Conservatives Without Conscience Read Free Page A

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 explained 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