Blind Ambition

by Dean, John W. ;

  “Get off that pussyfooting line,” Charlie snorted again. He was fingering through a box of french fries. I looked at him sourly. He laughed. The lunch break soon ended.

  To my amazement, I managed to finish reading the entire statement in one day. Mo and I watched a brief segment of the rerun on public television that night. I assessed my performance against the notes from the Cronkite interview and nursed my aching neck, which had cramped during the hours of leaning over the witness table toward the microphone. Sleep was fitful.

  Sam Dash began the cross-examination the next morning. His questions were soft and mushy—long-winded recitals of my statement, with tag lines asking me if I agreed with his summaries. “That is correct,” I answered repeatedly. This is too easy, I thought, trying to stay poised for anything. But Dash’s friendly probing put me in a thoughtless state, and he caught me badly off balance at the end.

  “I guess you are fully aware, Mr. Dean,” he said crisply, “of the gravity of the charges you have made under oath against the highest official of our land, the President of the United States?”

  “Yes, I am,” I replied softly. But the question struck like a dart. I felt my control loosening.

  “And, being so aware, do you still stand on your statement?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Mr. Chairman, I have no further questions,” Dash announced, and settled back in his chair.

  The silence further unnerved me. Dash’s summary and his precipitous exit had been too stark, and I felt compelled to say something. “I might add this, Mr. Dash,” I said. “I realize it is almost an impossible task if it is one man against the other that I am up against. And it is not a very pleasant situation …” My voice trailed off. I knew I was choking up, feeling alone and impotent in the face of the President’s power. I took a deep breath to make it look as if I were thinking; I was fighting for control. I ground my teeth and squeezed the pen I held in my hands, damn near breaking it. You cannot show emotion, I told myself. The press will jump all over it as a sign of unmanly weakness. I thought of how Senator Muskie’s campaign had collapsed after he had cried briefly in New Hampshire. “… But I can only speak what I know to be the facts, and that is what I am providing this committee.”

  “Mr. Dean, do you want to take a break?” Senator Ervin asked in a grandfatherly tone. His question alarmed me. I was sure I had not betrayed my state of mind, but apparently the Senator had sensed something wrong. The chairman’s offer was kind, but I fought immediately to resist it. Accepting his offer would be an admission of weakness.

  “I am here at the will of the committee,” I replied stoically, “and whatever the chair would like.”

  “We will proceed, then,” Senator Ervin said, and he recognized Fred Thompson, Dash’s Republican counterpart, for cross-examination.

  “Mr. Dean, you have, of course, made some serious accusations with regard to the cover-up of criminal activities,” Thompson began. “And we have heard other testimony about the cover-up of certain criminal activities. And, of course, the responsibility for prosecuting these criminal activities did lie with the Department of Justice.…”

  This will be my first major test, I thought as Thompson drawled on. I had still been in the White House when he was selected minority counsel, and all we had been able to learn about him was that he had handled a lot of moonshine cases as an undistinguished assistant U.S. attorney in Tennessee. He was a young political crony of Senator Baker, and Haldeman had been irritated at our failure to obtain a more experienced Republican counsel to help keep a lid on the committee’s investigation. That failure was a comforting thought now, but I was still apprehensive about Thompson. Where was he going with his speech about the Justice Department?

  “I would like to ask you a few questions based upon some of your testimony yesterday,” he continued, “concerning contacts with Mr. Petersen.” He started grilling me on my dealings with Henry during the cover-up. Instantly my back went up. I realized how shrewdly Thompson had chosen his line of questioning: he wanted me to accuse Petersen of crimes, because Henry would be in an excellent position to destroy my credibility. A man widely respected by both Republicans and Democrats in government, Petersen was as yet unsullied by Watergate. He was, as well, in charge of the Criminal Division at Justice. If I angered him with my testimony, he could make things more difficult for me in the criminal cases ahead. I was already standing alone against the President, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell; I wanted no part of Henry Petersen. Thompson knew this; I figured he was trying to push me out on a limb.

