“Very funny.”
He let out a belly laugh and slapped me on the back in celebration of his performance. “No, no. I’m kidding about what Nixon said, but your wife just called to inform us she heard on the radio that Ford did pardon Nixon. She’s damn mad about it. I don’t think she likes your old boss.”
One glance at Jill and Larry and I knew Jim was serious. “Did he pardon anybody else?” I asked tersely.
“No,” Jim growled, the humor draining from his face. “Just the President. The son-of-a-bitch. Presidents are special, you know.”
“They sure are,” I observed bitterly. “That’s what I used to think.”
“I can’t believe it,” sighed Jill. “I really can’t believe it. What’s happened to justice in this country? I don’t see how the citizens will stand for it.” Jill paused and looked off. “I wonder if our system is capable of equal justice. This is proof to me it isn’t.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one damn thing,” said Jim as Jill’s comment hung in the air. “This is going to have one hell of an impact on our trial. Old Jerry has really thrown a monkey wrench in the works.”
“I agree,” said Jill.
“It’s the old empty-chair situation,” Jim continued, carried away by his lawyer thoughts. “If I were a defense lawyer in this case, I’d stick a big empty chair in the middle of that courtroom for every juror to see. And I’d point to it every day and make speeches about how my client couldn’t get a fair trial because of the absent conspirator, Richard Nixon. The big cheese. The head man. A good lawyer could do wonders with that routine. I can’t understand why the hell Ford didn’t at least wait until the jury is sequestered.” He paused. “But I’ll tell you something else. This prosecutor has got him an alibi now.”
“What do you mean?” asked Larry.
“If we lose this damn case, it’s not our fault. It’s Jerry Ford’s fault.”
Jill looked at me with evident concern. “How do you feel about this, John?”
“Well, I’m not too happy about it,” I replied lamely. I looked away, trying to sort out my feelings. One second I felt a surge of anger that Nixon would never have to admit doing anything wrong, and I thought I would be willing to serve an extra month just to see him have to do it. The next second I would swing back: no, I’d rather see Nixon back in the White House if I could trade it for one week off my sentence. I didn’t know. “I will say one thing, Jill,” I said finally. “I’m sure as hell going to work harder on my testimony. I’ll be damned if I’m going to come off as the liar after all this.”
“Attaboy!” Jim exclaimed. “Mean John Dean.” A new nickname had been born, and “good ole John Dean” began to fade from Jim’s vocabulary.
“I guess we all just have to work harder,” sighed Larry. Jill agreed.
“Well, at least Ford’s taken poor Leon off the hook,” Jim mused. “I guess Leon is pretty happy he straddled the fence on whether to indict Nixon. He passed the cup to Jerry,” he said dramatically as he held out his Styrofoam coffee cup. He paused and then gulped down the coffee. “And Jerry poured it on the floor.” Jim grinned and turned the cup upside down.
Mo followed my marshal’s car to Holabird from the Special Prosecutor’s office, since she didn’t know the way. It was our first visiting day, and I had worked late the previous night cleaning my quarters. We rushed into each other’s arms. I don’t think I had ever felt more emotion, and Mo returned my feelings. We joked about making love in the closet and made nasty faces toward my door. My guard was standing just outside, as always, and he insisted that the door remain open. Rules. Mo and I were full of steam, but we had to channel it. She stepped back, smiled, and threw herself into a kind of birthday ritual, presenting me with all the things I’d asked her to bring—two potted plants, a small rug, an old radio, a soap dish, and new towels from Sears Roebuck.
We made the most of the ceremony, and then Mo brought up her worry about the pardon. “I’m going to issue a statement, John,” she said firmly. “Senator Weicker will help. I’m not going to just sit around and take this. The President’s got to pardon you. It’s only fair.”
I winced and decided not to encourage her hopes, or mine. “We’ve got to be realistic, sweetheart. The President’s probably not going to pardon anybody else. It’s over for now. Even the prosecutors would recommend against a pardon for me now. They want me in here.”
