Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (47 page)

I had now amassed a stack of notes that would help me put events in order, but the events would be comprehensible only if I wove them into a narrative. The amount of detail was the key. I would have to offer my own corroboration by filling in exact particulars. Building from small to big, I hoped to give my testimony credibility by sheer weight of concrete detail. The massive statement would give me a reassuring point of reference; those who attacked me would have to counter a statement I was completely comfortable with.

On June 11, I was summoned to the U.S. attorney’s office at the Federal Courthouse in Washington for a grand-jury appearance, a last-ditch effort by the prosecutors to protect themselves before I proceeded to give my Senate testimony. As Charlie and I were waiting outside Earl Silbert’s office, one of the new members of the Special Prosecutor’s office, James Neal, came walking out.

“Well, if it’s not old Shaffer,” Neal said with a big smile, extending his hand in greeting.

“Hello, Jimmy,” Charlie answered, obviously pleased to see him.

“You’ve really been ripping up the pea patch down here,” Neal said sarcastically, referring to Charlie’s dealings with Silbert and Glanzer.

“Isn’t that what you taught me?” Charlie asked. Charlie and Neal had been special assistants in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. They had tried many cases together, including the Jimmy Hoffa
prosecution. Neal had settled in Nashville, Tennessee, his home town, after serving as the United States attorney there. He had recently left his lucrative private law practice to assist the new Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox.

In the grand-jury room I had to bite my lip to keep from saying something I would regret. The prosecutors knew damn well I had to take the Fifth Amendment rather than confess to the crimes I had laid out for them. It was a humiliating, useless exercise. The grand-jury room was intimidating, and I cringed each time Silbert’s questions forced me to utter the words I had snickered at so often when others said them: “Upon advice of counsel, I must respectfully decline to answer, on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.” Over and over. I shot hostile glances at the prosecutors, and tried by my manner to communicate to the grand jurors that I wanted to tell them what I knew. My refusal to testify, I knew, would produce one more round of stories that Dean was out to save himself at others’ expense. Was it the element of truth in those stories that bothered me the most? Maybe so, I would think; then each time I looked at Silbert. He was putting me through this empty gesture just so that he could console himself with dreams of how tough he’d been, I thought, building a record to protect himself—he could say he’d called me but I’d refused to talk. I tried not to take spiteful pleasure in the fact that he was soon to be removed from the case under a cloud of suspicion. But I failed.

With only five days to complete my draft, I rushed my pace considerably. If there were going to be any mistakes, they had better be on the side of omission. I was clear on the main points of my meetings with the President, but I figured I had to take two things into account: the possibility that the President had recorded our conversations, and my commitment to be willing to take a lie-detector
test on anything I said in my testimony. I would tell only what I knew for a fact. To cross that line by an inch would be foolhardy.

For example, I believed that the President had probably known that Liddy was operating an intelligence program at the Reelection Committee long before the June 17 break-in. I could not imagine that Haldeman had kept anything of such magnitude from him, nor could I believe Bob had not known, though I had never asked him directly. Nothing that cost that kind of money, or that raised that kind of risk, or offered a potential for the type of intelligence so beloved of the White House could have escaped Haldeman’s attention. Still, I could hardly hazard such a speculation in my testimony.

As I was drafting the sections on my last meetings with the President, I wondered whether to mention my sensation that I was being taped. The President himself had raised the issue by telling Henry Petersen he had me on tape, but when Charlie had pressed Petersen to get a copy, the President had deflected Henry, claiming it was a Dictabelt of notes which had been misplaced. Later, when I was going over my records at Bethany
, I found this notation on a list of things to discuss with Charlie:

Information re tapes of JWD conversation with P

determine if Oval Ofc is wired:

Butterfield
(now FAA Administrator)

Bull (W/H staff)

Gen. Albert Redman
(WHCA)

Translation: Alexander Butterfield
, Steve Bull, and General Albert Redman
, head of the White House Communications
Agency, should be questioned about whether the President’s office was bugged. Later I had mentioned to Dash that I thought I’d been recorded, and he had expressed but passing interest.

Now, as I was drafting my testimony about the April 15 meeting, should I insert my suspicion about being recorded? It would violate the rule against speculation; on the other hand, my suspicion had been real, and the President’s claim to Petersen made it more than pure speculation. I resolved the matter by deciding to mention my sense of being taped only in the course of recounting the conversation during which it had occurred to me. I mentioned the leading questions the President had asked and my dismissal of the thought that he might be taping me. Then I wrote:

The most interesting thing that happened during the conversation was, very near the end, he got up out of his chair, went behind his chair to the corner of his Executive Office Building
office and in a nearly inaudible tone said to me he was probably foolish to have discussed Hunt’s clemency with Colson.

I added that I felt that the committee should seek such a tape if the conversation had indeed been recorded. I thought the mere suggestion of taping would produce cross-examination. It did not.
4
*

Charlie and Bob came to the house to review my draft when I finished it. They liked it; but Charlie had some strong criticisms.

“This is your testimony, I understand that,” he began, sitting on the living-room sofa with a stack of the testimony beside him. “And it’s good. In fact, it’s a great statement of what happened. But you’re asking for trouble in some places.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that goddam self-serving crap you’ve got in there.”

“I don’t think the statement is self-serving, Charlie. I confess a lot in there,” I replied defensively.

“Well, generally that’s true, but you’ve got a self-serving twist here and there,” he persisted. “And listen, you’re not going up there to win friends, or a popularity contest.”

