Blind Ambition

by Dean, John W. ;

  So this is my baptism, I thought. I was astounded that the President would be so angrily concerned about a funny article in a fledgling magazine. It did not square with my picture of his being absorbed in diplomacy, wars and high matters of state. Was it possible that we had a secret plan to cancel the election and the Bill of Rights? I was embarrassed by the thought. Now I cannot look back on this episode without laughing, but then I was not at all loose about it. It was the President of the United States talking. Maybe he was right.

  On the due date, I wrote my first memorandum to the President, explaining the hazards of a lawsuit and the wisdom of waiting to see what an FBI investigation produced. I thought the affair had been put to rest. Not so. Back came another action memorandum from the staff secretary. The President agreed with my conclusions, but he wasn’t yet content. “It was requested,” said the memorandum, “that as part of this inquiry you should have the Internal Revenue Service conduct a field investigation on the tax front.”

  This was the “old Nixon” at work, heavy-handed, after somebody. I began to fret. How could anything be at once so troubling and so absurd? The President was asking me to do something I thought was dangerous, unnecessary and wrong. I did nothing for several days, but the deadline was hard upon me. I couldn’t simply respond, “Dean opposes this request because it is wrong and possibly illegal.” I had to find some practical reason for doing the right thing or I would be gone. I called Bud Krogh several times, but he was out. Then I thought of my recent acquaintance, Murray Chotiner, and arranged to meet him.

  “I need some counsel, Murray.”

  “You’re the lawyer. You’re the one who is supposed to give counsel around here,” he said with a chuckle.

  “I’m still trying to find the water fountains in this place,” I said. “Murray, seriously, I need some advice. The President wants me to turn the IRS loose on a shit-ass magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly because it printed a bogus memo from the Vice-President’s office about canceling the ’seventy-two election and repealing the Bill of Rights.”

  Murray laughed. “Hell, Agnew’s got a great idea. I hope he has a good plan worked out. It would save us a lot of trouble if we dispensed with the ’seventy-two campaign.” Murray wasn’t taking my visit as seriously as I was. We joked about Agnew for a few minutes before I could get him to focus on my problem, and he had the answer. “If the President wants you to turn the IRS loose, then you turn the IRS loose. It’s that simple, John.”

  “I really don’t think it’s necessary, Murray. The President’s already got Mitchell investigating it. The FBI, I guess.”

  “I’ll tell you this, if Richard Nixon thinks it’s necessary you’d better think it’s necessary. If you don’t, he’ll find someone who does.”

  I was not convinced and said so, but nicely. “Okay, but let me ask you this, Murray. You’re a lawyer. Isn’t it illegal and therefore crazy to use IRS to attack someone the President doesn’t like?”

  “Not so,” he snorted. He stopped and retrieved the calm he rarely lost. “John, the President is the head of the executive branch of this damn government. If he wants his tax collectors to check into the affairs of anyone, it’s his prerogative. I don’t see anything illegal about it. It’s the way the game is played. Do you think for a second that Lyndon Johnson was above using the IRS to harass those guys who were giving him a hard time on the war? No sir. Nor was Lyndon above using IRS against some good Republicans like Richard Nixon. I’ll tell you he damn near ruined a few.”

  Murray was testy, or maybe defensive—I couldn’t decide. It was clear that he didn’t want to discuss the matter further. I thanked him and left. If I was going to play ball in Richard Nixon’s league, I would have to get over my squeamishness. I am not sure what I would have done if John J. Caulfield had not walked into my office.

  Jack Caulfield could easily have been born in the mind of Damon Runyon instead of in New York City. He had moved up the ranks of the New York police force, from a street beat to detective, arriving at the White House after an assignment as candidate Nixon’s personal bodyguard in 1968. Bob Haldeman had assigned him to me without telling me why. Caulfield explained that he was White House liaison with the Secret Service and the local police, but his principal assignment was to investigate Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s conduct in the Chappaquiddick accident for John Ehrlichman.

