Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (62 page)

“That’s too bad. I’d like to meet the old fart.”

I’d been vindicated one more time. The jury had believed me. That gave me a wave of satisfaction long enough for me to go down to Colson’s room and tell him the verdict. But I didn’t ride the wave long. When I returned to my room, I saw
The Summing Up
lying on my bed, open to the page I’d just read. I picked it up:

At first sight it is curious that our own offences should seem to us so much less heinous than the offences of others. I suppose the reason is that we know all the circumstances that have occasioned them and so manage to excuse in ourselves what we cannot excuse in others. We turn our attention away from our own defects, and when we are forced by untoward events to consider them find it easy to condone them. For all I know we are right to do this; they are part of us and we must accept the good and the bad in ourselves together. But when we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world. To take a trivial instance: how scornful we are when we catch someone out telling a lie; but who can say that he had never told not one, but a hundred? We are shocked when we discover that great men were weak and petty, dishonest or selfish, sexually vicious, vain or intemperate; and many people think it disgraceful to disclose to the public its heroes’ failings. There is not much to choose between men. They are all a hotchpotch of greatness and littleness, of virtue and vice, of nobility and baseness. Some have more strength of character, or more opportunity, and so in one direction or another give their instincts freer play, but potentially they are the same. For my part I do not think I am any better or any worse than most people, but I know that if I set down every action in my life and every thought that has crossed my mind the world would consider me a monster of depravity.

January 8, 1975

“Hey, Dean, telephone!” a voice shouted up the stairs.

“Okay, be right down,” I called back, and gathered up the papers I’d spread out on my small desk. I had been computing the debts I’d amassed in the twenty months I’d been without a pay check. We’d sold everything we could sell, except the house in California. Mo had told me she was ready to get a job if I thought it was necessary. I slipped the papers into the drawer hurriedly, and ran. “Okay, okay, I’m coming,” I answered again. I headed down the stairs to the wall phone in the main hall. “Hello.”

“You standing or sitting?” It was Charlie. I didn’t like his opening question. During the last week he had been in discussions with Henry Ruth
about where I was going to be sent to serve the rest of my jail term. Holabird
was being closed down.

“I’m standing. Why?”

“Well, sit down!” he ordered.

I untangled the cord and sat on the bottom step. “Okay. Let’s hear it. I’m sitting.”

“You’re about to find out what a fine goddam lawyer you’ve got, and I hope you appreciate it.”

“We’ll see,” I said tartly. “What do you have?”

“I just had a call from Sirica’s clerk, and the good judge has seen the wisdom of our motion to reduce sentence, and, to get right to the point, you’re a free man!”

“Charlie, don’t play around. Tell me what the hell the judge has done.”

“I just did. He’s freed you. He granted our motion and reduced your sentence to time served.”

“You’re shitting me?”

“No, sir. Now go pack your bags and I’ll make sure the judge’s order is out there as fast as possible.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“You bet your ass. I told you I was a good lawyer! No, the reason you’re free is that you...”

I listened but didn’t hear. It was true. Charlie wasn’t kidding. I was free. I’m free, was all I could think about. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream, or what to do next. When Charlie said he’d call back, all I could say was, “Thank you, I’ll talk to you then.”

I hung up the telephone. Jeb was coming down the hall. I wondered how he’d receive the news. Maybe Sirica had freed him too, and Herb. Or maybe he hadn’t. I wanted to avoid Jeb and hurried back to my room. I stood looking out the window.

“The nightmare is over.” I was talking out loud to myself. “It really is over,” I repeated and listened to my own words. I couldn’t stop shaking my head as I gazed out the window, nor could I stop the tears.

Everything is different now.

Updated Edition Afterword

WHEN I FINISHED WRITING the first edition of this book, I truly believed that Watergate had resulted in changes that would affect the way government operated in Washington for the better. The presidency, as
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward wrote in
Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate
(1999), had been changed. But that shadow has now faded.

