Blind Ambition

by Dean, John W. ;

  The tickler was an extension of Haldeman, and was probably more responsible for the chief of staff’s awesome reputation than was his own aluminum personality. It was a self-perpetuating paper monster, with a computer’s memory and a Portuguese man-of-war’s touch. Often those who were ticklers made calls for the sake of making calls, to impress Haldeman with their efficiency. Their machine never forgot or tired. Once a staff man was nailed with responsibility for the slightest project, the tickler would keep pestering until it was fed something: a status report, a piece of paper, a bit of information to chew on. No one could ignore the tickler, because no one could afford to ignore Haldeman. It reached everywhere. Even Mitchell and Kissinger were subject to it. Each call was recorded meticulously on the tickler scorecard, on which reputations were made and broken in Haldeman’s eyes. The tickler did not easily show mercy. Thus, when I received a confidential action memorandum from Haldeman on January 18, 1971, and told Higby that the January 26, 1971, due date was too soon for the complex and extremely delicate assignment, I was refused an extension. At the time, I did not know I was handling a matter of intense interest to the President, but years later this assignment would help me understand the chain of events that destroyed the Nixon Presidency.

  It began on January 14, 1971, when the President went all the way to the University of Nebraska to be assured a friendly reception, free of antiwar radicals and heckling students. As television commentators did not fail to point out, the President was neither welcome nor respected at institutions of higher learning. New campus protests had just broken out against stepped-up air operations in Cambodia and Laos, and Senator Muskie, who led the Democrats in the public-opinion polls, was getting extensive press coverage on his trip through the Middle East and Moscow. The President, his prospects for reelection slipping, wanted to be seen as a courageous and admired leader. But as Air Force One flew toward the Nebraska heartland he was thinking about more than his speech and his reception. He reached for his IBM dictating machine.

  “This is for Haldeman,” he said. “It would seem that the time is approaching when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes. Bebe [Rebozo] has some information on this, although it is, of course, not solid. But there is no question that one of Hughes’s people did have O’Brien on a very heavy retainer for ‘services rendered’ in the past. Perhaps Colson should check on this.”

  Rose Mary Woods, the President’s secretary, typed the message and passed it directly to Haldeman. Back in Washington the next day, Haldeman discussed the assignment with the President. Haldeman suggested that I, rather than Colson, pursue it, and the President agreed. “Let’s try Dean,” Haldeman noted on the bottom of the President’s memo, and three days later I received a Haldeman-authored directive to investigate the relationship between billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes and Democratic National Committee Chairman Lawrence F. O’Brien.

  Following my pattern, I talked it over with Jack Caulfield, who knew a lot of gossip about the Hughes empire. He told me it was embroiled in an internal war, with two billion dollars at stake, private eyes swarming, nerve-jangling power plays going on, and Mafia figures lurking in the wings. I found myself as cowed as any newspaper reader by the Hughes legend. The American dream in neon lights. He had built the last financial empire that was solely in the control of one owner, made movies in Hollywood, seduced a string of starlets beginning with Jean Harlow, and set world flying records. He had not been seen in public since 1957, pulling the strings of his one-man empire as a total recluse. He was more secret than the CIA and perhaps more powerful than the President. And he was feared in the Nixon White House, where some believed that the “Hughes loan” scandal had cost Richard Nixon the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy.* The implications of the assignment were clear. If Larry O’Brien was in fact on the Hughes payroll while serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, it would be a matter of scandal.

  Caulfield delighted in sharing his tales of Hughes intrigue, but after talking with his friends “who might know more” he could still confirm only that there was a rumor about O’Brien’s retainer, and I needed more. At Haldeman’s request I checked with Lyn Nofziger, who specialized in making certain that the press was abreast of bad news about political foes. Lyn had only heard rumors, too. Bebe Rebozo, the President’s pal, repeated what he had already told the President. I was living on a diet of rumors when Chuck Colson called. He had learned of my assignment and said he knew the man with the answer: Robert Bennett.