  Jack was a bountiful source of information. He knew what everybody was doing. He could tell you how to get a refrigerator or parking privileges and who was sleeping with whose secretary. And he wanted to help me find my bearings. He seemed a natural person to turn to with my IRS orders, and I decided to show him the memos. “How would you handle this assignment?” I asked.

  “This isn’t any problem. I’ll take care of it for you with a phone call,” he answered confidently. He returned the next day to report that a tax inquiry would be fruitless because the magazine was only six months old and its owners had yet to file their first return. Being resourceful, however, he had asked the IRS to look into the owners themselves. “You can tell the President everything is taken care of,” he assured me.

  “I’ve got a good one for you to pass along to the President,” Jack added proudly. His Treasury Department sources had noticed an authoritative article on U.S.–Mexico drug traffic published by Scanlan’s Monthly. It would make excellent background reading for the President’s upcoming meeting with Mexican President Díaz Ordaz. I attached a copy of the article to my memo to the President, and was amused to hear that the article was removed before the memo landed on the President’s desk. No one in Haldeman’s office wanted to be responsible for passing along anything from a magazine the President hated so much.

  I summarized the tax situation in my report. “The fact that Scanlan’s is a new entity does not make the tax inquiry very promising,” I concluded. “Accordingly, I have also requested that the inquiry be extended to the principal organizers and promoters of the publication.” Thus, within a month of coming to the White House, I had crossed an ethical line. I had no choice, as I saw it. The fact that I had not carried out the assignment myself eased my conscience slightly. I had no idea how Jack had done it so easily, nor did I ask, and I never found out what became of the IRS inquiry.

  Scanlan’s came back to plague me again the following month. This time it was charging the White House with inviting some “labor racketeers” to the President’s famous “hardhat luncheon.” I was asked to have the FBI check into the magazine’s charges and reported back that the labor leaders were indeed shady characters. Shortly after this report, Scanlan’s went out of business, its editors unaware of how much trouble they stirred up at the White House.

  Soon Haldeman was testing me again, with a sensitive task regarding what was to be known as the “Huston Plan.” Thomas Charles Huston, its patron, was the second person Haldeman assigned to my staff, again with no explanation. He was as mysterious and complex as the label on his plan: “Top Secret/Handle Via COMINT Channels Only.” Haldeman called me to his office to explain that Tom Huston had been charged with responsibility to revise domestic intelligence gathering. Every official involved agreed with the plan except FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had irritated the President by blocking its implementation. Huston could do nothing further, for he had offended the powerful Hoover. My assignment was to get the plan implemented.

  Before I read the plan, I thought there was nothing more than a personality clash in my way, and the fact that Huston had offended Hoover was no surprise. I had discovered his abrasiveness the hard way when I once asked Tom to draft a routine memorandum to the Attorney General asking for some information. The memo was sent, over my signature, to the Justice Department, where it exploded. Kleindienst had called me. “Listen, Junior,” he yelled, “I don’t like having to make this call, but John Mitchell is damn upset. I’m surprised at you acting like the rest of those assholes up there!” He then read me the memorandum Huston had drafted. It was curt and quick; I seemed to be ord
ering John Mitchell around like a deckhand. Horrified, I told Kleindienst I had signed the memo without reading it and assured him I would start reading my mail.

  Obviously I now had to read the plan, but Huston wouldn’t give me a copy until I had been given security clearance. The clearance procedure was hardly the ritual swearing to secrecy I anticipated, and it would have been funny if everyone had not been so solemn. Two CIA officials came to my office and told Jane Thomas, my secretary, and me that we had to keep the plan locked in a combination safe; we could not move these classified materials without a guard to accompany us; and, finally, we should not talk into lamps, flowerpots, or pictures if we were in a foreign hotel. Bugs, you know.

  With my “Top Secret/COMINT Channel” status, I received the plan. The President, I discovered, had ordered removal of most of the legal restraints on gathering intelligence about left-wing groups. He had authorized wiretaps, mail intercepts and burglaries. These were the hottest papers I had ever touched. The plan had the full support of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council—of everyone except Hoover’s FBI. Hoover had footnoted the document with an objection that the risk of each illegal method was greater than the potential return.

