Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (56 page)

“I hope I can deliver for you as a witness, Jim, but I want to be straight with you about it. I don’t know how I’m going to adjust to prison. I’m no Gordon Liddy, and testifying is a bitch. I’m going to miss all those Scotch-and-waters.”

“Ah, you’ll do fine,” Neal said, waving his hand as he headed toward his desk. “I’ll put you in a motel room with a bottle of Scotch every night if I have to. Lubricate your memory. We have a very flexible prison system.” He was grinning. “I’m not worried about ole John Dean. Let’s get to work.”

“It’s your wife,” Neal said as he handed me the phone. “Tell her you’re behaving. I’m willing to vouch for you.”

“When are you coming home, John?” asked Mo. “You’ve been there all day.”

“I can’t answer your question, dear, but I’m sure prosecutor Neal knows he’s cutting into our time together. Hold on, and I’ll check with him.” I was speaking loudly so that Neal could hear. “How much longer are we going to work tonight?” I asked him. I held the receiver toward him so that Mo could hear his answer.

“Eight or nine o’clock!” he boomed. “But tell her I’ll spend more time away from my wife in the next year than you will.”

I put the phone back to my ear. “That creep,” said Mo. “How about the weekend?”

“No problem. Prosecutor Neal tells me he’s in a tennis tournament back in Nashville this weekend.”

“I hope he loses,” she said.

When I turned back to Neal he was unconsciously studying his reflection in the windows of his bookcase. Vanity, I thought. He emerged from his reverie and grinned at me. “I’m going to win that tennis tournament,” he declared. “I’m one of those little guys who’s insecure, so I like to get into tournaments with big guys and whip ‘em.” I smiled at him, thinking how like Jim Neal was to a bantam rooster. I liked him, despite my vicious thoughts of a few hours earlier.

September 2, 1974

Charlie worried that his office doors were open. This was Labor Day, my last day of freedom, and he was still trying to find out where I would be imprisoned. The officials were giving evasive answers. They had merely hinted that I would be put in an abandoned missile site outside Washington. Charlie was expressing his displeasure over the confusion forcefully, but he was distracted by his unlocked doors. He was worried about break-ins and wiretaps.

“I’m going to have a look around,” he said, and he walked out the door. Deputy Marshal Bud McPherson
waited in the office and watched as Charlie nodded politely to a man walking by on the sidewalk. A few minutes went by.

“You’re under arrest!” Charlie thundered. Bud ran to the door. Charlie was crouched like a wrestler in front of a man he’d noticed before. The man was carrying a batch of office equipment under his arm. The veins were standing out in Charlie’s neck. “Don’t move!” he shouted. “You’re under arrest!”

“You can’t arrest me,” Charlie’s suspect sniffed with calm indignation. “Who are you, anyway?”

“That’s my office,” said Charlie, pointing to the building, “and that’s my partner’s Dictaphone,” pointing to the machine the man was carrying. “I’m making a citizen’s arrest!”

The suspect tensed visibly. “You haven’t got the power to arrest me.”

Charlie shrugged and backed off a few steps. “You’re going to be mighty surprised, friend,” he drawled amiably, “‘cause there’s a thirty-eight revolver about seven inches behind your head.” Charlie looked thoughtful, then: “Maybe ten inches.”

The suspect rotated slowly so as to keep an eye on Charlie, but he was shortly staring down the barrel of McPherson
’s gun. Bud was in the classic arrest pose, knees bent slightly, feet spread, arms stretched out, both hands steadying the gun. The suspect went pale and limp as sheets in a laundry bin. Later he pleaded guilty to breaking and entering.

September 3, 1974

“John, you’re not going to like this, but there’s been a change in the plan,” Bud McPherson
said grimly. He and Terry Walters
, his partner, had been protecting me for six months. Their last assignment was to deliver me to prison.

“What’s happening now?”

“Well, Marshal McKinney
says you have to surrender to his office instead of the Special Prosecutor’s office. He ordered us to bring you in to him at the courthouse.”

