Blind Ambition: The End of the Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

can and make some money. I’m going broke in this damn job.”
    I arrived early for my first day on the new job, July 27, 1970, and drove to the southwest gate of the White House grounds. A guard found my name on his clipboard and instructed me to park in one of the visitors’ spaces, since my permanent spot had not yet been assigned. Bud Krogh pulled in a few spaces away. He waved a greeting at me and hurried off, mumbling like the Mad Hatter that he was late. He would see me later, he called. It was not yet eight in the morning. Late, I thought. I had been worried about getting there too early. No one had told me when the work day started.
    I’d barely got acquainted with my new office in the Executive Office Building when Bud called in, “Hey, John, have you had a chance to take a real look around yet?”
    “No, I haven’t.”
    He seemed pleased. “Let me take you on a tour and show you some of the places no one sees.” There was a look of mischief on his face.
    Bud Krogh—Egil Krogh, Jr.—was a long-time friend of John Ehrlichman and his family in Seattle. After spending much of his childhood in the Ehrlichman home, he had joined Ehrlichman’s law firm and then followed Ehrlichman to the White House as his assistant. Such intimate sponsorship from Ehrlichman gave Bud a head start in the White House, and he made the most of it. Despite his youth, he was already known in the Administration for his quick grasp of complex issues and his forceful presence. Even when he was largely ignorant of the subject matter, he was sharp enough to dominate meetings and win the participants’ respect. Already he was the White House man in charge of relations with the District of Columbia government, with responsibilities ranging from reviewing its budget to overseeing its response to the massive antiwar demonstrations of the early Nixon years. He was also in charge of the White House effort to combat heroin and other dangerous drugs, a subject of great concern to the President. Later he would be selected to run the highly secret Plumbers’ Unit that was to stop up leaks, and still later he would go to jail for his activities there.
    Bud Krogh was someone I considered a friend. We took off toward the basement of the Executive Office Building like the Hardy Boys. Hidden in the depths we found the telephone switchboard headquarters, and behind it a massive equipment room filled with transformers, generators, and electrical circuitry. Bud introduced me to the chief operator, who seemed pleased by our visit. “This equipment we have, Mr. Dean, could handle a whole city the size of Hagerstown, Maryland,” she said proudly. I wondered why she picked Hagerstown, of all places, but her domain was certainly impressive, as were the skills of the women who worked as operators. They could locate anyone, just as they had found me for Larry Higby when Haldeman wanted me to fly to San Clemente. (Only once did I abuse this skill, when I asked one of the operators to track down a woman I had met who would not give me her unlisted telephone number.) Bud and I lingered briefly and then pressed on to the basement of the White House’s West Wing and the Situation Room.
    The Situation Room, I had heard, was where Henry Kissinger took his dates to impress them. It operated twenty-four hours a day to keep the President aware of what was happening throughout the world, Bud explained. I pictured this nerve center as a gleaming room packed with uniformed admirals and generals seated at long computer consoles, surrounded by lesser-ranking aides and walls of incomprehensible charts and maps. Wrong. The room was dreary and overcrowded, jammed with cluttered desks, and staffed by a few young military men wearing out-of-date civilian clothes and a secretary checking the antique-looking teletypes. Even the windowless wood-paneled conference room, designed to prevent eavesdropping, was boring. This vital communications post was far less imposing than the