  Tom Huston came to brief me. With rabid conviction, he told me the nation would surely crumble from within if the government failed to deal with the revolutionaries and anarchists who were bent on destroying it. He was incensed that the President’s orders could be blocked by Hoover merely because Hoover “wanted to ride out of the FBI on a white horse.” There was nothing really new about the plan, he assured me, for the FBI used to do those things regularly when Hoover was younger.

  After Huston left, I sat back to study my predicament. I was suspicious of his arguments because he was trying so hard to sell them. He had a vested interest in finding anarchy at the doors. (In fact none of the dire predictions in his report ever came true.) But I was no expert in internal security, and I knew that my arguments on the merits of the plan would convince no one. The methods would never hold up legally, and I was sensitive to my personal risk if I were involved in the decision to use them. I would have preferred to let someone else handle this one, but Haldeman had selected me. Still, I wondered, how did Haldeman expect me to get J. Edgar Hoover to reverse himself?

  After casting about for a few days, I decided that John Mitchell offered the only way out, and I arranged to see him on September 17. When I arrived at his office, he had just talked to the CIA representatives. To my relief, Mitchell said he had already made his decision. He was going to kill the plan somehow.

  “John, the President loves all this stuff,” he said slowly, “but it just isn’t necessary.” As he searched out loud for some sort of compromise, I was grateful to him for assuming my burden. He would take the heat at the White House, not I.

  We decided to endorse the idea of an interagency Intelligence Evaluation Committee, a toothless version of the Huston Plan. It was, in effect, a study group. Mitchell assumed the task of persuading Hoover to join the IEC as a sop to the White House. This took some doing, for Hoover had, in a fit of pique, cut off all communications with the other intelligence agencies. While Mitchell presented the IEC to Hoover as meaningless, I was to present it to the White House as a promising first step. True, I would say, it was not the Huston Plan, but it would at least get Hoover back in harness. My report was received without joy, but no wrath fell on me. The Huston Plan was laid to rest, and Huston himself soon left the White House in disgust.

  From Scanlan’s Monthly to the Huston Plan, I had survived two quick tests as different as the Marx Brothers and the Gestapo, and I had learned to expect anything in special assignments. But I also focused on my regular duties and was adjusting my instincts to what I saw daily in the White House. Before I hired my first assistant, I had formulated a plan of advancement. From three dozen resumés and a dozen interviews, I selected Fred F. Fielding, a successful young Philadelphia lawyer who resembles the actor George Hamilton. Fred is personable, poised, conservative in manner and quite witty. I liked him from our first meeting. I knew Fred wanted to succeed at the White House as badly as I did, and I explained my ideas for doing it.

  “Fred, I think we have to look at our office as a small law firm at the White House,” I began. “We have to build our practice like any other law firm. Our principal client, of course, is the President. But to convince the President we’re not just the only law office in town but the best, we’ve got to convince a lot of other people first. Haldeman, Ehrlichman and the others who surround the President. Here’s how we can do it.”

  Our conflict-of-interest duties were the key, I explained. The work was complicated and boring, but I had already sensed that it would produce new business. “It seems that when you really get to know a man’s personal financial situation,” I said, “and then candidly discuss his job here to determine if he has any conflicts, you can end up in his confidence if you play it right. And once you’re in his confidence, he sends you business. What we’ve got to do is service that business. First we go out and get it, and then we service it. When we get a question, we’ve got to fire back the right answer, fast.”

  We proceeded on that course, and it worked. We put in long grueling hours, and word soon got around that the counsel’s office was eager to tackle anyone and everyone’s problems and do it discreetly. We gave advice on the divorce laws to staff members whose marriages had been ruined, and we answered questions about immigration law for the Filipino stewards who worked in the mess. Although our work was technical and legal, we discovered that we could use it to get a foothold in substantive areas. If we were alert in conflict-of-interest reviews and investigations, we would have a small say in Presidential appointments. As with any law firm, our influence depended largely on our reputation, and our reputation was good. We cultivated it with care.

