higby snapped, “Work a little harder.” Higby was chewed out by Haldeman when the paper did not flow as the chief of staff wanted, so he leaned on others.

The tickler was an extension of Haldeman, and was probably more responsible for the chief of staff’s awesome reputation than was his own aluminum personality. It was a self-perpetuating paper monster, with a computer’s memory and a Portuguese man-of-war’s touch. Often those who were ticklers made calls for the sake of making calls, to impress Haldeman with their efficiency. Their machine never forgot or tired. Once a staff man was nailed with responsibility for the slightest project, the tickler would keep pestering until it was fed something: a status report, a piece of paper, a bit of information to chew on. No one could ignore the tickler, because no one could afford to ignore Haldeman. It reached everywhere. Even Mitchell and Kissinger were subject to it. Each call was recorded meticulously on the tickler scorecard, on which reputations were made and broken in Haldeman’s eyes. The tickler did not easily show mercy. Thus, when I received a confidential action memorandum from Haldeman on January 18, 1971, and told Higby that the January 26, 1971 due date was too soon for the complex and extremely delicate assignment, I was refused an extension. At the time, I did not know I was handling a matter of intense interest to the President, but years later this assignment would help me understand the chain of events that destroyed the Nixon Presidency.

It began on January 14, 1971, when the President went all the way to the University of Nebraska to be assured a friendly reception, free of antiwar radicals and heckling students. As television commentators did not fail to point out, the President was neither welcome nor respected at institutions of higher learning. New campus protests had just broken out against stepped-up air operations in Cambodia and Laos, and Senator Muskie, who led the Democrats in the public opinion polls, was getting extensive press coverage on his trip through the Middle East and Moscow. The President, his prospects for reelection slipping, wanted to be seen as a courageous and admired leader. But as Air Force One flew toward the Nebraska heartland he was thinking about more than his speech and his reception. He reached for his IBM dictating machine.

“This is for Haldeman,” he said. “It would seem that the time is approaching when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes. Bebe [Rebozo] has some information on this, although it is, of course, not solid. But there is no question that one of Hughes’s people did have O’Brien on a very heavy retainer for ‘services rendered’ in the past. Perhaps Colson should check on this.”

Rose Mary Woods, the President’s secretary, typed the message and passed it directly to Haldeman. Back in Washington the next day, Haldeman discussed the assignment with the President. Haldeman suggested that I, rather than Colson, pursue it, and the President agreed. “Let’s try Dean,” Haldeman noted on the bottom of the President’s memo, and three days later I received a Haldeman authored directive to investigate the relationship between billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes and Democratic National Committee Chairman Lawrence F. O’Brien.

Following my pattern, I talked it over with Jack Caulfield, who knew a lot of gossip about the Hughes empire. He told me it was embroiled in an internal war, with two billion dollars at stake, private eyes swarming, nerve-jangling power plays going on, and Mafia figures lurking in the wings. I found myself as cowed as any newspaper reader by the Hughes legend. The American dream in neon lights. He had built the last financial empire that was solely in the control of one owner, made movies in Hollywood, seduced a string of starlets beginning with Jean Harlow, and set world flying records. He had not been seen in public since 1957, pulling the strings of his one-man empire as a total recluse. He was more secret than the CIA and perhaps more powerful than the President. And he was feared in the Nixon White House, where some believed that the “Hughes loan” scandal had cost Richard Nixon the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy.
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The implications of the assignment were clear. If Larry O’Brien was in fact on the Hughes payroll while serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, it would be a matter of scandal.

Caulfield delighted in sharing his tales of Hughes intrigue, but after talking with his friends “who might know more,” he could still confirm only that there was a rumor about O’Brien’s retainer, and I needed more. At Haldeman’s request I checked with Lyn Nofziger, who specialized in making certain that the press was abreast of bad news about political foes. Lyn had only heard rumors, too. Bebe Rebozo, the President’s pal, repeated what he had already told the President. I was living on a diet of rumors when Chuck Colson called. He had learned of my assignment and said he knew the man with the answer: Robert Bennett.

Bob Bennett, son of Republican Senator Wallace Bennett of Utah, did have the answer. He had recently bought the Mullen public-relations firm in Washington and acquired a prize client, Howard Hughes. Bennett was unequivocal. Larry O’Brien had been retained by Howard Hughes, and the contract was still in existence. Bennett would document the facts as long as they were not used to embarrass Hughes. He promised to report back to me after visiting the Hughes people in Los Angeles.

I told this to Haldeman on my due date, January 26, in a lengthy memorandum in which I stressed how vigorously I had attacked the assignment—hoping thereby to camouflage how little hard evidence I possessed. Two days later Haldeman instructed:

You should continue to keep in contact with Bob Bennett as well as looking for other sources of information on the subject. Once Bennett gets back to you with his final report, you and Chuck Colson should get together and come up with a way to leak the appropriate information. Frankly, I can’t see any way to handle this without involving Hughes so the problem of “embarrassing” him seems to be a matter of degree. However, we should keep Bob Bennett and Bebe out of this at all costs.

