I wrenched myself out of bed late on the morning of Saturday, March 17, and decided to go to the office and struggle to compose some kind of innocuous Dean Report for the President. I had just arrived when the White House operator called and said the President wanted to see me in the Oval Office. I went immediately, wearing casual weekend clothes. It was the first time I met with the President without a necktie.
Manolo Sanchez, the President’s valet, was just taking the lunch tray away as I entered, and the President leaned back in his chair, brushing crumbs off the front of his dark suit. He was wearing a shamrock and a green tie in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.
He greeted me and asked where I lived. I told him, somewhat startled by the question.
“Any time that you need to get away from town, remember that my Camp David place is very conducive to that kind of awful work,” he said, referring to the Dean Report. He knew I was resisting the idea, and he was trying to make it more palatable by offering a sojourn at Camp David.
“I think that might be a good thing,” I replied, and proceeded, as usual, to praise him—this time by complimenting him on the effectiveness of his recent press conference on executive privilege. I went on to say I was trying to devise some way we could force Senator Ervin to hold his hearings in executive session, behind closed doors.
The President sat up. “I always hark back to the Hiss case,” he said. “We did that on the Hiss case.”
“You went into executive session?” I asked, knowing it full well.
The President described in detail how he had lined up the testimony of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers in private sessions before nailing Hiss in public. Then he launched into a long, rambling monologue on the benefits we could derive from a Dean Report. I knew he was leaning on me in his own way, which I had learned was usually indirect. The President was uncomfortable telling aides to do things they didn’t want to do. That was why he had Haldeman.
The President waited for my reaction to his speech. We had been down this road before. I didn’t like the idea of any Dean Report, but I was determined not to write one that would make me alone responsible for false conclusions. I coughed nervously and mumbled before trying to steer him toward my old “affidavit,” that is, the interrogatories, idea. “Let me just take you one step further,” I said. “It might be a very interesting approach. Ah, if Ervin were to be called down here and given sworn statements that were given to you. That’s after I have prepared my report on Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Dean, everybody.”
The President heard me out, seemed to waver, but reverted to his idea of a report—one without the affidavits I wanted in order to protect myself. I decided to try a new approach: if I couldn’t sell him on my version of the Dean Report, I would try to make him see that his version would prove unpalatable because I would have to include enough facts to invite disastrous scrutiny. We were jousting subtly so that neither of us would have to acknowledge that there was an argument between us. As a preview of his kind of Dean Report, I conducted him on a tour through the origins of the break-in. He interrupted me when I was recounting the discussions in Mitchell’s office of the campaign intelligence plan.
“You heard discussion of that, but you didn’t hear any discussion of bugging, did you, in that, your meetings?” He paused. “Or did you?”
He’s testing me, I thought; he knows about those discussions, he wants to see how I would handle them. I looked nervously at the floor. “Yeah, I did. That’s what, ah, distressed me quite a bit.”
“Oh, you did,” the President said quietly.
“Uh huh.”
“Who raised it? Liddy?”
“That’s right.”
“Liddy at that point said we ought to do some bugging?” the President asked.
“Right. Mitchell just sat there and puffed on his pipe and said nothing. He didn’t agree to it, and I, at the end of the meeting—”
“Well, you won’t need to say in your statement about the bugging.”
“No,” I said, backing off. I realized that this tack had failed to move him off the Dean Report.
Haldeman interrupted the meeting with some routine business and phone calls. When he left, the President rambled on about other subjects. He struck me as quite lonely. The White House was nearly empty. The President was by himself, the business routine suspended for the weekend. He seemed just to want someone to talk to. Finally he returned to Watergate and brought up the counterscandal idea, asking my progress in discovering wiretaps that had been ordered by his predecessors. For starters, he thought we should leak a story about how President Johnson had ordered him bugged in 1968.