Mo looked shocked and hurt by my response, then angry. We were both strung tight as bowstrings. “Why do you say that?” she exploded, in tears. “Do you like being in here?”
That stung me. I had taken the wrong approach. “No, I don’t like being in here,” I said gently. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up. That’s all.” I was trying to baby her, and it backfired.
“Well, you said the time was going by real fast,” she sobbed. “You said it was all right. I don’t understand you!”
All our emotions were out of sync. We floundered painfully until Mo finally said she was worried that she might not get home before dark. She left an hour before the visiting period ended, and I collapsed on the bunk, feeling as if I were wrenched inside out.
I struggled to my door in response to a loud knock. It was Chuck. He had persuaded certain guards to let him speak to me from the doorway as long as we didn’t discuss testimony.
“Hi, Chuck,” I sighed.
“Get on your horse.” He was sparkling. “We’ve got work to do! I told Magruder to draw up a game plan. And we should get Patty and Mo to do The Today Show, The Dick Cavett Show, Merv Griffin, and Mike Douglas. One tough and one crying, demanding pardons for their husbands. I’ll get ahold of some of the heavies to put the screws to Ford. Jeb can get his old operation going and take out full-page ads urging freedom for the POWs, Prisoners of Watergate! Herb can raise the dough.” Chuck was mimicking his old White House locomotive style. Then he roared with laughter, and it was infectious.
“Ah,” I sighed loudly, feigning lament. “Those days are gone forever.”
“I know.” Chuck grinned and ducked away in good spirits.
September 12, 1974
Gordon Liddy walked past me in Neal’s office, flanked by two marshals. I was just leaving for Holabird.
“Hello, Gordon. How are you?”
He stopped and peered into my face. His eyes were so glazed that I suspected he was under sedation. After a long and blank stare, he shook his head jerkily as if to throw off a dream. “John!” he exclaimed. “How are you? I didn’t even recognize you. I’m sorry.”
Liddy was holding a long thin cigar in his right hand. He stuck it into his mouth in order to shake hands. The smoke drifted up into his eyes, and he looked more natural as he squinted. Then he took the cigar out again and the dazed look returned.
“I’m fine, Gordon,” I said uneasily. “How are you holding up?”
“As well as can be expected, I guess.”
We had a brief formal conversation. I studied Liddy’s appearance. It was the first time I had seen him since June 19, 1972, at the moment I had watched him stroll off after offering to have himself shot on the street. He was drawn and hollow-cheeked, but mostly I was struck by his eyes and by his shirt collar. It was worn and grimy. His beard was turning prematurely white. His suit looked like a painted veneer.
Liddy walked off with his marshals. Jim was about to make one last vain effort to persuade him to break his silence. “I’m really sorry about not recognizing you,” Liddy called over his shoulder. “You know how it is.”
Not really, I thought. He had already spent nearly a year in the D.C. jail, a notoriously vicious and overcrowded inferno. My resentment of Holabird was ludicrous when I thought of Liddy’s environment. And I felt even luckier that Jim thought he needed me daily in the Special Prosecutor’s office.
Mid-September 1974
Despite the restrictions, I had formed a general idea of the Holabird prisoner population within the first couple of weeks. Since most of the others were imprisoned at H
olabird because of threats against their lives, I decided that it was not prudent to pry into the reasons for their incarceration. The knowledge seemed, in some cases, deadly.
As best I could piece it together, the twenty-some prisoners broke down as follows: four “Watergate guys”; two former Baltimore policemen on corruption charges; three members of the French Connection conspiracy; a con artist; a key figure from the Tony Boyle/Yablonski murders; three Latin heroin traffickers; a man who had slit the throat of a female government informant and burned her corpse (Chuck was working with him); a seasoned hit man with twenty-eight murders under his belt; and an assortment of Mafia figures whose crimes ran from murders to heavy narcotics trafficking.
