Returning home, I wondered how John Mitchell would react. I was anxious for the blessings of my mentor, and a bit concerned.
Mitchell called me to his office almost as soon as I returned from San Clemente. “Well, I can understand why you took the job, it’s a nice opportunity for a young lawyer,” he said. “Congratulations.”
I was relieved, and curious to hear any advice he had to offer before I moved on.
“It’s a tough place to work,” he began. “The hours are long, and sometimes the demands incredible. Everything has to be done yesterday. And it can be rough-and-tumble at times.”
“I gather it’s pretty competitive up there.”
“That’s right. Everyone wants the President’s ear and he’s only got two of them,” he said, leaning back in his chair as the smoke from his pipe rose to form the thin haze that always hung over his desk. He thought for a moment about what he wanted to tell me.
“I’m not sure what this latest reorganization of the White House staff means,” he continued. “I’ve been watching it.” He summarized the recent division of responsibilities: Henry Kissinger running the National Security Council (foreign policy), John Ehrlichman heading the new Domestic Council (domestic affairs), George P. Shultz directing the reorganized Office of Management and Budget (money matters), with Bob Haldeman “coordinating the whole ball of wax.”
“I see a head-on collision coming between Shultz and Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman is in over his head. He likes to dabble in everything,” Mitchell observed with annoyance. He stopped to repack his pipe, banging its charred contents into an ashtray. “I’ll be curious to see if Ehrlichman ever takes his foot off your shoulder. You’re going to be a threat to him.”
I was flattered by the remark, which Mitchell had not intended as flattery.
“Shultz is a good man,” he went on. “He’s a real stand-up-type guy. Tough too. I’m glad to see the President relying on him more, and I’ve told the President that. Shultz can keep the President out of trouble with Ehrlichman’s half-baked schemes to cure the ills of the country.”
John Mitchell, usually a man of few words except after several martinis, was talking more candidly about the White House than I had ever heard him. I listened hard. It was a place I knew nothing about, and Mitchell knew a lot.
“Don’t be intimidated by Haldeman,” he advised. “He’s really a fine, personable guy once you get to know him. The President needs Haldeman. I had to talk Bob into taking that job at the White House after the campaign. Now he’s the President’s right and left hands. He does for the President what the President isn’t any good at doing himself. Once you’ve proved yourself to him, well, the President will know it.”
Now Mitchell grew even more personal. “The President will like you. Just sit back and do the job you’re quite capable of doing and the President will discover you. Once you’ve gained his confidence, he’ll listen to you. You can help him and tell him the way things are, which he needs to hear more often.”
Mitchell wished me well at the White House and told me I was always welcome if I wished to return to Justice. We talked briefly about the future. He felt Richard Nixon would have no trouble getting reelected in 1972.
“Mr. Mitchell, what are you going to do in the next administration?” I asked. “Would you like to go to the Supreme Court?”
“Hell, no,” he replied with a laugh as he got up to give me a farewell handshake. “I just want to get back to New York as soon as I can and make some money. I’m going broke in this damn job.”
I arrived early for my first day on the new job, July 27, 1970, and drove to the southwest gate of the White House grounds. A guard found my name on his clipboard and instructed me to park in one of the visitors’ spaces, since my permanent spot had not yet been assigned. Bud Krogh pulled in a few spaces away. He waved a greeting at me and hurried off, mumbling like the Mad Hatter that he was late. He would see me later, he called. It was not yet eight in the morning. Late, I thought. I had been worried about getting there too early. No one had told me when the work day started.
I’d barely got acquainted with my new office in the Executive Office Building when Bud called in, “Hey, John, have you had a chance to take a real look around yet?”
“No, I haven’t.”
He seemed pleased. “Let me take you on a tour and show you some of the places no one sees.” There was a look of mischief on his face.
