A cashier’s check for twenty-five thousand dollars, in Kenneth H. Dahlberg’s name, had recently been discovered in the Miami bank account of one Bernard Barker. Barker was one of five men arrested earlier that summer attempting to burglarize the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex.
Dahlberg was a high-ranking fundraiser for President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign. The local investigator, eager to seize a moment in the national spotlight, “put me through the third degree,” Dahlberg remembers. “This guy was really tough.”
Driving Dahlberg back to his hotel after a grueling interrogation, the prosecutor relaxed. “I have a feeling I know you,” he told Dahlberg.
“Well,” Dahlberg replied, “I don’t have a feeling I know you, nor do I care to know you.”
The prosecutor, like Dahlberg a member of the World War II generation, persisted. “What did you do in the military?” he asked.
Dahlberg answered that he had been a fighter pilot. The investigator shook his head. That couldn’t be it.
“I was a tank commander,” he said. “The only pilot I knew was the dumbest shit I ever met. He got shot down during the Battle of the Bulge, crash-landed behind German lines. My driver and I risked our lives to go rescue him. And when we get up to the plane, he’s standing on the wing holding his ribs with one hand and holding a .45 in the other. He demands code words, like who pitched for the Yankees in ’39. I said, ‘Christ, I don’t know! Get in the damn tank!’”
Dahlberg listened calmly, then asked, “How is Ralph?”
“What?”
“Ralph. Your tank driver.”
The prosecutor nearly steered off the road. “You sonofabitch!” he cried. “You’re the guy!”
Dahlberg later mused that, on reflection, he probably should have shot his tormentor when he had the chance. The uncanny reunion put bookends on the improbable twentieth-century adventure of Ken Dahlberg—war hero, entrepreneur, political activist, and unwitting agent of a president’s destruction.
