From:
InsightMag.com
08/21/2000
Liddy and Dean Fight to a Draw
By Mark Davis
Although a federal judge dismissed John Dean's lawsuit against G.
Gordon Liddy, charges and countercharges still are flying between
the two men a quarter-century later.
Who ordered the Watergate break-ins and what were the burglars
hoping to find? Most historians thought these questions were
answered a long time ago, but for convicted Watergate
conspirators John Dean and G. Gordon Liddy the issue is far from
resolved. The two have been fighting an eight-year legal battle -
rife with incendiary charges of sex, lies and cover-ups - hoping
to prove their versions of what happened. It's a fight that
seemed to end in June when a federal district court dismissed the
lawsuit by mutual agreement, leaving Dean and Liddy to battle it
out in the court of public opinion.
The dispute centers on comments Liddy made in speeches and
on his nationally syndicated radio program in which he accused
Dean of masterminding the Watergate break-ins and of lying under
oath when he testified about the affair. Also at issue are
Liddy's claims that Dean's alleged lies sent innocent people to
jail, as well as his claim that Dean's wife, Maureen, was linked
to a call-girl ring.
The charges led the Deans to file a defamation lawsuit
against Liddy, whose comments they claim were false and malicious
and which they say hurt Maureen Dean's book sales and caused her
intense emotional suffering. Liddy isn't the first to make
sensational claims about the Deans. Many of his accusations are
part of a broader look at the 1972 Watergate break-ins ad-vanced
by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup, a best-selling
book on Watergate. The Deans also sued Colodny but dropped the
case when Colodny's libel insurance company paid both Colodny and
Dean to walk away from the case.
Silent Coup attacks the conventional understanding of
Watergate, based on the work of Washington Post reporters Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in which Attorney General John R.
Mitchell, manager of Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the
President, ordered the break-ins. Instead, the book claims, it
was John Dean who ordered the burglary, allegedly because he knew
of a call-girl ring operating out of the Democratic National
Committee, or DNC, headquarters and hoped the break-ins would
uncover dirt on the Democrats. By exposing the ring, Colodny
alleges, Dean thought he could impress his superiors and advance
his career.
If Colodny is correct, the Watergate burglars weren't
looking for the office of DNC Chairman Lawrence S. O'Brien, who
traditionally is believed to be the target. Instead, they
allegedly wanted to monitor calls from the phone of Ida Wells, a
secretary to the director of the office of the state chairmen,
Robert S. Oliver, and the DNC employee who allegedly helped
operate the call-girl ring.
But it's not what the burglars heard on Wells' phone that
changed history, says Colodny. In Wells' desk, he claims, the
burglars found pictures of prostitutes that DNC officials
allegedly offered to their guests. And with these pictures,
Colodny adds, the burglars found a photograph of Dean's
then-girlfriend, Maureen Biner. Colodny says Dean then ordered a
second break-in to destroy the evidence of Maureen's alleged
involvement in the ring. Here is where Colodny's account differs
most notably from Liddy's. According to Colodny, Maureen Biner
was only a friend of the call-girl madam, Heidi Rikan; Liddy has
accused her of being a prostitute. Dean responded by denying the
charges but refused repeated attempts by Insight to talk about
the lawsuit. Initially, Dean's Los Angeles attorney John Garrick
said that the Deans would not comment on the case but later
indicated they would be willing to answer Insight's questions via
e-mail. When Insight sent him a list of questions, however,
Garrick waited several days and then sent a nine-page response
announcing in legalese that the Deans had asked him to respond on
their behalf.
In the response, Garrick indicated that the allegations
against Maureen Dean are nothing more than ranting by a lunatic.
"Try to find someone with credible information that Mrs. Dean has
ever been involved in prostitution," he wrote. "She wasn't. It's
an outrageously false claim." Moreover, Garrick claimed in a
telephone interview, the only source for the accusations is an
attorney named Phillip Bailley - a convicted felon who supposedly
was a pimp for the call-girl ring and whom Garrick alleges has a
long history of mental illness.
But Colodny and Liddy say that Bailley was far from their
only source and point to a list of hundreds of sources at the end
of Silent Coup. Credible or not, these sources have been
insufficient to win either Colodny or Liddy a definitive court
verdict.