Haldeman’s memo led me to respect the fast rise of Bob Bennett. I had never heard of him until a few weeks earlier, and now he not only was the key to information that might influence the future of the Democratic Party chairman, but was also getting White House protection on a par with Bebe Rebozo’s. When Bennett came to see me after his trip to Los Angeles, I took handwritten notes of the conversation, something I seldom did.

Like Howard Hughes’s famous protective team of male “nurses” and the upper echelon of Hughes’s corporation, Bennett is a Mormon. He neither drinks nor smokes, and has a polished, businesslike manner. He would have fit well in the Administration. When he walked into my office, he eased his lanky frame into a chair and crossed his legs in a way that made him seem conscious of their length. He made me think of Ichabod Crane, gangly and mysterious, but extremely loquacious. He spoke endlessly around the subject at hand. Unlike Ehrlichman’s pithy metaphors or Haldeman’s sparse commands, Bennett’s speech was contoured in long, rounded sentences that imparted a softness to his words. He was discussing all manner of skullduggery, but he managed to give it the innocent air of a parson’s monologue.

The real problem, he seemed to be saying, was Robert Maheu, a former FBI man who had, until recently, run the Hughes hotel and casino properties in Las Vegas. Bennett’s superiors at the Hughes Tool Company had just ousted Maheu and spirited Hughes away to the Bahamas. Now, said Bennett, his superiors and the Maheu forces were “trying to destroy each other” in a battle for control of Hughes’s assets, with Bennett’s side having an inside advantage. It was Maheu who had hired O’Brien for Hughes. The contract had been drawn with one of O’Brien’s firms to keep him one step removed. Since O’Brien was part of the ousted Maheu faction, said Bennett elliptically, “his services are no longer needed.” But O’Brien, he said, was arguing that his contract was with the Hughes Tool Company and that he should continue to receive his retainer regardless of Maheu’s departure. I gathered from Bennett that O’Brien was bargaining hard to keep his job, or at least to depart with a large severance settlement. Bennett performed well in concealing any distaste for O’Brien. His desire to take O’Brien’s place was obvious.

It was a thorny matter, said Bennett. Maheu had handled all Hughes’s political activity for the last fifteen years and had the facts on everything from the old Hughes loan to the involvement of the President’s brother, Donald Nixon, with the Hughes empire. Since O’Brien was close to Maheu, there was a presumption that he knew a great deal. He had to be handled delicately.

As I tried to distill Bennett’s meaning from his long, orbital speech, I recoiled at the rat’s nest he was revealing. I admired how carefully he phrased his sentences, and I wondered about the things he was
not
telling me. He did not say specifically what O’Brien had done for the Hughes companies or, for that matter, what he himself was doing. And, more important from the standpoint of my assignment, he did not offer the promised documentation of O’Brien’s contract. Instead he focused on Maheu. The Hughes people had been forced to fire Maheu after discovering his involvement with notorious gangsters, Bennett said in a tone of piety, and suggested that the Administration pursue a criminal investigation. The conversation ended; as far as I know, the Administration never took any action.

I puzzled over Bennett’s message for several days. His superiors, I decided, must have tempered his desire to expose O’Brien. They were probably confident they could handle O’Brien in the “settlement negotiations.” Maheu was their real foe, and Bennett seemed to be steering the Administration against him, not O’Brien. What a mess, I thought.

Jack Caulfield’s supplementary reports tangled the situation further. Now Jack was cautioning against any hasty assault on the O’Brien-Hughes matter. “The revelation that an O’Brien-Maheu relationship exists poses significant hazards in any attempt to make O’Brien accountable to the Hughes retainer,” he wrote. Any forced embarrassment of O’Brien “might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.” The available information about the common knowledge between Maheu and O’Brien was weak, Caulfield told me, but his sources fed him all sorts of rumors about dirt in both political houses. Jack thought we should settle for a truce.

I told Haldeman that the Hughes people had apparently backed off from their offer to document O’Brien’s retainer, and that in any case we were treading in dangerous waters. I said “dangerous,” and I felt it so. Even my hardening experiences inside the White House were not equal to this kind of twisted intrigue. My brief investigation had already convinced me that O’Brien, Bennett, and Maheu were mysterious characters, but I had only a glimmer of what was to come. Maheu would later surface as the point of contact for the CIA’s effort to have the Mafia assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s. Bennett, for his part, would later amaze me by turning up as a crucial behind-the-scenes player in most matters that came to plague the Nixon White House. He would become as mysterious in his inconspicuous presence as Howard Hughes was in his conspicuous absence.
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