jugglers, clowns, and former officials

[excerpt, Woodward and Bernstein, All The President's Men]
     Bernstein asked if he thought there was any possibility that the President's campaign committee or -- less likely -- the White House would sponsor such a stupid mission as the Watergate raid.

Bernstein waited to be told no.  

"I know the President well enough to know if he needed something like this done it certainly wouldn't be a shoddy job," said the former official.  But it was not inconceivable that the President would want his campaign aides to have every piece of political intelligence and gossip available.  

He recalled that one White House political consultant "was always talking about walkie-talkies.  You would talk about politics and he would talk about devices.  There was always a great preoccupation at the White House with all this intelligence nonsense.  Some of those people are dumb enough to think there would be something there."  


This picture of the White House was in sharp contrast to the smooth, well-oiled machine Bernstein was accustomed to reading about in the newspapers -- those careful, disciplined, look-alike guards to the palace who were invariably referred to as "the President's Men."  

Ehrlichman, Haldeman

John Dean


     Bernstein asked about one of them, Robert Odle, presently director of personnel at CRP and a former White House aide.  The committee had identified Odle as the man who had hired McCord as its security coordinator. "That's bullshit," the former official replied.  "Mitchell wouldn't let go of a decision like that.

Mitchell would decide, with advice from somebody who knew something about security."  The hiring of McCord would almost certainly have involved at least one other person, he said -- a Mitchell aide whom he described as the former Attorney General's right-hand man, Fred LaRue.  

Bernstein jotted down the name (spelling it La Roue) as he was told more about him.  "I would expect that if any wiretaps were active up to the time of the break-in, LaRue would have known about them."  The former official offered an additional thought.  Murray Chotiner, 

the President's old friend and specialist in low-road campaign tactics since the days of Nixon's congressional campaigns against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas was in charge of something called "ballot security."  Although officially undefined, the job's purpose was to prevent the Democrats from stealing the election, as the President and his loyalists (as well as some Democrats) maintained had happened in 1960.  

Later that afternoon, David Broder, the Post's national political reporter and columnist, gave Bernstein the name of an official of the Republican National Committee and suggested that he be contacted.  

Broder described the official as a "very straight guy" who might know something because he was among those engaged in planning security arrangements for the GOP convention.  CRP had said that McCord had worked as a consultant on convention security.  "The truth is that McCord 

has never done security work of any kind for the convention," the party official told Bernstein.  "What he has been doing, I assume, is taking care of security for the Committee to Re-elect.  All they care about at CRP is Richard M. Nixon.  They couldn't care less about the Republican Party.  Given the chance, they would wreck it."

_____________________________

All the President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.  1974.  Simon & Schuster.

_______________________________

Ah -- you never turned around to see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did -- tricks for you

You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your -- kicks for you

You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder, a Siamese cat

Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you -- everything -- he could steal


How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone...

_________________________

Lyrics from "Like A Rolling Stone"
first cut on the album Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan

-30-