The Emperor's New Clothes: Exposing the Truth from Watergate to 9/11 - Hardcover

CHAPTER ONE  

Watergate

I watched John Dean drone through his fantastic testimony about the Watergate cover-up on television in the living room of my Manhattan apartment. Dean's monotone belied the explosive content of his allegations, detailing a ten-month cover-up orchestrated by the most powerful men in government, including President Richard M. Nixon himself. How could anyone believe that Nixon, wizard of the dark arts, had entrusted this young, blond, bespectacled twerp with the authority to run an insanely stupid and dangerous obstruction of justice right out of the White House counsel's office? My instincts as a prosecutor with all of five years of experience, albeit in the most highly regarded U.S. attorney's office in the nation, told me that Dean was exaggerating the role of higher-ups in an effort to escape punishment for his own misdeeds. Indeed, the Senate Watergate Committee, led by Sam Ervin of North Carolina, had already granted Dean immunity as a condition of his willingness to testify. I had seen many targets of criminal investigations try to plea-bargain their way out of serious prison time by turning state's evidence against their former friends and accomplices. The criminal justice system is dependent on this process. One of the most difficult tests of a prosecutor's judgment and integrity is the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff in such situations—to make a determination about the credibility of accusations from the mouths of people under tremendous pressure to save themselves by implicating others.

 

I shook my head in disbelief. Despite the details, Dean's story just didn't add up. One hell of a fight would be shaping up in Washington.

 

My thoughts about the implications of Dean's testimony were interrupted by a telephone call that would change my life. Jim Vorenberg, a Harvard law professor and friend of the newly appointed Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, called to ask if I would be interested in interviewing for a job on Cox's staff Vorenberg told me that Cox would be interviewing federal prosecutors who could jump in to conduct grand jury investigations and then try cases in the event indictments were returned. I was high on Vorenberg's list of possible candidates. Time was of the essence for assembling a staff .I told Vorenberg I would be on a plane to Washington the next day. If offered the job, I suspected I would be moving to Washington and would play a role in unwinding the greatest political scandal in American history.

 

Watergate had entered my life at a crossroads in my fledgling career. I had become restless at the U.S. attorney's office, even after my promotion to head the special prosecutions/anti-corruption unit. My relationship with the woman I was living with wasn't working out, and I was thinking seriously about leaving New York. A few months earlier, I had given a lot of thought to accepting an offer by the Department of Justice to head the Organized Crime Strike Force for Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. I would be based in San Francisco and would also have jurisdiction over Hawaii. But there was one major hitch—there was hardly any organized crime there. The Mafia in California was, at best, a joke. Would I be willing to accept a professional diet of chasing small-time gamblers in return for the benefits of the natural beauty and relaxed lifestyle that came with the territory? I agonized over my decision for weeks before turning down the offer.

 

The next morning, I stepped off the Eastern Airlines Shuttle, oblivious to Washington's famous humidity. Watergate promised to be the most compelling drama to be played out on America's stage. It seemed as though providence had guided my hand in turning down the strike force job when Watergate was just around the corner.

 

I met Jim Vorenberg in the special prosecutor's suite of offices—two floors at 1425 K Street N.W. in the heart of Washington's business corridor. I liked Jim immediately and found his lack of pretension and ready sense of humor a welcome change from the stereotypical law professor. Jim had done some background research on me and said that my experience in prosecuting corrupt public officials made me an attractive candidate for a senior position, despite my youth. If Archie—as everyone on staff called the reserved Yankee law professor—agreed, Vorenberg would recommend me to lead one of the task forces that had been created to address the broad categories of investigation that lay ahead. Vorenberg ticked off campaign finance, dirty tricks, the plumbers, and ITT as possibilities. The only task force leader's position that was taken was the one dealing with the Watergate cover-up. James Neal, an experienced former prosecutor who had established a highly successful criminal defense practice in Nashville, had already been selected for that position and had been on the job for a month. Cox and Neal had known each other from the Kennedy administration, for which Cox had been solicitor general and Neal had prosecuted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's number-one target—Teamster president Jimmy Hoff a. At forty-five, Vorenberg was a couple of years older than Neal. In the Kennedy administration, he had served under Bobby Kennedy as chief of a newly created Office of Criminal Justice. Immediately after Cox was sworn in, Cox and Vorenberg's first call was to Neal to see if their former colleague would join them in Washington.

 

I told Vorenberg that titles were not important to me; the only part of the investigation that truly appealed to me was the cover-up. I would gladly pick up and move to Washington for the opportunity to be Jim Neal's number two on the cover-up investigation—if Cox and Neal were to offer me that position. Jim sat back in his chair and thought for a moment. "Let's see how it goes with Archie. Then you can meet with Neal and see whether the two of you could work together."

 

Archibald Cox had a reputation as a stern and forbidding legal scholar, self-righteous and unyielding. His roots and background were about as different from mine as anything I could imagine. My interview lasted fifteen minutes. Professor Cox's appearance—tall, ramrod straight, with close-cropped steel-gray hair and clear blue eyes—did nothing to suggest the slightest connection between us. The starkness of his office, freshly painted white and unadorned with anything on the walls to personalize it, was of a piece with his unfashionable gray suit and drab narrow necktie. By contrast, I wore my hair in the longish contemporary style of the early 1970s, particularly unflattering in my case, given its tendency to frizz up at the slightest mention of humidity. Summer in the reclaimed swamp that is our nation's capital is synonymous with humidity. I was wearing a wide paisley tie—equally contemporary and an equally unfortunate fashion statement, given the benefit of hindsight. Photographs of me from this period evoke spontaneous gales of derisive laughter from my daughters. If my appearance was disconcerting to Cox, he gave no indication of it. He was all about substance, a trait I could be thankful for as I look back on our first encounter.

 

Archie spoke slowly, carefully choosing his words, as they fl owed into full sentences, the sentences into perfect paragraphs. He gestured for emphasis with the stub of a missing finger, the casualty I surmised of a long-ago accident chopping wood, one of his favorite activities for exercise and relaxation (with the added Yankee virtue of usefulness). After going over some of the cases I had prosecuted, Archie quizzed me on my reaction to a series of hypothetical situations involving bribery or conflict of interest, referring to himself as...