“Goddam, Bud, I don’t want to do that. Can we go in the backdoor?”

“Yeah, I think so. We’re supposed to rendezvous with two of McKinney
’s deputies at DuPont Circle. They’re making a big deal out of this.”

“More bad news,” Bud said later as he climbed back into the car at the rendezvous. “Those guys say we have to follow them right to the front door. They won’t let us go in the back.”

“Oh, no,” I moaned. “I don’t like any of this. Why do we have to follow those bastards? Can’t we just slip in the back when we get there?”

“Afraid not,” Terry lamented. “We’re from the L.A. office, and we’re in McKinney
’s jurisdiction. He’s like the Sheriff of Nottingham in his territory. We can’t buck him.”

I slumped down in the seat, hiding behind my sunglasses. There was a lump in my throat. My mind was brimming with memories of my leave taking from Mo just a few minutes earlier. A hug and a brief kiss, as if I were going to the office. I couldn’t have made it through anything more intimate. I was already daydreaming, I realized, living in memories. Like a prisoner.

“Oh, shit!” cried Bud. “Look at that!”

I snapped up and looked out the window. Several dozen reporters were milling in front of the courthouse. “I knew it,” I said. “I’ll give you a hundred to one McKinney
tipped them off. No wonder he’s making sure we go in the front door.”

“It figures,” said Terry. “His men up ahead have got on their Sunday duds.”

“Keep your chin up, John,” Bud encouraged. “Let’s go. We’ll fight our way through.”

The horde surrounded us before we could get out of the car. Questions came at me one on top of the other: “What’s your reaction to Nixon’s resignation?” “You’ve been vindicated as President Nixon’s chief accuser. Any comment?” “How do you feel about going to jail?” I forced a smile and muttered, “No comment.” McKinney
’s men were cheerfully official; I thought they lingered a bit before the cameras. Bud and Terry made a flying wedge for me all the way to McKinney
’s office, where the District of Columbia marshal was waiting proudly.

“Good work,” he said. “You’re right on time.” He accepted my surrender formally. It took all my willpower to control my temper. But I was McKinney
’s prisoner, and he could make life difficult for me.

I was spreadeagled against the wall in the cellblock beneath the courthouse, frisked, fingerprinted, and then posed for mug shots. Down the hall into a cell. A huge door clanged shut behind me. “The slammer.” Just like the movies. I turned around in panic and looked back at sixteen feet of greenish iron bars.

Only a few minutes—I was talking fast to myself—then I’ll be taken to some “safe house” jail. Don’t count on it, I cautioned myself. I hadn’t counted on this, surrendering at the courthouse and being locked in its basement cellblock, and I still didn’t know where I was going, or when. I was learning.

There wasn’t much to inspect in the cell. Iron bars, three very solid tile walls, a toilet with no seat, a sink high enough so that prisoners couldn’t urinate in it, and a long steel bench. It was clean. I sat down on the bench and read the graffiti. There was no window. I glanced at my watch. I had been there ten minutes. I thought about time. Chunks of it. Ticking sounds of it. Vast clouds of it. Circles, infinite numbers, endless waves.

One of my jailers came to check on me. He handed me the sports section of the
Washington Post
and left. I tried to read. Suddenly, I felt it coming. My pulse began racing. I tried to breathe deeply to relax, but that seemed to make it worse. The stale musty air coming into my lungs was so stifling that I tried to forget about breathing. The room was closing in. Claustrophobia. I kept telling myself I’d always been able to suppress it. I walked around the cell several times. That helped some. I forced myself to read the paper.

The deputy returned with a chair and sat down outside my cell. “Damn hot today,” he observed.

“Sure is.” I was glad he was there. But I was annoyed that he thought he could just talk at me.

“You remember me?”

I gave a weak nod.

“Up in Connecticut,” he prodded. “The big demonstration at Yale
.”

“Oh, sure.” The memory pushed the claustrophobia back a few degrees. He and I had shot the bull one afternoon back in 1970 when I was covering a pro-Bobby Seale
demonstration for the Justice Department.