The court order, which U.S. District Court Judge Emmet
Sullivan proposed and to which both sides agreed, dismissed
Dean's lawsuit and ordered both sides to pay their own legal
expenses. It also gave the Deans permission to reinstate their
lawsuit if they could show "good cause," a move that is rare,
according to an uninvolved attorney.
The absence of a trial, however, isn't stopping either
side from declaring victory. Garrick says that the Deans consider
their legal action a "huge success," explaining: "The Deans
brought their lawsuit so that they could establish the falsity of
. Liddy's statements about them. The suit has enabled them to
compile evidence which overwhelmingly does just that."
Garrick praises the court's order. "The Deans have the
best of both worlds," he says. "If Liddy does repeat his
defamatory statements, they have the option of reinstating the
suit back to where they were at the time of the order. If he
doesn't repeat them, that's good, too. The Deans can publicize
the falsity of his statements."
But Liddy scoffs at the idea that the Deans won. "We beat
the bastard," he says. "He didn't want to go to trial on that. He
knew we had it nailed." Liddy also says he will continue to
accuse John Dean. "I have since, many times over, repeated he's a
serial perjurer. I repeat it to you now. Of course I'm going to
keep saying this because it's the truth."
Ray Liddy, Gordon's son and attorney, concedes that he was
not entirely satisfied with the decision. "It was a mixed
blessing," he tells Insight. "He [Gordon Liddy] really wanted to
go to trial so historians will be able to piece together what
really happened." Colodny makes the point that it was the Deans
who brought the action but then backed away. "It's hard to see
any victory here," he says. "This is the outcome after nine
years. What did these people prove?"
Liddy long declared that he would take this case to trial,
that he wouldn't settle for anything else, Colodny notes. "Liddy
wants a trial and he didn't get his trial. I don't see that as
the victory that it could have been. I guess he claims he won,
but he didn't." And Colodny is no more charitable about Dean's
accomplishments in the case. "As far as John Dean is concerned,
he's come off as a chicken," Colodny says. "He had an opportunity
to let the court rule. And he refused."
With both sides so confident of their position, why did
they agree to allow the judge to dismiss the case? The answer
depends upon whom you ask.
According to a Liddy attorney, John Williams, Liddy would
have preferred to take the case to trial but the Deans made that
impossible by withdrawing many of their most important charges
against him - especially those that involved John Dean's alleged
perjury during the Senate Watergate hearings. "We were hoping to
go to trial to establish John Dean's perjury," Williams said.
"But he took the wind out of our sails when he dismissed with
prejudice virtually all his claims that Gordon defamed him when
he accused him of committing perjury."
Not so, retorts Garrick. The case, he says, was resolved
by mutual consent. As for the allegations that Dean dropped,
Garrick explains that they only dropped those charges that were
based on "vague, general claims" by Liddy. "All we did was pare
down the perjury claims to specific claims that Liddy claimed he
had firsthand knowledge of." Liddy's statement that "John Dean is
a master perjurer who sent a lot of people to jail," for example,
is too vague, so Dean dropped it, Garrick explained. But his
allegation that "Mr. Dean's perjury sent an innocent John
Mitchell to prison" was specific and thus kept in the trial, he
says.
"The only victory for either side would be to go to trial
and fight it out,'' Colodny says. So he plans to do the next best
thing: "We're going to have a trial on the Internet," he says.
"The people will become jurors." Working with the University of
South Florida, or USF, Colodny plans to launch an Internet site
called the USF Research Collection on the Nixon Presidency. The
Website, www.watergate.com, is set to debut Aug. 1 and eventually
will contain every document from John Dean's defamation lawsuits.
It also will present all the raw data from Colodny's hundreds of
Watergate-related interviews, including those with many
now-deceased advisers to Nixon.
Colodny, who also will teach a course on Watergate at USF,
says he's excited to let the public decide what really happened.
"The Internet will be the courtroom that decides this for
history," he says. "It will have every document we have."
But Liddy isn't willing to settle for an Internet trial.
He has been sued by Wells, the secretary Liddy says had a nude
photograph of Maureen Dean, and says he'll get his trial in that
lawsuit. "This will all come up in the Wells matter," he says.
"I'll get my trial anyway."
This document was printed out from InsightMag.com.
You can find the original at
http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200008218.shtml
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