These events certainly changed my life, and there was no question for me, at the time I wrote this book, that everything would be quite different because of this experience. After publishing and promoting
Blind Ambition
, I soon entered night school to study accounting (for five years) because it is the language of business. For the next several decades I was engaged in acquiring, merging and then selling small and middle market businesses, and with my partners we enjoyed success at what I called “private investment banking.” I also was blessed with an exceptional son, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa and then graduated at the top of his class in business school, before going on to succeed in business and life, marrying a college classmate and adding a lovely daughter-in-law and three beautiful little girls to the family. Because I do not believe in retirement, I returned to writing when I turned sixty years of age, an activity I enjoy and plan to do as long as I am able to do so. I could never have predicted, however, that I would find it necessary to defend myself against the false claims of people who would seek to reinvent this history for political or financial gain, or both. This new Afterword addresses those efforts, while explaining what, in fact, actually occurred. I have divided the material into three sections: Part I – An Overview of What Really Happened at the Nixon White House During Watergate; Part II – Watergate Revisionism or Sex, Lies and Bogus History; and Part III – A Few Persistent Questions About Watergate All These Years Later.

This Afterword is based on material I have gathered in the three-plus decades since I wrote this book; much of this information was unearthed when my wife Maureen and I filed a defamation lawsuit against the early Watergate revisionists. Although I discovered nothing in all these intervening years that would change anything I have written in the proceeding pages, I have, during that time, uncovered facts that further illuminate and clarify the earlier information I reported. Before turning to these subjects, however, it might be valuable for me to explain how this book was written.

Writing the First Edition of This Book

In 1974-75, when I was working on this book, very little information about the Nixon White House was available. I had been denied access to my White House files before I testified as well as when I worked on this book. Since then, and over the past three decades, a virtual tsunami of information has become available. The voluminous records of the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Impeachment Inquiry, and the Watergate Special Prosecution Force have been made public. Hundreds of hours of secretly-recorded conversations on Nixon White House tapes have been made public. Many of my former colleagues have written their accounts of what happened, and countless historians and journalists have written about these events.

Until 1991, I largely ignored all this material, but when I was forced to file a lawsuit to set the record straight, I read massive amounts of material that related to the activities at the Nixon White House. Nothing I learned from this material changed my mind about what I had written. To the contrary, I found solid corroboration. In addition, I learned a great deal more about Watergate and the Nixon White House.

Blind Ambition
was not written to explain Watergate; rather, it is a memoir of a few years of my life. Because I am trained as an attorney, however, I had a unique problem when writing it: How should I deal with my own testimony? I knew that I could not repeat it, verbatim, in the book, for it was as flat and dull as testimony tends to be. (It also ran over 61,000 words!) At first, I tried to quote select passages and explain my feelings about the matters involved. I proceeded in this fashion because I was concerned about changing so much as a word in my testimony—which might cause me to be asked, “Which is true, Mr. Dean, Blind Ambition or your testimony?” However, my literary agent, David Obst, and then my editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew, told me that my effort to tell the story in this fashion did not work. David had an idea, however: He would get Simon & Schuster to hire another of his writers, Taylor Branch, to help me pull it together—in less than a month we had reworked the material into the narrative you have just read.

The Assistance of Taylor Branch

Taylor is a few years younger than I. He is a wonderful writer and editor with a great eye for the story that should be told.
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After Taylor went through what I had written, he said he believed that my testimony must be the core of the book. Taylor felt the fastest way to work would be for us to discuss what occurred, event by event, with him making notes. We quickly fell into a pattern of doing this in the afternoon and evening, often over cocktails and dinner. The next day, Taylor would assemble a draft section, sometimes including details that had been inappropriate for testimony. I would then go through the revised draft, where Taylor had blended material from my manuscript, my testimony, and our conversations, to make sure I was comfortable with the way he was dramatizing the narrative.

By reason of this process, I knew I had a foolproof explanation if anyone claimed a difference between my testimony and the book, for I could explain how the book was assembled. For over a decade, I maintained all our drafts and working papers in storage, only to discover the box had been placed under a leaking roof, and mildew had disintegrated the materials. (Only recently did I find a few remnants of our work that had been misfiled and thus escaped water damage.) Reconstructing how
Blind Ambition
was written would become important during our lawsuit, because just as I had feared, the Watergate revisionists claimed the book was, in fact, evidence that I had perjured myself before the Senate. This is false, and the revisionists have raised differences so insignificant they are not worth addressing other than to show the extremes to which they will go to try to discredit me. (I provide a few examples in Part II.)

Had I the chance to do it over again now, after acquiring a better understanding of the book business as a result of writing and publishing ten books, I would give Taylor a “written with” credit, but at the time it never occurred to me, Taylor never mentioned it, nor did Alice or David suggest it. Not until the revisionists made a big deal out of how the book was written was the matter even relevant.