“You need it very much,” he said firmly. “I want it.” Then he leaned back and brought up my report again. “Now, you were saying where this thing leads, I mean in terms of the vulnerabilities and so forth. It’s your view the vulnerabilities are basically Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman, indirectly, possibly directly. And, of course, the second level is, as far as the White House is concerned, Chapin.” He looked at me. I hoped he was getting the message about how bad an idea the Dean Report would be.
“And I’d say Dean, to a degree.” I was telling him again about my own vulnerability.
“You?” asked the President incredulously. “Why?”
“Well, because I’ve been all over this thing like a blanket,” I replied, dismayed that this message never seemed to sink in.
“I know, I know,” said the President irritably, waving his hand as if to shoo the thought away. “But you know all about it, but you didn’t, you were in it after the deed was done.”
“That’s correct, that I had no foreknowledge—” I replied, but the President cut me off before I could make another run at the cover-up.
“Here’s the whole point. Here’s the whole point,” he said emphatically, shaking a forefinger. “My point is that your problem is, you …” His concentration faded. He stopped. Then he returned with force. “You have no problem. All the others that have participated in the goddamned thing, and therefore are potentially subject to criminal liability … You’re not. That’s the difference.”
“That’s right,” I agreed, although I was thinking just the opposite. I couldn’t bring myself to contradict his strong assertion.
There was a long, uneasy pause, before the President resumed ticking off the Watergate liabilities. He brought up Magruder, then Strachan. I told him that Strachan had pushed Magruder for intelligence “on sort of a tickler basis.” After a discussion of how interwoven all the testimony might become if we tried to have just one “higher-up,” like Magruder, take responsibility for the break-in, the President looked at me directly and rejected the idea. “Can’t do that,” he declared.
“No,” I agreed. I knew it would be impossible to get one person to take the fall without implicating others. That was the fundamental weakness of the entire cover-up.
“I think what you’ve got to do, to the extent that you can, John, is cut her off at the pass.” The President was quite intense again, making cutting motions through the air with a flat palm. “And you cut off at the pass. Liddy and his bunch just did that as part of their job.”
“They were out on a lark,” I echoed, picking up the standard cover-up line.
The President now seemed to be back on the idea of a Dean Report that would cut things off at Liddy. I decided to try to work in certain grisly things that could come out if I got into specifics. I mentioned Ehrlichman and the Ellsberg break-in. The President asserted that he had never heard about it, but then immediately assumed the attitude that Howard Hunt had done the deed. I didn’t for a moment believe his show of ignorance. I already suspected he often held things back from me.
We had been playing cat and mouse with each other for nearly an hour; I was the mouse, but I was becoming a little braver. Haldeman came in, and the President announced that he had to get some kind of report to Ervin quickly “so that I appear at least to be making a statement.” He looked at me, then at Haldeman, and summariz
ed the meeting for Haldeman as I listened closely. “Now, I’d simply say,” the President began in a practice speech to Senator Ervin, “‘Now, look, I required from every member of my staff a sworn statement. Here’s one from here. Here’s one from here, here, here.’” The President was handing out imaginary statements. I was elated. My message had gotten through after all.
“That’s good,” I said. “That’s great.”
“The sworn statement, Bob, is much better, rather than giving a statement by Dean,” the President told Haldeman.
“That’s right,” I said.
Haldeman nodded and the meeting broke up. I went back to my office. I had headed the President off for the moment, but I knew he was waffling. Once Ehrlichman talked with him again, I figured, he would be back on the Dean Report. I fiddled away the afternoon until Mo called to remind me of a dinner engagement we had that night with Dick Kleindienst. We couldn’t back out. Kleindienst was thinking of joining John Connally’s law firm in Washington, and he was entertaining one of Connally’s law partners.
Mo and I went to the dinner, but I was silent most of the evening. Kleindienst sensed my mood and commiserated with me about the rash of bad publicity I’d received. As we were preparing to leave, he pulled me aside. “I know it’s tough being out front like you are, John,” he said in a friendly tone, “but you’ve got to hold together. And think before you do anything. If things get to you, you can always come talk to me. Remember that.”
