Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (58 page)

“Hello, Gordon. How are you?”

He stopped and peered into my face. His eyes were so glazed that I suspected he was under sedation. After a long and blank stare, he shook his head jerkily as if to throw off a dream. “John!” he exclaimed. “How are you? I didn’t even recognize you. I’m sorry.”

Liddy was holding a long thin cigar in his right hand. He stuck it into his mouth in order to shake hands. The smoke drifted up into his eyes, and he looked more natural as he squinted. Then he took the cigar out again and the dazed look returned.

“I’m fine, Gordon,” I said uneasily. “How are you holding up?”

“As well as can be expected, I guess.”

We had a brief formal conversation. I studied Liddy’s appearance. It was the first time I had seen him since June 19, 1972, at the moment I had watched him stroll off after offering to have himself shot on the street; he was drawn and hollow-cheeked, but mostly I was struck by his eyes and by his shirt collar. It was worn and grimy. His beard was turning prematurely white. His suit looked like a painted veneer.
6
*

Liddy walked off with his marshals. Jim was about to make one last vain effort to persuade him to break his silence. “I’m really sorry about not recognizing you,” Liddy called over his shoulder. “You know how it is.”

Not really, I thought. He had already spent nearly a year in the D.C. jail, a notoriously vicious and overcrowded inferno. My resentment of Holabird
was ludicrous when I thought of Liddy’s environment. And I felt even luckier that Jim thought he needed me daily in the Special Prosecutor’s office.

Mid-September 1974

Despite the restrictions, I had formed a general idea of the Holabird
prisoner population within the first couple of weeks. Since most of the others were imprisoned at Holabird
because of threats against their lives, I decided that it was not prudent to pry into the reasons for their incarceration. The knowledge seemed, in some cases, deadly.

As best I could piece it together, the twenty-some prisoners broke down as follows: four “Watergate guys;” two former Baltimore policemen on corruption charges; three members of the French Connection
conspiracy; a con artist; a key figure from the Tony Boyle
/Yablonski
murders; three Latin heroin traffickers; a man who had slit the throat of a female government informant and burned her corpse (Chuck was working with him); a seasoned hit man with twenty-eight murders under his belt; and an assortment of Mafia figures whose crimes ran from murders to heavy narcotics trafficking.

Late September 1974

“How are you doing, Paul?” I asked as I poured milk over my morning Raisin Bran in the Holabird
kitchen.

“Fine.” He beamed. “Paul” was a professional banking swindler, the last of a group of con men who had been held at Holabird
. He was there to brief Senate investigators on the fine art of his profession.

“Why are you smiling so?”

“Well, I’m in the middle of a little project here,” he said casually as he bent over a sheaf of papers near the toaster. “I’m buying a couple of banks.”

“You’re what? I thought you were out of the business.” I began backing out of the kitchen with my cereal, fearful of learning about another crime.

“Don’t worry, John. It’s perfectly legit. I can do it all in correspondence with letters of credit. I don’t have to put up a cent. Here, look at this.” He proudly outlined complicated financial maneuvers showing how he could buy banks with no money. From prison. “I’ve got a line on another one in Texas,” he said. “You want it?”

“No, thanks,” I declined, laughing.

“Nothing to it,” he said. “Let me know if you change your mind. I figure it will look good on my parole sheet if I can prove I’m a respectable bank owner.”

September 29, 1974

Jim Neal had moved into a new office in the Federal Courthouse in preparation for the trial. He sat behind his desk, looking thoughtful. Suddenly he started chuckling to himself and shaking his head.

“What are you laughing at?” I asked.

“Aw, I was just thinking about old John Wilson
,” he drawled. “He’s a funny old codger.”

“What’s he doing now?” John J. Wilson, Haldeman’s lawyer, had always struck me as fearsome and choleric.

“Well, he was in the other day, and he stopped me after the meeting. And he says, ‘You deal a lot with Dean, don’t you?’ So I say, ‘Yeah I do.’ And then he says, ‘Well, let me ask you a question. After you’ve been dealing with him, do you have to wash your hands? ‘” Jim cracked up laughing. I swallowed. “Old John’s really something,” he went on. “But don’t you worry about him. He’s not going to lay a glove on you.”

I wasn’t reassured.

October 5, 1974

“Mr. Dean, you’ve got an emergency phone call!” shouted one of the security guards in the Special Prosecutor’s office. He had caught me walking down the hall between two marshals, on my way back to Holabird
.

“What for? Who from?” I asked in panic.

“Don’t know. The operator said it’s an emergency call.”

I rushed to the phone, fearing a tragedy. Mo? My son? My parents? Mo’s mom?

“John, this is Junie.” It was a friend of Mo’s in California. “Mo’s okay, but she’s in the hospital.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Well, she got real run down. So I sent her to my psychiatrist, and he put her in the hospital. But don’t you worry about it. Believe me, John, this is for the best.”

