Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (69 page)

People like Liddy and Colodny do not seem to understand how deeply untrue words can hurt. To the contrary, they have relished praise from right-wing ideologues (like the crowd at Fox News in Washington). Their mentality is foreign to me: How could these men attack innocent women merely to politically attack me or make money? I was so troubled by their false claims that I wrote a book about such personalities to better understand them.
7
*
They are, in short, people who simply have no conscience. They have no real feeling or empathy for others, only for themselves and those with whom they are close. If I had thought as Liddy did, the solution would have been simple: I would have done to Colodny and Liddy’s wives, or some other family members of theirs, what they had done to mine, as revenge for the pain and suffering they caused Maureen. But I do not think like this, and there are rules in our civilization, even if others do not play by them. In truth, a lawsuit is a legally-authorized brawl, and win, lose, or draw, the suit itself can cause no end of grief for those who sue and are being sued. In this case, however, I believed we could win, and I also knew that the lawsuit would enable us to figure out how this bogus history had been assembled, so that we could show it for what it truly was. But we proceeded carefully, for I was aware that the only litigation nastier than a defamation lawsuit is one in the area of domestic relations. When Maureen said she was up to the undertaking, regardless of how unpleasant it would be—because it was as strong a statement as we could possibly make that the charges against us were false—we proceeded.

The law of defamation is stacked against public officials (which I had been) and public figures (which we assumed Maureen might be considered, very unfairly, because the revisionists had tried to drag her falsely into Watergate or simply because she had been a public official’s wife). In fact, Nixon and I had an Oval Office conversation about
New York Times v. Sullivan
, the seminal Supreme Court defamation case. We had discussed how difficult the U.S. Supreme Court has made it for the public-person plaintiff to find redress through the American courts. As a private New York lawyer, Nixon had argued a case before the Supreme Court under the impossible standards of
Sullivan
and lost.
Sullivan
, and its progeny, hold that a public official (and later any public-figure) plaintiff must prove that the defamatory statement at issue was published with “actual malice”—a misleading standard because it does not really involve malice in the traditional sense of ill-will or hatred. Rather, the “actual malice” standard requires that the person publishing the defamation either knew that the statement was false when publishing it, or acted, when publishing it, in reckless disregard as to whether it was true or false. This standard is daunting because no defendant is about to admit that he or she thought the statement they published was false or reckless regarding whether it was false. To the contrary, every defendant will claim that he, she, or the company believed that the published statement was true, so it takes a lot of digging to show the defendant knew the statement to be false or acted with reckless disregard to its truth or falsity. The Supreme Court demands clear and convincing evidence on this score. (Indeed, making things even more difficult for plaintiffs, in this area of law appellate courts will take the almost unheard-of measure of nullifying jury findings if they do not think the evidence was truly sufficient for the jury to reach the conclusion it has reached.)

The rationale of
Sullivan
and related cases is well-meaning: It is the belief that freedom of speech and of the press, under the First Amendment, need breathing room, and that defamation lawsuits at times chill even valuable speech. For these reasons, the High Court has made it particularly difficult for public people to prevail in such lawsuits, because they can defend themselves in the marketplace of ideas instead. Public people, the thinking goes, have access to the media to deny false and damaging charges. While that might be true, in practice it is also correct (as the old saying goes) that the truth cannot get its boots on before the lie has traveled the world. In addition, this body of law has become a refuge for people like Liddy, who use it for personal reasons to strike out at others, knowing that it is difficult (not to mention monumentally expensive) for the object of their defamation to prevail in court. In our case, St. Martin’s was well-insured against such a lawsuit, so Liddy actually encouraged us to sue. He may have hoped that the lawsuit would draw attention to
Silent Coup
, and sell more copies, because if a public person enters the public debate, it draws more attention to the false charge.

The defamations in
Silent Coup
, and Liddy’s follow-up actions, were so egregious that I had no doubt that we could prove actual malice and win the lawsuit. Although we issued a denial, we made no public appearances, knowing it would only draw more attention to the book. Indeed, we wanted to wait until the book had run its course before filing our lawsuit, to avoid giving it publicity. In the interim, we undertook a search for the right lawyers, an effort that proved worth the time. We wanted to find a firm that would take the case on a contingency-fee basis, because not only would this hold down our expenses, but it would also mean the firm believed it could win the case.
8
*
We interviewed high-profile and low-profile attorneys, preferring the latter. A friend suggested the attorney whose law firm that had taken the
National Enquire
to task for publishing false information about Elizabeth Taylor, Neil Papiano of Iverson, Yokum, Papiano & Hatch in Los Angeles. It proved a great choice. Neil assigned the case to two partners: Arnold “Doug” Larson and John Garrick (who have since opened their own firm). We would talk or visit with our attorneys almost every day for the next nine years. At one point, the defendants had no less than seventeen lawyers representing them. Yet Doug and John—and occasionally Neil or one of the firm’s associates—kept the defendants’ attorneys dancing full-time in what became a massive lawsuit.