“Thanks, Dick,” I replied, thinking I must be telegraphing my instability. “I’d like to do that, but I don’t think we should talk right now.”
Marney Kleindienst, Dick’s wife, had always been very kind and supportive of me. As we were saying goodbye at her door, she cracked an innocent joke to try to cheer me up. “John,” she laughed, “if they send you to prison, I’ll bake cookies for you and come visit you every week.”
A look of terror must have crossed my face. Marney, Dick and Mo were halfway through a tension-breaking laugh when they noticed. I tried to force a smile, but I had no control over my facial muscles.
When Marney sensed how badly she had hurt me, she went ashen. “Wait here a minute,” she said anxiously. She went off and quickly returned with a folded cloth in her hand. “Here, John,” she said, “this will help your spirits.”
I thanked her, but did not stop to look at the cloth. Mo hustled me out the door as if I were a mental patient.
“What’s that?” she asked as we headed for the car.
I unfolded the cloth and discovered a hand-made art poster with a huge red caption: “KEEP ME GOING, LORD.” Under it, a big red fireball was rolling down a green mountainside. I gaped at Mo; she gaped at me.
I shrugged. “Think this would look nice in my prison cell?”
“Really, John,” she said, disgusted with my sarcasm. We rode home in silence.
After a miserable Sunday, I went to the office on Monday, March 19. Paul O’Brien came in, looking edgy, his normal wit and swagger notably missing.
“John, I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all weekend.”
“I’ve been available.”
“Well, I don’t know why I couldn’t get you.” He seemed flustered.
“What’s on your mind?”
“I’ve got some pretty heavy stuff here that’s not such good news,” he said. I braced myself. I was used to bad news from O’Brien, but he usually delivered it lightheartedly. “Bittman called me last Friday and asked me to meet personally with Hunt. So I went over there. And Howard Hunt’s not a very happy man.” He paused.
“What’s new about that?”
“Well, hang on. I think you’re going to find a lot new. Hunt said he was going to meet with Colson too, but I’m not so sure that’s going to happen. I think Colson may send his law partner. Anyway, what Hunt was pressing me on was this. He said sentencing is coming up for him. And he’s got to get his life in order pretty damn quick. He said, ‘I get sentenced next Friday, and by Wednesday I want to have this whole matter resolved of these payments.’ I asked him what the problem was. And Hunt said, ‘Well, I’ve got to get things in hand well in advance of my sentencing.’ And then he said what he really had in mind. He said, ‘I’ve got a message I want you to deliver over at the White House, if you can.’ And I told him I thought I could.”
O’Brien is dragging this out, I thought. Here comes the money again. I quit looking at him and stared out the window. I could see myself banging back and forth between Mitchell and Ehrlichman again like a clapper in a bell.
“And I’ve come with Howard Hunt’s message for you, John,” O’Brien continued. “He said, ‘You tell John Dean that I need seventy-two thousand dollars for support and fifty thousand for attorney’s fees—’”
“Why me?” I shouted as my head shot around toward O’Brien. “Why the hell did he send the goddam message to me?”
O’Brien gave me a helpless look. “I don’t know, John. I asked him the same question, and he just said, ‘You tell Dean I need the money by the close of business Wednesday. And if I don’t get it, I’m going to have to reconsider my options. And I’ll have some seamy things to say about what I did for John Ehrlichman while I was at the White House.’ And that’s the message.”
“You’re shitting me! He sent that message to me?”
“He sure did.”
I sat back and grabbed my forehead with my left hand, pressing my temples between my thumb and forefinger. Hunt was dragging me directly into his extortion loop. He must have learned that I was the one who had carried the money messages before, and now he figured he had a hold on me for more. I could see Hunt extorting me, milking me, for the rest of our lives. This was it. I knew it. I felt a sickening fear, and then a boiling anger at Hunt.