Everything in this book came from my memory, my testimony, my journal, my first draft of the manuscript, and my agreement as to the way Taylor and I would assemble and present it all. As I understand the term, this book was not “ghosted,”
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as some have claimed, for Taylor used verbatim portions of my earlier draft (some of which were cut and pasted as we assembled the draft for the typist). In addition, there are parts of the book that Taylor had no involvement in writing whatsoever, like the 24,000 words we took from my journal to close out the story, which I tweaked to conform to the narrative style of the earlier parts of the book after Taylor departed. According to my wife’s calendar, we completed the revised manuscript’s ten chapters from start to finish in twenty days, with interruptions for a few social evenings. Having written a bi-weekly column for the past nine years, along with countless articles and book reviews for many different publications, and having written eight non-fiction books in the same period, I consider myself a relatively fast and experienced writer. Thus, I feel confident in saying that no one could have ghosted this book in twenty days; instead, Taylor provided invaluable assistance and editing in that time. He was indispensable in this way, and also in providing me with the editorial assistance that allowed me to flesh out some parts of my testimony while condensing others, and making it more readable and vivid.

Frankly, I wish Taylor and I had recorded our discussion sessions, for he was good at drawing me out, and it was much easier for me to talk about these events with someone who was genuinely curious about them, than it was for me to decide, sitting in front of a keyboard, what I should or should not address. Today, three decades after writing the book, there is no way I can recall the emotions I felt during these events, which were still quite fresh in my mind when writing this book.

Part I

An Overview of What Really Happened Inside the Nixon White House During Watergate

With the distance of time, and the availability of new information, it is now quite clear, at least to me, how the bungled burglary on June 17, 1972 at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Watergate offices unraveled the presidency of Richard Nixon, ultimately forcing him out of office. The hallmarks of this troubling episode in American history are not only venality and criminality, but also banality and stupidity. If one looks back through the wreckage, there are a number of key events that conflated to ruin the Nixon presidency. Over the years, some of us who were involved in different aspects of these events have tried to figure out what happened and why. For example, I have discussed these matters at length over many years with Alex Butterfield, who had no involvement whatsoever in any criminal activity, and Bud Krogh, who pled guilty to his involvement in the break-in at Dan Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. In addition, the evidence is now available to confirm what occurred. As a result, there are no major unanswered questions regarding Watergate, although Nixon apologists and Watergate revisionists like to pretend otherwise. There is certainly no mystery about why Watergate happened or about the pure stupidity of it either.

The “Pentagon Papers” – Nixon’s Newly Exacerbated Attitude

Everything changed in the Nixon White House in mid-June 1971, following the leak by Dan Ellsberg of the so-called Pentagon Papers (the classified Defense Department study of the origins of the war in Vietnam). While Nixon had always been concerned about leaks of national security information, which made it difficult for him to govern, this massive release of classified national security information took his concern to new levels. Nixon’s dark mood and growing anger are evidenced by the White House tapes of this period.
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It was at this time that Nixon sought to enjoin the
New York Times
and other newspapers from publishing the leaked documents. It was at this time that Nixon ordered a break-in at the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC, believing that the Institute possessed government documents related to the Pentagon Papers. It was at this time that Nixon created a special unit within the White House to investigate leaks; that unit would break into Dan Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office looking for information. This was also when Jack Caulfield arrived in my office to tell me that Chuck Colson had ordered him to “fire-bomb” the Brookings Institute, and then to send burglars in to retrieve government papers related to what the President wanted, which prompted me to fly to San Clemente to try to put an end to the craziness. When I wrote
Blind Ambition
, I was unaware that Nixon himself had ordered the break-in. I learned that fact only in 1997, when historian Stanley L. Kutler published
Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes
.

Nixon’s reactions define the period. For example, on June 17, 1971, Nixon demanded, “Goddamnit, get in [the Brookings Institute] and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” During a conversation on June 30, 1971, Nixon again issued an order: “They [the Brookings Institute] have [a] lot of material... I want Brookings, I want them just to break in and take it out. Do you understand?… You talk to [White House aide Howard] Hunt. I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in.” During an early-morning conversation with Haldeman and Kissinger on July 1, 1971, Nixon rhetorically and sarcastically asked, “Did they get the Brookings Institute raided last night? No. Get it done. I want it done. I want the Brookings Institute’s safe cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that makes it somebody else....” Again, the next day, when talking with Haldeman and Colson, Nixon made himself very clear: “Also, I really meant it when—I want to go in and crack that safe. Walk in and get it.” While this was bad, it would get worse.