Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (26 page)

“Well, we may not have much choice. Think about it.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

I walked back into the kitchen, where my family was eagerly speculating on what weighty matter of state had led the White House to call me. “What was that all about?” asked my sister.

“Oh, nothing really,” I shrugged. “Just some routine business.”

I flew back to Washington the next day and had an awkward meeting with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They were riding high from Camp David and refused to be bothered with “Mitchell’s problem.” Each of them offered a few words of encouragement for me to pass on to LaRue but refused to discuss the matter further. I went back to my parents’ for the weekend. Things were coming to a head, I knew that, and I wondered whether Mitchell or the White House would budge first.

There was a lot of phoning among the cover-up participants during the following week. The pressure to respond to Hunt was rising. We had not delivered. Mitchell gave the final push in the war of brinkmanship with Haldeman and Ehrlichman when he told me to ask Haldeman for a “loan” from the $350,000 slush fund. He sounded desperate and I didn’t argue with him. I called Haldeman on the I.O.

“Bob. I hate to ruin your day, but Mitchell has asked me to see if we could use some of the three-fifty fund. I don’t like it. I don’t think the White House should have its money used directly, but I don’t have any better suggestion. We’re all afraid Hunt might blow soon. Things are getting hotter. And Mitchell feels we’ve got to do something.” I sounded like Magruder to myself.

Haldeman seemed remarkably calm as he made a fast scan of the wretched impasse. “Well, if Mitchell says there’s no choice and you don’t have any better ideas, then go ahead and do it. Just make goddam sure you get that money back, and fast. Make it clear it’s a loan.”

“Okay. You want me to call Strachan and tell him you authorize giving the money to LaRue?”

“Yep.” He hung up.

The first bite out of the three-fifty was delivered to LaRue and passed on to the defendants. But the money pressure was not eased. LaRue had to scramble to pay back the White House as well as make the next payment to the defendants. He called or dropped by often, appealing for advice. He looked like a zombie and I began to worry that he might come unhinged. I had seen it happen to Kalmbach; it seemed to me there was an attrition rate for money men. In fact, there was a pattern for all those who worked in the boiler rooms of the cover-up. First came shock, then a burst of dutiful activity, then wariness and stonewalling, and finally the frayed edges began to show. I plotted where each of us fit on the scale. LaRue, I thought, was close to the bottom.

I told Fred I would ask Ehrlichman for advice and did in fact make a lengthy explanation of Fred’s difficulties to Ehrlichman in his office, during which Ehrlichman’s head moved slowly from side to side in lugubrious tribute to LaRue’s dilemma.

“Well, why doesn’t Fred go see our friend Tom Pappas?” he suggested after some thought. Pappas was a very wealthy Boston supporter with extensive business holdings abroad, mainly in Greece.

“That sound possible,” I replied. “I’ll pass it along.”

“I think he might be your man. He’s discreet. I’ve got some other dealings with Pappas and, in fact, I’d been thinking of asking him to find some work for young Donnie Nixon, who’s gotten himself in trouble down in the Bahamas again.”

“Like what?”

“Well, he’s got some troubles with some girls this time. I think what I’m going to do is to send young Donnie over to Greece and let Mr. Pappas keep him in some armed camp somewhere over there until he grows up a bit.” One of Ehrlichman’s jobs, which had started when he was counsel to the President, was to make certain that the President wasn’t caused any embarrassment by his brothers. Ehrlichman was telling me about nephew Donnie because he wanted me to assume this responsibility eventually.

I told LaRue what Ehrlichman had said about Pappas.

“He’s right, John,” Fred declared. “I’ve already thought of Pappas, but I haven’t followed up on it. I’ve had some dealings with Pappas myself, but I haven’t really pitched him. I’m not sure why. I guess I don’t want to queer my dealings with him.”

“You may have to, Fred.”

