Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (19 page)

On June 20, as Fielding and I were sorting Hunt’s papers with our rubber gloves on, the President had summoned Chuck Colson to his hideaway EOB office. “Now, I hope everybody is not going to get in a tizzy about the Democratic Committee thing,” the President had told Chuck before he even sat down.

“A little, it’s a little frustrating—disheartening, I guess, is the right word,” Chuck replied, and he commenced his standard speech about Howard Hunt. “Been off our payroll for three months,” he said. “Pick up the goddamn
Washington Post
and see the guilt by association.”

The President commiserated with Chuck about the newspaper stories linking him to Hunt, and Chuck continued to protest his innocence. “Do they think I’m that dumb?”

The conversation drifted. Then the President faced the issue squarely. “A lot of people think you ought to wiretap,” he said.

“Well, they, I’m, I’m sure most people...” Chuck trailed off, not knowing how to respond to the President’s blunt remark.

“Know why the hell we’re doing it,” the President picked up. “And they probably figure they’re doing it to us, which they are.” The President strongly believed this rationale for the hardball tactics—that he was fighting back against ruthless opponents.

“That’s why they hired this guy [McCord] in the first place, to sweep the rooms, didn’t they?” asked Nixon, aware that the Reelection Committee had taken precautions against being bugged.

“Yes, sir,” Chuck answered, and he again insisted on his ignorance. “Frankly, sir, I haven’t got into the ultimate details that we want on this, but I assume he was hired to protect our own offices.”

The President, displaying more knowledge of the facts than Colson, pursued the matter. He was worried about leaks. “You’ve got a goddamn person over there that’s ratting on us. What do you think?”

Chuck speculated that Larry O’Brien had a clandestine pipeline into the Reelection Committee. The President wondered whether Committee secretaries might be the source. He then turned to “the real question,” which he identified as the silence of the suspects in the case.

“Basically, they are all pretty hard-line guys?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” said Colson.

“If we are going to have this funny guy take credit for that...”

“You mean the one with Hunt?” Chuck interrupted. The President had been referring to Liddy, but Chuck was worried about Hunt. “I, I can’t believe he’s involved. He’s, he’s too smart to do it this way. He’s just too damn shrewd, too much sophisticated techniques...”

“It doesn’t sound like a skillful job,” agreed the President. “If we didn’t know better, you would have thought it was deliberately butchered.” The clownish aspects of the Watergate “caper” were being ridiculed in the press, but the President was revealing his opinion that a double-agent theory would not work.

Colson, still anxious about Hunt, offered his theory that the men in jail pulled off the break-in without Hunt’s knowledge. “...Then I figured maybe it’s the Cubans that did it. Organizing it on their own.”

The President warmed to this notion and backed off his choice of Liddy, who had not yet surfaced in the press, as the culprit. A discussion of Cubans followed, in which Chuck and the President agreed that they are violence-prone and might do anything. “That’s, great, great,” the President concluded. “Well, and then too, of course, we are just going to leave this where it is, with the Cubans.”

Colson, having rescued Hunt, turned to matters of strategy and warned the President against “the ITT mistake.” He said it would be a great error to fight the Watergate charges head on, as we had done in the ITT scandal, because doing so would only feed the Watergate coverage in the press. He recommended ignoring Watergate.

“Mistake would be what?” the President asked.

“Mistake would be to get all of them zeroed in on it.”

“Oh.”

“Make a big case out of it.”

“Oh, shit. I couldn’t agree more.”

“Go after it day in and day out.”

“Yeah,” said the President.

“Follow the every, uh, I’d say the hell with it, believe me.”

The President concurred with the strategy. He endorsed it emphatically to the end of the conversation. “I’m not going to worry about it. The hell with it... At times, uh, I just stonewall it.”

