Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (29 page)

One weekend during the trial, I was alone in my office and I decided to search for those Hermes notebooks Silbert had inquired about with such assurance. I still couldn’t recall them, but I was troubled by the possibility that they might somehow turn up. In one of my safes, down under the President’s estate papers, I found them—two Hermes notebooks and a metal pop-up address book. I leafed through them. Paul O’Brien had told me they contained the names of people Hunt had recruited for the Ellsberg break-in and his “other” White House operations.

I went through a tumble of nervous calculations. These documents were no longer relevant to the trial after Hunt’s guilty plea, I rationalized. But they were certainly dangerous to the cover-up. I would have to get rid of the goddam things, as others had gotten rid of evidence. I put them into my new shredder. The machine tore through the pages but choked on the cardboard covers, and I was afraid it might break down. I felt a wave of paranoia. I glanced at the microphone-like devices attached to the ultrasonic alarm system on my walls. I had asked for the sensor system, as I had the shredder, after I had seen new ones in Ehrlichman’s office; they were part of the status race. At this moment I worried whether the sensors would “hear” the shredder choking. Finally it ate the last of the documents with a loud growl.

Destroying the notebooks was only a small addition to a whole string of criminal acts I had committed, but it seemed to me to be a moment of high symbolism. This direct, concrete, and sweaty act had also shredded the last of my feeble rationalizations that I was an agent rather than a participant—a lawyer defending guilty clients, rather than a conspirator.

Toward the end of January, the outward signs were still good. The Watergate trial ended without major mishap, all seven defendants convicted. The President negotiated a settlement in Vietnam; his popularity in the polls rose to a high of sixty-eight percent approval. These were bright spots that helped me hold together an optimistic front. Inside, I was dying.

I closed my office doors for long stretches during the day to escape in daydreams. I flashed through all the weak spots in the cover-up, projected an everlasting series of hurdles for the future. I reflected on my career and listed my talents: an organized mind, an ability to read the desires of my superiors, a capacity to anticipate. Deep down, I knew I was a meek, favor-currying staff man, not hardboiled enough to play the game I had watched Ehrlichman and Mitchell play. The same mental predilections that had propelled me to the White House and into a leading role in the cover-up now made it impossible for my mind to ignore the grave weaknesses of our position, I thought sourly. No one else was focused in on what had happened after the break-in. I pondered my criminal acts, pushing at them like an aching tooth. At times, I thought of myself as a contemporary Raskolnikov, paranoid, schizoid, wanting to get caught, and, for the first time, I thought seriously about the prospect of going to jail. I thought I was not as bothered by the prospect as I had been. Sometimes it actually seemed perhaps the only way to end the lies that had ruined my private life even as they had made me a superficial success. Still, there was no way I could think of to end the cover-up cleanly. One could not just walk out of it. It was ridiculous, I thought, to think about going to jail as I sat there in the White House. Round and round in circles, always the same ones. I drifted on.

February drove some new spikes into the tire. The Senate voted unanimously to establish a committee to investigate Watergate and we were staring at a new hurdle. We retreated to those strategies that had delayed the Patman hearings: strategies to emasculate the planned hearings; to keep key Administration witnesses from testifying. I began reworking the President’s position on executive privilege—the doctrine by which we hoped to keep White House aides out of Congressional hearings.

Late in February, Pat Gray went before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation hearings on his nomination to become permanent director of the FBI. These hearings provided the first opportunity for the senators to question an Administration official on Watergate publicly, and they took full advantage. Gray, trying desperately to sound sufficiently candid to be confirmed, but not so candid as to destroy himself, got into immediate trouble as he testified that he had given Dean the FBI reports on the Watergate investigation, and that he and Dean had met repeatedly during the previous summer. I was in the headlines for the first time: “Dean Monitored FBI Watergate Probe;” “Dean Refuses Senate Testimony;” “Nixon Backs Dean.”

I became a public Watergate target. I directed the ugliest possible thoughts at Gray and kicked myself for not having protested his nomination more vigorously. It was an idle regret; we had no choice. We couldn’t afford an angry Pat Gray loose on the streets. It was just one more example of the Watergate tar baby: the only thing worse than nominating Gray would have been not nominating him.

Just as the hearings began, I had my first Watergate meeting with the President since the September 15 stroking session. Now, all of a sudden, I was meeting and talking with the President almost every day in my final quantum leap toward intimacy with him. There were complicated reasons behind this new relationship. For one thing, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were swamped with the new Presidential appointees and the reorganization. Both, particularly Ehrlichman, were less and less tolerant of the Watergate problems I kept bringing to them. They were happy to have someone else carry Watergate to the President. And, more importantly, we were all worried that my claim of executive privilege might not hold up in court because I had had negligible contact with the President. This had to be remedied.

On February 27, the first day of a series of private meetings with the President, he called me into the Oval Office and offered me a cup of coffee, which I declined. When he offered it again, I accepted. I was too timid to tell the President that I hate coffee and never drink it, it does terrible things to my body. So I drank black coffee with him as we launched into Watergate.

The President, dealing privately with me for the first time, quickly broke down restraints, confiding his feelings on countless subjects, ranging from the “assholes” in his Cabinet to the “boobs” on the Supreme Court. But the bulk of our conversations dealt inevitably with aspects of Watergate—the Ervin Committee,
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the Gray hearings, executive privilege.