“Specifically, what are you talking about?”

Charlie flipped through some pages and read: “I had never heard Mr. Magruder’s story in full detail until just before his Grand Jury appearance, in mid-August 1972 when he asked me if I would be a devil’s advocate and question him before he went before the Grand Jury. Magruder came to my office, as I recall, the day before his second appearance before the Grand Jury.”

Charlie looked up and took off his reading glasses. “Now, listen, the next sentence is the kind that’s trouble. This is what I’m talking about: ‘When he came in I told him I could not tell him to lie before the Grand Jury. ‘”

“That’s true, that’s exactly what I told Jeb.” I was getting very defensive; this was exactly the kind of self-protective statement I’d been so careful to construct all through the cover-up.

“I don’t give a shit if it’s true or not,” Charlie declared. “You might have told him to consult with his wife, his conscience, and the Pope himself before he lied. But so what? You sat there with him and helped him prepare the lie. You helped him practice, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

“Well, that’s what’s important, dammit. So say it, and don’t try to make it look like something nice you did. Otherwise they’re going to tear your statement apart up there.”

We worked our way through the statement, knocking out most of the apologies. I met the next morning with the staff of the Watergate Committee for a preview of my testimony. I had decided not to give them anything from my prepared statement; instead, I just answered questions for five hours, mostly from Republican staffers.

That night I got a call from one of my new friends in the press. “John, those guys you met with today are passing out your executive session testimony to any and all takers.”

“Who’s doing it?” I asked.

“The minority staffers. They damn near put out a press release on it. They’re trying to destroy it before you even give it. What they are really pushing is the stuff you gave them about your using the money that was in your trust for your wedding and honeymoon expenses.”

“It figures. I’m glad I refused to talk about the President. I think that pissed them off.”

“I know it did, but you were smart not to do it.”

“Did they mention what I told Baker
?” Senator Baker had opened the session and then left, but not before I had given him a little message.

“What did you tell Baker
?”

“Well, I don’t think I should get into the details right now, but someday I’ll tell you about Baker’s secret dealings with the White House. I mentioned it to him in the session today. Baker was shocked that I knew about his meeting with Nixon, but he played it cool as a cucumber. He’s a damn slick fella.” I had reminded Baker that I knew the Watergate Committee was a political proceeding, and that I knew how the White House had tried to influence the senators. I had worked that side of the street myself.

On Monday, June 18, 1973, I was scheduled for a private session with all seven senators. On Tuesday I would present my public testimony. As the time drew closer, I began veering wildly from one state of mind to another. I have never been an emotional person—
quite the opposite—but I found myself trembling at odd times for a few seconds, feeling that I might be on the verge of breaking down, and then I would swing back to a lucidity and calmness I had rarely known. I felt as conflicted as I had during the worst moments of the cover-up, but in a different way. At certain moments I would dread the ordeal by national television so much that I would stop writing and ponder running away. At others I would actually look forward to it, yearn for it. I would swell with the confidence that I could remember every fact, every small detail—what people were wearing on certain days, where everybody was seated at a meeting—like a computer. Then one fact would slip out of place and the whole edifice would crumble. One moment I would dismiss my fears with the thought that I would simply be telling the truth. My mind would lock on the facts, and I would recite them as easily as people recite their names or birthdays. I had no cover stories or complicated lies to keep straight. I thought of the ordeal that someone like Mitchell or Ehrlichman would endure, and counted myself lucky. The next moment I would freeze at the thought that I was the guy who had given his heart, body, and mind to be treated as little more than an artifact in the Oval Office. Wasn’t I still that person deep down? It was impossible that I would go alone in front of millions of people and call the President a criminal. Anger, duty, fear, guilt, truth. The emotions blew hot and cold. I had risen so high and fallen so low. If I were believed, I might put myself back together, I would have something to start with. If I were not, if I were rolled over by the power and deceit I had seen in politics, things could get even worse. I would begin to crack up, maybe go crazy. I was not only playing for the Presidency and the Congress and the networks and the respect of millions of people, I was playing for myself, and the odds were against me. I would feel the little trembling again. Back to details, calculations. What did the President say next? Return the call to Charlie. Run back through the virtues and hypocrisies of each senator on the committee: this is politics. I’ve got the strategy. Finish the sentences, think of everything. What should I be thinking of at the last minute? How should I look? Cosmetics are important for something like this. I’ve got everything else under control. On track.

I thought about how I wanted to look. I had watched some of the others testifying, seated at the witness table, flanked by lawyers who whispered in their ear. I decided to sit alone—to dramatize the fact that I was comfortable with my own words. Neither Bob nor Charlie argued with this decision, although both of them seemed disappointed that they would be out of the spotlight.

I reviewed the notes I had made on my interview with Cronkite
.

“
Eyes blinking
.” I had been oblivious to the fact that my eyelids were flickering in a nervous twitch, but I found that my contact lenses had scratched my right cornea badly. I stopped wearing the lenses and fished out an old pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Sam Dash said he liked what they did for me: “You look more studious and distinguished.”

“
Voice inflection and gesturing/trying to impress people
.” It would be easy to overdramatize, or to seem too flip about my testimony. I knew from speech-making and from appearances before Congressional committees that there was a lot of ham in me. I would, I decided, read evenly, unemotionally, as coldly as possible, and answer questions the same way. When I told Mo I was going to use a monotone, she worried that I would put everyone to sleep.