The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (42 page)

18
.
   
Many of Clark Mollenhoff’s papers are in the Special Collections Department of Iowa State University.

19
.
   
Clark Mollenhoff,
Game Plan for Disaster: An Ombudsman’s Report on the Nixon Years
(New York: Norton, 1976), 349.

20
.
   
Ibid., 289–90.

21
.
   
Ibid., 249.

22
.
   
Ibid., 250.

23
.
   
Ibid., 250.

24
.
   
Clark Mollenhoff,
Investigative Reporting
(New York: Macmillian, 1981), “Watergate and the Aftermath,” 337–38.

25
.
   
Mollenhoff,
Game Plan for Disaster
, 251.

26
.
   
Ibid., 253.

27
.
   
Email of April 24, 2014, to the author from Michel Gardner, former president of the
Des Moines Register
. See also Michael Gartner’s memories of the
Des Moines Register
:
http://www.dmcityview.com/cover-story/2013/05/29/michael-gartners-memories-of-715-locust-street/
.

28
.
   
Files from Silbert’s Watergate investigations are a part of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force files in the Special Access Section of Archives II in College Park, Maryland.

29
.
   
Sirica,
To Set the Record Straight
, 38.

30
.
   
Samuel Dash’s papers, other than those sealed as a part of the Ervin Committee, are in the Library of Congress.

31
.
   
Samuel Dash,
Chief Counsel: Inside the Ervin Committee—The Untold Story of Watergate
(New York: Random House, 1976), 26.

32
.
   
Ibid., 26.

33
.
   
Ibid., 26.

34
.
   
Ibid., 26–27.

35
.
   
Ibid., 27.

36
.
   
Archibald Cox letter to Charles Shaffer, Dean’s criminal defense counsel, dated October 18, 1973.

37
.
   
Watergate: Chronology of a Crisis
(Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1975), 616, “Transcripts of 46 Tapes (May 4, 1974).”

38
.
   
John Dean,
Blind Ambition
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 358.

39
.
   
Sirica,
To Set the Record Straight
, 270–71.

40
.
   
Dean,
Blind Ambition
, 355.

41
.
   
Ibid., 384–85.

42
.
   
Deposition of John Dean,
Dean v. St. Martin’s Press
, January 22, 1996, 10.

43
.
   
Brian Lamb, January 29, 2004 interview of John Dean. See:
http://www.cspanvideo.org/videoLibrary/transcript/transcript.php?programid=154549
.

44
.
   
Amy Goodman interview of April 7, 2004, with John Dean. See
http://spymaster.tblog.com/post/142297
.

45
.
   
Chapman University’s
Panther
newspaper interview of January 29, 2012. Posted by staff contributor Taylor Johnson. See:
http://www.thepantheronline.com/news/q-a-with-former-nixon-counsel-john-dean
.

46
.
   
Excerpt from Dean’s July 24, 1974, financial statement, from his sentencing file among Judge Sirica’s papers in the Library of Congress.
The Bantam contract disclosure was an interesting finesse. Earlier, Sirica had banned activities by convicted Watergate defendants that might allow them to cash in on the notoriety stemming from the Watergate scandal, certainly including books. Thus, Dean describes these as “non-Watergate books,” but no such books were ever forthcoming in this time frame. Dean’s first and only book in the relevant time frame was
Blind Ambition
, published in 1979.

47
.
   
Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton,
Stonewall: The Real Story of the Watergate Prosecution
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 107.

48
.
   
Trial Transcript, 2499–2501.

49
.
   
Ben-Veniste and Frampton,
Stonewall
, 343.

50
.
   
Sirica,
To Set the Record Straight
, 270–71.

CHAPTER SEVEN: EVENHANDED, NONPARTISAN PROSECUTORS

1
.
     
George V. Higgins,
The Friends of Richard Nixon
(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975), 9–67.

2
.
     
Geoff Shepard,
The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President: Inside the Real Watergate Cover-Up
(New York: Penguin Sentinel, 2008), chapters 11–14, 18–20.

3
.
     
John A. Farrell,
Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century
(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2001), 355.

4
.
     
Judge Silberman was named Deputy Attorney General following the Saturday Night Massacre and served in that capacity through the end of the Nixon administration. He played a key role in holding the Department of Justice together as Watergate wound toward its conclusion.

5
.
     
In Re Sealed Case
, 838 F.2d 476 (1988). The Circuit Court’s decision was reversed by the Supreme Court in
Morrison v Olson
, 487 U.S. 654 (1988), Justice Scalia dissenting, but Silberman’s concerns have characterized the actions of a whole series of subsequent special prosecutors.

6
.
     
Shepard,
The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President
, 138.

7
.
     
Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton,
Stonewall: The Real Story of the Watergate Prosecution
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 107.

8
.
     
William J. Campbell,
Eliminate the Grand Jury
, 64 J. CRIM. L.& CRIMINOLOGY 174 (1973).

9
.
     
See In Re Petition of Geoff Shepard, DC Federal Court, Case 1:11-mc-00044 (RCL).

10
.
   
This analysis that follows is primarily taken from a loose leaf legal treatise by Professor Paul Marcus, first published by Mathew Bender in 1978 and revised seven times since then.