Junie told me, as gently as possible, that Mo had suffered a breakdown. I had never felt more helpless. What could I do? Nothing but worry. I couldn’t even call her.

The vomiting began about one-thirty in the morning. I slipped quietly in and out of the bathroom without telling the deputy posted at the door. I had eaten no dinner. By dawn I had discovered blood coming up from my stomach. A marshal drove me to a Baltimore hospital, where I was pumped full of anti-nausea serum before being returned to Holabird
.

October 10, 1974

Mo was released from the hospital on her birthday. She hadn’t told me how she was planning to cope with my being in jail, but I soon found out. She tried to pretend nothing had happened. I felt guilty. I felt a void opening between us.

October 12, 1974

The jury was selected. Neal spent the day watching a University of Tennessee football game and then guided me through a dress rehearsal of my testimony. He had trouble concentrating. He was upset. Leon Jaworski
had unexpectedly resigned.

Several members of the staff watched the evening news in Jim’s office. When it was reported that President Ford would take an active role in the selection of a new Special Prosecutor, Jim hit the roof.

“Dammit!” he roared. “That really burns my ass. I don’t know why the hell Leon couldn’t have told me what he was going to do! He begged me to come back and handle this case, and now he’s walking out on me. Shit, I’ve got enough to worry about without Ford putting some bastard in over me who might fuck up my case!”

I had never seen him as angry or depressed. The staff lawyers kept their distance.

October 16, 1974

“You’re on next, John,” whispered Judge Sirica’s bailiff. “Uh, excuse me. I mean Mr. Dean.”

As I entered the packed courtroom I spotted Mo, who had agreed to come for the first day. I winked at her, and walked to the witness box where I was sworn in. While Neal gathered his papers and walked to the lectern; I watched the five defendants. None of them looked back at me, and I felt I had won the first round.

“Mr. Dean, are you acquainted with Mr. John N. Mitchell?” Jim intoned.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Would you, for the benefit of the court and the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, identify Mr. Mitchell for the record?”

“Yes, sir. He is—”

Before I could identify Mitchell, his lawyer, William Hundley
, jumped up and stipulated that I knew him. I wondered if Hundley
was worried about how I might describe the John Mitchell I saw hunched over his table in the back corner of the defendants’ area. His wan, expressionless face gazed up at me as if I were a total stranger. At least he was looking, I thought. He had avoided my eyes at the Vesco
trial. I still felt sorry for him. He and I both knew he was guilty, and I figured he was rolling the dice again as he had done in the Liddy plan, but they were still loaded against him.

“Do you know, Mr. Dean, the defendant H. R. Haldeman?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Would you identify him for the record, please?”

“Mr. Haldeman is sitting right over there with the brown suit on.” Bob turned from a stack of papers he was busy underlining with multicolored pens and faced me. He looked much less severe since he had let his hair grow stylishly longer. “Trial cosmetics,” the prosecutors had joked. Bob and I exchanged our first glances since I had left the White House. He no longer struck fear in me, nor guilt. Jail and time had healed most of my squealer emotions. I was riveted on the fact that Bob had called me a liar under oath, and that he was about to do so again. Don’t waste that innocent look on me, Haldeman, I thought. You and I know better. My stage fright lessened as Jim led me through a description of Bob’s duties at the White House.

“Now, do you know the defendant Mr. John D. Ehrlichman?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Would you identify Mr. Ehrlichman for the record, please?”

“Mr. Ehrlichman is there in the blue suit, with glasses on.” He was seated at the table closest to me and the jury, making notes. He didn’t bother to look up. I wondered if he could make it through the whole trial with his armor intact. I thought of Liddy, of myself, and of the other prisoners, and I decided he could never stay unruffled all the way through prison.

When I identified Bob Mardian, mentioning the color of his tie, he whipped off his glasses to face the jury and looked quickly down at his tie to make sure I was right. The same old hyper-animated Mardian. Frightened, but vain and defiant. He was paying for his brief but crucial role in the early days of the cover-up—a corporal in the dock with the generals.

Ken Parkinson, the last defendant, seemed completely out of place. I knew a half-dozen men who had played much larger roles in Watergate than Ken, and who were absent. He had never met Haldeman or Ehrlichman before his indictment. I harbored some suspicion that the prosecutors had included him as “mercy bait.” An acquittal of Parkinson would lend an air of even-handedness to the trial.

“Well, how did it feel in there?” Jim was cheerful enough. “You got your sea legs yet?” The postmortems were pleasant, even though most of my time on the stand had been spent listening to legal haggles over the admissibility of my testimony.

“I thought it went okay, but only a few of the jurors looked at me. They’re a shy bunch so far, but it’s hard to tell about them.”

“You did fine, John. Don’t worry about the jury. We’ll get their attention tomorrow when you get mean. Just stay comfortable.”

“I’m getting there, but there is one thing. You went off the witness sheet several times in there and threw those dollar figures about the hush money at me. I couldn’t answer those because I’m not ready to go on the box with them. I thought we had ruled those out.”