Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (73 page)

Liddy’s response to this motion was technical, claiming these were facts that should be tried before a jury. But the rules of procedure give the judge the power to narrow the issues for trial to keep the trial focused. After Judge Sullivan received the weak response from Liddy’s attorneys, he called all counsel to his chambers in Washington. He advised Liddy’s attorneys to settle the case because, he suggested, he was inclined to grant our motion for partial summary judgment, which would effectively gut Liddy’s defense. The only issue at trial would be whether he had made the defamatory statements with actual malice, and we were confident that any jury would agree that relying on Phillip Bailley—when one was aware of his mental condition, as Liddy had been—was proof of actual malice. We were later told that Liddy’s lawyer, John Williams, in essence, explained to Judge Sullivan that Liddy would never settle, but also that Williams recognized the problems they faced. After more jockeying, Judge Sullivan said he was going to dismiss the case “without prejudice,” which means the matters had not been resolved. Informally, too, Judge Sullivan advised our lawyers that if we felt it necessary to proceed in the future, he would reopen the case right where it had ended, with our pending motion for partial summary judgment. This ended the matter for us, but not for Liddy, who was still dealing with Maxie’s lawsuit.

After the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Judge Motz, Liddy was forced to go to trial. David Dorsen tried the case for Maxie, and Williams handled the case for Liddy, in a jury trial that began on January 16, 2001. Shortly before trial, Motz made evidentiary rulings that indicated he was going to allow Liddy to go wherever he wished, while keeping a tight rein on the evidence Maxie could present. David was deeply frustrated by Judge Motz’s handling of the case, but there was nothing he could do. When the jury got the case for deliberation, however, they could not reach a decision. At that point, Judge Motz issued another remarkable ruling for Liddy, claiming that “no reasonable jury” could have found in favor of Maxie on the issue of whether Liddy had been negligent in making the remarks at issue despite the fact the Fourth Circuit has said precisely the opposite. Again, Dorsen returned to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and again they reversed Judge Motz, calling for another trial. This time, Judge Motz had a scheduling conflict so he passed the case to another judge. Again, we were delighted because this was either costing Liddy money, or his law firm was losing money if they were doing it for free. For Dorsen, who had once been deputy chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, it had become a matter of not allowing Liddy to distort history, and he was willing to fight as long as necessary.

Aside from the good news, as I saw it, that it was getting expensive for Liddy (or his attorneys), the bad news was that even though Judge Motz was gone, he had already created the law of the case; his evidentiary rulings from the prior trial would govern the second one as well. David knew this was a problem. The case went to the jury on July 3, 2001. Ready to go home for the Fourth of July holiday, the jury deliberated about 45 minutes, and returned with a ridiculous verdict, notwithstanding the show Liddy was able to put on: Liddy statements that Maxie had sued on were not “of and concerning” her, another requirement of libel law. Liddy had talked, at the event Dorsen had recorded, about photographs of prostitutes in the desk of Maxie Wells, yet the jury decided that did not mean Liddy accused her (in the statements at issue) of being involved in prostitution.

While Liddy escaped liability, he won nothing. He certainly did not establish the truth of his claim that there was a call-girl operation, nor did the jury reach a decision about whether he made the statements with actual malice. Maxie, understandably, was exhausted and wanted to get on with her life, which she would do by teaching literature to college students.

In short, the litigation ended with a whimper. This was fine by us, because we now had all the evidence that will ever be needed for any sane and honest historian to see the Colodny and Liddy Watergate revisionism for what it really is: a total distortion of the historical record. Sadly what these revisionists have done is typical of what those who have followed them have done as well. I welcome honest revisions in history. However, I will fight dishonest revisionism, for we learn nothing when history is distorted.

Part III

A Few Persistent Questions that Remain about Watergate, Even All these Years Later

Hopefully, in the preceding pages of this Afterword I have answered most all of the significant questions that remain about Watergate. I have been guided by questions that I have been asked over the years. However, there have been a few other persistent questions that I have not addressed in Parts I and II, which I have set forth below, in no particular order, along with my answers. As well, I have a closing question of my own. After the rather heavy material in the preceding pages, I thought it might be appropriate to end with some straightforward answers to the questions that I am frequently asked by persons interested in these events, and about which I feel uniquely qualified to answer without merely speculating:

Q: Did
The Washington Post
crack the Watergate case and force Nixon from office?

A: No. This is not to say that the
Post
did not play a vital role, for it did. When no one else was covering the Watergate story, the
Post
was making it front-page news. While the
Post
did not crack the case, so to speak, they made it an important story inside the Beltway, which made it important to members of Congress, prosecutors and judges—who did crack the case. Had the
Post
not given the story the attention it did, the matter would have ended long before Nixon’s reelection in November 1972. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did a great job reporting the story, and great credit goes to Ben Bradley, the editor in chief who had the guts to keep pushing on and Katharine Graham, the owner and publisher, who supported Bradley all the way.

Q: What about Woodward’s notorious source, Deep Throat, who turned out to be Mark Felt, the Assistant Director of the FBI, and the number-two man?

A: It was well-known that Felt was a leaker, but it was not known that he was leaking to Woodward. In October 1972, Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen, who headed the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, told me that an attorney for
The Washington Post
(presumably Edward Bennett Williams, an experienced criminal defense lawyer) had expressed concern to Petersen that Felt was leaking to the
Post
. (Peterson said Felt was known in the Justice Department as “the white rat,” for his prematurely white head of hair and his squealing whenever he thought it might help Mark Felt.) In turn, I reported this to Haldeman, who advised the President of Felt’s reputation. At one point in their conversation, Nixon said to Haldeman, “You know what I would do with Felt, an ambassadorship.” This was how Nixon placated former CIA Director Richard Helms, who went quietly on to become the U.S. Ambassador to Iran. So clearly, Nixon was worried about Felt. Frankly, I was hoping that Deep Throat was someone with more noble motives than Felt possessed; Felt was trying to undercut Acting FBI Director Pat Gray, so he could become Director himself.