The “stonewall” strategy functioned from the very first episodes of the cover-up. It was instinctive, from the very top of the Administration to the bottom. It was also ad hoc, developed in small reactions to the flurry of each day’s events. There was not time to take stock of the whole case or to plan a careful defense in the meticulous fashion of trial lawyers. Instead, we found ourselves trying to hold a line where we could. But the line could not be held at the Cubans and McCord; there was too much evidence implicating Hunt and Liddy. Almost immediately, we knew that the money used to pay for the break-in would be traced by the FBI to the Reelection Committee. We conceded that and worked toward two goals: to explain the use of the money by claiming that Hunt and Liddy had diverted the funds on their own for illegitimate purposes, and to keep the FBI from tracing the money backward from the Reelection Committee to its donors. Such a backward trace, we knew, could lead the FBI into what we called “other problems”—Campaign Act violations, unreported contributions, corporate contributions, secret contributions by nominal Democrats, and the like.

I began my role in the cover-up as a fact-finder and worked my way up to idea man, and finally to desk officer. At the outset, I sensed no personal danger in what I was doing. In fact, I took considerable satisfaction from knowing that I had no criminal liability, and I consistently sought to keep it that way. I wanted to preserve my function as an “agent” of my superiors, taking no initiatives, always acting on orders. In the process, I often found myself searching for alternatives that would keep me from taking dangerous steps. When Ehrlichman suggested I “deep-six” the sensitive materials from Hunt’s safe by throwing them into the Potomac River, for instance, I delayed for several days, searching for an alternative. I did not want to disappoint Ehrlichman, but I did not want to take responsibility for destroying potential evidence. Finally I came up with what I thought was a clever idea—to give the documents directly to L. Patrick Gray III, the acting FBI director after Hoover’s death. By this ruse, we could say we had turned all evidence over to “the FBI,” and literally it would be true. At the same time, we felt we could count on Pat Gray to keep the Hunt material from becoming public, and he did not disappoint us.

On such half-truths I sustained the image of myself as a “counsel” rather than an active participant for as long as I could, but the line blurred and finally vanished. I was too central a figure, and there was too much hasty activity required as the cover-up proceeded speedily along its two main themes containing the Justice Department investigation, and paying the hush money to the defendants. I am still not sure when I crossed the line into criminal culpability, when I failed in my efforts to protect myself, but I know that certain crucial events took place on park benches in meetings as covert as the microfilm exchanges in the spy movies.

Once, I met Pat Gray secretly at his home in southwest Washington. We were both apprehensive about the meeting as we walked to a park and sat down on a bench overlooking the Potomac, discussing my request to obtain the FBI 302s and AirTels on the Watergate investigation. I had remembered Liddy’s advice about the 302s and the Air Tels, and I had raised the matter with Kleindienst, Petersen, Mardian, and Ehrlichman before asking Gray himself. On the park bench, I told Gray I needed the materials to keep track of the investigation’s progress. He felt the pressure and asked for assurances that the President himself wanted the documents. I told him they would be used “for that purpose”—which was half true and half false, because I knew that the President would not take the time to sift through such documents. Gray gave in, consoling himself with the observation that the President is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and is therefore entitled to reports on all criminal investigations.

Making sure that the FBI did not surprise us was key to protecting the White House. When I learned, for instance, that agents wanted to interview the vacationing Kathleen Chenow, secretary of the Plumbers’ Unit, about Howard Hunt’s activities in the White House, I dispatched Fielding to England to get her. Fred brought Ms. Chenow back within twenty-four hours. Thus we could say we were actively “cooperating” with the investigation by producing the witness at our own expense. But we were in fact afraid she might reveal damaging information if an FBI agent caught her by surprise. I got to her first and took advantage of the opportunity to advise her not to testify about “national security” matters, such as the Ellsberg break-in.

