Read Blind Ambition: The End of the Story for Free Online Page A

of rooms. “This,” Bud announced, “is the President’s bomb shelter.”
    I looked around. Ventilated air. Stored supplies. Beds. An appropriately Presidential desk flanked by flags. And a conference room with three built-in television sets, plus radio equipment and telephones everywhere. It looked like a President’s bomb shelter.
    Bud said Ehrlichman found this an ideal command post for monitoring demonstrations, which puzzled me. It was remote, to say the least, and totally out of touch with what would be occurring on the streets. I conjured an image of “Field Marshal Ehrlichman,” whose interest in demonstrations Haldeman once likened to that of a firehouse Dalmatian at a blaze. I knew I wouldn’t use the shelter for monitoring demonstrations, although Haldeman had told me that that would be one of my responsibilities. The only time I ever returned there was for a secret screening of Tricia’s Wedding , a pornographic movie portraying Tricia Nixon’s wedding to Edward Cox, in drag. Haldeman wanted the movie killed, so a very small group of White House officials watched the cavorting transvestites in order to weigh the case for suppression. Official action proved unnecessary; the film died a natural death.
    As Bud and I went past the offices of the White House staff members, I noticed furniture and files being moved. The White House, far more than any other government office, was in a state of perpetual internal flux. Offices were constantly exchanged and altered. One day I visited the President’s Congressional-liaison man, Bryce N. Harlow, in his first-floor West Wing office (which later belonged to Clark MacGregor and then to William E. Timmons) and found a team of workmen busy constructing a new wall where a door had once been. Bryce explained he had been forced to give up his private bathroom because the stairwell from the basement to the second floor was being made smaller so that Henry Kissinger’s office could be expanded. “In a way, I’m glad to know the place I used to shit will be Henry’s office,” he said with a wry smile. “That tells me who’s who around here.” Harlow was perhaps the only man in the White House who did not care about losing space; he was planning to leave anyway.
    Everyone jockeyed for a position close to the President’s ear, and even an unseasoned observer could sense minute changes in status. Success and failure could be seen in the size, décor, and location of offices. Anyone who moved to a smaller office was on the way down. If a carpenter, cabinetmaker, or wallpaper hanger was busy in someone’s office, this was a sure sign he was on the rise. Every day, work men crawled over the White House complex like ants. Movers busied themselves with the continuous shuffling of furniture from one office to another as people moved in, up, down, or out. We learned to read office changes as an index of the internal bureaucratic power struggles. The expense was irrelevant to Haldeman. “For Christ’s sake,” he once retorted when we discussed whether we should reveal such expenses, “this place is a national monument, and I can’t help it if the last three Presidents let it go to hell.” Actually, the costs had less to do with the fitness of the White House than with the need of its occupants to see tangible evidence of their prestige.
    Our tour ended and it was time to go back to my “temporary” EOB office and work. By all White House standards my office was shabby. The walls needed painting and the furniture looked like military discards. I was across and down the hall from Special Counsel Charles W. Colson, whose growing staff had lovely views of the White House and its tree-filled south lawn from their freshly decorated offices. From my window I could gaze on an interior asphalt courtyard filled with delivery trucks and parked cars plus the rear ends of air conditioners in other office windows.
    I spoke with Larry Higby about this situation, which I felt did not