Bud Krogh—Egil Krogh, Jr.—was a long-time friend of John Ehrlichman and his family in Seattle. After spending much of his childhood in the Ehrlichman home, he had joined Ehrlichman’s law firm and then followed Ehrlichman to the White House as his assistant. Such intimate sponsorship from Ehrlichman gave Bud a head start in the White House, and he made the most of it. Despite his youth, he was already known in the Administration for his quick grasp of complex issues and his forceful presence. Even when he was largely ignorant of the subject matter, he was sharp enough to dominate meetings and win the participants’ respect. Already he was the White House man in charge of relations with the District of Columbia government, with responsibilities ranging from reviewing its budget to overseeing its response to the massive antiwar demonstrations of the early Nixon years. He was also in charge of the White House effort to combat heroin and other dangerous drugs, a subject of great concern to the President. Later he would be selected to run the highly secret Plumbers’ Unit that was to stop up leaks, and still later he would go to jail for his activities there.
Bud Krogh was someone I considered a friend. We took off toward the basement of the Executive Office Building like the Hardy Boys. Hidden in the depths we found the telephone switchboard headquarters, and behind it a massive equipment room filled with transformers, generators and electrical circuitry. Bud introduced me to the chief operator, who seemed pleased by our visit. “This equipment we have, Mr. Dean, could handle a whole city the size of Hagerstown, Maryland,” she said proudly. I wondered why she picked Hagerstown, of all places, but her domain was certainly impressive, as were the skills of the women who worked as operators. They could locate anyone, just as they had found me for Larry Higby when Haldeman wanted me to fly to San Clemente. (Only once did I abuse this skill, when I asked one of the operators to track down a woman I had met who would not give me her unlisted telephone number.) Bud and I lingered briefly and then pressed on to the basement of the White House’s West Wing and the Situation Room.
The Situation Room, I had heard, was where Henry Kissinger took his dates to impress them. It operated twenty-four hours a day to keep the President aware of what was happening throughout the world, Bud explained. I pictured this nerve center as a gleaming room packed with uniformed admirals and generals seated at long computer consoles, surrounded by lesser-ranking aides and walls of incomprehensible charts and maps. Wrong. The room was dreary and overcrowded, jammed with cluttered desks and staffed by a few young military men wearing out-of-date civilian clothes and a secretary checking the antique-looking teletypes. Even the windowless wood-paneled conference room, designed to prevent eavesdropping, was boring. This vital communications post was far less imposing than the switchboard rooms, and I decided that Kissinger must have something more than the Situation Room to impress the ladies.
Outside the “Sit Room” we peeked into a large storage area beside the mess, where workmen were building an executive dining room for senior staff and Cabinet officers, which would resemble a private men’s grill at a posh country club. We walked on, peering into the White House barbershop, the limousine drivers’ waiting room, the photographer’s office, the vault safe for sensitive Presidential papers, and a Secret Service command post.
We went upstairs to the first floor of the West Wing, where the President’s Oval Office is located. Bud was amazed that I had never seen it. As we approached, he pointed out a small monitoring device that kept constant track of the President’s whereabouts. It indicated that the President was in his hideaway office at the Executive Office Building next doo
r. An Executive Protective Service officer was posted near the monitor. A thick velvet rope guarded the door to the Oval Office, which was standing open. Bud, never shy, asked the officer to remove the rope so that we could take a closer look. He obeyed reluctantly, with the request that we step just inside.
“This is The Man’s office,” said Bud. “What do you think?”
“Not bad, not bad at all. In fact, it’s damn impressive.” I could feel the importance of the office as I took it all in. My attention was caught by the conspicuous rug and the huge desk. The oval rug was deep blue, with a ring of gold stars and a huge gold eagle in the middle, a replica of the President’s seal of office. It struck me as surprisingly flashy for Richard Nixon, who had such strong feelings about appearing dignified and Presidential. He would not, despite the advice of his television experts, wear a blue shirt. Blue shirts weren’t Presidential, he said, and he didn’t care if his white shirts made his dark features appear harsher on television; white shirts were Presidential. His blue-and-gold rug, like the short-lived Bavarian-guard uniforms he commissioned for the White House, was in odd contrast to all that.
