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

that the President stay away from the case while Calley’s lawyers appealed, but I was overruled by Ehrlichman and the President.) When the commander of an American vessel caused a scandal by handing a desperate Lithuanian detector back to the Russian ship from which he had escaped, we found ourselves informing the President of what was happening and why. When the Pentagon Papers sent the whole Administration into an uproar, we dove into constitutional law and offered discouraging opinions on the chances of enjoining newspapers from publishing them. Through it all our law firm performed well, and our intelligence specialty inched us upward. But there was one crisis in the intelligence field that did not help my stature in the White House.
    One day in July 1971, Jack Caulfield bolted into my office, his face flushed. I was alarmed; Jack was not easily moved to fear. Usually, Caulfield strolled casually into my office and waited patiently, rocking on the balls of his feet like a schoolboy about to tattle. As he waited, I would sense him trying to read my mail upside down. When I acknowledged him, he would hand over a deadpan report on some salacious item he had picked up from his sources. Jack labored over the prose of his memos and his feelings were easily hurt, so I would praise his report and give him another assignment. Fielding and I would often crack up over an entertaining gem such as Special Agent XXX, but we liked Caulfield. He was Jack Anderson on our side.
    “Jesus Christ, John!” he shouted, without waiting for my greeting. “You’ve got to help me. This guy Colson is crazy! He wants me to firebomb a goddam building, and I can’t do it.”
    “Now, wait a minute, Jack,” I said. I shut the door and told my secretary to hold my calls. “Calm down and tell me from the beginning.”
    “Colson’s been pestering me for weeks to get this guy Halperin’s Vietnam papers out of the Brookings Institution.” (There had been reports that Morton H. Halperin and Daniel Ellsberg had secret documents that would extend the Pentagon Papers into the Nixon years, and we were all climbing the walls about it, especially Henry Kissinger.) “Well, I told Colson I might be able to get them.” He paused. “Listen, John, I didn’t take this assignment until Colson assured me it was okay with Ehrlichman. Tony, my man, went over to case the place. It’s a big gray building on Mass Avenue. You know where it is?”
    “Yeah.” I knew that “Tony” was one of Jack’s operatives, but I didn’t find out his last name, Ulasewicz, until years later. Jack always said his last name was something I didn’t “need-to-know,” in spy jargon.
    “Well, Tony cased the place, and he finally figured he could buy one of the security guards to get us in the building. And he found out Halperin’s papers are in this big vault safe upstairs. The security on that vault is tough. It didn’t take long to figure out this wouldn’t be any easy job. We’d have to get past the alarm system and crack the safe somehow.” I sensed that Jack was getting a buzz off the story in spite of himself.
    “I told this to Colson,” he continued. “I told him this thing is impossible! I figured Chuck would forget it. But he didn’t. Chuck says, ‘I don’t want to hear excuses! Start a fire if you need to! That’ll take care of the alarms. You can go in behind the firemen. I’m not going to think of everything for you. That’s your business!’”
    His eyes were wide. “Now, John, I’m no chicken, but this is insane. Tony can’t go in there with a bunch of firemen. There are so many holes in this thing we’d never get away with it. You’ve got to get me out of this.”
    He was pleading and stammering by the end, and there was a short silence as my head reeled. “Goddammit, Jack,” I said finally, “this is what you get for messing around with Colson.” I couldn’t resist the dig. “You just sit tight and don’t do anything until you hear