Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (44 page)

Now Charlie quickly decided what to do with the new information about the President. “We’re going to see how serious those fellows downtown are about seeing justice done,” he told me, dialing Silbert’s number. “I want to put a little more coal on the fire we’ve got under them.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I want to find out what those bastards are made of,” he said as he let the phone ring. “And I may want you to tell them of your dealings with the P, at least those I don’t believe are privileged.” Charlie had decided that any dealing I had with the President in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy would not be subject to attorney-client or executive privilege.

“Hello, Earl my boy, how’s my favorite prosecutor?”

Silence. Laughter.

“Of course. That’s why I’m calling. I think you should talk to Dean one more time, before I meet with Sam Dash, up there with that Senate committee. Dash sure is interested in talking to us.”

Silence. Charlie’s eyes were smiling as he listened.

“Right, and I think you guys should come out here, particularly because of what I want my man to tell you about.”

Silence. Then Charlie put his hand over the mouthpiece and told me Silbert was bucking a private meeting now that our dealings were known.

“Listen, goddammit, he’s going to tell you about the P,” he said into the phone.

A very brief silence and Charlie erupted. “The P, goddammit. The Man. Your top boss who lives down the street in the big house. You know now?” Silence. “Good. I always knew you were a bright fellow. I want to find out if you fellows plan to really prosecute this case. Otherwise, I don’t want my man to throw in with you. I know a lot of U.S. attorneys around the country that would love to talk to my man, and I—”

Silence. Now Charlie could not keep from smiling. Again he covered the mouthpiece as he nodded and said to me, “They’ll meet with us. I’ve got poor Earl so high in the air he’s afraid to come back down.” Then to Silbert: “Okay, I’ll wait to hear back from you. But don’t waste our time if you’re not interested in taking this case all the way.”

Charlie hung up. He stood up, stretched, and plopped back down.

“They want you to plead guilty to a one-count felony—“

“What?” I exclaimed.

“Don’t get excited. I refused to even discuss it with them. I’ve just upped the ante, but they’re almost afraid to talk with you. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Earl can’t make a move, I suspect, without talking to Petersen now. I want old Henry to know this is the biggest fucking case he’s ever touched. Earl’s going to have to meet with us, and I want you to tell him of the highlights of your dealings with the P, the money, and clemency stuff.”

“You think that’s wise? Petersen’s going to pass it right on to the President, I suspect.”

“That’s fine. I think Nixon should get the message that you’re not going to lie for his ass. He’d better fess up before he’s in jail.”

Earl called back, and a meeting was arranged for May 3. But it was different from what Charlie and I expected. The prosecutors listened to my details on the President’s complicity as if I were talking about something of historical value rather than immediate interest. At one point, I thought Earl might fall asleep. Only Seymour Glanzer seemed to be absorbing every word, his eyebrows rising and falling. He seemed to be plotting how the facts I was relating fit with the law.

“John, I want you to listen to me,” Glanzer said as I concluded. “We need more details, more facts, more specifics, more proof. Not impressions, opinions, and conclusions. This information is amazing, but it is not strong enough.”

“I understand, but—”

“Hold it, son,” Charlie interrupted. “You don’t need to give these fellows any ‘buts.’ You’ve already given them enough. Maybe too much. Now if they want to do their jobs they know where to come for the information. If they’re not interested, well, the United States Senate is very interested. I suggest we adjourn. If you guys want to talk further, you’ve got my phone number.”

I didn’t know where we were now. Charlie was playing the heavy negotiator, and I relied on him to handle it. He knew how prosecutors thought and acted, I didn’t. Charlie reported to me almost daily, but gave me few details. I was growing less convinced they would grant me immunity, but the negotiations gave us time to figure out what I should do, and Charlie was more optimistic than I was about the prosecutors. He felt that Seymour Glanzer was far ahead of Earl Silbert in analyzing the situation. Glanzer had told Charlie privately that I should be granted immunity because I was telling the truth and would make a key witness for unraveling the entire mess. He seemed to understand my position—it was my word against Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and the President. Glanzer had asked a private law firm to prepare a brief on whether a sitting President could be indicted. Clearly he saw where all this was headed, but he was not in charge.