His desk was enormous and had allegedly been used by Woodrow Wilson. Two Presidents, maybe four, could have worked at it without disturbing each other. There was a story about the desk around the White House. The President liked to sit with his feet on it, and his heels had scarred the top. Once, when he was out of the country, someone noticed the damaged mahogany surface and sent the desk out to be refinished. When he returned, Nixon noticed that his heel marks had been removed. “Dammit, I didn’t order that,” he snapped. “I want to leave my mark on this place just like other Presidents.”
We moved on to the East Wing, with Bud pointing out places of interest along the way—the doctor’s office, the chief butler’s office, the Map Room, the Lincoln Library, the kitchen, the secret tunnel. We stopped briefly at the door of the secret tunnel, which ran from the basement of the White House to the Treasury Department a block away. Bud said the Secret Service had contingency plans for bringing troops through the tunnel if a hostile demonstration ever got out of hand. But the only trooper to use the tunnel was Chief Justice Warren Burger. On the day his Supreme Court nomination was announced, the tunnel enabled him to enter the White House unnoticed by the press.
Down we went to the East Wing basement, until halted by a large steel door posted “Restricted Area.” Bud ignored the sign, and I followed him through a room of furnaces, low-hanging pipes and huge valves to a second steel door with a small window. He rang the doorbell, and a face appeared that recognized him. The door opened and Bud stated his purpose: “I want to show Mr. Dean, the new counsel to the President, the area we use as a command post during demonstrations.”
We walked through a corridor maze until we came to a small suite of rooms. “This,” Bud announced, “is the President’s bomb shelter.” I looked around. Ventilated air. Stored supplies. Beds. An appropriately Presidential desk flanked by flags. And a conference room with three built-in television sets, plus radio equipment and telephones everywhere. It looked like a President’s bomb shelter.
Bud said Ehrlichman found this an ideal command post for monitoring demonstrations, which puzzled me. It was remote, to say the least, and totally out of touch with what would be occurring on the streets. I conjured an image of “Field Marshal Ehrlichman,” whose interest in demonstrations Haldeman once likened to that of a firehouse Dalmatian at a blaze. I knew I wouldn’t use the shelter for monitoring demonstrations, although Haldeman had told me that that would be one of my responsibilities. The only time I ever returned there was for a secret screening of Tricia’s Wedding, a pornographic movie portraying Tricia Nixon’s wedding to Edward Cox, in drag. Haldeman wanted the movie killed, so a very small group of White House officials watched the cavorting transvestites in order to weigh the case for suppression. Official action proved unnecessary; the film died a natural death.
As Bud and I went past the offices of the White House staff members, I noticed furniture and files being moved. The White House, far more than any other government office, was in a state of perpetual internal flux. Offices were constantly exchanged and altered. One day I visited the President’s Congressional-liaison man, Bryce N. Harlow, in his first-floor West Wing office (which later belonged to Clark MacGregor and then to William E. Timmons) and found a team of workmen busy constructing a new wall where a door had once been. Bryce explained he had been forced to give up his private bathroom because the stairwell from the basement to the second floor was being made smaller so that Henry Kissinger’s office could be expanded. “In a way, I’m glad to know the place I used to shit will be Henry’s office,” he said with a wry smile. “That tells me who’s who around here.” Harlow was perhaps the only man in the White House who did not care about losing space; he was planning to leave anyway.
