“I think you’d better come back, John.” His voice was unexpectedly serious.
“Why?”
“There’s a story in the newspaper that’s going to cause some problems.”
“I don’t really give a damn, Fred.”
“You’d better.” He told me about the Washington Post story on the arrest of five men in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building. Allegedly they were attempting to bug Larry O’Brien’s office. Fred was persistent. He wanted to talk to me, but not on the telephone.
Halfway across the country, I was stretched across two seats when a stewardess approached.
“You look awful,” she said. “Got a hangover? ’Cause I’ve got the cure.”
“What’s the cure?”
“Oxygen.”
“Why not,” I told her, and she produced a canister and a face mask and warned me not to smoke. A few hefty snorts revived me. I felt groggy but respectable when I landed in Washington after twenty hours in the air. Fred was waiting for me at my house.
“What’s so damned important I have to jeopardize my mental and physical health to hear it from you?” I asked testily.
“Caulfield called me about that story, about the DNC break-in—”
“Did Jack do it?” I interrupted, trying to be funny.
Fred wasn’t in the mood. “No, dammit, John, just listen. Jack said a guy named McCord, from the Re-election Committee, was arrested with some Cubans in the DNC. McCord told the police his name was Ed Martin.”
I knew that was James McCord. He was security coordinator of the Committee to Re-elect the President.
“But here’s the clinker,” Fielding went on. “They found a check on one of the Cubans from Howard Hunt. How about that?”
“Shit, I’ve always told you Colson is crazy.” This sounded like Colson, who was about as subtle in pursuing political intelligence as a pig hunting truffles.
“What else?” I asked.
“That’s all Jack told me and all I know.”
I sat and thought, All that crazy screwing around has finally caught up with us. No one can help now. “Well, Freddie, there’s not a damn thing I can do tonight. I’m bone tired. Leave it to Colson to blow the election. I’m going to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
It was a good night’s sleep. The best I would have for years to come.
The White House, June 19, 1972 (Monday morning again). I walked into the office and made a few cracks about the octopus in my stomach. It would be a bad week, I told Jane, because it had started with two Mondays. This didn’t register. I acknowledged a few welcome-home waves from my staff and went on to my desk, preoccupied. I had hardly begun sorting through the pile of paper in my in box when Jane buzzed. Caulfield was on the line.
“Johnny,” he said, “I’m worried.”
“Yeah, I thought you would be. Fred tells me Jim McCord got picked up at the DNC. Are you sure?”
“Yep. The Secret Service boys told me. They got it from the police.”
“Do they know who McCord is yet?”
“Jesus Christ! It’s in the paper this morning. He gave them an alias, but it didn’t even last through the weekend. Listen, I’m the guy who put Jimmy over there at the Committee. But I didn’t know he was mixed up in this business. I had no idea.”
“Well, Jack, I don’t think you have anything to worry about if you’re not involved.”
“Rest assured, John, I’m not involved.” He tried to sound solemn, as if he were taking an oath, but his voice quickly gave way to panic. “Not at all. Believe me!”
“Well, then, just sit tight and don’t worry.”
“I’ve got to worry. This thing could go all over the place.”
“Is that stuff about Howard Hunt’s name being on one of the Cubans true?”
“Yeah, it’s true. That’s what I mean.”
“It figures. Look, Jack, the best thing you can do is to hold on, and don’t call people about this thing. You’ll be all right. Okay? I’ve got to go.”
“Okay, John.”
I reached for the morning paper. Caulfield was right. It had not taken long for the press to smoke out McCord’s identity. Headlines: “GOP Security Aide among Five Arrested in Bugging Affair.” The story, written by two Washington Post reporters I had never heard of, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, included a statement from John Mitchell denying any relationship between McCord’s job at the Re-election Committee and the break-in. It was meant to sound as if Mitchell had never heard of McCord. That won’t hold, I thought.
While I was still reading, Jane buzzed again. Jeb Magruder was calling. He needed to speak with me urgently.
“What’s going on, Jeb?”