  From the thrust of his questions, it seemed to me that Thompson had interviewed Petersen and was fishing for testimony that might cause Henry to accuse me of perjury to protect himself. I sparred with Thompson evasively, volunteering nothing. Fortunately, he did not know the precise questions to ask. Henry, I gathered, had understandably failed to tell Thompson of areas in which he might have compromised himself during the cover-up. I was able easily to deflect the questions, but I worried about appearing vague and uncooperative. Thompson had me on a tightrope, and he seemed to know how to shake the wire.

  Suddenly he switched targets and started asking me about Ziegler. Had I lied to Ziegler? Was he involved in the cover-up, too? Another attempt to pull a marginal figure into my charges, I thought. He wanted me to overstate my case. Or at least he wanted me to look as if I were reaching out to drag everyone in the Administration down. I wanted to stick to the charges in my prepared statement. They were more than enough. Again I parried his questions. And again I thought I was successful because Thompson did not know the right ones to ask. I imagined Haldeman and Ehrlichman grinning at their television sets somewhere, watching me squirm, applauding Thompson’s efforts to push me into vulnerable territory. Thompson had me rattled already.

  Then he switched directions. “Mr. Dean, let me ask you a few questions about your actions after the Watergate incident by asking about your own personal involvement,” he said. “I hope that I am not appearing to be badgering you in any way …” I flinched. Now he is going to bear down, I thought. “… but I’m sure you understand that your actions and motivations are very relevant?” He looked to me for an expression of agreement, and I looked back at him across thirty feet of television lights. All the sentimentality of the Dash interlude had vanished, and my survival instincts allowed me to concentrate solely on Thompson. They also told me I had to strike back or Thompson would trip me up disastrously.

  “Yes,” I replied firmly. “In fact, if I were still at the White House, I would probably be feeding you the questions to ask the person who’d be sitting here.” I stared straight at him. Now he flinched.

  “If I were here—as I am—” Thompson said, scrambling to regain his equilibrium, “I would have responded as I have responded. That I do not need to be fed questions by anybody.” I had put him on the defensive. Good.

  “Don’t get cocky just ’cause you hit the guy pretty good,” Charlie whispered from behind. He was right. I eased off, and so did Thompson. He brought his questions to a close without doing further damage. I figured he would save his ammunition for his final round of cross-examination.

  Senator Ervin recognized Herman E. Talmadge, the easygoing Georgia Democrat. I knew that Talmadge’s colleagues in the Senate considered him one of their brightest members, but I did not expect him to be a skilled interrogator. I had pegged him as a behind-the-scenes man without great forensic talent. Wrong. Talmadge seemed to have a divining rod pointed toward all the questions I had trouble answering, and he bore in on them relentlessly.

  “What makes you think that your credibility is greater than that of the President, who denies what you have said?” he asked.

  I floundered. “Well, Senator, I have been asked to come up here and tell the truth …” I hesitated and sighed. I was winging it. “You are asking me a public-relations question, really, in a sense. Why should I have greater credibility than the President of the United States?” I repeated his ques
tion. I couldn’t say what I was thinking: Nixon is a goddam liar, and if you put us both on the box you’d find out who’s lying. All I could add was, “I’m telling you what I know. I’m telling you just as I know it.”

  I felt that my answer had been inadequate, and, by the look on his face, so did Talmadge. He pressed on. “Now, you are testifying, I believe, under use immunity that this committee has granted you?”

  “That is correct.” I braced myself for an attack on my motives.

  “You would not be here testifying today had we not granted that use immunity, would you?”

  “I would probably be before the prosecutors downtown,” I dodged. He would never believe me if I said I would have testified without immunity.

  “Now, you refused to testify before the grand jury, I believe, did you not?”

  “That is correct.” Talmadge was not going to let me get away with anything, including my evasive answer about being “before the prosecutors.”

  “You pleaded the Fifth Amendment there?”

  “That is correct,” I submitted.

  “You have been bargaining with them for immunity, which has not been granted. Isn’t that an accurate statement?”

