Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (70 page)

At first blush, it looks like Colodny was correct, and that when I walked in my office at the White House on Monday morning, June 19
th,
and that I had had two Sundays, not two Mondays. In fact, I had had two Sundays, but I was also starting my second Monday as well. What Colodny failed to calculate before calling me a liar was the time it requires to fly between these cities. The fact that I had experienced two Mondays was (and remains) stuck in my mind for a unique reason, which I would have explained had he asked. Traveling to Manila, we had stopped in Tokyo, and shopped at the duty-free store in the U.S. Embassy, where I purchased a Seiko watch that had the day and date. Flying to Manila, I had read the instructions to figure out how to set the day and date, which was a bit tricky.

When I was flying home, after our plane was many hours out of Tokyo, the pilot came on the public address system to announce that we had just crossed the International Date Line, and he gave us an estimated arrival time for San Francisco. Earlier, I had looked at my watch and it was Monday, June 19
th
so I had dated several postcards I had picked up in Manila to send to my family, and on which I had written the header, “Manila, June 19
th
,” with a message that I was heading home. (I mailed them from San Francisco.) Chapter Four had originally started with a note from one of those post cards, in which I explained that although I had starting writing the card on Monday, June 19
th
, it had become Sunday, June 18
th
after crossing the International Date Line, and I was trying to figure how to reset my new watch, but to do so I had to dig out the instruction manual before I got it correct.

After
Silent Coup
claimed I had lied, I discussed my travel with a pilot who flew regularly to Tokyo, who said it would be impossible to prove—all these years later—precisely when my Northwest Airlines flight had crossed the International Date Line because it would have depended upon the weather and wind, and the flight plan that evening. However, he said that my day/date watch and the pilot’s announcement struck him as being accurate—and that I had, indeed, had two Mondays. (He also offered to find an expert witness who could corroborate this, if necessary.) In calling me a lair on this bit of minutiae, Colodny simply ignored the time that it took for me to travel from Manila to cross the date line, which is thousands of miles from Tokyo. I had traveled all day Sunday, and sometime after midnight, when over the Pacific Ocean, I had my first Monday, but when we crossed the date line, I was back to Sunday.

Silent Coup
claims I lied because I did not want anyone to come upon “such people as Perry Rivkind and his assistant Bob Stutman, whose testimony could have impugned Dean.” This assertion, too, was false and baseless. The information with which Rivkind or Stutman might have “impugned” me was never reported, because, in fact, it did not exist. Stutman, as Colodny learned when he spoke with him, corroborated the fact that I first learned of the Watergate break-in upon landing in San Francisco on June 18, 1972. As Colodny’s secretly-taped telephone conversations show, Stutman’s memory of the event was clear, and neither Colodny nor Gettlin could get him to change his story, despite repeated efforts. Stutman remembered that I told him “some assholes got caught breaking into the DNC and my office thinks I should come back to Washington.” Because of what occurred later, he never forgot the poetry of my first reaction. Rather than face the facts, however,
Silent Coup
contrived an alternative, fictional universe, declaring that yours truly, “the consummate actor,” had fooled Stutman (an experienced law enforcement officer) by withholding my knowledge of the break-in from him for all those hours while flying from Manila to Tokyo and then to San Francisco, but then suddenly coming up with this explanation after calling my office from San Francisco. Colodny’s effort to make the facts go away by merely declaring that I was “the consummate actor” was a fiction and, because he knew this was an invented explanation, it was evidence of actual malice.

One Colodny tactic was to not allow a person with a hazy memory of events from years earlier to correct his or her memory after thinking further about the matter. This is how Colodny dealt with Perry Rivkind, who tried to recall his visit to Manila with me for Colodny many years earlier. Unaware he was being secretly recorded, Rivkind tried to recall what had occurred by thinking aloud, and thought it possible I had learned of the Watergate break-ins while in the Philippines. However, Rivkind told Colodny, “I honestly can’t remember whether that’s when he learned it.” When Colodny pressed him on his first mistaken memory, Rivkind repeated, “I’m honestly drawing a blank.”

Even though Rivkind made it clear to Colodny that he “could have it wrong” and “you better ask Stutman” and “I honestly can’t remember,” Colodny was determined to use the mistaken recollection whether Rivkind really believed it or not. As Colodny explained in a later conversation with Bud Krogh:

Krogh: And will Rivkind, ah, be, stand up under pressure if he is asked by others about this.

Colodny: Oh, I don’t care what he does at this point [laughs].

If Colodny secretly got someone on tape to indifferently support his preconceived story, even if that person told Colodny that he was not sure or requested that Colodny confirm the fact with someone else, then Colodny “relied” on that person as a source. This was how Colodny has reinvented history. This was also further evidence of Colodny’s actual malice.

In trying to make me a liar about hearing from Jeb Magruder while I was still in Manila, Colodny showed how he could manipulate information as he did with Magruder, literally planting information to manipulate him into recalling a telephone call, years after the event, which never occurred. Magruder never called me in Manila, and, if he had, he would have recalled that fact long before Colodny planted the thought in his mind. Colodny’s conversations with Magruder are illustrative of his use of highly deceptive techniques (here, secretly recording a person when giving them false and misleading information). During a deposition in this lawsuit, Magruder was read a portion of one of his recorded conversations where Colodny repeatedly gave Magruder false information, including, most importantly, telling Magruder incorrectly that there was a record of a telephone call from California to Manila (via the White House Signal Corps switchboard, or Secret Service) on June 17, 1972. Neither the Signal Corps nor the Secret Service maintained such records, a fact formally acknowledged by both agencies to our attorneys. But Colodny’s false statement convinced Magruder that he must have made the call.