Charlie’s bargaining put the prosecutors in an awkward spot. They didn’t know what to do with me, while Sam Dash, the chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, had no doubts: he wanted my testimony. But he told Charlie he was worried that the members of his committee, who were reading heavy doses of anti-Dean material in the newspapers, would need more detail about my testimony in order to make a decision about whether to grant me immunity.

Charlie continued to play the Senate committee against the U.S. attorney’s office for my testimony, and the negotiations dragged on. Each conversation I had with Bob McCandless and Charlie ended up at the same point: it was inevitable that I would soon testify somewhere, but my story was anything but organized. “Goddammit,” Charlie said. “You’ve got to quit worrying about everything else and focus on that testimony. You let McCandless worry about the press, and let me worry about your legal problems.”

When I protested that daily distractions made it impossible for me to focus, Bob McCandless arranged for Mo and me to use a beach house in Bethany
, Maryland, that belonged to a friend of his. Late on the night of May 7, as neighbors turned off their lights to darken the alley, we slipped from our house through Fielding’s house and into Pete Kinsey
’s waiting silver BMW, while Pete went in the other direction from Fred’s house through our house and down to our garage, revved up my Porsche and took off. The reporters scrambled to follow him as he roared up the street into his own garage, closed the door, and went to bed.

The oceanfront house was marvelous, even in gusty, overcast weather. There were no televisions or newspapers or reporters. The beach was deserted. Mo looked happier than I had seen her for weeks, and I began the task I had put off so long: recapturing nine months of complex detail. The highlights were easy, so I began with a rough outline. Reading old newspaper clippings helped call to mind what had been going on simultaneously inside the White House. My memory operates something like a movie projector when I hit the right switch. I knew I had to be very careful. Sometimes the pictures in my mind were out of focus, and sometimes I could not hear the accompanying words; when I tried to force my memory, it resulted in greater confusion.

The process was slow, but I made good progress for the next two days. Then McCandless called. “Johnny, I hate to bother you,” he began, “but I told you things were going to get a lot rougher, and it’s happened. Daniel Schorr
is going on CBS tonight with a story that the reason you’re fighting for immunity is that you’re afraid to go to jail for fear of homosexual attacks.”

“You’re shitting me! Aren’t you?”

“Nope. I tried to get him to kill the story. I told him it was the most preposterous thing I’d ever heard, but he’s still going with it.”

I was stunned, then angry. “For Christ’s sake, Bob, I can’t believe Schorr
’s going with that garbage. He’s been around a long time, and he sure as hell must know a smear when he sees one.”

“No way to turn him off. I’ve tried. He’s attributing the story to one of your lawyers. Shaffer may choke the son-of-a-bitch, if I don’t do it first.”

“Well goddammit, try once more, Bob,” I said. “Tell him I’m not any more afraid of getting raped in jail than any other man. But I know enough to know that those guys in prison watch the news. If Schorr
runs that story, they’ll lick their chops to test me my first day in prison. You tell Schorr
that’s the dirtiest goddam stunt I ever heard of.” I hung up, fighting a small suspicion that Bob himself might have faked the story in order to force me out in the public with my story.

“Mo,” I said, as she watched a stray dog wander down the beach, “how do I counter the image of an unethical, President-deceiving, fag fearing squealer whose wife, it is rumored—
and according to Bob it’s still only a rumor—has quietly left him because she unwittingly married the scum of the earth?”

“That’s really sweet,” she replied.