“We’ve got a real problem, John. I think we can handle it, but, well, it’s a hell of a problem. Mitchell told me to get hold of you. Get your help. We’ve issued a statement. Mitchell issued it in California yesterday. He’s still out there. Did you read the paper this morning? Basically the thing is going to be a tough PR problem. But I think we can handle it.” Jeb’s sentences came at me in a rapid staccato. He was on a thin edge between bravado and loss of control. His voice jumped up in pitch every now and again as if he had swallowed a gulp of helium. He was flailing, I thought—throwing Mitchell’s name around, looking for my help. Then he hit me.
“Listen, John, this is all that dumb fucking Liddy’s fault. He blew it. The stupid bastard. He should have never used McCord. He never told us he was using McCord. It was stupid. This mess is all his fault.…”
Oh, shit! I lost the next few sentences. Prickles swirled up and down my back. The octopus juice bubbled ominously. I flashed back through the Liddy meetings. My mind sped through its guilt file in an instant and retrieved every seamy entry. I had put Liddy over at the Committee. I saw Mitchell huddled over his budget. Faint hopes against the worst vanished. I was falling off a ledge, and my instincts grabbed for something. What do you mean, we’ve got a problem, Jeb? I thought. You’ve got a problem, baby! I recovered a bit. The first thing I had to do was get Magruder off the phone.
“… I think you should talk to Liddy, John.” He was still going. “I can’t talk to him, because he hates my guts. But he’ll talk to you. And you can find out what else went wrong. And what else we’ve got to worry about. Okay?”
“Uh, I just got back in my office, Jeb.” I was trying to conceal my reactions. “I’ve been out of the country, and I’m trying to figure out what happened—”
Ring-ring-ring. It was my I.O. (interoffice phone line). Someone in the White House was calling. Salvation. Magruder could hear the ring, and he knew what it meant.
“I’ve gotta go, Jeb. I’ll get back to you. I’ll find out what I can.”
“Thanks, John. Listen, Liddy’s over at 1701 [the Committee headquarters, 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue]. You can get him there.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
I clicked Magruder off the line and leaned forward in my chair. I took one deep breath and exhaled. The signals from my body were all bad, but stable. I punched in on the I.O. It was Ehrlichman.
“How’s the world traveler?” he asked with facetious calm.
“I wish I hadn’t come back, to tell you the truth.” Ehrlichman’s reaction would be a telling signal, I thought. He knew almost everything, and I knew he was not offended by the idea of wiretaps. I flashed quickly back a few months and saw Jack Caulfield, raconteur, pacing around my office like a happy cat burglar, telling me how he had tried to bug the home of columnist Joseph Kraft on Ehrlichman’s orders: “… You wouldn’t believe it, Johnny. It was a dark night. And here we are in the alley over in Georgetown. And I’m holding a ladder up against the pole …”
“I presume you are aware of the little incident that transpired the other night?” Ehrlichman asked me.
“Yeah, I’m afraid I am.”
“Well, here’s what I’d like you to do. The Secret Service called me on Sunday morning about the arrests, and had som
e intriguing details. One of the Cubans had a check in his possession made out by Howard Hunt. That made me think of Mr. Colson. So I called Chuck over the weekend to ask about Hunt’s well-being, and Chuck sounded like he hardly knew the man. Said he hadn’t seen him in months. Said he couldn’t imagine how a thing like this could have occurred. Now, I’m not totally satisfied our Mr. Colson is telling all. Why don’t you have a little chat with him and find out what you can, and find out what happened to his friendship with Hunt?”
“I’ll try, John, but Chuck isn’t likely to tell me anything he won’t tell you.”
“Give him a call, anyway. And give your friend Kleindienst a call, too. Find out what he’s up to. See if you can find out how all this stuff from the Metropolitan Police is leaking to the newspapers.” Ehrlichman and Kleindienst had grown almost openly hostile to each other, and Ehrlichman often used others as go-betweens.
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do. Uh, listen John,” I went on, thinking of what I had just learned. People were already calling me out of a compulsion to talk, and I too needed to confide in somebody. “Jeb Magruder just called me. He sounded shaky. He said Gordon Liddy was running the break-in. He said it was Liddy’s fault. That’s pretty strong stuff. Jeb wants me to talk to Liddy and find out what happened. I guess that’s a good idea?”