  Haldeman’s assignments always received priority, of course, and he fired questions at us regularly. A Presidential fact-finding committee had returned from Vietnam with two captured Chinese rifles for the President, and the Treasury Department wanted to disallow the gifts because they had been illegally imported. What could we do? After a crash study of the relevant law, we had no trouble persuading Treasury to classify the rifles as legal “war trophies” for the Commander in Chief. A corporation, said Haldeman, had upset the President by marketing a replica of the Presidential seal. Could anything be done? A few statutes cited on White House stationery made the company desist. Congress wanted the General Accounting Office to audit the White House budgets in which the redecorating expenses had been buried. Haldeman wanted to know if the audit could be blocked legally. We let the auditors in but assured Haldeman we could stall them for four years. Jeb Stuart Magruder, the deputy director of White House communications, wanted to make a mass mailing to Nixon supporters at government expense. Not legal, we said, but Magruder went ahead anyway. Henry Kissinger wanted to meet with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; would it violate the President’s principle of executive privilege for him to visit Capitol Hill? It was a close call, we said; we advised Kissinger to meet the senators on neutral ground at Blair House, the official guest mansion, to avoid precedent.

  The staffers we helped recommended us to their bosses, and the bosses seemed satisfied with our work. It did not take long for Haldeman, who knew everything, to learn that business was booming at the counsel’s office. He gave his blessing, which meant that I was soon enjoying some of the coveted White House status symbols: a daily copy of the President’s news summary, a new twelve-line telephone in place of my two-line model, subscriptions to more magazines and newspapers than I wanted, an Army Signal Corps telephone in my home (on which I could call London faster than I could dial next door), and carte blanche to redecorate an impressive new office. The small law firm grew; within six months my professional staff was up to three lawyers, plus Caulfield. We enjoyed neither the power nor the spectacular growth of C
huck Colson’s office, but we became known as a steady ground-gainer.

  By the beginning of 1971, the members of my staff were hopelessly overworked; but they were well organized, and business flowed in and out routinely. I left most of the standard casework to Fred and began scouting around for more important cases. It did not take long to notice that the counsel’s office could perform in intelligence work for the White House. We had already assumed the role in our conflict-of-interest investigations. And we had Jack Caulfield, who knew such waters. We advertised our office as the place where questions would be answered. I encouraged this new specialty, figuring that intelligence would be more valued by the policy-makers than would dry legal advice. All through 1971, my “warm-up” year, we were bombarded with intelligence requests. I learned a lot about some of the things my superiors were interested in.

  —Chuck Colson asked us to search the military records of some antiwar Vietnam veterans for unrespectable conduct. The counsel’s office checked the files but found no bombshells.

  —Haldeman sent us frequent questions about Millhouse: A White Comedy, a satirical film based on the President’s “Checkers Speech” and other embarrassing events. Would it hurt us with the youth vote? Could we stop it? Caulfield acquired a dossier of FBI material on Emile de Antonio, the film’s creator. We planned to leak it if the movie became a hit or if the Democratic Party sponsored showings. Neither occurred.

  —Haldeman requested an investigation of “Richard M. Dixon,” the comedian who was seeking to capitalize on his striking resemblance to the President. Caulfield did a quick undercover investigation, but Haldeman lost interest when President Dixon faded.

  —Colson sent me a transcript of a telephone call he had had from William Lambert, a senior investigative reporter for Life Magazine, whose message was as complicated as it was wild and seamy. He said Teddy Ratenoff, an old informant of his, had gone to work as a freelance consultant for the Knapp Commission, which was then investigating police corruption in New York. Ratenoff, said Lambert, had just called to say he had penetrated a high-class prostitution operation and discovered “a lot of politicians mixed up in it, even at the White House.” Lambert told Colson that Ratenoff sounded menacing, as if he might peddle his information. My assignment: find out what Ratenoff knew and whether it was true.