“We’re trying to work on an oil deal together to import crude oil for conversion,” he continued, “but we’ve got a tariff problem. You know, if I could go to Pappas and tell him that this tariff problem could be taken care of, I’m sure he’d be much more receptive.”

“Well, Fred, there’s nothing I can do about that. Do you want me to mention it to Ehrlichman?”

“Why don’t you?”

“Okay. “

Back to Ehrlichman, who listened with interest.

“John, do you want me to become some sort of expert on the oil business?” I asked, pleading for a negative. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Nope, I don’t want you to get in the oil business. Here’s what you do. Tell Fred that when the problem comes up he should call me and I’ll have it taken care of.”

Back to LaRue. Whatever help he got from Pappas—if he got any he didn’t tell me. Not long afterward the pressure became so intense that Haldeman transferred the remainder of the three-fifty fund to LaRue. “Just get all that damn money out of here,” he said, weary of being asked for yet “another bite out of the apple.”

The money item was rising from the bottom, and at the same time there was pressure from the top. Whenever there was a lull, Haldeman and Ehrlichman suggested I transform the “Dean investigation,” the mythological concept, into a historical reality. It would “clear the decks” for the President’s second term, they would say; it would definitively establish the White House’s innocence in the break-in. The President wanted it: the Dean Report would administer the coup de grace to the investigation, put Watergate behind us. I was the only man who could write the report with credibility and, as the President’s counsel, safely.

I didn’t much like the idea. A public report with my name attached would associate me even more with Watergate. Moreover, I didn’t think a report would work at this stage. It could only raise more questions. I equivocated, raising a host of technical objections with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, which they waved away. My ambitions kept me from saying no flatly.

Finally I thought I had a solution that would satisfy them and protect myself. Instead of stating my own conclusions, I would take “sworn interrogatories” from all those at the White House who were involved and base my report on their answers. If they wanted to lie, fine. I was willing to help them fuzz, ignore, and stonewall, without offering my own versions of the lies. I submitted a draft of this plan to Haldeman on December 5, along with sample questions. It was a halfhearted effort.

A few days later, Haldeman called me into his office. “I’ve looked over the draft you sent in and it doesn’t quite do it.”

“Well, Bob, I’m not sure we can do much more.”

“I’m not sure about that. I think you ought to go back and try. What we need is just some sort of report that’ll put this whole thing to rest and say, ‘The White House wasn’t really involved.’ That’s what the President has in mind.”

I was being maneuvered, just as LaRue was at the money meetings. I was being pushed toward something awful. I didn’t want to do it, and if Bob thought about it, or so I thought, he’d agree. I was confused, but, even so, I hoped that my words carried authority. “Well, Bob, if I go back and spell things out in a report, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. This whole thing is going to fall apart. People are going to want to know how I learned all I know. If I say why the White House was not involved, because this was a Mitchell and Magruder operation, then the grand jury is going to open up its doors again and start business very quickly. It’s going to call everybody back in there. And none of the stories will hang together and they’ll start looking at the cover-up. Then there’s going to be a whole slew of new indictments, and I’ll tell you who’s going to be indicted. Magruder’s going to be indicted. Mitchell’s going to be indicted. Ehrlichman’s going to be indicted. And Haldeman’s going to be indicted. And Dean’s going to be indicted.” By the time I had finished, I was pacing the room the way Parkinson did. I thought my words were clipped and forceful, but I felt near collapse.

“What do you mean?” Haldeman was startled and irritated. “What for? I can understand Mitchell and Magruder for the break-in, but I don’t see the others.”

“Well, Bob, Mitchell and Magruder know about all these money payments. So do all the defendants and a lot of other people. Everybody’s going to have to trust everybody else to commit perjury. If even one person cracks and starts looking for a deal, we’re in an obstruction-of-justice situation.”

A resigned, slightly nauseated look came over Haldeman’s face. “I guess a report isn’t such a viable option, then.”

“No, I don’t think so.” I was relieved.