  My mind raced. I felt helpless. I knew I couldn’t say I was holding out for immunity because I was unsure whether the prosecutors would go after the others involved. Everything seemed cloudy. I submitted again: “That is correct, Senator.”

  Talmadge shifted the subject. “Now, there have been various reports in the press. I know nothing whatever about their credibility. Did you see an article in one of the Washington papers that you were kicked out of a law firm here for violations of the canon of ethics?”

  “I did, sir.” I cringed. Talmadge was cutting to the nub.

  “Would you like to comment on that?”

  As I began to explain the incident, I felt an inner despair about being able to satisfy anyone. The public forum and pressure demanded simple answers. How could I make a complicated matter simple? To explain what had happened on February 4, 1966—the day I was “fired” from my first and only job in private law practice—I would have to spin out a long story about a young lawyer’s initiation into a Washington communications law firm. The senior partners were wheeling and dealing in broadcast stocks, and I quickly became bored and unhappy with the work. When a friend at the firm asked me if I would be interested in investing in a television station, I said yes, and soon suffered the consequences. The firm’s senior partner, a man who intimidated me by his practice of carrying a revolver in his office, learned of my investment, and was outraged. Since I already planned to leave the firm, I refused to talk about my investment and told him I was quitting. He told me I was fired. Two years after, he accused me of “unethical conduct,” but he retracted the charge when I resolved to take the charge before a lawyers’ ethics committee.

  Now—before Talmadge and the whole world—these old skeletons were coming out of the closet. I could not do justice to the incident in less than an hour, so I said merely that the matter had been investigated by a lawyer responsible for certifying my integrity to the Civil Service Commission. I offered the lawyer’s letter, which had cleared me, to the committee.

  Senator Ervin broke in to ask me to read the letter. I did so gratefully, but I was stung by the realization that it is impossible to get clean once one is publicly tarred.

  Next Talmadge asked a string of specific questions about the early days of the cover-up, which was fine with me. They were easy. I recounted the facts almost by rote. My confidence began to revive, but I couldn’t figure out where the Senator was headed until he arrived: “Now, after all those facts were available to you, why did you not, as counsel to the President, go in at that time and tell him what was happening?” The Senator looked intent as he awaited my answer.

  “Senator, I did not have access to the President,” I replied lamely. Talmadge’s unhappy look told me he was not at all satisfied, so I tried harder. “I was never presumptuous enough to try to pound on the door to get in, because I knew it just did not work that way.” I paused, glanced at the Senator’s stare, and panicked. I had seen Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register sitting in the gallery. He inspired another feeble answer. “I know of efforts of other White House staff to get in,” I stammered. “I have seen, for example, one of the reporters sitting here in this room, Mr. Mollenhoff. I have seen memoranda he tried to send in to the President, and they were just blocked.…” Mollenhoff had worked briefly at the White House, and I hoped he would clue Talmadge in on Haldeman’s system.

  Senator Talmadge looked incredulous. “You mean you were counsel to the President of the United States and you could not get access to him if you wanted to? Is that your testimony?”

  My mind went blank. How could I possibly explain in a few words the way the White House worked? How could I explain that my stature in the White House was not all that different from a grounds keeper? I’d be laughed out of the hearing room if I testified that I was not sure the President had known my name then, or if I told of my “meeting” in the Oval Office with the college newspaper editors. There were hundreds of stories I might have offered to show that I could not have gotten a piece of paper into the Oval Office, much less my body. Even later in the cover-up, after my influence had risen dramatically, Haldeman had blocked me. Once, when the President was preparing for a meeting with Senator Henry Jackson, I had written a “talking paper” for him, suggesting ways he might question Jackson about the early talk in the Senate of a Watergate investigation. I had shown how the President might ask Jackson whether it was inevitable and, if so, whether Jackson might lead it; we thought he would be much friendlier to the White House than someone like Senator Ervin. Ehrlichman had approved the talking paper, but Haldeman had cut it off before it reached Nixon. Later, when he handed it back to me with a big line drawn across it, I had protested and mentioned Ehrlichman’s okay. Haldeman had said, scowling, “I didn’t approve it. Besides, the President’s no good at this sort of thing.”

