I sent Caulfield to New York on that one. After huddling with some of his old colleagues there, he returned with a cloak-and-dagger report entitled “Interview with Special Agent XXX regarding Xaviera de Vres a.k.a. Hollander.” Special Agent XXX confirmed that Ratenoff worked for the Knapp Commission, providing bugging equipment and expertise. He had wired the lush business quarters of a madam named Xaviera Hollander (later a.k.a. the Happy Hooker) and had made tapes of famous clients “having intercourse and engaging in abnormal sexual practices.” Most of the clients appeared to be judges. Ratenoff had also managed to copy Ms. Hollander’s address book. But there was another address book, for sensitive political people, and it was not known whether Ratenoff had it. Special Agent XXX said Ratenoff had already entered into a financial arrangement with author Robin Moore to write a book about Hollander. Ratenoff was clearly on to something, but it was impossible to determine what he knew about White House people.
Caulfield and I decided the information cut such a wide swath there was little chance of its being put to political use. The only real danger might be political embarrassment to the White House, but even that seemed remote. Still, I decided to check around quietly to find out what kind of response I would get. It would be entertaining to drop hints of the information from Special Agent XXX, and it would also let people know that the counsel’s office had ears in hidden corners. I began asking the more adventurous men at the White House if they might have anything to fear from Xaviera Hollander’s address book. When I whispered my story to Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, his face went white as a sheet. “I’ll deny it,” he said quickly. “I’ll deny it.” He turned and walked away. But over the next few weeks Ziegler kept up a steady stream of calls to me, asking for further developments. His tone was so urgent I could scarcely keep from laughing. There were no further developments, except that Ms. Hollander did quite well as a public figure.
The counsel’s office built up a reputation for such intelligence investigations—some juicy, many simply laborious—and we handled them while the ordinary legal work hummed along. I became the White House collecting point for antiwar intelligence reports, and I funneled information directly to the President during emergencies. In May of 1971, for instance, we expected as many as forty thousand antiwar demonstrators to come to Washington for what became known as “Mayday.” Shortly after the President announced his surprise military “incursion” into Laos, antiwar leaders had announced their intention to “close down the government” by blocking bridges, traffic intersections and entrances to government buildings. Loosely organized radical groups were to divide up the key targets, armed mostly with their own bodies, some with rocks and trashcans to throw.
With the demonstration set for the morning of Monday, May 3, officials of the Administration mapped their opposing strategy in summit meetings the preceding weekend. Ehrlichman, Kleindienst, Police Chief Jerry Wilson and several Pentagon generals led the sessions. I attended to hear the intelligence reports, as I had when I had monitored demonstrations for the Justice Department. There were detailed briefings on the precise transmission frequencies of the demonstrators’ walkie-talkies, which would be monitored, and general estimates of the percentage of drug users in the ranks. And there were constant updates on the intentions of the demonstrators, which was no great feat since the plans were printed in antiwar newspapers, complete with maps and arrows. Shortly before the battle, Assistant Attorney General Robert C. Mardian reported that the government knew the exact target areas of every antiwar group except one faction of Gay Liberation.
On Mayday, Ziegler issued a placid statement that the President anticipated a normal business day, but the President, in fact, wanted reports every half hour, and my office was responsible for gathering the intelligence. Direct lines had been installed between my phone and the command posts at the FBI, the Metropolitan Police, the Secret Service and the Justice Department. When I picked up any of those lines, a special White House light flashed in the command post. My staff would call each command post for its latest word—what bridges were open, how much violence there was, how many people had been arrested, the general outlook. We would write a hurried report, fire it off to the President and begin immediately on the next one. We were an information conduit only, making no decisions, but we got a great deal of attention.
Ehrlichman kept calling for information, and Colson popped in and out of the office with questions. Colson’s intrusions became so annoying that Fred Fielding finally suggested in jest that he send a crate of oranges to the demonstrators locked up in jail. Senator Edmund Muskie, his Presidential campaign already under way, had a custom of sending oranges to his volunteers. The idea was that Muskie would be identified with violent antiwar radicals.