Q: Would Watergate and the Nixon presidency have turned out differently if the Republicans had controlled Congress instead of the Democrats?

A: Absolutely. Had Republicans been in control, there would have been no Watergate investigations and no pressure to prosecute anyone. While those caught breaking into the DNC and trying to bug Larry O’Brien would have been prosecuted, and the FBI would have found out that Liddy and Hunt were in charge, the investigation would likely have ended with Hunt and Liddy. Nixon might have openly pardoned them all, explaining that they had also engaged in national security operations for the White House, which he would have refused to discuss. Democrats would have been outraged, but unable to do anything about it. One need merely look at how Republicans responded when the Bush/Cheney Administration flagrantly violated the most fundamental American laws (to engage in massive electronic surveillance of Americans, the arrest and detention without charge of perceived enemies including American citizens, and the use of torture to extract information) to see what a Republican Congress would likely have done had Republicans been in power during Watergate.

Q: What was the most difficult moment, or moments, you experienced when going through the account you related in
Blind Ambition
?

A: There was no single difficult moment; rather it all was a rather unpleasant experience. Re-reading this book after all these years was not what I call a pleasant experience either. Nonetheless, Watergate was a very maturing experience for me. I see now that I lacked experience in the criminal law, which I sorely needed. But otherwise, I feel that the Office of the White House Counsel performed very well during my tenure in the post, except with respect to Watergate. In the years since serving, I have had occasion to look at records from the office, and we did top-quality work. We also did a lot of business. The files from my office at the National Archives constitute one of the larger collections. But I did not write about what we did right in
Blind Ambition
; rather, I focused on what I did wrong. It was not pleasant having to turn on Nixon and those who had once been friends and colleagues. But when they refused to do the right thing and end the criminal activity, and then tried to blame me for what had gone wrong, they had selected the wrong person to scapegoat. Just as Liddy was the wrong person to hire to do illegal acts, because he was incompetent, I was the wrong person to seek to use to perpetuate an indefinite cover-up, because I refused to live on the wrong side of the law and to lie.

Q: Why did you not return to the practice of law?

A: While still working at the White House, I had planned to leave the practice of law and go into investment banking, which I did after Watergate (and after returning to night school for five years to study accounting). While I was disbarred for my actions during Watergate, I have actually had invitations to get readmitted to the practice of law by bar counsel and others who wanted to sponsor my readmission. But because I do not want to practice, I have not considered it necessary. I treasure my legal education, and there is not a day I do not rely on it. I have kept abreast of legal developments in the areas of law that interest me, I write about legal matters, but I have never had the urge to practice. During our lawsuit, I prepared the first drafts of countless pleadings and motions and became well-versed in the federal rules of civil procedure, so I got a good taste of the law for some nine years, and it did not entice me to practice either.

Q: Did you ever talk with Richard Nixon, or the others at the Nixon White House, after Watergate?

A: I never talked to Nixon, but I did talk with almost everyone else. Talking to me was not the sort of situation that Nixon could have handled. He believed that I should have fallen on my sword for him. Loyalty, to me, is a two-way proposition, and as the tapes show, Nixon did everything in his power to undercut me and to make me not only his scapegoat, but Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s as well. I realize now that Nixon was simply not capable of doing the right thing; it was not in his character. I ran into Bob Haldeman coming out of an elevator in Westwood, California, where he was working. We had a very friendly exchange, he gave me his card, and he encouraged me to call and arrange a lunch. I regret that I did not do so, for he passed away not long afterward. John Ehrlichman wanted revenge, and teamed up with Leonard Colodny to do whatever he could to cause me damage.

Unlike Haldeman’s taped conversations with Colodny, Ehrlichman’s conversations were pathetic. Ehrlichman had once aspired to high office, starting with the U.S. Senate. Listening to his taped conversations with Colodny, I felt very good that I had cut short his political career, for this was not a man of character. The only time I talked to Ehrlichman was during his deposition in our lawsuit, as we were riding down to lunch in the elevator. Colodny had so embittered Ehrlichman that he literally foamed at the mouth with saliva during the deposition, exuding hate, plainly feeling very put-upon by being forced to testify (although St. Martin’s, not we, had called for his deposition), and being as nasty as he could. He looked awful, and was quite overweight, and soon I realized he had lost his once-sardonic wit and personality as well. During the elevator ride, he refused to look at me, so I said to him as we arrived at the first floor, “Well, John, after listening to your testimony, I guess I won’t be getting a Christmas card this year?” Expecting the old John to have a quick comeback, I was stunned when he became nearly catatonic from thinking he had somehow been sending me Christmas cards in earlier years, which I assured him had not been the case. John Garrick, who was the attorney conducting the deposition—and whom Ehrlichman had compared to former assistant Watergate Special Prosecutor Richard Ben Veniste trying to intimidate a non-intimidateable Garrick, who took it as a compliment—looked at me after we got out of the elevator and asked, “Was he always so out of it?”

Q: Do you regret joining the Nixon White House?

A: Not at all. It was a great experience. There were more good days than bad, and relatively speaking, Watergate activities were not where I spent most of my time. It was a phenomenal education, for from the White House Counsel’s Office, you can truly see how the government operates.