Conservatives Without Conscience (2 page)

We gave Hays a statement the next morning that made clear we were preparing for legal action. Hays gave us his telephone number in Salt Lake City, where he planned to stop to visit with family en route back to Washington. Several hours later we called him, because I had had another idea, and I asked if he thought it would be worth my effort to go directly to Henry Muller,
Time
’s managing editor, to ask him to reconsider. Hays could not offer any encouragement. It was Friday evening in New York, and this issue of the magazine was heading for the printer. In addition, he confided that
Time
had paid fifty thousand dollars for the serial rights. But he gave me Muller’s office number, and told me, “Only someone like Muller could pull a story at this late stage.” I called Muller’s office, and arranged to fax a letter. Rather than threatening legal action, I tried to appeal to Muller’s journalistic good sense. They were reporting a story that
60 Minutes
had investigated and rejected, and their principal Watergate reporter, Hays Gorey, had told them the story was baseless. Surprisingly, the effort
worked. Within less than an hour of sending the letter, Hays called back. “You did it, Muller pulled the story. The whole thing. We’re not going to even mention
Silent Coup.
I have only seen that happen once before in my thirty years with
Time.
” Hays was ebullient, clearly proud that
Time
had done the right thing.

I decided to try again to persuade Tom McCormack, chairman and CEO of St. Martin’s Press, to reconsider the publication of
Silent Coup.
McCormack had refused to talk with me earlier, so I faxed him a letter to let him know he was walking into a lawsuit. A day later we received McCormack’s answer, when CBS’s
Good Morning America
(
GMA
) called on Saturday morning to tell us that Colodny and Gettlin would be appearing Monday morning, May 21, 1991, to promote their newly published book and
GMA
wanted to give us a chance to respond. We faxed them the statement we had given
Time.
Clearly, a book tour was underway, but by pushing
60 Minutes
and then
Time,
we had mortally wounded the book and destroyed the carefully planned launch, which might have given the story credibility. Now it would be difficult to treat
Silent Coup
as legitimate news.

Watching the authors on
Good Morning America,
we felt encouraged. Colodny, the older of the two, who looked to be in his early fifties, was a retired liquor salesman and conspiracy buff. Gettlin, who appeared to be in his forties, was a journalist. This was their first book. Both were tense.
GMA
’s host, Charlie Gibson, an experienced journalist, was not buying the
Silent Coup
story relating to the Deans, so his questions focused on the material in the book related to Bob Woodward and Al Haig, which was as unfounded as the material relating to us. (Woodward was accused of CIA connections; Haig had allegedly plotted the “coup” of the title that had removed Nixon from office.) With St. Martin’s publicity department pumping out information about their sensational new book, requests for responses and appearances became so frequent we had to put a message on the answering machine to handle the requests. Not wanting to do anything to attract additional publicity to the book, however, we declined all
appearances and issued a statement explaining that the charges were false.

We watched the authors again on CNN’s
Larry King Live.
Bob Beckel was the substitute host in Larry King’s absence. Colodny claimed that he and Gettlin were “not making any charges against Maureen Dean.” Yet I had made a note during my quick read of the book that they claimed that Mo’s alleged “acquaintanceship with [Phillip Mackin] Bailley, and the true identity of her friend Heidi [Rikan]…[were] the keys to understanding all the events of the break-ins and cover-ups that we know under the omnibus label of Watergate.” That was some “no charge.” After a commercial break, well into the program, both Colodny and Gettlin simply disappeared without explanation, as if snatched from their seats by hooks. In their places were Howard Kurtz, a media reporter for the
Washington Post,
and Gordon Liddy, Watergate’s most decorated felon. Beckel asked Liddy for his “theory” of why
60 Minutes
and
Time
had “pulled” their stories on
Silent Coup.
Liddy said, “Well, I don’t have to go for a
theory
with respect to those two things, because they are on the record.” Liddy claimed none of the people charged by the book would appear on
60 Minutes.
“They wanted to get John Dean, etcetera,” Liddy claimed. “They wouldn’t come on the program and face these two men.
Time
magazine just said, you know, the thing is so densely packed that it did not lend itself to being excerpted and they felt that they couldn’t do it.”

Liddy’s remarks were untrue, for I had agreed to do
60 Minutes
(as had Woodward and Haig) and I had a copy of the
Time
excerpt, not to mention my letter, which had killed it. Mike Wallace, who had obviously been watching the show, called in to correct Liddy’s false characterizations. Wallace reported that he had read
Silent Coup,
and had interviewed Colodny and Gettlin. “And we intended to go, just as
Time
magazine intended to go. We checked, Gordon. I did talk to John Dean,” he said. “We objected to the fact that the authors refused or declined to let the objects of their scrutiny, these three [Woodward,
Haig, and Dean] in particular, see the book, read the book ahead of time, so that they could face the charges.” As to the charge that I was the “mastermind” of Watergate, Wallace explained, “We could not, on our own, source the thing sufficiently to satisfy ourselves that it stood up as a
60 Minutes
piece. That’s why we didn’t do the piece.” Mo applauded when one of America’s best-known journalists knocked down the book’s central charge.