Daniel Schorr
’s story was one of a mass of similar tales—all seemed designed to frighten me or impugn my motives. I knew that the White House was behind most of them. It was a rough game. The White House was taking advantage of its power, and betting that millions of people did not wish to believe a man who called the President a liar. It played upon emotions: no one likes a squealer, a Judas, an informant, a tattletale, especially one who is also guilty. Every base motivation was attributed to me: I had turned on the President for money, for publicity, for spite, because I was a perverted character. More commonly, it was stated that I was lying about the President to save my own skin.

The stories stung me. I kept reminding myself that I was not lying, and that my loyalty to Richard Nixon had died a long, painful, and justified death. But I winced defensively when reasonable commentators said that my record cast doubt on my right to accuse the Nixon White House of anything. I exploded in anger when I was called a liar. The statement that most infuriated me was columnist Joseph Alsop
’s public declaration that I was a “bottom dwelling slug.” I didn’t even know what a slug was, so I went to the dictionary: “any of various slimy, elongated...gastropods related to the terrestrial snails.” Slugs live in mud, under rocks.

McCandless called two to three times a day with rumors and intelligence he had picked up from reporters, and I soon had an unhappy baptism into the ways of the Washington press corps. Reporters who swore publicly that they’d rot in jail before revealing their sources were calling McCandless with stories that the White House was trying to plant on them. Some wanted to trade them for my stories on the White House. Colson was peddling a story that I had lied to the President about Howard Hunt. What dirt did I have on Colson? Pat Buchanan
was putting out the word that I had taken part in wild sex orgies. What did I have on Buchanan
? Maxine Cheshire
, the
Washington Post
gossip columnist, was about to write a story that I had bought a new Mercedes, the implication being that my disloyalty had brought me ill-gotten riches. (I had been seen driving Charlie’s Mercedes.) Did I have a better story that we might offer for the one about me?

McCandless called me in the wake of the Daniel Schorr
story. “John, I know you’re working on your testimony, but you’ve got to stand up and punch back at these bastards in the White House. They’re killing you in the press, and the reporters wonder why you’re hiding.”

“Talk to Charlie, Bob,” I replied. “He’s all over me to pin down my whole story, and it’s going to take months this way. I’m getting subpoenaed all over the place. I can’t focus on it. I can’t remember. I just don’t have time to deal with reporters. Nothing else matters if I can’t testify truthfully. When I go on the box and under oath, people will believe what I say.”

“Come on now, John,” Bob said impatiently. “You know better than that. I know your testimony is important, but this truth stuff is not worth a damn if you don’t have any credibility. Goddammit, you’ve been around long enough to know that. Christ, John, LBJ lied through his teeth about Vietnam in 1964 and won in a landslide. McGovern
told the truth about Watergate last year and got his ass kicked. You’ve got to start fighting to build an image! You’ve got to give these guys something to convince them.”

“Okay, Bob. I tell you what. Why don’t you draft up a statement to denounce the malicious stories about me? Something tough, but general?”

“All right. That’s a start. But these guys want to see you in the flesh. Get a feel for you. They say their asses are on the line about believing you.”

“Well, let’s start with the statement. I’ll talk to Charlie.”

Through early May, I stayed isolated at Charlie’s insistence. Bob had to handle the reporters himself in the “great war of leaks” after Watergate began to break open. I would see bits of my testimony like Liddy’s offer to be shot or Ehrlichman’s order to “deep-six” the things from Hunt’s safe on the front pages. I thought Bob had leaked them, but I never asked him. Charlie wanted me to be able to testify that I had not “tried my case in the press.” I could say under oath that I had not leaked stories and had not been told who did.

Tension inevitably developed between Charlie and Bob, since their functions were almost diametrically opposed. Charlie protested whenever a story appeared that looked as if it had come from me; it hurt his negotiations with the prosecutors, who wanted my testimony kept secret with them. On the other hand, Charlie’s tough demands that I be granted immunity hurt Bob’s relations with the press; they made it seem that I was trying to get off scot-free, and they worsened my squealer image. I felt pulled and tugged between my two lawyers.