Blind Ambition: The End of the Story by John W. Dean Read Free Book Online Page A

Caulfield explained that he was White House liaison with the Secret Service and the local police, but his principal assignment was to investigate Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s conduct in the Chappaquiddick accident for John Ehrlichman.
    Jack was a bountiful source of information. He knew what everybody was doing. He could tell you how to get a refrigerator or parking privileges and who was sleeping with whose secretary. And he wanted to help me find my bearings. He seemed a natural person to turn to with my IRS orders, and I decided to show him the memos. “How would you handle this assignment?” I asked.
    “This isn’t any problem. I’ll take care of it for you with a phone call,” he answered confidently. He returned the next day to report that a tax inquiry would be fruitless because the magazine was only six months old and its owners had yet to file their first return. Being resourceful, however, he had asked the IRS to look into the owners themselves. “You can tell the President everything is taken care of,” he assured me.
    “I’ve got a good one for you to pass along to the President,” Jack added proudly. His Treasury Department sources had noticed an authoritative article on U.S.-Mexico drug traffic published by Scanlan’s Monthly. It would make excellent background reading for the President’s upcoming meeting with Mexican President Diaz Ordaz. I attached a copy of the article to my memo to the President, and was amused to hear that the article was removed before the memo landed on the President’s desk. No one in Haldeman’s office wanted to be responsible for passing along anything from a magazine the President hated so much.
    I summarized the tax situation in my report. “The fact that Scanlan’s is a new entity does not make the tax inquiry very promising,” I concluded. “Accordingly, I have also requested that the inquiry be extended to the principal organizers and promoters of the publication.” Thus, within a month of coming to the White House, I had crossed an ethical line. I had no choice, as I saw it. The fact that I had not carried out the assignment myself eased my conscience slightly. I had no idea how Jack had done it so easily, nor did I ask, and I never found out what became of the IRS inquiry.
    Scanlan’s came back to plague me again the following month. This time it was charging the White House with inviting some “labor racketeers” to the President’s famous “hardhat luncheon.” I was asked to have the FBI check into the magazine’s charges and reported back that the labor leaders were indeed shady characters. Shortly after this report , Scanlan’s went out of business, its editors unaware of how much trouble they stirred up at the White House.
    Soon Haldeman was testing me again, with a sensitive task regarding what was to be known as the “Huston Plan.” Thomas Charles Huston, its patron, was the second person Haldeman assigned to my staff, again with no explanation. He was as mysterious and complex as the label on his plan: “Top Secret/Handle Via COMINT Channels Only.” Haldeman called me to his office to explain that Tom Huston had been charged with responsibility to revise domestic intelligence gathering. Every official involved agreed with the plan except FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had irritated the President by blocking its implementation. Huston could do nothing further, for he had offended the powerful Hoover. My assignment was to get the plan implemented.
    Before I read the plan, I thought there was nothing more than a personality clash in my way, and the fact that Huston had offended Hoover was no surprise. I had discovered his abrasiveness the hard way when I once asked Tom to draft a routine memorandum to the Attorney General asking for some information. The memo was sent, over my signature, to the Justice Department, where it exploded. Kleindienst had called me. “Listen, Junior,” he yelled, “I don’t like having to make this call, but