“I think that sounds fine.” No reaction. “Find out what he knows and call me back. I’ve got to gather up a little report for the party in Florida.” Haldeman and the President were returning from Key Biscayne that night. Ehrlichman hung up.
I sat back. Suddenly I felt calmer. I had a report to make, top priority, one stop away from the President. Somehow the assignment drove my anxiety into temporary retreat. I decided I would call Colson first, then Kleindienst, saving Liddy for last. The I.O. rang again.
“John, this is Gordon. I need to come over and see you.” It was Strachan, Haldeman’s tickler, excited. I didn’t want to hear it. I was riveted to my job for Ehrlichman, miles above Strachan’s level.
“Gordon, I’m tied up right now,” I said abruptly. “I just talked to Ehrlichman and I’ve got to do something for him right now. I’m trying to find out what happened on this Watergate thing. I’ll talk to you later.” I left him no room to protest, hung up, and dialed Colson on the I.O. before anybody else could call.
“Chuck, I just talked with Ehrlichman, and he asked me to look into this incident at the DNC. Howard Hunt’s name keeps coming up, and I wanted to ask—”
“For Christ’s sake! I talked to Ehrlichman about it over the weekend,” Chuck shouted angrily. He spat out words like a machine gun, giving off so much energy I imagined him running sprints around his office. “I told him I had no idea where Hunt was, or what he was doing! I haven’t seen Hunt in months! He’s off my payroll. He has been. I can’t believe Hunt’s involved in that Watergate thing, anyway. That’s the craziest goddam thing I ever heard! I can’t believe any of it—”
“Well, Chuck,” I interrupted, as firmly but mildly as I could, “what’s the story on Hunt’s relationship to you?”
“I hired him as a consultant for Ehrlichman,” he said, stressing the name.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, those guys were all out in California, and they wanted me to bring somebody in to work on the Pentagon Papers. So I sent Hunt over to Ehrlichman. Hell, he wasn’t even at the top of my list!”
“Chuck, you sent Hunt out to interview Dita Beard a few months ago, didn’t you? We worked on that.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “and he wasn’t even around here then. I had to go find him. That’s the last time I remember seeing him. Look, I’m going through my files right now to get all the information. I’ll put it all together for you, and I’ll let you know what’s happening. But I don’t know what the hell Hunt’s doing. This doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“Okay, Chuck. Let me know.”
“Oh, and, John, I’d like to have a talk with you and Ehrlichman.” His tone shifted. He became almost subdued. “I’ve got some things I’d like to go over with both of you about Hunt. I think we ought to have a meeting later.”
“All right. I’m gonna see John later today. I’ll raise it with him then. I’ll call you.”
“Right.” He hung up, and I brooded. Obviously, Chuck did not trust Ehrlichman to determine who had sponsored Hunt, and wanted me there as an observer. I called Kleindienst.
“Hello, Junior,” he said. “I can’t guess what you’re calling me about.”
“Yeah. Needless to say, there’s some interest over here in finding out what’s going on.”
“That’s no surprise. I had a little encounter about that thing over the weekend. The investigation is proceeding as it should.”
I had no idea what that meant. Kleindienst was being cool and businesslike. He was the Attorney General. I didn’t know whether he was not yet clued in or was already stonewalling.
“I’m sure it is. Say, Dick, my people over here are concerned about all the leaks coming out of the investigation. That shouldn’t be going on. Do you have any idea where they’re coming from?”
“Whoever’s concerned is wasting his time, Junior. It’s all coming out of the Metropolitan Police, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That place is a sieve.”
“I guess so.” I decided not to press. “Well, it looks like a pretty strange case. I’ll talk to you later.”
Now it was time for Liddy, from whom I had learned to expect horrendous surprises. I braced myself and called. He was not in, so I left word. As soon as I hung up, I kicked myself mentally: Real smart, Dean, Liddy’s all mixed up in this and you’re leaving word for him to call you. How will you explain the call? Wait a minute, I thought. I’m not supposed to know anything about Liddy and this break-in. This can be explained as a perfectly innocent call—legal work, campaign finance laws. I steadied myself, but the fears had already set in.
