Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (8 page)

Young and I went to Poff’s office and spent four hours one afternoon questioning him on his judicial philosophy, background, and potential enemies, probing for skeletons. Poff was willing to cooperate even though he had just gone through a similar ordeal with a team of Mitchell’s men from the Justice Department. Young wrote a glowing report to Ehrlichman, which satisfied me immensely because I had liked Poff ever since serving under him at the House Judiciary Committee. Poff passed muster all the way up to the President, but then caught everyone off guard by suddenly withdrawing himself from consideration.

An open race commenced between Mitchell and Ehrlichman as both scanned the South for acceptable names. Ehrlichman sent Young off to study Representative Wilbur Mills, and District Judge Lewis F. Powell, Jr., rose to the top of his reserve list. Mitchell quickly sent his next two names to the White House: Herschell Friday of Arkansas and Judge Mildred Lilly of Southern California. Ehrlichman lost no time in sending Young and me to screen them. He instructed us to report back to him by phone as soon as possible.

David Young and I flew to Little Rock. Neither of us mentioned what we were both aware of: that he was along to make sure my old loyalties to Mitchell did not get in the way of Ehrlichman’s intentions, and I was there to keep Ehrlichman from looking too openly partisan.

After nine hours with
Herschell Friday, I phoned Ehrlichman. “John, he’s a fine man, a good smart lawyer with a very lucrative practice, but he would probably make Harrold Carswell look good as a witness in the Senate. He knows little constitutional law, and he hasn’t thought much about the major social issues that would confront him on the Court. I think we would take a beating trying to get him confirmed.”

Ehrlichman asked a few questions and then said, “Give me a written report when you return, but take the next flight now and meet with the lady judge.” I was soon back on the phone, speaking from a private room in Judge Lilly’s apartment. “She sure as hell looks like what our woman candidate for the Court should look like,” I said. “She’s damn bright and knows her mind. I don’t think she’d have any trouble getting confirmed, but the big question is whether the ABA committee will approve her. They may not think she’s experienced enough.”

Back in my office, I was not surprised to learn that Ehrlichman had used my assessment of Friday to block Mitchell’s recommendation. And when the American Bar Association blocked Judge Lilly, Mitchell had failed with three straight. The bases were empty and Ehrlichman stepped up to bat. He offered Lewis Powell as his candidate. Mitchell acceded, and Powell went on to the Court. I had been circulating the name of Assistant Attorney General William H. Rehnquist in the White House. It caught on, although the President could not pronounce Rehnquist’s name and called him a “clown” because of his pink shirts and his sideburns. Mitchell liked Rehnquist, but he smarted because the recommendation had come from the White House. And he smarted even more when someone leaked a story to columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak about how the President had to rely on the White House staff for Supreme Court nominations because the Attorney General could not deliver.

I was astonished at the boldness of Ehrlichman’s move against Mitchell and the shrewdness with which he had enlisted me. He had challenged and beaten the President’s most intimate adviser in an area where Mitchell cherished his prerogatives. It was a blow to Mitchell, not the first or the last. Long before his coup on the Supreme Court nominations, Ehrlichman had mounted a patient but relentless poaching war on Mitchell’s territory. He was campaigning to gather control over all the far-flung domestic agencies into the White House, where he could pull the levers, and by early 1971 he had tamed nearly all of them except Mitchell’s Department of Justice. It remained a sizable gap in his empire. As Ehrlichman moved in on his last and strongest opponent, many of us in the White House spent hours discussing the fine points of his deft skills.

Typically, he would begin by instructing his Domestic Council staff to study some matter in the Attorney General’s domain, such as drug abuse or antitrust policy. He would solicit and get Mitchell’s cooperation in the President’s name. Then a critical study would emerge, and Ehrlichman would explain privately to the President the failures in existing practices. He would recommend new solutions which always contained a transfer of authority to himself, and he would win the President’s approval.

Ehrlichman gained leverage over antitrust policy by attacking the suits brought by Mitchell’s Assistant Attorney General Richard McLaren against International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). He argued that the suits not only were contrary to the President’s desired antitrust policy but also were evidence of Mitchell’s failure to keep McLaren in bounds. For months he needled Mitchell, who, at least partly because he did not want to lose another battle to Ehrlichman, straddled the issue. Then, on April 28, 1971, Ehrlichman delivered his
coup de grace.
“Your strong views on how the Administration should conduct antitrust enforcement are not being translated into action,” he wrote the President, and he concluded with a request for power: “You should authorize us to require all government-wide antitrust policy work to be coordinated through one White House office, preferably the working group under Krogh that has been working on this for the past 90 days.” The President approved, and Ehrlichman had his foot on Mitchell’s neck. As the moving force behind the effort to settle the antitrust suits against ITT, he worked to consolidate his hold.

A year later, on February 29, 1972, the ITT settlement exploded in the Administration’s face when Jack Anderson published a memo purportedly written by ITT lobbyist Dita Beard, in which she baldly told her boss that the antitrust suit against ITT would be dropped in return for a $400,000 contribution of ITT cash and services to the GOP convention in San Diego.
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The next day Anderson lobbed another bombshell: he charged that Kleindienst, who had just been appointed Attorney General (Mitchell having left to head the Committee to Reelect the President), had lied “outright” about the settlement of the ITT case. Impulsively, Kleindienst demanded that his confirmation hearings be reopened so that he could clear his name.