  Bob Bennett, son of Republican Senator Wallace Bennett of Utah, did have the answer. He had recently bought the Mullen public-relations firm in Washington and acquired a prize client, Howard Hughes. Bennett was unequivocal. Larry O’Brien had been retained by Howard Hughes, and the contract was still in existence. Bennett would document the facts as long as they were not used to embarrass Hughes. He promised to report back to me after visiting the Hughes people in Los Angeles.

  I told this to Haldeman on my due date, January 26, in a lengthy memorandum in which I stressed how vigorously I had attacked the assignment—hoping thereby to camouflage how little hard evidence I possessed. Two days later Haldeman instructed:

  You should continue to keep in contact with Bob Bennett as well as looking for other sources of information on the subject. Once Bennett gets back to you with his final report, you and Chuck Colson should get together and come up with a way to leak the appropriate information. Frankly, I can’t see any way to handle this without involving Hughes so the problem of “embarrassing” him seems to be a matter of degree. However, we should keep Bob Bennett and Bebe out of this at all costs.

  Haldeman’s memo led me to respect the fast rise of Bob Bennett. I had never heard of him until a few weeks earlier, and now he not only was the key to information that might influence the future of the Democratic Party chairman, but was also getting White House protection on a par with Bebe Rebozo’s. When Bennett came to see me after his trip to Los Angeles, I took handwritten notes of the conversation, something I seldom did.

  Like Howard Hughes’s famous protective team of male “nurses” and the upper echelon of Hughes’s corporation, Bennett is a Mormon. He neither drinks nor smokes, and has a polished, businesslike manner. He would have fit well in the Administration. When he walked into my office, he eased his lanky frame into a chair and crossed his legs in a way that made him seem conscious of their length. He made me think of Ichabod Crane, gangly and mysterious, but extremely loquacious. He spoke endlessly around the subject at hand. Unlike Ehrlichman’s pithy metaphors or Haldeman’s sparse commands, Bennett’s speech was contoured in long, rounded sentences that imparted a softness to his words. He was discussing all manner of skullduggery, but he managed to give it the innocent air of a parson’s monologue.

  The real problem, he seemed to be saying, was Robert Maheu, a former FBI man who had, until recently, run the Hughes hotel and casino properties in Las Vegas. Bennett’s superiors at the Hughes Tool Company had just ousted Maheu and spirited Hughes away to the Bahamas. Now, said Bennett, his superiors and the Maheu forces were “trying to destroy each other” in a battle for control of Hughes’s assets, with Bennett’s side having an inside advantage. It was Maheu who had hired O’Brien for Hughes. The contract had been drawn with one of O’Brien’s firms to keep him one step removed. Since O’Brien was part of the ousted Maheu faction, said Bennett elliptically, “his services are no longer needed.” But O’Brien, he said, was arguing that his contract was with the Hughes Tool Company and that he should continue to receive his retainer regardless of Maheu’s departure. I gathered from Bennett that O’Brien was bargaining hard to keep his job, or at least to depart with a large severance settlement. Bennett performed well in concealing any distaste for O’Brien. His desire to take O’Brien’s place was obvious.

  It was a thorny matter, said Bennett. Maheu had handled all Hughes’s political activity for the last fifteen years and had the facts on everything from the old Hughes l
oan to the involvement of the President’s brother, Donald Nixon, with the Hughes empire. Since O’Brien was close to Maheu, there was a presumption that he knew a great deal. He had to be handled delicately.

  As I tried to distill Bennett’s meaning from his long, orbital speech, I recoiled at the rat’s nest he was revealing. I admired how carefully he phrased his sentences, and I wondered about the things he was not telling me. He did not say specifically what O’Brien had done for the Hughes companies or, for that matter, what he himself was doing. And, more important from the standpoint of my assignment, he did not offer the promised documentation of O’Brien’s contract. Instead he focused on Maheu. The Hughes people had been forced to fire Maheu after discovering his involvement with notorious gangsters, Bennett said in a tone of piety, and suggested that the Administration pursue a criminal investigation. The conversation ended; as far as I know, the Administration never took any action.

