“But I thought more about it later, when I finally got back to the hotel after that stinking accident I'm still trying to explain. . . and it occurred to me that those bastards are really mean enough to do that to Colson themselves -- if they only had the wits to think about it. They could go out and drag him down the street in a car with old McGovern stickers on the bumpers or put on false beards and wave a wine bottle out the window as they passed the White House and cut him loose. He'd roll to a stop in front of the Guard House and the Guard would clearly see the McGovern sticker on the car screeching off around the corner and that's all Nixon would need. If we gave them the idea, they'd probably go out and get Colson tonight.”

“He'd be babbling, I'd think --”

“He'd be hysterical, in very bad shape. And of course he'd claim that McGovern thugs had done it to him -- if he were still able to talk. I really believe Nixon would do a thing like that if he thought it would get him out of the hole. . . So I thought about it a little more, and it occurred to me what we should do was have these masks made up -- you know those rubber masks that fit over the whole head.”

“Ah yes, very convincing. . .”

“Yeah, one of them would have to be the face of Haldeman, one the face of Ehrlichman and one the face of Tony Ulasewicz.”

“Yes, the meanest men on the Nixon Staff.”

“Well, Colson's the meanest man in politics, according to Pat Buchanan. Ulasewicz is the hit man, a hired thug. I thought if we put these masks on and wore big overcoats or something to disguise ourselves and went out to his house and kind of shouted: 'Tex, Tex! It's me, Tony. Come on down. We've got a big problem.' And the minute he opens the door, these people with the Haldeman and Ehrlichman masks would jump out from either side and seize him by each arm -- so that he sees who has him, but only for two or three seconds, before the person wearing the Ulasewicz mask slaps a huge burlap sack over his head, knots it around his knees and then the three of them carry him out to the car and lash him to the rear bumper and drag him down the street -- and just as we passed the White House Guard Station, slash the rope so that Colson would come to a tumbling bloody stop right in front of the guard. . . and after two or three days in the Emergency Ward, when he was finally able to talk, after coming out of shock, he would swear that the people who got him were Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Ulasewicz -- and he would know they were mean enough to do it, because that's the way he thinks. He's mean enough to do it himself. You'd have to pick a night when they were all in Washington, and Colson would swear that they did it to him, no matter what they said. He would know it, because he had seen them.”