Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (9 page)

“Lower than dog shit,” he went on. “Mr. Dean, let me tell you a story. My housekeeper puts papers down in the hall, every night, for my dogs, and every morning she picks up the paper and puts it in the trashcans in the back of the house. Well, one day Anderson and his boys came out to my house to fish in my trashcans for a story. To look at my
trash,
can you believe that? Anyway, they fished all through that trash and all the way to the bottom, underneath the dog shit, to see what they could find. So when you’re talking about Anderson I know you’re talking about a man that’ll go lower than dog shit to find his stories. Isn’t that something, Mr. Dean?” he asked, shaking the fleshy jowls of his face.

I strained to hold back a chuckle, not sure if I was supposed to laugh or not. The story was funny, but he was not joking. I finally nodded and said, “It certainly is some story, Mr. Hoover, some story indeed.”

I reported back to Ehrlichman and Colson that I was confident Hoover would supply the report Chuck needed to blow the Kleindienst-ITT hearings out of the headlines, and I relayed his parting offer: “Mr. Dean, if you’d like some material from our files on Jack Anderson, I’d be pleased to send it over.” Colson literally applauded, warming his hands at the thought of J. Edgar Hoover reaching into his famous files for derogatory material on his publicity enemy number one.

Waiting for the FBI reports, Chuck got a tip from the President’s barber, who was also Jack Anderson’s barber, that Dita Beard was a drinking buddy of Anderson’s long-time secretary, Opal Ginn. Chuck charged off after that one, asking me to interview the barber to see if we could discredit Anderson’s testimony (that no one in his office was a friend of Dita Beard). The barber had nothing, but Chuck found a photograph of Beard and Ginn together at a party and fed a press release and the photograph to Marlow W. Cook, a Republican senator on the Judiciary Committee.

Cook’s release all but said Jack Anderson was a liar, and the Senator found himself on the end of a fragile limb when Anderson rebutted with a sworn affidavit from Ginn that she had met Beard only once. Chuck soothed Cook with promises. He expected to learn more from his special consultant, E. Howard Hunt.

Clad in the ill-fitting red CIA wig that has since become famous, and equipped with a voice modifier, Hunt interviewed Beard at her bedside in a Denver hospital. He called after his first visit. She had met Opal Ginn only once.

“She’s lying,” Chuck insisted. “Bear down on her and get her to tell the truth.”

Hunt failed to extract anything different. Senator Cook was furious. He had been made a fool of by Colson, who would soon do the same to others.

“What does the stuff Hoover sent over on Anderson look like?” Chuck asked me.

“Chuck, you’re going to be amazed what’s in Hoover’s famous files.”

“Well?”

“Newspaper and magazine clippings.”

“Shit. You’re kidding me.”

“Nope, that’s it!” That was it. In this case, at least, the poisonous files proved to be a myth.

Caulfield conducted an investigation on Anderson’s brother that produced nothing. Jeb Magruder, who was now deputy director of the Reelection Committee, sent former Plumber G. Gordon Liddy to run down a tip that Jack Anderson was involved in a questionable land deal in Maryland. Nothing.

Colson was reporting to the President on his efforts. It reminded the President of the Alger Hiss case of how, as a young congressman, he had fought to prove that the State Department official was a Communist and a perjurer. “The typewriters are always the key,” the President told Chuck. “We built one in the Hiss case.” As were all the top Nixon aides, Chuck was frequently instructed to reread the pertinent chapter in
Six Crises
for lessons on how to run over bureaucrats and smoke out political enemies.
5
*

The original Dita Beard memo went to the FBI on March 10 at my request. The lab work did not begin for several days, and ITT had Pearl Tytell, a New York document analyst, compare a photocopy of the memo with other materials from Dita Beard’s typewriter. When she had concluded that the document was phony, ITT flooded the FBI with documents.

On March 13, Colson asked me to retrieve the original memo from the FBI. Pearl Tytell, he said, would not issue a notarized report of her findings until she had inspected the original. I had been nervous about ITT’s expert from the beginning; the FBI never touched evidence analyzed by anyone else. Hoover had an iron rule against competition, the possibility of contradiction. I was afraid of what Hoover might do if he found out we had sent the original to an outside expert. Colson said it was vital for Tytell to have it, and assured me no one would know. I called the FBI lab and had it picked up. ITT officials took it to New York. The next day, Tytell called Colson to say she would stake her professional reputation on her conclusion. It was clearly a fraud, but she recommended a chemical analysis.

Chuck was enchanted with Tytell’s potential as a Senate witness. “Who’d dispute that nice, grandmotherly little lady?” he asked. “Even Teddy Kennedy wouldn’t doubt her in public.” He authorized an ITT official to fly the memo to chemical expert Walter McCrone for “paper chromatography” and “microprobe analysis” work. McCrone snipped two small corners off the original, performed his tests, and reported his support for Tytell. Chuck was ecstatic. The document was phony.

Now Chuck felt confident enough to make use of Howard Hunt’s report that Dita Beard denied writing the memo and was prepared to so testify before a special panel of senators who were to question her in Denver as soon as she got out of the oxygen tent she was in. A Dita Beard statement was phoned to Washington as Chuck scrambled to rehabilitate her image in the media, an image he himself had sought to discredit by leaking stories that she was a sad old drunkard. Suddenly, stories appeared concerning her distinguished career at ITT.