Late September 1974
“How are you doing, Paul?” I asked as I poured milk over my morning Raisin Bran in the Holabird kitchen.
“Fine.” He beamed. “Paul” was a professional banking swindler, the last of a group of con men who had been held at Holabird. He was there to brief Senate investigators on the fine art of his profession.
“Why are you smiling so?”
“Well, I’m in the middle of a little project here,” he said casually as he bent over a sheaf of papers near the toaster. “I’m buying a couple of banks.”
“You’re what? I thought you were out of the business.” I began backing out of the kitchen with my cereal, fearful of learning about another crime.
“Don’t worry, John. It’s perfectly legit. I can do it all in correspondence with letters of credit. I don’t have to put up a cent. Here, look at this.” He proudly outlined complicated financial maneuvers showing how he could buy banks with no money. From prison. “I’ve got a line on another one in Texas,” he said. “You want it?”
“No, thanks,” I declined, laughing.
“Nothing to it,” he said. “Let me know if you change your mind. I figure it will look good on my parole sheet if I can prove I’m a respectable bank owner.”
September 29, 1974
Jim Neal had moved into a new office in the Federal Courthouse in preparation for the trial. He sat behind his desk, looking thoughtful. Suddenly he started chuckling to himself and shaking his head.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked.
“Aw, I was just thinking about old John Wilson,” he drawled. “He’s a funny old codger.”
“What’s he doing now?” John J. Wilson, Haldeman’s lawyer, had always struck me as fearsome and choleric.
“Well, he was in the other day, and he stopped me after the meeting. And he says, ‘You deal a lot with Dean, don’t you?’ So I say, ‘Yeah I do.’ And then he says, ‘Well, let me ask you a question. After you’ve been dealing with him, do you have to wash your hands?’” Jim cracked up laughing. I swallowed. “Old John’s really something,” he went on. “But don’t you worry about him. He’s not going to lay a glove on you.”
I wasn’t reassured.
October 5, 1974
“Mr. Dean, you’ve got an emergency phone call!” shouted one of the security guards in the Special Prosecutor’s office. He had caught me walking down the hall between two marshals, on my way back to Holabird.
“What for? Who from?” I asked in panic.
“Don’t know. The operator said it’s an emergency call.”
I rushed to the phone, fearing a tragedy. Mo? My son? My parents? Mo’s mom?
“John, this is Junie.” It was a friend of Mo’s in California. “Mo’s okay, but she’s in the hospital.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Well, she got real run down. So I sent her to my psychiatrist, and he put her in the hospital. But don’t you worry about it. Believe me, John, this is for the best.”
Junie told me, as gently as possible, that Mo had suffered a breakdown. I had never felt more helpless. What could I do? Nothing but worry. I couldn’t even call her.
The vomiting began about one-thirty in the morning. I slipped quietly in and out of the bathroom without telling the deputy posted at the door. I had eaten no dinner. By dawn I had discovered blood coming up from my stomach. A marshal drove me to a Baltimore hospital, where I was pumped full of anti-nausea serum before being returned to Holabird.
October 10, 1974
Mo was released from the hospital on her birthday. She hadn’t told me how she was planning to cope with my being in jail, but I soon found out. She tried to pretend nothing had happened. I felt guilty. I felt a void opening between us.
October 12, 1974
The jury was selected. Neal spent the day watching a University of Tennessee football game and then guided me through a dress rehearsal of my testimony. He had trouble concentrating. He was upset. Leon Jaworski had unexpectedly resigned.
Several members of the staff watched the evening news in Jim’s office. When it was reported that President Ford would take an active role in the selection of a new Special Prosecutor, Jim hit the roof.
“Dammit!” he roared. “That really burns my ass. I don’t know why the hell Leon couldn’t have told me what he was going to do! He begged me to come back and handle this case, and now he’s walking out on me. Shit, I’ve got enough to worry about without Ford putting some bastard in over me who might fuck up my case!”
I had never seen him as angry or depressed. The staff lawyers kept their distance.