Everyone jockeyed for a position close to the President’s ear, and even an unseasoned observer could sense minute changes in status. Success and failure could be seen in the size, décor and location of offices. Anyone who moved to a smaller office was on the way down. If a carpenter, cabinetmaker or wallpaper hanger was busy in someone’s office, this was a sure sign he was on the rise. Every day, workmen crawled over the White House complex like ants. Movers busied themselves with the continuous shuffling of furniture from one office to another as people moved in, up, down or out. We learned to read office changes as an index of the internal bureaucratic power struggles. The expense was irrelevant to Haldeman. “For Christ’s sake,” he once retorted when we discussed whether we should reveal such expenses, “this place is a national monument, and I can’t help it if the last three Presidents let it go to hell.” Actually, the costs had less to do with the fitness of the White House than with the need of its occupants to see tangible evidence of their prestige.
Our tour ended and it was time to go back to my “temporary” EOB office and work. By all White House standards my office was shabby. The walls needed painting and the furniture looked like military discards. I was across and down the hall from Special Counsel Charles W. Colson, whose growing staff had lovely views of the White House and its tree-filled south lawn from their freshly decorated offices. From my window I could gaze on an interior asphalt courtyard filled with delivery trucks and parked cars plus the rear ends of air conditioners in other office windows.
I spoke with Larry Higby about this situation, which I felt did not befit a man with my title. “Larry, I don’t want to sound like a complainer, but I’m embarrassed to invite anyone to my office for a meeting, it’s such a dump. Also it’s sometimes hard to concentrate, listening to the urinals flush all day, since you’ve got me right beside the men’s room.”
“It’s only temporary,” he said. He agreed to have the walls painted and some decent furnishings delivered, but added a teaser: “Bob hasn’t decided where he wants to put you yet.” Then he dangled “possibilities” before me—nice big offices of people Haldeman might move out in order to move me in. I did not have to be told what was happening. I was being tested and my performance would determine what I would get. I was at the bottom of the ladder, and instinctively I began to climb.
For a thousand days I would serve as counsel to the President. I soon learned that to make my way upward, into a position of confidence and influence, I had to travel downward through factional power plays, corruption and finally outright crimes. Although I would be rewarded for diligence, true advancement would come from doing those things which built a common bond of trust—or guilt—between me and my superiors. In the Nixon White House, these upward and downward paths diverged, yet joined, like prongs of a tuning fork pitched to a note of expediency. Slowly, steadily, I would climb toward the moral abyss of the President’s inner circle until I finally fell into it, thinking I had made it to the top just as I began to realize I had actually touched bottom.
Chapter Two
FIREFIGHTING
The tests started that first day at th
e White House. After a brief examination of my meager quarters, I had sat down at my desk. I didn’t have anything to do, but then my secretary brought me a sealed envelope with a small red tag. I asked her what it was. She had not opened it; it was stamped “CONFIDENTIAL,” and the red tag meant “priority.” Someone had been planning work for the new counsel. The cover memorandum was a printed form, with striking blue and red instructions filled in:
ACTION MEMORANDUM
FROM THE STAFF SECRETARY LOG NO.: P523
Date: Friday, July 24, 1970 Time: 6:30 P.M.
Due Date: Wednesday, August 5, 1970 Time: 2:00 P.M.
SUBJECT: Request that you rebut the recent attack on the Vice-President.
An attached “confidential memorandum” said that a new muckraking magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly had published a bogus memo linking Vice-President Agnew with a top-secret plan to cancel the 1972 election and to repeal the entire Bill of Rights. Agnew had publicly denounced the memo as “completely false” and “ridiculous,” and the editors of Scanlan’s had replied: “The Vice President’s denial is as clumsy as it is fraudulent. The document came directly from Mr. Agnew’s office and he knows it.” My instructions were clear: “It was noted that this is a vicious attack and possibly a suit should be filed or a federal investigation ordered to follow up on it.”
“Noted” by whom? Since the memorandum was signed by John Brown, a member of Haldeman’s staff, I called him to find out. The “noter” was the President, I was told; he had scrawled my orders in the margin of his daily news summary. No one had to explain why the President’s name was not used. He was always to be kept one step removed, insulated, to preserve his “deniability.”
Blind Ambition Page 3