Although I still went home to Scotch each night, my new status with the President temporarily revived my confidence that I could endure as the ringmaster of the cover-up. I could go no higher: I had become the junior member of the select group that met almost daily with the President. Occasionally he would tell Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler, or Kissinger to wait while he finished a meeting with me. I would pass them going in and out of the Oval Office, and we would exchange brotherly glances in tribute to our membership in the most select fraternity we could imagine. Kissinger joked in passing that he was happy to read my name in the gruesome Watergate headlines, instead of his own.

No one had given me pointers on how to conduct business with the President of the United States. I listened to his questions and responded, never volunteered sensitive information unless asked. I was determined not to tell the President anything that might draw him into an obstruction of justice. I had watched Ehrlichman protect him during the clemency discussions. From the beginning, however, the President asked me detailed and knowledgeable questions. Could Magruder’s testimony sink Colson? Could Hugh Sloan damage Magruder? His inquiries loosened me up somewhat, and at the end of the first meeting I was hinting to him that I myself had Watergate vulnerabilities. He dismissed my remarks abruptly on the ground that I had not known of the break-in in advance.

In subsequent meetings, the President continually asked questions I had already answered. This disturbed me. He would have bursts of lucidity and logical thinking, but mostly he was rambling and forgetful, and as I grew used to talking with him I nursed the heretical thought that the President didn’t seem very smart. Either that or he was carrying a mental overload. His desk was as neat and spotless as my own, but his thoughts and actions were far from organized. Whenever he wanted to make a note to himself, he would go through a long and awkward ritual. First he would put on his dark-rimmed glasses. (To my surprise, I thought they made him look much better.) Then he would reach into a vest pocket to fish for an envelope or a scrap of paper. Simultaneously, he would reach into the opposite vest pocket with his other hand to find his pen. The required objects would often elude his grasp, leaving the President struggling, his arms crossed in front of himself. Finally he would pull out the fountain pen, bite off the top, and hold it in his teeth as he scrawled with some difficulty on the scrap of paper he clutched in the palm of one hand. I would sit silently and watch the effort.

Such episodes, plus the obtuse conversations, gradually humanized Richard Nixon for me. The President still intimidated me, but I had lost a great deal of the romance. I also began to lose faith that the President could overcome the Watergate scandal by infinite power and wisdom. He seemed as enmeshed in it as the rest of us. I soon began to stop looking forward to these meetings; they no longer offered me confidence—about anything. The power fix, the high which I had pursued all my adult life, was wearing off. I was coming down.

Three themes dominated my conversations with the President until mid-March: his desire to launch a counter-scandal against the Democrats, his reminiscence of the Hiss case, and his determination to find a strategy to handle the upcoming Ervin hearings. Each of these topics bothered me. The President was never satisfied with the evidence I brought him of buggings and surveillance by previous Administrations, even though I thought it was impressive in a grisly way. He kept sending me out for more, and I developed a feeling that he was grooming me as his new hatchetman, his new Colson. (Chuck had left the White House.)

The President was famous for reliving the Hiss case, but it unsettled me when he did so for my benefit. He would wax eloquent about how he and his investigators had overcome incredible odds and all sorts of government obstructions to catch Alger Hiss in a crime. Even the power of President Truman hadn’t stopped him, he would say. His constant analogies between the Hiss case and Watergate baffled me; I thought the President had everything backward. I identified with Hiss, not the investigators, and I winced whenever the President talked about how he had finally “nailed” him.

The President’s emerging strategy for the Ervin hearings was most troubling. He warmed to the idea of taking the steam out of the Senate investigation with a “comprehensive” Dean Report. He never gave me the feeling he was setting me up to take the blame for Watergate, but I began to suspect that Ehrlichman had simply not clued him in on what he had in mind. I squirmed, I raised all sorts of objections, but I couldn’t bring myself to say no.

I wrenched myself out of bed late on the morning of Saturday, March 17, and decided to go to the office and struggle to compose some kind of innocuous Dean Report for the President. I had just arrived when the White House operator called and said the President wanted to see me in the Oval Office. I went immediately, wearing casual weekend clothes. It was the first time I met with the President without a necktie.

Manolo Sanchez, the President’s valet, was just taking the lunch tray away as I entered, and the President leaned back in his chair, brushing crumbs off the front of his dark suit. He was wearing a shamrock and a green tie in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

He greeted me and asked where I lived. I told him, somewhat startled by the question.

“Any time that you need to get away from town, remember that my Camp David place is very conducive to that kind of awful work,” he said, referring to the Dean Report. He knew I was resisting the idea, and he was trying to make it more palatable by offering a sojourn at Camp David.

“I think that might be a good thing,” I replied, and proceeded, as usual, to praise him—this time by complimenting him on the effectiveness of his recent press conference on executive privilege. I went on to say I was trying to devise some way we could force Senator Ervin to hold his hearings in executive session, behind closed doors.

The President sat up. “I always hark back to the Hiss case,” he said. “We did that on the Hiss case.”

“You went into executive session?” I asked, knowing it full well.

The President described in detail how he had lined up the testimony of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers in private sessions before nailing Hiss in public. Then he launched into a long, rambling monologue on the benefits we could derive from a Dean Report. I knew he was leaning on me in his own way, which I had learned was usually indirect. The President was uncomfortable telling aides to do things they didn’t want to do. That was why he had Haldeman.

The President waited for my reaction to his speech. We had been down this road before. I didn’t like the idea of any Dean Report, but I was determined not to write one that would make me alone responsible for false conclusions. I coughed nervously and mumbled before trying to steer him toward my old “affidavit,” that is, the interrogatories idea. “Let me just take you one step further,” I said. “It might be a very interesting approach. Ah, if Ervin were to be called down here and given sworn statements that were given to you. That’s after I have prepared my report on Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Dean, everybody.”