October 16, 1974
“You’re on next, John,” whispered Judge Sirica’s bailiff. “Uh, excuse me. I mean Mr. Dean.”
As I entered the packed courtroom I spotted Mo, who had agreed to come for the first day. I winked at her, and walked to the witness box where I was sworn in. While Neal gathered his papers and walked to the lectern I watched the five defendants. None of them looked back at me, and I felt I had won the first round.
“Mr. Dean, are you acquainted with Mr. John N. Mitchell?” Jim intoned.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Would you, for the benefit of the court and the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, identify Mr. Mitchell for the record?”
“Yes, sir. He is—”
Before I could identify Mitchell, his lawyer, William Hundley, jumped up and stipulated that I knew him. I wondered if Hundley was worried about how I might describe the John Mitchell I saw hunched over his table in the back corner of the defendants’ area. His wan, expressionless face gazed up at me as if I were a total stranger. At least he was looking, I thought. He had avoided my eyes at the Vesco trial. I still felt sorry for him. He and I both knew he was guilty, and I figured he was rolling the dice again as he had done in the Liddy plan, but they were still loaded against him.
“Do you know, Mr. Dean, the defendant H. R. Haldeman?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Would you identify him for the record, please?”
“Mr. Haldeman is sitting right over there with the brown suit on.” Bob turned from a stack of papers he was busy underlining with multicolored pens and faced me. He looked much less severe since he had let his hair grow stylishly longer. “Trial cosmetics,” the prosecutors had joked. Bob and I exchanged our first glances since I had left the White House. He no longer struck fear in me, nor guilt. Jail and time had healed most of my squealer emotions. I was riveted on the fact that Bob had called me a liar under oath, and that he was about to do so again. Don’t waste that innocent look on me, Haldeman, I thought. You and I know better. My stage fright lessened as Jim led me through a description of Bob’s duties at the White House.
“Now, do you know the defendant Mr. John D. Ehrlichman?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Would you identify Mr. Ehrlichman for the record, please?”
“Mr. Ehrlichman is there in the blue suit, with glasses on.” He was seated at the table closest to me and the jury, making notes. He didn’t bother to look up. I wondered if he could make it through the whole trial with his armor intact. I thought of Liddy, of myself and of the other prisoners, and I decided he could never stay unruffled all the way through prison.
When I identifie
d Bob Mardian, mentioning the color of his tie, he whipped off his glasses to face the jury and looked quickly down at his tie to make sure I was right. The same old hyperanimated Mardian. Frightened, but vain and defiant. He was paying for his brief but crucial role in the early days of the cover-up—a corporal in the dock with the generals.
Ken Parkinson, the last defendant, seemed completely out of place. I knew a half-dozen men who had played much larger roles in Watergate than Ken, and who were absent. He had never met Haldeman or Ehrlichman before his indictment. I harbored some suspicion that the prosecutors had included him as “mercy bait.” An acquittal of Parkinson would lend an air of even-handedness to the trial.
“Well, how did it feel in there?” Jim was cheerful enough. “You got your sea legs yet?” The postmortems were pleasant, even though most of my time on the stand had been spent listening to legal haggles over the admissibility of my testimony.
“I thought it went okay, but only a few of the jurors looked at me. They’re a shy bunch so far, but it’s hard to tell about them.”
“You did fine, John. Don’t worry about the jury. We’ll get their attention tomorrow when you get mean. Just stay comfortable.”
“I’m getting there, but there is one thing. You went off the witness sheet several times in there and threw those dollar figures about the hush money at me. I couldn’t answer those because I’m not ready to go on the box with them. I thought we had ruled those out.”
“Oh, hell, I know that,” Neal said sheepishly. “That’s why I’m throwing you some curves. I want the jury to watch you struggle and then refuse to answer things you’re not sure of—it makes you look good. Besides, I can slip the dollar amounts in with questions. You still don’t understand how we prosecutors work. You just keep going.”
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