As usual, John Ehrlichman took charge at the White House. On March 8, 1972, I was invited to his office for my first of many meetings on the Kleindienst-ITT matter, along with Chuck Colson, public relations pros and Congressional-liaison men. Always the congenial host, Ehrlichman motioned us all to be seated and took his usual easy chair. We could tell that John was not scheduled for other important meetings that day by his working uniform: blue blazer, white button-down shirt, club tie, and creaseless gray slacks. His formidable stomach, which had been expanding in proportion to his power, served as a comfortable rest for the pad of white paper he always carried to meetings. I thought he was a copious note taker until one day I stole a glance at his doodles. He was the finest and most prolific doodler in the Nixon White House, which helped him to stay awake at many meetings. Ehrlichman’s quick mind could not tolerate what others had to say once he had collected the facts and made up his mind.

At this meeting, he was collecting. “Well, fellas, what do you have to report from the boiling kettle?”

“Kleindienst is a damn fool,” Colson said instantly. “Jim Eastland tried to talk him out of going back to the Hill, but Kleindienst charged off after his honor like Sir Galahad. We wouldn’t be in this mess if he wasn’t so stupid.” James 0. Eastland, the venerable Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had become even friendlier to the Administration since Mitchell had assured him he would face no Republican opposition in his reelection campaign. He chaired the Kleindienst hearings to our advantage.

When Colson finished chewing on Kleindienst, we began assessing in earnest. We faced the nearly impossible task of proving a negative—of showing there was no collusion involved in the ITT settlement. After reviewing the documented history of the ITT case, I knew that Dita Beard’s memo conveyed a hopelessly inaccurate, almost naive view of the Administration’s workings. She appeared to be puffing up her own influence by ignoring the other forces at play, most notably Ehrlichman’s effort to wrest control of antitrust policy from Mitchell’s Justice Department. I also knew, however, that the campaign’s fund raisers would never hesitate to milk any decision for all it was worth.
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In short, we considered the Beard memo crass, almost an insult to our professionalism, but we knew we could not stand an open investigation. An honest defense based on the intricacies of tough opportunism would only make matters worse. As we kicked “scenarios” around the room, a public-relations strategy emerged around two central themes: hide the facts and discredit the opposition.

Ehrlichman approved the strategy and left the implementation to Chuck Colson, who threw himself into the campaign night and day, oblivious to unfavorable developments and undaunted by failure. He kept coming back again like a battering ram. From the beginning, Colson’s extraordinary efforts centered upon his conviction that the Dita Beard memo was a forgery. If he could prove it, he would expose the Democrats as hucksters. Bob Mardian did not share Colson’s belief and was convinced Colson’s effort was wasted time that would not help his friend Kleindienst get confirmed. I witnessed many table pounding debates between the two on this point, but Colson pressed on. The FBI’s famous laboratory would prove him right, he said. Since J. Edgar Hoover did not like Colson, I was sent to enlist the director’s cooperation, a delicate mission.

I was somewhat apprehensive about dealing with Hoover, not knowing what to expect from this legendary man I had met only once during my tenure at the Department of Justice. When I arrived five minutes early for our scheduled meeting, I was greeted by a lanky black agent neatly dressed in a dark-blue suit.

“Mr. Dean, Presidential counsel, I presume?” he said, standing at the door. He bowed his head slightly as he shook my hand, and said the director would see me in a minute.

I looked around the reception office filled with Hoover memorabilia: gangsters’ guns, clues from celebrated crimes, pictures, and other battle treasures placed in large glass cases.

“You’ve never been to the director’s office before, have you, Mr. Dean?”

“No, I haven’t,” I answered, thinking Hoover was probably reading my FBI file before he met me.

“Well, please feel free to look around.” I continued looking until he told me, without receiving any signal that I was aware of, that the director was ready to see me. “Please follow me, Mr. Dean.”

He led me along a dim corridor of inner offices where aging gray faces, Hoover’s personal staff, looked up from their desks as I passed their doors. Hoover was poised at the end of a long, polished conference table, waiting for me as if I were there to photograph him.

“Mr. Dean, please come in,” said the immaculately dressed, perfumed director. He excused my escort as we shook hands and ended the ceremonial arrival. I risked no small talk with the formidable chief and waited for his cue, which he wasted no time in giving. “Please hold my calls,” he said, flipping a switch on a large console beside his desk. “Mr. Dean, what can I do for you?”

“Mr. Hoover, we, the White House that is, Mr. Ehrlichman and others”—I wanted to get my authority established—“have good reason to believe the so-called Dita Beard memorandum is a phony, and we’d like to have your lab test it because we are sure that your test will confirm that it is a forgery.”

Hoover sat back and thought for a moment. “Do you have the document with you?”

“No, sir, but I’ll have it sent over if you are willing to examine it.”

“Of course I’ll examine it. I’d be happy to.” He leaned over to his console, flipped a switch and said, “Felt.” He paused, then hit the switch again, said, “Never mind,” and told me to get the document to Assistant Director Mark Felt, along with samples from the typewriter it was written on and some other comparative documents which Felt would describe for me.

“Yes, sir,” I answered. “This will be most helpful, because Dick Kleindienst is taking a terrible beating over that document. His confirmation hearing has nothing to do with him anymore. It’s a political attack on the Administration now. Jack Anderson started it all with the memo, and if we can show it’s a forgery...”

“I understand exactly, Mr. Dean, what you need,” the director said with emphasis, “and I’m delighted to be of service. Jack Anderson is the lowest form of human being to walk the earth. He’s a muckraker who lies, steals, and let me tell you this, Mr. Dean, he’ll go lower than dog shit for a story.” The director turned his red leather chair to face me as I sat in a matching-color chair beside his desk. This was not the J. Edgar Hoover I had expected.