“Yeah, Chuck, that’s a great idea,” I chimed in, laughing.
To our surprise, Colson stopped, looked around, and then smiled. “You’re right,” he said, “I’ll do it,” and he dashed out the door. A few hours later he strolled back in. “I sent the oranges,” he said proudly, “and I tipped off the press.”
There were high political stakes involved in the handling of the demonstration, but we were quite distant from the passions and fears as we monitored numbers and information. Distant enough to play war games. On Mayday, I did something I could never have hoped to do when I first became counsel. I asked for, and got, a military helicopter to fly me over the city for a firsthand view. At the last minute I asked Ehrlichman to go with me, and I considered it a coup when this powerful man accepted. Taking various assistants with us, we took off from the Ellipse, and the pilot banked and rolled in the air as we passed over knots of people on the ground. We saw burning cars in Georgetown, a confused maze of little figures running through the streets, and conclaves of demonstrators on university campuses. Flashing police lights and pitched rock battles blended into a general scene of chaos. Ehrlichman, busy with his home movie camera, said little on the flight. When we finally circled back to land at the Ellipse, the ground there was crisscrossed with demonstrators and with blue-uniformed police giving chase. We could not land there, said the pilot, so Ehrlichman ordered him to set down on the south lawn of the White House. That pad was strictly reserved for the President, and Ehrlichman later smilingly said he had been chewed out by the First Lady.
By the next day the violence had subsided, and the recriminations began. Critics of the Administration denounced the mass arrest of some ten thousand demonstrators, who later won a court ruling that the arrest methods were illegal. The President announced that he was proud of the government response, and I ushered Chief Wilson and the generals of the Mayday command into his office to receive congratulations.
The Mayday demonstration was at once gruesome and sporting for the officials involved on the inside. It was one of a series of crises that year, many of which served to slowly advance the importance of the counsel’s office. When Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of murder for his part in the mass killing of civilians in the Vietnam village of My Lai, we called all over Washington to order delivery of documents on military law, inundated ourselves, talked with other experts and became instant experts on the procedures of military courts. (For both legal and political reasons, spelled out at great length, I recommended that the President stay away from the case while Calley’s lawyers appealed, but I was overruled by Ehrlichman and the President.) When the commander of an American vessel caused a scandal by handing a desperate Lithuanian defector back to the Russian ship from which he had escaped, we found ourselves informing the President of what was happening and why. When the Pentagon Papers sent the whole Administration into an uproar, we dove into constitutional law and offered discouraging opinions on the chances of enjoining newspapers from publishing them. Through it all our law firm performed well, and our intelligence specialty inched us upward. But there was one crisis in the intelligence field that did not help my stature in the White House.
One day in July 1971, Jack Caulfield bolted into my office, his
face flushed. I was alarmed; Jack was not easily moved to fear. Usually, Caulfield strolled casually into my office and waited patiently, rocking on the balls of his feet like a schoolboy about to tattle. As he waited, I would sense him trying to read my mail upside down. When I acknowledged him, he would hand over a deadpan report on some salacious item he had picked up from his sources. Jack labored over the prose of his memos and his feelings were easily hurt, so I would praise his report and give him another assignment. Fielding and I would often crack up over an entertaining gem such as Special Agent XXX, but we liked Caulfield. He was Jack Anderson on our side.
“Jesus Christ, John!” he shouted, without waiting for my greeting. “You’ve got to help me. This guy Colson is crazy! He wants me to firebomb a goddam building, and I can’t do it.”
“Now, wait a minute, Jack,” I said. I shut the door and told my secretary to hold my calls. “Calm down and tell me from the beginning.”
