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

befit a man with my title. “Larry, I don’t want to sound like a complainer, but I’m embarrassed to invite anyone to my office for a meeting, it’s such a dump. Also it’s sometimes hard to concentrate, listening to the urinals flush all day, since you’ve got me right beside the men’s room.”
    “It’s only temporary,” he said. He agreed to have the walls painted and some decent furnishings delivered, but added a teaser: “Bob hasn’t decided where he wants to put you yet.” Then he dangled “possibilities” before me—nice big offices of people Haldeman might move out in order to move me in. I did not have to be told what was happening. I was being tested and my performance would determine what I would get. I was at the bottom of the ladder, and instinctively I began to climb.
    For a thousand days I would serve as counsel to the President. I soon learned that to make my way upward, into a position of confidence and influence, I had to travel downward through factional power plays, corruption, and finally outright crimes. Although I would be rewarded for diligence, true advancement would come from doing those things which built a common bond of trust—or guilt—between me and my superiors. In the Nixon White House, these upward and downward paths diverged, yet joined, like prongs of a tuning fork pitched to a note of expediency. Slowly, steadily, I would climb toward the moral abyss of the President’s inner circle until I finally fell into it, thinking I had made it to the top just as I began to realize I had actually touched bottom.

Chapter Two: Firefighting

    THE TESTS STARTED that first day at the White House. After a brief examination of my meager quarters, I had sat down at my desk. I didn’t have anything to do, but then my secretary brought me a sealed envelope with a small red tag. I asked her what it was. She had not opened it; it was stamped “CONFIDENTIAL,” and the red tag meant “priority.” Someone had been planning work for the new counsel. The cover memorandum was a printed form, with striking blue and red instructions filled in:

    ACTION MEMORANDUM
    FROM THE STAFF SECRETARY
    LOG NO.: P523
    Date: Friday, July 24, 1970
    Time: 6:30 P.M.
    Due Date: Wednesday, August 5, 1970
    Time: 2:00 P.M.
    SUBJECT: Request that you rebut the recent attack on the Vice-President.

    An attached “confidential memorandum” said that a new muckraking magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly had published a bogus memo linking Vice-President Agnew with a top-secret plan to cancel the 1972 election and to repeal the entire Bill of Rights. Agnew had publicly denounced the memo as “completely false” and “ridiculous,” and the editors of Scanlan’s had
    replied: “The Vice-President’s denial is as clumsy as it is fraudulent. The document came directly from Mr. Agnew’s office and he knows it.” My instructions were clear: “It was noted that this is a vicious attack and possibly a suit should be filed or a federal investigation ordered to follow up on it.”
    “Noted” by whom? Since the memorandum was signed by John Brown, a member of Haldeman’s staff, I called him to find out. The “noter” was the President, I was told; he had scrawled my orders in the margin of his daily news summary. No one had to explain why the President’s name was not used. He was always to be kept one step removed, insulated, to preserve his “deniability.”
    So this is my baptism, I thought. I was astounded that the President would be so angrily concerned about a funny article in a fledgling magazine. It did not square with my picture of his being absorbed in diplomacy, wars, and high matters of state. Was it possible that we had a secret plan to cancel the election and the Bill of Rights. I was embarrassed by the thought. Now I cannot look back on this episode without laughing, but then I was not at all loose about it. It was the President of the United States talking. Maybe he was right.
    On the due date, I