11
.
   
65 Geo. L. J. 970 (1976–1977). The article is also available online as a part of the Faculty Publications by William and Mary Law School, where professor Marcus presently teaches.

12
.
   
Richard Harris, Reflections, “The Watergate Prosecutions,”
The New Yorker
, June 10, 1974, 60.

13
.
   
John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, Robert Mardian, Kenneth Parkinson, and Gordon Strachan.

14
.
   
Gray had secretly accepted possession of documents retrieved from Howard Hunt’s safe, which he did not share with his agents and later destroyed. He also had lied about this on two occasions to Henry Petersen, the head of the Criminal Division. His actions came to light only when John Dean began his meetings with prosecutors to work out his own plea bargain. His exclusion was a judgment call by the Special Prosecutor. With the notable exceptions of John Mitchell and Robert Mardian, no one who had served in the Department of Justice was included in the cover-up indictment.

15
.
   
Of those not ultimately indicted, William Bittman was Howard Hunt’s defense attorney, and Herbert Kalmbach was Nixon’s personal attorney. Bittman was never charged; Kalmbach pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation and became a witness for the government at the cover-up trial.

16
.
   
Bittman was quite a hero in Democratic circles, since he had obtained a conviction against Jimmy Hoffa in the Test Fleet pension-abuse case in Chicago in 1964 and had prosecuted Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s secretary when he was majority leader of the Senate, without implicating Johnson himself.

17
.
   
It was learned later that Bittman had secreted a memo from Howard Hunt containing disclosure threats if money was not forthcoming, and
he again came under threat of indictment. Henry Ruth, having been named special prosecutor upon Jaworski’s resignation, decided on July 3, 1975, not to indict, and Bittman again walked free.

18
.
   
Lacovara memo to Jaworski, “Status of Charles Colson in Watergate Case,” February 22, 1974.

19
.
   
Giglio v. United States
, 405 U.S. 150 (1972).

20
.
   
United States v. Agurs
, 427 U.S. 97 (1976), 112–14.

21
.
   
Agurs v United States
, 510 F2d 1249 (1975). Interestingly, Silbert was on the brief for the U.S. attorney’s office and Chief Judge Bazelon was one of judges voting to overturn the murder conviction. He did not, however, write the opinion itself.

22
.
   
Ben-Veniste and Frampton,
Stonewall
, 106.

23
.
   
See “2 Sides Warned on Dean Debate,”
Washington Star News
, February 15, 1974, A-4. Copy obtained from Jaworski’s confidential Watergate files.

24
.
   
These files concerned what Mitchell later referred to as the White House Horrors and contained information regarding the Huston Plan, the Plumbers break-in, the NSC wiretaps, the Dairy Producers campaign contributions, and the Townhouse Project.

25
.
   
John Dean,
Blind Ambition
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 253.

26
.
   
This twenty-six-page memo was reproduced in full at Appendix U of Shepard’s
The Secret Plot
; it is reproduced in part in Appendix O of this book.

27
.
   
Dean later claimed to have sought Haldeman out after his February 4, 1972, meeting in Attorney General Mitchell’s office, where Liddy was describing his scaled-down campaign intelligence plan. The difficulty for WSPF prosecutors was that Dean did not make this assertion until May 2, after a full month of meetings with the career prosecutors. WSPF prosecutors later maintained that this meeting was when Dean had dropped out of the conspiracy to undertake the break-in.

28
.
   
Had Nixon ever been prosecuted, one can only imagine the devastating effect this notation (had it become public) would have had on Dean’s witness credibility.

29
.
   
This is an apparent reference to the files Dean had taken from the counsel’s office when he jumped ship.

30
.
   
James Neal memo to Larry Lason, “John Dean’s Contacts and Information Imparted to the Original Prosecutors,” October 2, 1974.

31
.
   
Trial Transcript, 2398–2399.

32
.
   
Trial Transcript, 2404.

33
.
   
United States v Haldeman
, Brief for the Respondent, 251.

34
.
   
In 2003, Magruder suddenly, and for the first time, recalled overhearing a telephone call between Mitchell and President Nixon at this very meeting, wherein the president ordered Mitchell to approve Liddy’s plan.
Salina Journal
, July 27, 2003, 1.

35
.
   
Among the many challenges faced by prosecutors was that Magruder’s book,
An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate
, had been published in 1974, well before the cover-up trial. It was thus important that his testimony not seriously contradict his published story. In his book, at page 210, Magruder denied that he had ordered Liddy’s team back into the Watergate office building. Instead, Liddy had admitted that one of the bugs was not working and had stated that he would “get everything straightened out right away.” Liddy’s own book, published in 1980, strenuously contradicted Magruder’s version.

36
.
   
Buzhardt repeated this conversation to me shortly after it occurred.

37
.
   
Dean,
Blind Ambition
, 359.

38
.
   
Lawyers cannot lead their witnesses on direct testimony. They are supposed to introduce general topics and let their witness respond accordingly. It is only on cross-examination that opposing counsel can ask leading or direct questions.

39
.
   
The abusive prosecutions of Perry and Walker are continuing as this book goes to press.

CHAPTER EIGHT: AN UNTAINTED AND UNBIASED JURY