  Now, facing Senator Talmadge, I gave up. No illustration of White House procedures would be convincing, and I couldn’t think of good ones anyway. “I thought it would be presumptuous of me to try,” I repeated. I looked at Talmadge. Still not enough. I tried to accelerate my mind, but it was in neutral. “Because I was told my reporting channel was Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman,” I added weakly, “and I was reporting everything I knew to them.”

  Senator Talmadge wasn’t buying. “It seems to me after finding evidence of a conspiracy of this magnitude, it was incumbent upon you as counsel to the President to make every possible effort to see that he got that information at that time.”

  His persistence had worn me down. Forget the White House, I thought. Try another angle. “Senator, I was participating in the cover-up at that time,” I said bluntly. This confession, although hardly new, seemed to mollify him. Later, during the lunch break, McCandless reported hearing that this one sentence had gone a long way toward winning the Senator’s confidence.

  That afternoon, Senator Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., Republican of Connecticut, went fishing all throughout his cross-examination. I tried to figure out what he was driving at with his long speeches and readings from my testimony, but I could only guess. He wasn’t asking many questions. From his declarations, he appeared to be particularly incensed about the Administration’s political abuse of government agencies like the FBI and the IRS. I decided that his anger might stem from a private encounter I had had with him weeks earlier at Charlie’s home, when I had informed him of a White House strategy to “neutralize” him, if necessary, by confronting him with evidence that he had received political funds from Jack Gleason’s 1970 Town House Operation. Weicker had stopped me to deny the allegations as if he were making a speech on the Senate floor; he said he had reported every cent of his contributions over his entire political career. Now he was going on about the Administration’s unscrupulous use of government information for political purp
oses. I thought perhaps he was still piqued about what I had told him.

  “I apologize to the committee for taking so much time,” Senator Weicker said near the end of his allotted period, “but it is a subject that I confess I don’t have every last bit of information on. It is a difficult thing to piece together.”

  I decided to volunteer something that might help him. “I might also add,” I said, “that in my possession is a rather—very much down the line as to what you are talking about—is a memorandum that was requested of me, to prepare a means to attack the enemies of the White House. There was also maintained what was called an ‘enemies list,’ which was rather extensive and continually being updated.”

  Senator Weicker sat up straight at the mention of this memo and the list. “I am not going to ask who was on it. I’m afraid you might answer,” he quipped. “I wonder, are these documents in the possession of the committee?”

  No, I explained. They did not fit the description of the Watergate documents Mr. Dash had asked for, but I would be happy to submit them.

  Weicker had reeled in a whopper. The press went crazy over the enemies list, and it became an instant status symbol to be on it. In the chaos, I was not asked what the enemies list meant. Colson, whose office had prepared it, defended himself with a statement that the list was nothing more than a compilation of names of people to be banned from White House functions. That much was true, but it was also true that Haldeman had selected some twenty people from the list who had incurred the President’s special wrath. These people had been targeted for IRS audits and other government harassment, but no action had been taken as far as I knew.

  The furor over the enemies list threw me into another of the uncomfortable situations that I was learning to expect. I thought it was vastly overplayed in the media as evidence of a sinister and repressive machine. Under ceaseless pressure from the tickler, the enemies project had indeed grown from nothing into a list-making effort and could have had repressive effects in the second term, but it hadn’t. When the President’s political detractors exaggerated its significance and applauded me for revealing it, I felt even more of a squealer as a party to untruth. At the same time, however, I was aware that the hoopla was helping me. Everyone who loved the enemies list developed a stake in my value as a witness. The President’s opponents began to defend me more vigorously, almost as if the enemies list were more important to them than my testimony on the cover-up. I felt confused. The interpretations were beyond my control, and the atmosphere was heated. And since no one asked for my opinion about the enemies list, I sat back and privately enjoyed Colson’s attempts to explain himself.