Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (32 page)

I was in a bind. Krogh hadn’t told me exactly how he had testified.

I faltered, then made a guess. “His... Did, uh, did he know the Cubans? He did.”

“He said he didn’t?”

“That’s right. They didn’t press him hard. Or that he...”

I was attempting to drum up another possible way Bud might have perjured himself, when the President interrupted me. “He might be able to—I am just trying to think. Perjury is an awful tough rap to prove. He could say, ‘I...’” He was beginning a perjury defense for Krogh. He stopped and waved the problem away as if it weren’t worth the effort. “Well, go ahead.”

I coughed several times to give myself a space to think. The President was returning each of my volleys like a backboard. Each time, I backed off before hitting again. “Well, so that’s, that’s the first, that’s one perjury,” I said, thinking maybe a whole list might have more impact. “Now Mitchell and Magruder are potential perjurers.” I went down the perjury list, but I thought I saw the President’s concentration drifting for the first time.

He shifted in his chair and looked straight at me. He was back now, and frowning. “Don’t you—just looking at the immediate problem—don’t you have to handle Hunt’s financial situation...”

“I think that’s...damn soon? That’s—I talked to Mitchell about that last night.”

“Mitchell.” The President nodded approvingly.

“And, uh, I told—I was getting set to tell him about my problems when he interrupted.”

“Might as well,” he said firmly. “May have to rule you’ve got to keep the cap on the bottle that much.”

He would not welcome any contradiction, and I didn’t give him any. “That’s right. That’s right.”

“In order to have any options.”

“That’s right,” I said. I was turned around again. Maybe he is right, I began to think. After all, he’s an old pro at this sort of thing; maybe I’m just nervous. In any case, my acquiescence seemed to reduce the tension in the room.

My steam was down. I rambled about Kalmbach and lesser weak spots until he broke in to change direction.

“But what are your feelings yourself, John? You know pretty well what they all say. What are your feelings about the options?”

I twisted inside. Surely, the President must know what my feelings were after all this. I suspected that he was testing me now, taking his own reading on how reliably I’d stay on course. I didn’t want him to think I would be all that reliable. “I am not confident that, uh, we can ride through this,” I confessed. “I think there are, I think there are soft spots.” I felt as if I was one of them.

“You used to feel comfortable,” he said quietly. The remark hung in the air. It cut into my exposed emotions—guilt and loyalty. Guilt. He was drawing my attention to my loud enthusiasm about the cover-up, calling up memories of the September 15 meeting, making me feel that my tough demeanor had contributed to the dilemma. Loyalty. He was implying that I was abandoning ship. I felt beaten down. I felt I had lost his confidence by admitting to a certain weakness. My rise in the White House was over.

We meandered, but the dynamic did not change. I had been on the offensive, with the President battening down my cover-up woes. Now he was on the offensive, drawing me out, testing options. “All right,” he said, starting down a new path. “Now go on. So what you really come down to is, is what the hell will you do? Let’s suppose that you and Haldeman and Ehrlichman and Mitchell say, ‘We can’t hold this.’ What then are you going to say? Are you going to put out a complete disclosure? Isn’t that the best plan?”

I couldn’t rally to this idea any longer. I knew the President didn’t intend to disclose the rat’s nest we’d just clambered through. The question was insincere. He was probing, I thought, to see how far I might defect. But I figured I’d at least give him my best thinking on this option. “Well, one way to do it is to—”

“That’d be my view of it,” he interrupted.

“One way to do it is for you to tell the Attorney General that you finally, you know, really this is the first time you are getting all the pieces together.”

“Ask for another grand jury?”

“Ask for another grand jury,” I said. And I told him how best I thought it could be done. “But some people are going to have to go to jail. That’s the long and short of it, also,” I concluded.

“Who? Let’s talk about that.” The President was leaning toward me again, intent.

“All right. I think I could, for one.”

“You go to jail?” he asked in disbelief.

“That’s right.”

“Oh, hell, no,” said the President, shaking his head as if the idea were absurd. “I don’t see how you can.” Later, when I had explained to him that I was vulnerable for the obstruction of justice, he replied, “Well, I don’t know. I think [that] that, I feel, could be cut off at the pass. Maybe the obstruction of justice...”

“It could be a—you know how—one of the—that’s, that’s why...” I was sputtering again, I couldn’t bring myself to agree or disagree. I gave up in a sigh.

The President asked how I might be construed to be guilty of obstruction.

“Well,” I responded wearily, “I’ve been a conduit for information on taking care of people out there who are guilty of crimes.”

“Oh, you mean like the blackmail.”

“The blackmail. Right.”

“Well, I wonder if that part of it can’t be, I wonder if that doesn’t, let me put it frankly: I wonder if that doesn’t have to be continued?” The question was declarative.

Back to the Hunt demands. I cleared my throat to avoid having to say anything.

“Let me put it this way,” he continued. “Let us suppose that you get, you get the million bucks, and you get the proper way to handle it, and you could hold that side.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It would seem to me that would be worthwhile.”

I cleared my throat and again said nothing. I looked at the floor to avoid the President’s eyes, which I knew would be seeking agreement.

He didn’t press. Instead, he went to other subjects. Then he asked who else might have to go to jail. I decided not to try out any more notions about perjuries or obstructions. I simply said Ehrlichman might have to go.

“Why Ehrlichman? What’d he do?”

I drew a breath. “Because of this conspiracy to burglarize the, uh, Ellsberg office.”

“You mean, that is, provided Hunt breaks,” the President said, qualifying the danger to Ehrlichman.

“Well, uh, let me say something interesting about that. Within the files—” I was getting ready to clue him in on yet another route of discovery.

He interrupted. “Oh, I saw that. The picture.”

