Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (49 page)

“That is correct,” I submitted.

“You have been bargaining with them for immunity, which has not been granted. Isn’t that an accurate statement?”

My mind raced. I felt helpless. I knew I couldn’t say I was holding out for immunity because I was unsure whether the prosecutors would go after the others involved. Everything seemed cloudy. I submitted again: “That is correct, Senator.”

Talmadge
shifted the subject. “Now, there have been various reports in the press. I know nothing whatever about their credibility. Did you see an article in one of the Washington papers that you were kicked out of a law firm here for violations of the canon of ethics?”

“I did, sir.” I cringed. Talmadge
was cutting to the nub.

“Would you like to comment on that?”

As I began to explain the incident, I felt an inner despair about being able to satisfy anyone. The public forum and pressure demanded simple answers. How could I make a complicated matter simple? To explain what had happened on February 4, 1966—the day I was “fired” from my first and only job in private law practice—
I would have to spin out a long story about a young lawyer’s initiation into a Washington communications law firm. The senior partners were wheeling and dealing in broadcast stocks, and I quickly became bored and unhappy with the work. When a friend at the firm asked me if I would be interested in investing in a television station, I said yes, and soon suffered the consequences. The firm’s senior partner, a man who intimidated me by his practice of carrying a revolver in his office, learned of my investment, and was outraged. Since I already planned to leave the firm, I refused to talk about my investment and told him I was quitting. He told me I was fired. Two years after, he accused me of “unethical conduct,” but he retracted the charge when I resolved to take the charge before a lawyers’ ethics committee.

Now—before Talmadge
and the whole world—these old skeletons were coming out of the closet. I could not do justice to the incident in less than an hour, so I said merely that the matter had been investigated by a lawyer responsible for certifying my integrity to the Civil Service Commission. I offered the lawyer’s letter, which had cleared me, to the committee.

Senator Ervin broke in to ask me to read the letter. I did so gratefully, but I was stung by the realization that it is impossible to get clean once one is publicly tarred.

Next Talmadge
asked a string of specific questions about the early days of the cover-up, which was fine with me. They were easy. I recounted the facts almost by rote. My confidence began to revive, but I couldn’t figure out where the Senator was headed until he arrived: “Now, after all those facts were available to you, why did you not, as counsel to the President, go in at that time and tell him what was happening?” The Senator looked intent as he awaited my answer.

“Senator, I did not have access to the President,” I replied lamely. Talmadge
’s unhappy look told me he was not at all satisfied, so I tried harder. “I was never presumptuous enough to try to pound on the door to get in, because I knew it just did not work that way.” I paused, glanced at the Senator’s stare, and panicked. I had seen Clark Mollenhoff
of the
Des Monies Register
sitting in the gallery. He inspired another feeble answer. “I know of efforts of other White House staff to get in,” I stammered. “I have seen, for example, one of the reporters sitting here in this room, Mr. Mollenhoff. I have seen memoranda he tried to send in to the President, and they were just blocked.”

Mollenhoff had worked briefly at the White House, and I hoped he would clue Talmadge
in on Haldeman’s system.

Senator Talmadge
looked incredulous. “You mean you were counsel to the President of the United States and you could not get access to him if you wanted to? Is that your testimony?”

My mind went blank. How could I possibly explain in a few words the way the White House worked? How could I explain that my stature in the White House was not all that different from a grounds keeper? I’d be laughed out of the hearing room if I testified that I was not sure the President had known my name then, or if I told of my “meeting” in the Oval Office with the college newspaper editors. There were hundreds of stories I might have offered to show that I could not have gotten a piece of paper into the Oval Office, much less my body. Even later in the cover-up, after my influence had risen dramatically, Haldeman had blocked me. Once, when the President was preparing for a meeting with Senator Henry Jackson
, I had written a “talking paper” for him, suggesting ways he might question Jackson about the early talk in the Senate of a Watergate investigation. I had shown how the President might ask Jackson whether it was inevitable and, if so, whether Jackson might lead it; we thought he would be much friendlier to the White House than someone like Senator Ervin. Ehrlichman had approved the talking paper, but Haldeman had cut it off before it reached Nixon. Later, when he handed it back to me with a big line drawn across it, I had protested and mentioned Ehrlichman’s okay. Haldeman had said, scowling, “I didn’t approve it. Besides, the President’s no good at this sort of thing.”

Now, facing Senator Talmadge
, I gave up. No illustration of White House procedures would be convincing, and I couldn’t think of good ones anyway. “I thought it would be presumptuous of me to try,” I repeated. I looked at Talmadge
. Still not enough. I tried to accelerate my mind, but it was in neutral. “Because I was told my reporting channel was Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman,” I added weakly, “and I was reporting everything I knew to them.”

Senator Talmadge
wasn’t buying. “It seems to me after finding evidence of a conspiracy of this magnitude, it was incumbent upon you as counsel to the President to make every possible effort to see that he got that information at that time.”

His persistence had worn me down. Forget the White House, I thought. Try another angle. “Senator, I was participating in the cover-up at that time,” I said bluntly. This confession, although hardly new, seemed to mollify him. Later, during the lunch break, McCandless reported hearing that this one sentence had gone a long way toward winning the Senator’s confidence.