Magruder explained what had occurred during his deposition in our lawsuit:

Q. Reverend Magruder, if you could turn specifically to the bottom of page three [of the transcript of your conversation with Colodny], and I’d just like you to bear in mind where Mr. Colodny states in the second to last paragraph there: “Do you have any recollection because it looks like the phone call went through California to Manila—California to the White House to Manila at 11:30 Manila time on the 17th.” And then I also want to direct your attention to the middle of page six and specifically where Mr. Colodny states: “Whoever made the call, okay, rather than say you did it or somebody else did it, it went through the White House signal board.” And then it drops down and he says: “There’s a record of the phone call coming through at about 8:30—about 8:30 your time, 11:30 Washington time, 11:30 Washington time a call is placed to the White House signal board to Manila.” Now, when Mr. Colodny gave you the information that I have just read, did you assume that it was accurate?

A. Yes.

Q. Did you believe, based on what he told you, that he had a record of a call from California to the White House signal board to Manila that was made at 8:30 California time on June 17, 1972?

A. That’s what he said, he had a record.

Q. And did you rely upon Mr. Colodny’s representation of having this record in responding to his questions to you about an alleged call you made to John Dean?

A. I assumed he was correct about a call.

Q. And subsequently, and just you can correct me if your memory is different, but I think you state to Mr. Colodny later on in one of these transcripts that it’s possible that you did make that call; correct?

A. The way the conversations went, it was narrowed down to the point where I was the only person who could have made that call, if there was a call.

Q. And was that surmise or conclusion, however you want to characterize it, on your part, based upon Mr. Colodny’s representation of having a record of that phone call?

A. Based on that and based on a number of other documents that other people said that it was me who made the phone call.

When Colodny was under oath, after a good bit of misdirection (which became the norm in his deposition), he admitted he had given false information to Magruder to induce a false response:

Q. When you talked to Mr. Magruder prior to
Silent Coup’s
publication, when you first asked him about that phone call from Dean to Mr. Magruder on June 17, 1972, did Mr. Magruder remember it?

A. Mr. Magruder—like the conversation with Mr. Liddy, the third one—at first didn’t recall, didn’t recall. We kept talking about the evidence that—that mitigated against the call coming—the instruction coming from Mr. Mitchell for a lot of reasons that we’ve already discussed, timing, the fact that Liddy says the call came from Magruder. The order had to have been given between 8:30 and 9:00 and the time when he said he hadn’t even talked to Mitchell yet.

Q. So the answer to my questions is: He did not remember it when you first asked him about it?

A. Right.

Q. But you told Mr. Magruder that he had made such a call, didn’t you?

A. I did not tell him that he had made such a call.
*

Q. Did you tell him that you had a record of such a call on June 17, 1972 from Mr. Magruder’s hotel in California to the White House to Manila at 8:30 AM? Did you tell him that?

A. I don’t know that I used a specific time.
**
I told him that—that such a record existed and—but I didn’t say that that record came from him. I didn’t say it was a record from him.

Q. Okay. And did such a record exist?

A. I had been tracing such a record based on the evidence.
10
***
And after numerous discussions with Mr. Magruder, while I had every reason to believe I thought we were going to get it, we hadn’t. It’s a technique you don’t usually use, but it is used. And it’s a technique where you have a lot of evidence pointing in one way, and you indicate that there’s a document or person said something and see what reaction that draws sometimes. And obviously if Mr. Magruder didn’t make the phone call, whether there was a call from that hotel or not, Mr. Magruder would have said “I didn’t make that phone call.” That is a technique, by the way, is used not only by police and journalists—although I must tell you I thought those records still existed. As I later found out, the records were destroyed by the Signal board.
*
So while I was saying to him—and I had every belief to have it—I did not have it in hand.

Q. Is that technique you referred to called lying? [Counsel withdrew this question as argumentative, and restated it.] You didn’t really have such a record, correct?…And the answer is “no,” right?

A. The answer is no.

This is about as clear an example of actual malice as one might find, for Colodny knew he created false information by giving Magruder false information. This was the way Colodny proceeded through much of his research, employing such tactics. Based on our analysis of literally hundreds of his secretly-recorded calls with countless persons he said he had “interviewed,” we summarized for the court how Colodny conducted his interviews. His principal research tool was a telephone connected to a tape recorder, which he did not explain to those he called and with whom he talked. To get the information he wanted, he used a number of methods, such as asking leading questions to obtain negative information from persons hostile to me and, by association, my wife; relying on faded memories of events occurring over 15 years earlier; and disclosing false information in order to obtain false information. He also consistently sought to prejudice persons against us by “poisoning the well” with derogatory and false information about us; frequently planted information with a person who had no memory of a particular event, and later enticed that person to repeat back to him the planted information as if it were his or her own information; he interrupted and switched the subject or ended a conversation when the information being given was inconsistent with his desired version of events; and, of course, he failed to tell anyone that his or her interview was being treated as “on-the-record” for attribution. This pattern of dishonesty repeated itself, time after time, for Colodny secretly recorded over a thousand conversations.