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

John Mitchell is damn upset. I’m surprised at you acting like the rest of those assholes up there!” He then read me the memorandum Huston had drafted. It was curt and quick; I seemed to be ordering John Mitchell around like a deckhand. Horrified, I told Kleindienst I had signed the memo without reading it and assured him I would start reading my mail.
    Obviously I now had to read the plan, but Huston wouldn’t give me a copy until I had been given security clearance. The clearance procedure was hardly the ritual swearing to secrecy I anticipated, and it would have been funny if everyone had not been so solemn. Two CIA officials came to my office and told Jane Thomas, my secretary, and me that we had to keep the plan locked in a combination safe; we could not move these classified materials without a guard to accompany us; and, finally, we should not talk into lamps, flowerpots, or pictures if we were in a foreign hotel. Bugs, you know.
    With my “Top Secret/COMINT Channel” status, I received the plan. The President, I discovered, had ordered removal of most of the legal restraints on gathering intelligence about left-wing groups. He had authorized wiretaps, mail intercepts, and burglaries. These were the hottest papers I had ever touched. The plan had the full support of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council of everyone except Hoover’s FBI. Hoover had footnoted the document with an objection that the risk of each illegal method was greater than the potential return.
    Tom Huston came to brief me. With rabid conviction, he told me the nation would surely crumble from within if the government failed to deal with the revolutionaries and anarchists who were bent on destroying it. He was incensed that the President’s orders could be blocked by Hoover merely because Hoover “wanted to ride out of the FBI on a white horse.” There was nothing really new about the plan, he assured me, for the FBI used to do those things regularly when Hoover was younger.
    After Huston left, I sat back to study my predicament. I was suspicious of his arguments because he was trying so hard to sell them. He had a vested interest in finding anarchy at the doors. (In fact none of the dire predictions in his report ever came true.) But I was no expert in internal security, and I knew that my arguments on the merits of the plan would convince no one. The methods would never hold up legally, and I was sensitive to my personal risk if I were involved in the decision to use them. I would have preferred to let someone else handle this one, but Haldeman had selected me. Still, I wondered, how did Haldeman expect me to get J. Edgar Hoover to reverse himself?
    After casting about for a few days, I decided that John Mitchell offered the only way out, and I arranged to see him on September 17. When I arrived at his office, he had just talked to the CIA representatives. To my relief, Mitchell said he had already made his decision. He was going to kill the plan somehow.
    “John, the President loves all this stuff,” he said slowly, “but it just isn’t necessary.” As he searched out loud for some sort of compromise, I was grateful to him for assuming my burden. He would take the heat at the White House, not I. We decided to endorse the idea of an interagency Intelligence Evaluation Committee, a toothless version of the Huston Plan. It was, in effect, a study group. Mitchell assumed the task of persuading Hoover to join the IEC as a SOP to the White House. This took some doing, for Hoover had, in a fit of pique, cut off all communications with the other intelligence agencies. While Mitchell presented the IEC to Hoover as meaningless, I was to present it to the White House as a promising first step. True, I would say, it was not the Huston Plan, but it would at least get Hoover back in harness. My report was received without joy, but no wrath fell on me. The Huston Plan was laid to rest,