He wanted to reminisce, but I was spent and nauseated. I went over to the tall sink, cupped my hand under the spigot, but there was no water. The deputy brought me a cup of ice water from the cooler. Then he lectured me about how President Ford had vetoed a pay hike for the Marshal’s Service
. I said enough to keep the conversation going. Each time I glanced at him one of his eyes was cut off by a cell bar. It was disconcerting at first, but then I found a game in it: I would look around the cell quickly and try to guess which of his eyes I would see when I turned back. I was batting just over .500 when he left.

“Hey, Joe! Bring him out!” A guard’s yell echoed down the cellblock, and soon my door was rattling open. I was escorted out of the courthouse basement and into a car by more marshals.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Fort Holabird
.”

The Marshal’s Service ran a small prison at Fort Holabird
, near Baltimore; it was used mainly for Mafia witnesses with contracts on their heads. Magruder, Colson, and Kalmbach had been transferred there in preparation for the cover-up trial. I was surprised to be joining them. Neal had told me I wouldn’t be, because he was worried that the defense lawyers might charge us with concocting false testimony if we were together. I hadn’t talked with my old colleagues for nearly a year and a half, and I presumed none of them would be happy to see me. My apprehension was overshadowed by relief. Two hours in the cellblock had felt like an eternity. It was a bad omen.

“Dean, I’m the site supervisor,” announced a frail, colorless man with a surprisingly strong voice. He avoided looking at me and sat fidgeting at his desk, appearing uncertain about what to say. “We’re crowded here,” he said. “This is a small place. We can barely handle the twenty-one men who are here, so we have rules that must be followed.” He paused again, and then something else jumped into his mind. “Listen, Dean. I don’t want you signing a lot of autographs around here. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied. I was bemused and disoriented. The idea of autographs in prison was to baffle me until deputies started asking me to sign copies of Magruder’s book; he sold them to all takers.

“Good,” the supervisor said. “Now, if everyone follows the rules here, we all get along pretty well. You will be treated fairly. All the men are called ‘principals,’ not prisoners. Understand? This is a special facility. It’s no hard-core prison. All principals are allowed two personal phone calls every week. Collect only. They have to be placed by the supervisor on duty. Understand? Now, you are allowed unlimited calls to and from your lawyer, of course. Your wife is not your lawyer. Don’t try to cheat. Okay. Once a week you will be paid a witness fee of eight dollars a day, but half of it goes into our general house fund here for food and supplies. And you are not to keep any of it in your room or on your person. We don’t want any trouble, and we’ve got a lot of fellows in here with sticky fingers. Understand? Just see the supervisor if you want to transfer some money. Okay. Now, the principals are responsible for all cooking, housekeeping, and chores. They assign their own duties. You’ll get the hang of it. That’s about it. You’ll pick up the rest. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.” I nodded.

“Now, one other thing. I have been directed by Washington,” he declared with emphasis, “that you’re to be confined to your quarters and not to talk to anyone here. You will be segregated from the other principals. You will eat your meals in your room, and there will be a deputy posted outside your door at all times. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied mechanically. The prosecutors wanted me to have no contact with the other Watergate witnesses. It was just as well.

A deputy took me down to the grimy pit of a kitchen after I’d unpacked the Second World War-vintage supplies in my room, which was in a dilapidated Army barracks. It seemed almost plush after the cellblock.

Kalmbach and Colson appeared, and I eyed them tensely. Then Herb came over, shook my hand firmly, and looked me in the eye. “I’m glad to see you, John.” I knew he meant it, and I felt immense relief. Herb had lost weight. I would have thought he looked chipper but his eyes told me otherwise.

“Hi, John,” Chuck said nervously. “Would you like to borrow my radio or something?”

“No, thanks. I’m fine, Chuck.”

“The food is damn good here.” He was making conversation. “We rotate the cooking every day, and some of these fellows are terrific. You’ll find beef Stroganoff in the refrigerator from dinner, and I highly recommend it.”