I stood up and started pacing. “Listen, Paul. There’s no sense bringing that message to me, because I’m not going to do a goddam thing with it. I’m out of the money business! Ever since that three-fifty went over, I’m out of it. And I plan to stay out of it. And Hunt can shove it up his ass!”
O’Brien seemed taken aback by my reaction, which was out of character. He tried to soften the blow. “Well, look. I don’t think it’s a message directed at you, John,” he said softly. “I think it’s a message he wants passed on.”
“Well, I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to pass it on. Both of us, as you well know, are up to our teeth in an obstruction of justice. You and I have been passing these fucking messages back and forth, and now we’re in trouble. And someday we could face an awful lot of problems. And I don’t want to compound mine any more. This thing has gotten bad enough for me. I’m out of it.”
“I know we’ve got problems, John,” O’Brien said. He seemed unhappy that I had mentioned his criminal liability. “Listen, I’m just passing the message along. I don’t like it, either.” He waited a moment for me to calm down. “Well, what are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, what the hell should I do?”
“As far as I’m concerned, you can take this back to Mitchell. This is out of my ball park. I don’t want anything to do with it, Paul. And I’m not inclined to pass it on to Ehrlichman.” I hesitated. “But I may have to mention it to him. I just don’t know.”
This last comment cracked the door a little bit—enough for O’Brien to feel he might not have to carry the whole weight. We lamented a bit about how we had both gotten into this monster as message carriers and then been eaten up by it, and O’Brien left.
I went home early, canceled out on a going-away party that night for Chuck Colson, and pulled out the Scotch bottle. I had no idea what I was going to do. I was going to do something.
* The case against Liddy, Hunt and the others.
* On February 7, 1973, the Senate established the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, composed of four Democrats and three Republicans, to investigate the Watergate break-in and related 1972 campaign improprieties. The committee was chaired by Senat
or Sam Ervin of North Carolina.
Chapter Seven
BREAKING POINT
I slept late the next morning, March 20. I stayed home to avoid the office and debated with myself how I could get out of this thing—deal with Hunt’s extortion and protect the President at the same time. The President. I felt myself rising instinctively in salute. I thought of aircraft carriers, battles, strong men reverent at the mention of his name, a communications network that flashed each utterance around the world. This was my life’s nourishment. I felt tall for having made it so close to the shadow of the Presidency. Then I contemplated the crimes and the cover-up meetings, the blackmail, and I shriveled to a midget. Alice in Wonderland.
Strategy, I told myself; we needed a strategy, and that was what I was good at. Somebody would have to walk the plank to end this; somebody would have to fall on his sword for the President. I thought of a dozen appropriate phrases, but none of them had the romantic ring I remembered from my college literature courses. Mitchell and Magruder. They were the logical candidates. They had authorized the break-in, and that was what everyone—the press, the prosecutors, the politicians, everybody—wanted to hear about. After nine months, the hot torch of skepticism had finally burned through our story that Liddy had done it on his own. Even the President could no longer lie about it convincingly, and it was eroding his power. Mitchell. That would be convincing. The first Attorney General ever to go to prison. It would end it. No one would show the slightest interest in a cover-up; no one had. Would Mitchell go it alone? I doubted it. And Mitchell had hooks in Ehrlichman, in the cover-up, in me.
I sank even lower. But what if Mitchell did take the blame for the break-in? A public orgy. Sackcloth in some quarters, glee in others. The Watergate case cracked and ended. But what would that do for Howard Hunt? Nothing. He would still demand clemency from the President and money from me, and from Ehrlichman, and from the whole cover-up network. It was a spider web. To save the President, we would all have to go together. En masse. What were the chances of that? Nearly zero. Only the President had the slightest chance of making it happen, and he seemed miles from any such decision. It could ruin him. Was I ready to do my part? Go to jail? Yes, I thought. Then, no. There had to be another way. My thoughts, I realized, were no longer measured or rational. Every breath I drew in seemed cold, and the chill latched on to my thoughts and dragged them down into my stomach, then around up my spine. My cool, my detached calculation, was dissolving in fear. I went to the office.
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