Jesus Christ, I thought, the President knows as much about all this as I do. He not only knows about the Liddy picture, he’s seen it. If he knows all this, surely he can’t think this cover-up will hold. I laid out a few other ways the Ellsberg break-in might come out, and then I made one more run at my original thrust: “But what I am coming to you today with is: I don’t have a plan of how to solve it right now, but I think it’s at the juncture that we should begin to think in terms of, of how to cut the losses, how to minimize the further growth of this thing rather than further compound it by, you know, ultimately paying these guys forever.”

“Yeah. “

“I think we’ve got to look—”

“But at the moment,” the President intruded, leaning forward again, “don’t you agree that you’d better get the Hunt thing? I mean, that’s worth it, at the moment.”

“That’s worth buying time on, right.”

“And that’s worth buying time on, I agree.” He had agreed quickly, as if it were my idea. I was turned around again and I had very little spirit left. Ehrlichman must have whispered in his ear about Hunt’s demands.

Soon the President buzzed for Haldeman and summarized our meeting for him accurately and succinctly: we had to buy time by meeting Hunt’s immediate money demands; he listed almost all the “soft spots” in the cover-up that I had identified.

“The point is,” said the President, turning to me, “your feeling is that we just can’t continue to pay the blackmail of these guys?”

“I think that’s our greatest jeopardy,” I agreed.

“Yeah,” said Haldeman.

“Now, let me tell you, it’s no problem,” said the President. “We could get the money. There is no problem in that. We can’t provide the clemency. The money can be provided. Mitchell could provide the way to deliver it. That could be done. See what I mean?”

“But Mitchell says he can’t, doesn’t he?” Haldeman asked me.

“Mitchell says that— Well, that’s an interesting thing. That’s been an interesting phenomenon all the way along on this. It’s that there have been a lot of people having to pull oars, and not everybody pulls them at the same time, the same way, because they all develop self-interests.”

“What John is saying,” Haldeman told the President, “is that everybody smiles at Dean and says, ‘Well, you better get something done about it.’”

“That’s right,” I said, grateful to him for stating it far more bluntly than I dared.

“And Mitchell is leaving Dean hanging out on a... None of us.” Haldeman paused. “Well, maybe we’re doing the same thing to you,” he confessed.

“That’s right,” I agreed.

The meeting went on through the same points over and over, although I was not much of an advocate for my position any longer. Haldeman wound up by saying that the Watergate erosion was now hitting directly at the President and had to be stopped at any cost.

It finally ended, after nearly two hours. I went back to my office feeling as if I had been squeezed in a vise, experiencing all the unpleasant emotions pressure can bring to bear. My head ached from the mental effort of trying to keep up with all the nuances going on behind the dialogue with the President. There was some relief, however, in having unburdened myself of my doubts about the cover-up. Those above me were now fully aware. Maybe the cover-up was in more capable hands. And I had the solace of having gone through an entire meeting without hearing the Dean Report mentioned.

But even that comfort vanished the same afternoon. Ehrlichman joined Haldeman, Nixon, and Dean, and he lost no time in advocating the Dean Report as the needed solution. Ehrlichman was clever and blunt. He came out directly and said that the Dean Report would give the President a public alibi if the cover-up were to collapse. As always, I wondered how much he was motivated by devotion to the President as opposed to his own protection. I figured—perhaps generously—about fifty-fifty. This meeting accomplished nothing; we simply went round and round. I mentioned the cancer again, Ehrlichman countered with the Dean Report. The only new development was a consensus that Mitchell should be summoned to Washington; he would be cajoled to step forward, own up, walk the plank.

When I went home on the evening of March 21, I avoided Mo’s questions. The day seemed to have lasted forever, and I tried to stretch out the night’s reprieve with alcohol. I found myself searching for something to look forward to—anything. The search was fruitless, until I began meditating sardonically about the Mitchell meeting which was set for the next day. It would be a real Armageddon. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell in a shootout. Lives and empires at stake. I visualized it as something like the Napoleonic Wars—bluffs, frontal attacks, and mass slaughter—and drifted off to sleep with such thoughts.

The four of us gathered the next morning in Haldeman’s office, and I waited for the first missile to blast off. It didn’t happen. Once Mitchell said, in code, that Hunt’s immediate blackmail threat had been “taken care of,” the drums stopped beating. The communication reached new heights of internal stonewalling. I was astonished. It was dominated by nervous pleasantries and indirect ribbing, but with no confrontation, not even an acknowledgment that a cover-up, a Presidency, and criminal prosecutions might be hanging in the balance. It was as if four men were discussing adultery: each knew the others were cheating, each was reluctant to admit it first.

In the afternoon, we four met with the President and there were more jokes and further evasions. At one point, the President asked me what I really hoped to gain with the idea of opening up Watergate, lancing the boil.

“What it’s doing, Mr. President, is getting you up above and away from it,” I replied seriously. “And that’s the most important thing.”

“Oh, I know,” said the President. “But I suggested that the other day, and we all came down on—remember, we came down on the negative on it. Now what’s changed our mind?”

“The lack of alternatives, or a body,” I said, meaning that no one was willing to risk jail, alone or in company. The whole group broke up in laughter—this time not nervous, pressured laughter, but guffaws.

“We went down every alley,” said Ehrlichman, and he peered over his glasses at each of us in a mock search for a volunteer. More laughter.

“Well,” said the President, “I feel that at the very minimum we’ve got to have the statement, and let’s look at it.” He meant some kind of Dean Report. “Whatever the hell it is. If it opens up doors, it opens up doors, you know.”

“John says he’s sorry he sent those burglars in there, and that helps a lot,” quipped Ehrlichman, looking at Mitchell.