As a hard news story
Silent Coup
was now for certain dead and would undoubtedly have been headed for the remainder table, but St. Martin’s had a lot of money tied up in it, and was determined to make it a best seller. Their plan was to sell the book to Nixon apologists and right-wingers, giving them a new history of Nixon’s downfall in which Bob Woodward, Al Haig, and John Dean were the villains, and randy Democrats had all but invited surveillance. Who better to peddle this tale than uber-conservative Gordon Liddy? Although we did not know it at the time, Liddy had been a behind-the-scenes collaborator with Colodny in developing, sourcing, and writing
Silent Coup
’s version of the Deans’ involvement in Watergate. In fact, without Liddy’s support St. Martin’s might well have abandoned the project, for neither Colodny nor Gettlin had actually written it. St. Martin’s had hired a freelancer, Tom Shachtman, to assemble a story based on material that Liddy and other right-wingers had helped Colodny assemble. Schactman himself was contractually immunized from any legal liability, and shortly before
Silent Coup
’s publication, St. Martin’s had doubled its insurance coverage for defamation and worked out a plan for Liddy, who was already a St. Martin’s author, to lead a charge to the bestseller list. To compensate Liddy for his efforts, and to give him an excuse to be out promoting, St. Martin’s reissued a paperback edition of his autobiography,
Will,
with a new postscript that embraced
Silent Coup
as the definitive account on Watergate. In that material Liddy claimed, without any explanation, that I had duped him in “an exercise in sleight-of-hand worthy of The Amazing Randi himself,” and that he had not truly understood Watergate until Colodny ex
plained to him what had purportedly transpired, by telling him of Phillip Bailley’s story. According to this revised accounting of history, Liddy’s former partner-in-crime Howard Hunt was merely my pawn, working secretly for me unbeknownst to Liddy. (And unbeknownst to Howard Hunt as well, for he, too, denied the
Silent Coup
account.)

Liddy’s involvement in this specious attack did not surprise me. He had once planned to kill both Howard Hunt and me, he had said in
Will,
but his orders to do so had never come—although he did not say who he expected would send them. “Howard Hunt had become an informer,” he wrote, and when Hunt agreed to testify he became “a betrayer of his friends, and to me there is nothing lower on earth…. Hunt deserved to die.” About me, Liddy wrote that the “difference between Hunt and Dean is the difference between a POW who breaks under torture and aids the enemy, and Judas Iscariot.”
²
The subtext of Liddy’s statement is that the U.S. government had become his enemy and that Richard Nixon had become something of a Christ figure for him. Attacking Howard Hunt and me was consistent with both his conservative politics and his personality. He sought to resurrect Nixon for conservatives and blame others for his destroyed presidency. His attacks on Mo, however, were inexplicable. It did not strike me as consistent with his macho perception of himself to attack a noncombatant woman, yet he traveled the country repeating the false story that Phillip Bailley had told him. Clearly,
Silent Coup
had come at a perfect time for Liddy. Since the first publication of
Will
in 1980 he had made a living by putting his dysfunctional personality on display. By the early nineties speaking engagements were becoming less frequent for him, and his business ventures, including several novels, were unsuccessful.
Silent Coup
put him back in the spotlight, where he loved to be—publicly misbehaving.

My former colleague Chuck Colson’s appearance on national television to endorse
Silent Coup
truly surprised me and stunned Mo, who was deeply hurt by his gratuitous attack. Chuck and I had crossed swords at the Nixon White House only once, and even then we had
not communicated directly. I had had virtually nothing to do with his office, or its nefarious activities, except for the time Chuck had wanted to firebomb and burglarize the Brookings Institution, convinced that this Washington think tank had copies of documents the president wanted. When I learned of his insane plan I flew to California (where the president and senior staff were staying at the Western White House) to plead my case to John Ehrlichman, a titular superior to both Chuck and myself. By pointing out, with some outrage, that if anyone died it would involve a capital crime that might be traced back to the White House, I was able to shut down Colson’s scheme. As a result, over the next several months I was told nothing about Colson’s shenanigans, such as his financing the infamous burglary by Liddy and Hunt of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office after Ellsberg released the so-called Pentagon Papers, which was a precursor to the later Watergate break-ins.

After I eventually broke rank with the Nixon White House, Colson had set about trying to destroy me for telling the truth, though he backed off after purportedly finding God. He also became rather busy with his own problems. On March 1, 1974, Colson was indicted for his role in the Watergate cover-up, and six days later he was indicted for his involvement in the conspiracy to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Chuck, no doubt, sensed even more problems to come, because the Watergate Special Prosecution Force was considering charging him with both perjury and subornation of perjury.
³
He was facing a lot of jail time. However, the prosecutors allowed him to plead guilty to a single—and given what he was facing, innocuous—charge in exchange for his cooperation, although in the end he proved to be utterly useless as a government witness, since the prosecutors could not vouch for his honesty.

Chuck and I had agreed to let bygones be bygones during the Watergate cover-up trial when we found ourselves only down the hall from each other, under the federal Witness Protection Program, at the Fort Holabird safe house in Maryland, just outside Washington. Until
Colson started promoting
Silent Coup
I had taken him as a man of his word, and we had even continued to visit from time to time after Watergate was behind us. When I saw Colson promote
Silent Coup
on
Crossfire,
I was still unaware of his earlier prepublication discussions with Colodny about this invented history. (Colodny had illegally tape-recorded all of his telephone conversations.) Why, of all people, would Chuck Colson promote
Silent Coup
’s conspicuously phony account of Watergate? Where was his conscience? How could he call himself a Christian? I promised myself I would find answers to these questions, because I did not understand what was compelling his behavior.

The promotion campaign to sell the book to conservatives worked, thanks to Liddy’s nationwide tour, in which he appeared on countless right-wing talk-radio shows. By July 7, 1991,
Silent Coup
had peaked at number three on the
New York Times
best-seller list. On July 12, 1991, our answering machine handled a very early call. When Mo checked the message I heard her shriek, and ran to find her standing beside the answering machine sobbing and shaking. “What is it?” I asked but she could not speak, as tears poured from her eyes. As I held her I could feel every bone in her body trembling. “What is it?” I asked again.