That afternoon, Senator Lowell P. Weicker
, Jr., Republican of Connecticut, went fishing all throughout his cross-examination. I tried to figure out what he was driving at with his long speeches and readings from my testimony, but I could only guess. He wasn’t asking many questions. From his declarations, he appeared to be particularly incensed about the Administration’s political abuse of government agencies like the FBI and the IRS. I decided that his anger might stem from a private encounter I had had with him weeks earlier at Charlie’s home, when I had informed him of a White House strategy to “neutralize” him, if necessary, by confronting him with evidence that he had received political funds from Jack Gleason
’s 1970 Town House Operation
. Weicker
had stopped me to deny the allegations as if he were making a speech on the Senate floor; he said he had reported every cent of his contributions over his entire political career. Now he was going on about the Administration’s unscrupulous use of government information for political purposes. I thought perhaps he was still piqued about what I had told him.

“I apologize to the committee for taking so much time,” Senator Weicker
said near the end of his allotted period, “but it is a subject that I confess I don’t have every last bit of information on. It is a difficult thing to piece together.”

I decided to volunteer something that might help him. “I might also add,” I said, “that in my possession is a rather—very much down the line as to what you are talking about—is a memorandum that was requested of me, to prepare a means to attack the enemies of the White House. There was also maintained what was called an ‘enemies list,’ which was rather extensive and continually being updated.”

Senator Weicker
sat up straight at the mention of this memo and the list. “I am not going to ask who was on it. I’m afraid you might answer,” he quipped. “I wonder, are these documents in the possession of the committee?”

No, I explained. They did not fit the description of the Watergate documents Mr. Dash had asked for, but I would be happy to submit them.

Weicker
had reeled in a whopper. The press went crazy over the enemies list, and it became an instant status symbol to be on it. In the chaos, I was not asked what the enemies list meant. Colson, whose office had prepared it, defended himself with a statement that the list was nothing more than a compilation of names of people to be banned from White House functions. That much was true, but it was also true that Haldeman had selected some twenty people from the list who had incurred the President’s special wrath. These people had been targeted for IRS audits and other government harassment, but no action had been taken as far as I knew.
1
*

The furor over the enemies list threw me into another of the uncomfortable situations that I was learning to expect. I thought it was vastly overplayed in the media as evidence of a sinister and repressive machine. Under ceaseless pressure from the tickler, the enemies project had indeed grown from nothing into a list-making effort and could have had repressive effects in the second term, but it hadn’t. When the President’s political detractors exaggerated its significance and applauded me for revealing it, I felt even more of a squealer as a party to untruth. At the same time, however, I was aware that the hoopla was helping me. Everyone who loved the enemies list developed a stake in my value as a witness. The President’s opponents began to defend me more vigorously, almost as if the enemies list were more important to them than my testimony on the cover-up. I felt confused. The interpretations were beyond my control, and the atmosphere was heated. And since no one asked for my opinion about the enemies list, I sat back and privately enjoyed Colson’s attempts to explain himself.

My second day at the Ervin hearings ended with cross-examination by Democratic Senator Joseph M. Montoya
of New Mexico, who read prepared questions from index cards, one after another, oblivious to the possibility of pursuing any answer I might offer. The Senator was so friendly that I fell prey to temptation and took the opportunity to bounce back from Thompson’s and Talmadge
’s grillings by making sanctimonious speeches about my good intentions. The nobler my answers, the better Montoya
seemed to like them, though I could hear Charlie groaning in the background as I told the Senator what a fine character I was. When Montoya
asked me how I thought the committee could resolve conflicting testimony in light of the President’s refusal to appear, I obliquely challenged the President to get on the box: “Mr. Chairman, I strongly believe that the truth always emerges. I don’t know if it will be during these hearings. I don’t know if it will be as a result of further activities of the Special Prosecutor. I do not know if it will be through the processes of history. But the truth will come out someday. As far as any issue of fact...I am quite willing to submit myself to a polygraph on any issue of fact with any individual who says that what I’m saying is less than truthful.”

Senator Montoya
smiled as he read his next question: “What’s really made you change and start coming out with the truth in this matter as you have related it? What motivated you?”

I answered with a lyrical speech about my conversations with Mo on the power of truth and the dead end I saw in the cover-up. Charlie gagged, but I was too far gone to pay any attention.

“Do you have peace of mind now?” Montoya
intoned.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“In disclosing everything that you knew,” the Senator repeated, “do you have peace of mind and a clear conscience?”

“I’m not here as a sinner seeking a confessional,” I replied, laying it on ever more thickly, “but I have been asked to be here to tell the truth. And I have always planned at any time before any forum to tell the truth.”

The Senator rose to new heights. He wasn’t even reading from index cards. “What I’m trying to ask you is do you feel better now that you’ve told the truth instead of hiding it?”

“Indeed I do,” I averred. “It’s a very difficult thing to hide. And as I explained to the President, it would take perjury upon perjury upon perjury if it were to be perpetuated. I’m not capable of doing that...”

“That is all,” said Montoya
. “Thank you.” And Senator Ervin adjourned for the day.

I was barely out of the room when Charlie accosted me. “Goddammit, John, you sounded like you were running for office in there!”

“What’s wrong?” I snapped.

Charlie looked exasperated. “If that self-serving crap makes you feel good, fine. Just forget I said anything.” He changed the subject, but his advice sank in.