I met Herb Kalmbach on a park bench. He became the first of several fund raisers for the hush money which was the sustenance of the cover-up. The hush-money issue sharpened the divide between the White House forces, mainly Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and the Mitchell forces. No one wanted to handle this dirty work. Everyone avoided the problem like leprosy. Not surprisingly, the White House thought Mitchell should “take care of” the payments because he had approved the Liddy plan and because Liddy and McCord worked for Mitchell’s Reelection Committee. Mitchell, on the other hand, believed just as strongly that the White House had created his dilemma by sending him Liddy and pressuring him for intelligence. Moreover, Mitchell felt the hush money would serve to protect not only himself but also the President from the “White House horrors” that Liddy and Hunt had carried out while working at the White House. I was with Mitchell in his office, looking out the window on Seventeenth Street at the Tax Court building, when he asked me to enlist Herb Kalmbach to raise and pay the “commitments.” “John,” he said, “you go back over to the White House and check this out.” Then, in a low voice, “I think your people over there should be interested in having this problem solved, especially John Ehrlichman.” I had no doubt what he meant. Mitchell wanted no part of the hush money—nobody wanted any part of it—but if he were forced to get involved he was determined not to carry the burden alone. He suggested Kalmbach, Nixon’s attorney, as the fund raiser, knowing that Kalmbach would never accept the role without the explicit approval of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. I took Mitchell’s proposal to both Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Neither liked it, but both approved it. Then I called Kalmbach, and our clandestine meetings began.

Kalmbach gulped and made sour faces upon learning of his assignment, but he accepted it. He knew it was vital for the President’s reelection, and he was completely devoted to the President’s service. With surprising aplomb, Kalmbach adopted the mannerisms of an amateur spy. After raising the first batch of cash, he called me to arrange a tryst. “Meet me in Lafayette Park,” he said, and hung up. The President’s personal attorney and the President’s counsel met soon thereafter in the park and ambled casually to an unoccupied bench.

“It’s done,” Kalmbach said simply, sotto voce. We stared off at the feeding pigeons and he reached down to pat his briefcase softly. “I’ve got it right here.” I was distressed at the thought of being so near the actual cash in a public place and quickly adjourned the meeting.

Kalmbach called again a few days later from California to report success—after many initial difficulties—in delivering the money to the defendants. He was calling from a pay phone which was “secure,” and he had to interrupt the conversation several times to feed quarters to the operator. The paranoia had caught on.

“You can tell the Brush—” Kalmbach began mysteriously. “You know who I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” I said, deciphering the makeshift code. This could only mean Haldeman.

“And you can tell the Pipe. You know who that is?”

“Yes.” Obviously Mitchell.

“And you can also tell, let’s see, we can call him Brows. Will that do?”

“Yes,” I said. Ehrlichman’s distinctive furrows made this one easy.

“Well, you can tell them it’s all taken care of. The guy I’ll call ‘Mr. Rivers’ has finally made contact with the Writer’s Wife. And he is giving her the Script.” Translated, this meant that Caulfield’s man Tony had given the hush money to Howard Hunt’s wife.

“Right, I understand.”

“Okay,” Kalmbach said. “Good-bye.”

The cover-up churned on through hundreds of similar episodes, and did so quite successfully.

I carried messages back and forth between the Mitchell faction and the White House faction. There was no love lost between them in the first place, and the Watergate recriminations made things worse. Neither side wanted to budge. Each side waited for the other to confess and shoulder the cover-up alone. The war of leverage dragged on.

My sense of guilt was to deepen as I lost the few remaining rationalizations that I was acting as a low-level agent. Everyone betrayed a sense of guilt in meetings. I had managed for a while to evade it by contemplating the startling boost that Watergate had given me into the inner councils. My adult life had been calculated blindly and shrewdly, I had always thought. I was now reaching the pinnacle. I was not the source of authority for the cover-up, yet I became its linchpin. I was the only one with the knowledge and personal rapport to reconcile the pitched camps at the White House and the Reelection Committee. I could feel my power growing in every meeting and each conversation as I went back and forth—resolving disputes between the warring factions and unwittingly linking and knitting them together in conspiracy.