Part II: My Friend John [Ehrlichman]
In which John tells me about his real punishment for his crimes
This story was first published in March of 2018 on my WordPress site. Because I’m in the middle of a major move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I lived from 1979 until 1985, I’ve decided to bring back some of my older pieces referencing that era. I hope that you’ll enjoy them.
Summer flew by between my sophomore and junior years, and soon I was back in the throes of school. Still, I continued working for John and Christy. The job paid well, and they gave me the run of the house.
The house was tastefully decorated—a rambling Santa Fe adobe tucked into a hillside. Unlike many of the houses I had been in, it lacked the garish Santa Fe stylings. I enjoyed spending time there. Christy had been in the interior design business before meeting John, and she had furnished the house to be comfortable but not too fussy.
Christy and I got along well, especially during the first year and a half of our relationship. She had come to trust and rely on me when she and John couldn’t be there, but she never confided in me. There was something slightly cool and a little brittle about her, yet she was generous and kind toward me.
One day, I arrived at the house to babysit and found John home alone. Christy was out picking up Michael from a playdate and was running a little late. John invited me to sit down and set aside the newspaper he had been reading. Making small talk, I said, “I love the furniture in this room! It’s so comfortable.”
John smiled. “Yes, Christy’s work! I’m afraid I can’t take credit for that.”
He went on. “That’s how we met. She was one of the first people I encountered when I got out of prison. I was shopping for furniture—felt completely lost at the time,” he mused, “and she came to my rescue.”
“What was prison like?” I asked.
He laughed uncomfortably. “Not too bad… it wasn’t quite a country club, but it wasn’t all that bad.”
“How did you spend your days there?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Well, I read a lot, played a bit of tennis, and after a while, they allowed me to leave on furlough to work. It wasn’t high security or anything like that.”
It didn’t sound like prison had exacted much punishment. “Hmmm…” I said. “Sounds like a country club to me! How much do you think it cost us taxpayers to keep you there?”
“I know it was on the order of forty thousand per year, maybe more,” John replied.
“Now that is a crime if you ask me,” I said. “That’s almost four times what my mother makes as a college professor! You should have done hard labor for what you did.”
John laughed. “And here I thought you were my friend.”
We went on to discuss what might have been a better alternative to prison. “My punishment came in losing my family and my dignity, not in going to prison,” he said. I believed him. He agreed that there could have been better ways to make reparations—consequences with more value to society that wouldn’t have cost taxpayers as much. White-collar criminals should have to pay their own way.
I loved working at John and Christy’s house and getting a glimpse into the life of the infamous. There was a strange comfort in learning that they were ordinary people with ordinary problems and aspirations. They fretted about what to make for dinner and who would pick up the kids. They even had a few rip-roaring arguments—one right in front of me that ended with Christy throwing a wad of keys at John and stomping out of the room. He deserved it, as I remember.
John was always nice to me, but he had a mean streak that I witnessed a few times, mostly aimed at Christy. I also saw it rise up whenever anything related to Nixon came up. He hated him, a fact I first realized one day when I was doing my homework in his office—something he encouraged me to do. Bored, I started browsing his bookshelves and pulled out The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. Skimming through it, I noticed that John had marked it up with underlines and margin notes.
It made for fascinating reading and gave me some insight into how John’s ambition and misplaced sense of duty toward the office of the president had clouded his judgment. He considered Nixon a complete liar. After reading his notes, I started to think he blamed Nixon for what had happened to his life more than he blamed himself.
One time, while house-sitting, I was hunting around in the office for a legal pad. I opened a drawer and saw a file folder labeled The 18-Minute Tape Gap. I immediately closed the drawer, feeling as if I had stumbled upon something dangerous. A surge of adrenaline ran through me.
In the press, the tape gap was still a source of great speculation. Some believed it contained a damning conversation between Nixon and Haldeman. Nobody ever discovered the truth, but someone had to know. Maybe it was Ehrlichman, I thought.
For the next few nights, I lay awake in my bedroom next to the office, obsessing over the folder and whether I should look at its contents. I knew it was wrong—it would be a level of snooping that was morally reprehensible. And yet, after several days, I decided to look.
I nearly fainted from anticipation as I opened the folder. To my great disappointment, it contained nothing but newspaper clippings about the tape gap. I felt pretty stupid for thinking I would find the smoking gun sitting in almost plain sight.
By the end of my junior year, I had been working in the Ehrlichman household for a year and had developed a genuine friendship with John. But I felt vaguely ashamed to admit it, especially to my mother, who despised all of Nixon’s cronies and criminals. Just the thought of having a conversation with her about my job made me sweat.
Still, I decided I needed to tell her. It seemed too big a thing to hide.
That summer, before my return to Santa Fe for my exciting new job at the Pink Adobe’s Dragon Room as a cocktail waitress, I finally told my mother about my job at the Ehrlichmans'. I also told her about the unexpected friendship John and I had developed—and how much I liked him. He seemed smart, kind, and like a real person. He reminded me of my own father, whom I didn’t know all that well.
At first, she seemed surprised and a little concerned. But she found the news interesting, and, to my relief, she was willing to withhold judgment—for the time being.
To be continued next week…
Note: This story is a recollection of events that took place more than four decades ago. In creating this narrative, I have constructed dialogue that approximates real conversations that I might have had. Doing this exercise, reminds me of just how thin the line is between fact and fiction.