I went back to my office and the calls started to come from the cover-up principals. There was panic on one more front. Hunt’s wife had been killed in a plane crash near Chicago, and $10,000 in bills had been found in her belongings. Was the money ours? Could it be traced? Paul O’Brien reported back that our payments had been in untraceable bills. LaRue said there could be no prints; he wore gloves.

It was time to face squarely what I had rather impulsively told Haldeman about obstruction of justice. I closed the doors to my office and took out a book of criminal statutes. (Ehrlichman had remarked, the first day I met him, how shocked he had been that there were no lawbooks in the counsel’s office. When I had succeeded him there were still none, and I had ordered a library.) I was not, am not, an expert on criminal law, but now I took a sweaty tour through the obstruction-of-justice laws. What I found obliterated any notions I might have entertained that I had been protecting myself. Conspiracy to obstruct justice can be proven with evidence of any conversation whose purpose it is to impede or hamper a criminal investigation; the only additional requirement is an “overt act” in furtherance of the conspiracy. My behavior had combined such acts. I stared out the window. It is uncanny, I thought, how the law prohibits all those little acts that had set off my chemical instincts of guilt, instincts which had been quiet as possums during all those meetings. Now that I had read it in black and white, it was clear enough. We were criminals. We had skated this far on the President’s power. How had I doubted it?

Haldeman called me again about the Dean Report a few days later, having reconsidered. Maybe I had overreacted, he said. I dodged and made excuses. I was willing to reconsider. I was, in truth, planning how to delay, kill the idea one more time. Ehrlichman has gotten to Haldeman, I thought. Maybe to the President. Or maybe the President has gotten to Haldeman after some coaching from Ehrlichman. Haldeman told me he had scheduled a meeting for December 13—he and I would kick it around again, along with Ehrlichman, Ziegler, and Richard Moore, a Presidential aide who had helped me with my draft. I was not looking forward to it. Fortunately, Ehrlichman ended up boycotting it. At the last minute Haldeman transferred the meeting from his office to Ziegler’s, and Ehrlichman refused to descend to Ziegler’s office. Without Ehrlichman’s skillful advocacy, a consensus was arrived at that a Dean Report would create more problems than it solved. I didn’t have to prompt my colleagues overly; the Dean Report went gratefully to sleep. It would return to plague me.

So would Pat Gray. About that time, Earl Silbert, the government’s prosecutor, invited Fielding, Bruce Kehrli, and me to the Justice Department to run through the chain of evidence based on the material we had delivered from Hunt’s safe. Silbert was preparing his case.
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We met with him and Henry Petersen in a small conference room off Petersen’s office. Responding to Silbert’s questions, we described what we had done, omitting not only that we had worn rubber gloves and had had many anxious meetings, but that we had “edited” the contents of Hunt’s file. Needless to say, we didn’t tell him that we’d given the selected files to Pat Gray.

“That sounds fine,” Silbert said. “Except for one thing. Hunt has raised a question about materials he says are missing from those documents. We’ve had to turn over what we have to him in pretrial discovery. He says there are two Hermes notebooks missing. He claims they are vital to his defense, and his lawyer plans to file a motion claiming we’re hiding them if we don’t come up with them. It sounds like bullshit to me. You guys know anything about these notebooks?”

“Earl, I don’t even know what a Hermes notebook is,” I replied apprehensively. Fielding didn’t, either. I was afraid Hunt was trying to use what he knew had been there, what I’d first held and then given Gray, to get the case against him dismissed. I cringed at the thought that I was getting caught in the middle.

“Well, they’re little cardboard notebooks like clerks use,” Earl replied. “And they have ‘Hermes’ written on them. H-E-R-M-E-S. You remember anything like that?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. I was trying to call up a mental picture of the material that had gone to Gray, and I didn’t remember any such notebooks. This didn’t lighten my concern about Hunt’s line of thought.