“Colson’s been pestering me for weeks to get this guy Halperin’s Vietnam papers out of the Brookings Institution.” (There had been reports that Morton H. Halperin and Daniel Ellsberg had secret documents that would extend the Pentagon Papers into the Nixon years, and we were all climbing the walls about it, especially Henry Kissinger.) “Well, I told Colson I might be able to get them.” He paused. “Listen, John, I didn’t take this assignment until Colson assured me it was okay with Ehrlichman. Tony, my man, went over to case the place. It’s a big gray building on Mass Avenue. You know where it is?”
“Yeah.” I knew that “Tony” was one of Jack’s operatives, but I didn’t find out his last name, Ulasewicz, until years later. Jack always said his last name was something I didn’t “need-to-know,” in spy jargon.
“Well, Tony cased the place, and he finally figured he could buy one of the security guards to get us in the building. And he found out Halperin’s papers are in this big vault safe upstairs. The security on that vault is tough. It didn’t take long to figure out this wouldn’t be any easy job. We’d have to get past the alarm system and crack the safe somehow.” I sensed that Jack was getting a buzz off the story in spite of himself.
“I told this to Colson,” he continued. “I told him this thing is impossible! I figured Chuck would forget it. But he didn’t. Chuck says, ‘I don’t want to hear excuses! Start a fire if you need to! That’ll take care of the alarms. You can go in behind the firemen. I’m not going to think of everything for you. That’s your business!’”
His eyes were wide. “Now, John, I’m no chicken, but this is insane. Tony can’t go in there with a bunch of firemen. There are so many holes in this thing we’d never get away with it. You’ve got to get me out of this.”
He was pleading and stammering by the end, and there was a short silence as my head reeled. “Goddammit, Jack,” I said finally, “this is what you get for messing around with Colson.” I couldn’t resist the dig. “You just sit tight and don’t do anything until you hear from me.” I was trying to sound calmly in command. “And whatever you do, don’t talk to Colson.”
“I won’t go near him, John,” he said. His face portrayed fear, relief, embarrassment, gratitude, and uncertainty that I would be able to save him.
I stared out the window and wondered if the President’s mind was as cluttered as mine when he stared out his window. Garbage and tension, I thought. I knew I had to get out of this thing. It was out-and-out street crime. I saw fat burglars wearing stocking masks slipping behind firemen and felt a rush of revulsion. And now I was trapped. Caulfield was on my staff, and I knew the plan before the fact. In order to escape, I would have to stop it. I suppressed a dart of anger at Caulfield, and then at Colson, before focusing on strategy. I thought about going straight to Colson, but rejected the idea. He was too fired up about Halperin’s papers and too forceful. He might pull out all the stops to break me down. He was powerful, and he might squeeze me to choose between this break-in and my job as counsel. Then I thought of Ehrlichman.
Ehrlichman was in San Clemente with the President. By now I could get him directly on the phone, although I did so sparingly. “John,” I said, “something’s come up here that requires your firm hand.” I was trying to make light of it. “I can’t talk to you about it on the phone, so I’d really like to come out there and see you for a few minutes, if you can work me in tomorrow. It’ll only take a few minutes.” He could tell I was rattled, and I worried about it; being rattled was not an admired state in the White House.
“Okay,” he said evenly. Ehrlichman did not waste words.
That afternoon I flew to San Clemente on the C-135, a courier flight, and Bob Mardian sat beside me. I asked him why he was going out to San Clemente, and he replied that he had to speak directly with the President about a matter so sensitive he couldn’t tell me a thing. (He was worried, I learned later, that J. Edgar Hoover might blackmail the Administration with his knowledge of the President’s special wiretaps against newsmen and employees suspected of leaking.) I was impressed and bested, since I could say only that I had to speak directly with Ehrlichman on a matter so sensitive I couldn’t tell Mardian a thing. We chatted and played gin rummy. Mardian, an old Arizona colleague of Dick Kleindienst and Senator Barry Goldwater, was considered tough as nails in the Administration. His shiny dome and huge hands were his most striking features. He had little sense of humor, but he tried hard to be sociable.