Our lawsuit named as defendants Colodny, Gettlin, Liddy, St. Martin’s Press and its top officers, and a number of people who had republished the material at issue. Because St. Martin’s had the largest insurance policy, the company took the lead. We filed in a California court. St. Martin’s got the suit removed to federal court, which we had fully anticipated, and Liddy’s attorney—using dubious claims that all the witnesses and documents were back in Washington—got the case transferred back to the District of Columbia. This meant that we had to hire a Washington lawyer as well. A couple of years into the case, we hired David Dorsen as Washington counsel. David not only had extensive defamation law experience and was willing to work on a contingency fee, but he had also been Sam Dash’s deputy chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, and thus knew Watergate well.

I closed down my business and devoted myself full-time to assisting our attorneys. St. Martin’s and all the other defendants moved to dismiss, contending that even if the facts we pled in our complaint were true, we still had no legal claim. But all those motions failed. Soon after, the defendants offered us a settlement if we would allow them to continue publishing
Silent Coup
. In effect, they wanted a license to defame us. We said no. While the lawsuit continued, we had the power of a subpoena, and until we learned how this bogus history had been written—which would enable us to discredit it—we had no interest in settling. Fortunately, we did learn exactly that.

One day I will deconstruct all the Watergate revisionism (but should I fail to get around to it, for there is little joy in wading in false history, the material in my files will enable others to do so). For now, I will merely show how Colodny and Liddy invented their false stories about my wife and me by using a few of the many examples, rather than by attempting to refute all their false charges, which would itself require a hefty book.

Inventing Bogus History: How Revisionists Revise

Colodny had untrue information about me or my wife on almost every page in his account of Watergate, consistently calling me a liar whenever my account differed from anyone else’s. To charge a person with lying is easy, and as I will show, it can be done in a few sentences. To refute such a false charge, by contrast, typically requires many pages. Accordingly, I have selected a few typical examples of the types of charges that run throughout
Silent Coup
to show how the revisionists in general, and Colodny in particular, operate.
9
*
But also I want to show that unpacking a false charge (even in summary form) is far more complex that making the charge – and the revisionists have an endless supply of false charges.

More specifically,
Silent Coup
makes much of the “brashness of the lie” I purportedly told when I returned to the United States from the Philippines, where I was giving a speech as Liddy’s men were getting arrested during their second entry into the DNC. Upon my return to the office, I noted that I had had two Mondays that week because I had started the week on the other side of the International Date Line (the imaginary line that separates consecutive calendar days, with the Eastern hemisphere always one day ahead of the Western hemisphere).
Silent Coup
found it offensive that I written that I’d had “two Mondays in a week, something no one should have to endure.” According to
Silent Coup
, “Dean didn’t have two Mondays, he had two Sundays.” It then proceeds to ask:

Why would Dean lie about when he had left Manila? Why fabricate the business about two Mondays? What difference did it make when Dean learned of the break-in? It made all the difference in the world, because Dean desperately wanted to convince everyone that he had had nothing to do with the beginning of the cover-up, which started in Magruder’s phone call to him in Manila on the night of the seventeenth. If he started admitting that Magruder had called him quite so early in the game, all sorts of inquiries would be stirred alive, and he would not be able to keep the questioners from probing his story closely, and coming upon such people as Perry Rivkind and his assistant Bob Stutman, whose testimony could have impugned Dean.

In fact, I did have two Mondays when crossing the International Date Line. Colodny located my White House travel records at the National Archives, where he found my “travel voucher” with my flight times from Washington to Tokyo to Manila and back by the same route, and he even contacted the Bureau of Immigration in Manila to find when precisely I had departed. The voucher shows the following:

(Sunday) June 18 Leave Manila 9:00 AM

(Sunday) June 18 Arrive Tokyo 1:15 PM

(Sunday) June 18 Leave Tokyo 4:00 PM

(Sunday) June 18 Arrive San Francisco 9:00 AM

(Sunday) June 18 Leave San Francisco 12:05 PM

(Sunday) June 18 Arrive Washington 8:57 PM