  I puzzled over Bennett’s message for several days. His superiors, I decided, must have tempered his desire to expose O’Brien. They were probably confident they could handle O’Brien in the “settlement negotiations.” Maheu was their real foe, and Bennett seemed to be steering the Administration against him, not O’Brien. What a mess, I thought.

  Jack Caulfield’s supplementary reports tangled the situation further. Now Jack was cautioning against any hasty assault on the O’Brien-Hughes matter. “The revelation that an O’Brien-Maheu relationship exists poses significant hazards in any attempt to make O’Brien accountable to the Hughes retainer,” he wrote. Any forced embarrassment of O’Brien “might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.” The available information about the common knowledge between Maheu and O’Brien was weak, Caulfield told me, but his sources fed him all sorts of rumors about dirt in both political houses. Jack thought we should settle for a truce.

  I told Haldeman that the Hughes people had apparently backed off from their offer to document O’Brien’s retainer, and that in any case we were treading in dangerous waters. I said “dangerous,” and I felt it so. Even my hardening experiences inside the White House were not equal to this kind of twisted intrigue. My brief investigation had already convinced me that O’Brien, Bennett and Maheu were mysterious characters, but I had only a glimmer of what was to come. Maheu would later surface as the point of contact for the CIA’s effort to have the Mafia assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s. Bennett, for his part, would later amaze me by turning up as a crucial behind-the-scenes player in most matters that came to plague the Nixon White House. He would become as mysterious in his inconspicuous presence as Howard Hughes was in his conspicuous absence.

  For the time being, Haldeman let the matter drop and I received no further instructions. The O’Brien inquiry lay dormant, but it was not lost from his memory, or from mine. The President began planning for his reelection campaign and reached out in a new direction—one that would later merge with a new O’Brien investigation.

  Late in April 1971, the President reviewed a series of task-force proposals for the 1972 campaign, covering everything from advertising budgets to political strategies, and discovered there was no task force on campaign intelligence. He reached for his dictating machine and ordered Haldeman to rectify the mistake: Make sure we have a political intelligence capability better than we had in previous campaigns. Haldeman ordered ticklers Higby and Strachan to solicit thoughts on a campaign intelligence system.

  It did not take me long to realize that Haldeman’s interest in intelligence had been intensified. He called me to his office and offered a stilted explanation: “Nothing has higher priority than the President’s reelection. We’ve got to take maximum advantage of the President’s incumbency, and I want every office in the White House to be thinking about how to help in the reelection effort.” He knew what he wanted from me. “One thing that can be improved, for example, is demonstration intelligence. That stuff you send over here is worthless. There’s more information in the newspapers. We’re not going to have a convention like the one the Democrats had in Chicago. Antiwar demonstrators would love to destroy our convention, but we’re not going to let it happen.”

  I reflected on how I might take advantage of Haldeman’s preoccupation. I was still building my law firm, seeking new business, and I knew the campaign would be a steppingstone for those who distinguished themselves. But as I looked ahead I saw the counsel’s office performing rather menial campaign tasks—legal chores hardly important enough to get me admitted to the inner councils of the Nixon campaign.

  If the counsel’s office could play the same role at the Republican convention we had played on Mayday—special White House tie-lines, half-hourly reports—I knew we would be in the thick of things. We had a jump on other White House offices in demonstration intelligence. Why not expand our role to all intelligence that would be of interest to the President in a campaign? I wrote a memo to Haldeman, seeking a grant of authority:

  My office receives a great amount of intelligence information regarding the activities of domestic insurgents of the new militant left, civil disorders, etc. Other offices receive domestic intelligence regarding such matters as crime and drug statistics, civil rights problems of note, political intelligence and other matters of domestic intelligence that I suspect never reach the President.