On the following morning I had the first of what would be many encounters that revealed John Ehrlichman to be unflappable. I was quite exercised in his office, giving him a speech about an outright break-in, which was hardly a run-of-the-mill affair. I kept waiting for him to interrupt me with some sort of question or exclamation, but he never did. He just sat there, staring out over the top of his half-rimmed glasses like a professor. The only sign of interest he gave was an occasional slight twitch of an eyebrow. Meanwhile, I offered every practical argument I could think of against the scheme—criminal statutes that would be violated, the likelihood that Halperin had other copies, the security around the safe, the exposure of Caulfield, on and on.
“Yep, okay,” he said finally, nodding. “I’ll take care of it.”
He picked up the phone and called Colson. “Chuck, that Brookings thing. We don’t want it anymore. I’m telling Dean to turn Caulfield off. Right. Goodbye.”
I felt a great weight lift off me, and I admired the ease with which Ehrlichman had removed it. I also admired the skill with which he had handled me. He showed no hint of a reaction—no surprise, no argument, no demonstration of his knowledge. Impulsive reactions could be telling, and Ehrlichman had protective instincts. I wondered then if this thing had been ordered by the President. Years later, I learned that the President had angrily demanded Halperin’s papers, had ordered “everybody to rifle” the files, if necessary.
Back in Washington, I was visited by Bud Krogh, who had by now taken command of the Plumbers’ Unit. As part of his mandate to stop leaks, he wanted to harass the Brookings Institution in any way he could, and he was checking in with me. He told me the counsel’s office should play some role in the “declassification” program of the Plumbers. He seemed almost apologetic, and I sensed he was slightly embarrassed at being chosen to head an intelligence operation that should logically have been mine. It was an uneasy conversation, with much nonverbal communication, and Bud was finally moved to offer an explanation: “John, I guess there are some people around here who think you have some little old lady in you.”
Bud knows about the Brookings break-in, I thought. I was upset that they thought of me as a little old lady, but I tried not to let on. Later, as if to prove myself again, I had Caulfield obtain the tax records of Brookings from IRS as Bud had requested and sent them to him with a covering memo, noting that Brookings received many government contracts we might cut off. I also told him there were Nixon loyalists on the Brookings board whom we might use clandestinely. A week later I sent Bud another terse and self-serving memo, offering to help “turn off the spig
ot” of funds to Brookings, but he never called on me. Although I was never sorry about my action to stop the break-in, I was pained it might have harmed my reputation for toughness in the White House. Within my limits, I was tough, too, and it had served me well.
In the fall of 1971, my small law office reached a plateau. I had acquired additional office space next door, and the carpenters erected partitions there to accommodate another lawyer, two secretaries and Jack Caulfield. Upstairs, on the second floor of the EOB, I commandeered another large office. With partitions, it had room for two lawyers and a secretary. Soon I would take over the remaining office in my own suite, occupied by a man whose wife was a friend of Mrs. Nixon. His job was to greet those friends of the President whom the President did not want to see, but he spent most of his time reading newspapers. It took months of delicate sessions with Haldeman’s staff and the personnel people to accomplish my goal. We had to find the man a nice job in another department, handling him gently. When the lateral arabesques were accomplished, I partitioned his office, redecorated, and brought two attorneys into the suite.
I was drained after nearly a year and a half’s constant work. Haldeman granted permission for a vacation, and I flew to London, Paris, the Riviera, Rome, Athens and the Greek Isles. While basking in the high life and relaxation, I reviewed my career prospects. I was getting closer to the center of things, I thought, having arrived at the edge of the President’s inner circle. Yet I knew I had risen about as high as I could go. Ehrlichman would always have a foot on my shoulder, for he was in fact the President’s counsel; I was merely a successful staff lawyer.
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