I summoned Fielding into my office and told him to go to the White House personnel office and pull Howard Hunt’s employment records. I would need some hard facts if I ended up refereeing a dispute about when, and if, Hunt had worked for Colson. Fred did not question the assignment. He could feel emergency in the air. There might as well have been air raid sirens going off. He sprang to his duty like a military officer in battle. No questions asked. Lives at stake.
Jane buzzed. It was Liddy.
“Gordon,” I said, “I’d like to meet with you.”
“I’ll be right over,” he replied instantly, words clicking. I detected relief. “Have me cleared.” He signed off in a hurry.
I buzzed Jane and told her to clear Liddy past the guards downstairs. I sat back to compose myself, and then another wave of self-recrimination washed over me. Another dumb move, John. You’re not thinking straight. Liddy has just been involved in a crime, and now you’ve built a record of meeting with him. I grimly pictured the Executive Protection Service clearance log: “Mr. Gordon Liddy; June 19, 1972; 11:15 A.M.; Northwest Basement Entrance, EOB; cleared by Miss Thomas for Mr. Dean; official business.” There was nothing I could do about it now. I finally decided, rather irrationally, that I would intercept Liddy in the hall to lessen the number of people in my own office who would see him with me. I hurried out to the bathroom and then paced slowly in the hallway, trying to look as if I were going somewhere. Just as I was heading for the water fountain, I saw Liddy coming toward me.
“Gordon, I think we ought to take a little walk.”
He nodded. He knew exactly what was going on, and he could read on my face that this was a very sensitive meeting. We walked briskly and wordlessly out the nearest exit.
“Let’s walk down this way,” I said, turning south on Seventeenth Street. We walked toward the Ellipse, with the EOB and the White House on our left, the FDIC building across the street on our right.
This was not the crisp Gordon Liddy I had dealt with before. His heavy beard was no longer shaven to the nubs. The black-and-gray stubble was long
enough to glisten in the sun. His usual snappy three-piece suit had given way to a rumpled cord summer suit, the kind I associated with fraternity parties at the University of Virginia. He looks almost disheveled, I thought, he seems flustered, no longer the commanding presence. I noticed lines etched in his forehead.
I began with what I thought were calming remarks. “Gordon, I think I have to … I think you can understand why it’s important for me, for the White House, to know exactly what’s happened. I’ve spoken with Jeb, and Jeb has told me—”
He interrupted. “This whole goddam thing is because Magruder pushed me. I didn’t want to go in there. But it was Magruder who kept pushing. He kept insisting we go back in there—”
“Back?”
“Yes. We made an entry before and placed a transmitter and photographed some documents. But the transmitter was not producing right. I think it was because of the range. The equipment we used was only effective up to an air distance of about five hundred yards. Our pickup was within range, but we got interference from the support girders running up the building. They’re steel, and they can deflect a weak signal if they are placed so the transmission passes through their magnetic field. Anyway, it’s defective, and the batteries might be weak. So we went in to find out what was the matter. The other thing is Magruder liked the documents we got from the first entry and wanted more of them.…”
Liddy was gushing now. We stopped on the corner across the street from the Corcoran Art Gallery. I turned away from the traffic, facing the Ellipse. It was nearly lunchtime. I knew that the buildings would soon emit hundreds of familiar faces, and I didn’t want to be seen with Gordon Liddy. I edged over to a park bench and stood there, my back to the sidewalks. Liddy followed me like an awkward dance partner learning a new step. I felt very conspicuous.
“… And, John, I know using McCord was a serious mistake. I accept full responsibility for it. It’s my fault, and I don’t want to put off responsibility on anybody else. But I do want you to know why I did it. And that’s because Magruder cut my budget so much and was pushing me so hard I had to use McCord. I didn’t have time to do anything else. Jim’s a professional, and I trusted him. He was the only guy I could turn to.”
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