On March 17, Chuck incorporated her statement into a press release and had it delivered to the home of Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott. Fielding and I watched the news that evening. Scott appeared on all three networks, proclaiming Dita Beard’s denial of authorship.

“At last we’ve turned the corner,” said Chuck. “We’ve started to reverse the bad news. Next we hit them with the FBI lab report, and it’s all over.”

J. Edgar Hoover called me. “Mr. Dean, I’ve arranged for you to meet with Mr. Felt to discuss the lab findings.” He hung up abruptly and I called Felt.

“What have you got, Mark?”

“Well, I’m not sure it’s what you need. I’m sending over a draft letter, which the director is ready to sign, but he’s authorized me to let you see it first. It says we can’t make a definite finding.”

I read the letter with dismay. It was worse than I had expected from Felt’s remark. In FBI jargon, Hoover was saying the Dita Beard memo was legitimate. Colson, outraged, called Felt to complain and then accused Bob Mardian of sabotaging the lab study by leaking word about ITT’s experts to Hoover. He insisted that I persuade Felt to change the letter, at least to make it innocuous.

Felt would not budge, because the director would not budge. Colson carried the FBI’s draft letter to the President’s office, and when be returned he said he had never before seen the President so furious. The President penned a note to his friend Edgar, asking him to “cooperate,” then gave it to Ehrlichman with instructions to turn Hoover around. Ehrlichman could not budge the director an inch. When the President was told, he mused, “I don’t understand Edgar sometimes. He hates Anderson.”

Colson did not tell ITT officials about the FBI report, but instead he encouraged them to release their experts’ reports. They did so on March 20. The next day, Dita Beard’s lawyers released her sworn affidavit that the memo was not hers, just as Senator Scott had told the world she would. On March 23 Senator Scott and the ITT officials found out that they had been left on a limb, as Hoover sawed it off by releasing the FBI letter. Public debate on the memo’s authenticity ended with the FBI’s pronouncement.

A fresh wave of anti-Hoover sentiment lapped through the Administration. Had he deliberately doctored the lab reports after discovering the work of ITT’s experts? Speculation intensified when he threatened to have McCrone indicted for tampering with FBI evidence. We tried to trace all the people who knew about the ITT work, but the original memo had traveled thousands of miles, and through countless hands. An old proposal to make Hoover “director emeritus” was briefly recalled. Colson wanted to fire Hoover. The idea was, as always, discarded. There was a question on Hoover in each secret poll of public opinion conducted by the White House, and he always ranked extremely high. This piece of political realism, more than fear of blackmail, probably guaranteed Hoover his job until he died, unexpectedly, a few months later.

The most intense debate took place over what to do about the Kleindienst hearings in the wake of Colson’s defunct memo strategy. It was election year, and the Administration was getting hit every day with revelations about the ITT deal and evidence of favoritism toward big business. Once again Colson came up with the game plan: the President should end the political drain of the Kleindienst hearings by canning him. The President agreed and instructed Haldeman to inform Mitchell. But the firing was never carried out. I don’t know why. Perhaps the President simply could not face anyone down in person, or perhaps Kleindienst saved himself with a message that his friend Senator Eastland would block any other nominee. The hearings dragged on through April as the President’s popularity slipped.

The ITT scandal was serious enough business, but I found some hilarity in the high jinks even then. That ceased abruptly in mid-April when Haldeman and Ehrlichman sent me up to the Kleindienst hearings to order a witness to refuse to give testimony. The witness was Jack Gleason, a former Administration official who was now an ITT consultant and who was scheduled to testify about his work for the corporation.

I already knew that Gleason was scared about something. He had come to my office and said, “John, I could be in some trouble. I can’t tell you the details, but I need a lawyer.” I had sent him to a friend who had been my lawyer, and it didn’t take me long to figure out what was bothering him. He was worried about potential
criminal
liability. I knew from Chotiner that Gleason had been involved in a secret effort in 1970 to raise and distribute political funds. Gleason had operated out of the basement of a Georgetown town house, and the records of the Town House Operation were considered radioactive in the Administration. Colson had them for a while, but he decided to turn them over to my office because I was doubly protected against having to disclose them: not only did I fall under executive privilege but, as the President’s official lawyer, I could also cite attorney-client privilege.
6
*
When Colson called to say he was sending the files, he ordered me to keep them secret and said that anyone who had knowledge of the information would be endangered.

I knew all this before Haldeman summoned me to his office. To my surprise, I found Ehrlichman there, too. Obviously this was important.

“John, I’ve got a job for you,” Ehrlichman began. “You know Jack Gleason is testifying down at the inquest today. We’ve decided we don’t want to run any chance that he’ll talk about his prior service here. I want you to see if he’ll take the Fifth. You know his lawyer, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I’ve known him for a long time. But I don’t think he’ll let Jack take the Fifth out of the blue. That’s throwing up a red flag. They don’t know anything about Gleason yet.”

“And they still won’t if he doesn’t say anything,” said Haldeman.

“When he takes the Fifth, it’ll be all over the press.” They knew this as well as I did, but I wanted to hear their answer. Ehrlichman and Haldeman in the Town House Operation, I was thinking. They must have sold the Washington Monument for one of those contributions. Or Gleason must know something else even worse. “And they’ll start investigating the shit out of him within twenty-four hours.”