  I would like to recommend and urge that a digest of this information be prepared on at least a bi-weekly basis for the President, with circulation limited to you, John Ehrlichman and the President. I suggest the limited circulation because much of the information would be extremely sensitive, and not many members of the staff would “need-to-know.” I would think that if a matter reported in the digest deserved follow up by another staffer, one of you would so direct.

  In late July 1971 I carried the memo into Haldeman’s office and made my pitch. I reviewed my proposal with him briefly and suggested, of course, that the counsel’s office would be a good place to have the intelligence digest prepared.

  “We’ve done this before,” I said, hinting at previous demonstrations, “and I think we could beef it up. I’ve already talked to Bernie Wells at the IEC [Intelligence Evaluation Committee], and I think those guys over there will improve themselves in the election year.”

  “That stuff isn’t worth a damn,” Haldeman said quickly.

  “I know,” I said, already on the defensive, “but they see everything the Bureau and the police turn up from their informants. Which isn’t much. What they don’t see are all the tips I pick up from the advance men and friends who come out of the woodwork. I know there’s a lot more out there, political stuff, but nobody can collect it unless they have backing from you. Otherwise no one is going to send their stuff in to one place. They’ll want to give it directly to you so they can get the kudos for it.”

  “You’ve got a good idea, John, but it’s already coming in. Strachan collects it. Besides, I’m not so worried about collecting information as getting it in the first place.”

  “Jack Caulfield might be able to help,” I offered. “I know he’s been working on a plan for campaign security and intelligence. I don’t know how good it will be, but Jack tells me he’s preparing a proposal to cover everything. He wants to present it to you and Mitchell and Ehrlichman.”

  “Well, I don’t have a lot of faith in Jack Caulfield,” said Haldeman, “but let’s see what he comes up with.” He looked away. I could almost hear his stopwatch ticking in his head. The meeting was over. I had been shot down.

  At Haldeman’s instruction, his assistant, Gordon Strachan, had begun to educate himself on the kind of tactics savvy insiders used in the big time. He had never been in a Presidential campaign before, and sought the advice of those who had worked in the 1968 campaign: Dwight Chapin, speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan, chief advance man Ronald Walker. Strachan was surprised when the veterans regaled him with tales of what Richard Nixon’s opponents had done to him in 1968—infiltrated his campaign staff, disrupted and sabotaged his rallies, lea
ked false stories, planted rumors. Buchanan, who popularized the term “political hardball,” argued for such tactics. We should expect the opponents to do what they had done in the past, and we should do it first, and better. There was general agreement. The Nixon campaign would not be soft.

  On August 14, 1971, Strachan wrote to Haldeman that he now had “oral recommendations for political intelligence and covert activities.” Haldeman expressed interest only in independent operations, so that any slipups could not be traced back to the White House. Things began to move. Chapin called an old college friend, Donald H. Segretti, and hired him to disrupt, ridicule and harass the Democratic candidates and stir up as much intramural bickering as possible. Strachan called Jeb Magruder at the Re-election Committee, and Magruder agreed to infiltrate the office of Senator Muskie, the Democratic frontrunner.

  Political intelligence was now lodged in the tickler, and it would remain there until Haldeman was satisfied. Every week or so, Strachan tickled me with the same questions: “Anything new on demonstrations?” “Does Caulfield have anything on Kennedy?” After making his rounds, Strachan would write a report for Haldeman. His September 18 memo was typical:

  Monitoring of Democrats—Colson submitted a memorandum expressing surprise and dismay that we did not have a list of attendees of the Muskie “Fat Cat” week-end. [We did have such a list and sent him a copy.] His other concern is that no arrangements have been made to tape record all of Muskie’s statements, including the “offhand” comments. Colson suggests that Nofziger arrange for this, but Lyn said he had no money for this type of project.