Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (71 page)

Colodny called this journalism. In fact, as we believe we demonstrated with clear and convincing evidence in our court filings it was deception, if not fraud. But Colodny’s deceptive research methods pale in comparison to his primary new Watergate source, the man on whom he and Liddy relied to turn history upside down. For not only was their new source conspicuously unreliable, they understood, in Colodny’s words, that he was “crazy,” not euphemistically speaking, rather they knew he was a man who was mentally disturbed, who would tell them whatever they wanted to hear, and they shamelessly exploited him.
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Colodny’s and Liddy’s New Watergate Source: Phillip Mackin Bailley

I had never heard of Phillip Mackin Bailley before his name was published in the newspaper on June 9, 1972 and his case was brought to my attention by government attorneys who sought me out to inform the White House that one of Bailley’s victims was a women working in the Executive Office of the President. I did not call the prosecutors; rather, they arranged to come to the White House because the Department of Justice wanted the White House informed of the situation: A young women working there had been extorted into prostitution by Bailley, who was being indicted, and the government might need to call her as a witness in a rather seamy case, if it went to trial.

Bailley, then a seemingly attractive and fun-loving young attorney, would troll the bars in Georgetown at night, where he would seek to meet young ladies whose relationships with their boyfriends had turned bad. Soon, Bailley would be wining and dining them, and luring them back to his apartment, where he would get them high on wine and marijuana. Once they were stoned, he would get them to pose for highly compromising nude photographs. Next, Bailley would use the photos to extort the young women, telling them if they did not have sex with whomever he instructed, then he would reveal the photos to the women’s parents. A coed from the University of Maryland went to the police and reported what Bailley was doing, and because taking women across state lines for immoral purposes is a federal crime, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia had jurisdiction. It was an awful story the Assistant U.S. attorneys reported, but the young lady they thought worked at the White House in fact worked at the Office of Emergency Preparedness (FEMA’s predecessor) instead. Thus, after informing her superior of the situation, I had nothing further to do with the matter. The prosecutors did not show me an address book or notebook with Maureen’s name in it, or that of anyone else for that matter. Until
Silent Coup
was published, I never again heard Bailley’s name, nor did I know what had become of him.

It was Jim Hougan who first told the world Bailley’s story, which Bailley had begun peddling in the mid-1970s after his release from federal prison. At that time, Bailley began telling anyone who would listen that he knew the real story of Watergate, because he had been an attorney who represented prostitutes before he got busted, and he had learned about a call-girl ring operating out of the Columbia Plaza Apartment building. When
Silent Coup
was published in 1991, I tracked down J. Anthony Lukas, who had written one of the first Watergate books,
Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years
(1976), because he had reported: “So spicy were some of the conversations on this phone that they have given rise to unconfirmed reports that the telephone was being used for some sort of call-girl service catering to congressmen and other prominent Washingtonians.” When I talked with Lukas, he said that when he had reviewed Jim Hougan’s book for the
New York Times
and had read about Phillip Bailley in the book, he had paused to wonder if this was the person he had been told in 1975-76, when he was doing research, was chatting up the call-girl rumor in Washington. He could not be certain, but felt it entirely possible. He said that when he had talked to the prosecutors and a few people from the DNC, however, he had called it what it was, a “rumor,” and one he felt was not worth pursuing.

With each telling, Bailley’s story got better, and soon he had every attractive woman directly or indirectly associated with the Nixon White House as part of the call-girl operation. (In addition to my wife, he falsely claimed the call-girl ring included Diane Sawyer, who had worked in the White House Press Office and later for ABC News; an assistant who had worked for John and Martha Mitchell; Debbie Sloan, the wife of the reelection committee treasurer, Hugh Sloan, who was briefly portrayed in the movie “All the President’s Men”; as well as many others.) When Colodny tracked down Bailley and started talking to him, Colodny believed he had struck it rich. Bailley agreed with everything Colodny would tell him, and added even more. Colodny was so excited that he went to St. Martin’s and told them that he was going to totally re-work his Watergate material. While I would remain his villain, he had discovered totally new information that he felt changed everything.

There was one problem, however, with using Bailley as a source: He had been in and out of mental institutions and mental care for his entire adult life. After his arrest for extorting women, and before his guilty plea, he had been sent to St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, DC, so that the prosecutors could evaluate whether he was even mentally fit to stand trial. After his release from prison, where he claims he talked with Hunt and Liddy, he falsely confessed to being the Green River Serial Killer when living in the Seattle area and after being arrested naked in the middle of a highway.
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Bailley was thrilled that Colodny was taking him seriously and giving his (concocted) story the credit he believed it deserved. With Colodny, Bailley thought he had struck it rich, as Colodny coached him to fill the gaps and holes in his story. Colodny made it easy for Bailley because he explained that he was not interested in any of the other supposed call girls, only Maureen Dean.

Colodny shamelessly manipulated Bailley into elaborating his fantasies, letting his imagination run wild. Did Colodny know what he was doing? He knew exactly what he was doing, and recorded himself doing it. Colodny understood that Bailley was mentally unbalanced, if not insane. In fact, Colodny told just about anyone to whom he spoke (except Bailley, of course) that Bailley was crazy. For example, when discussing Bailley with the man who had prosecuted Bailley for extortion, John Rudy, Colodny said, “Bailley’s the last guy I want to talk to at this point. I want to know what’s going on before I ever approach Bailley. Because everybody’s gonna say he’s crazy.” To which Rudy replied, “And they may not be very far from the truth.” Later, after Colodny had been dealing with Bailley, Colodny was asked by a former Mitchell aide, Steven King, “How do you perceive Bailley?” Colodny answered, “Bailley’s crazy, there’s no question about it.” Colodny obtained Bailley’s criminal case file, a public document, from which he learned that government lawyers believed that Bailley was not only crazy, but also a liar. For example, prosecutor John Rudy had stated the following to Federal Judge Charles Richey, who had jurisdiction of Bailley’s case:

During the investigation—and I will not go into the grand jury testimony, but it pretty well followed the rest of the investigation—many, many witnesses—and there are very few exceptions—or the people that I talked to in my office concerning the allegations against Mr. Bailley expressed to me that they thought Mr. Bailley ranged from being weird in his actions to outright paranoia.

Now, of course, these were not expert witnesses. These were male and female persons who were associated with Mr. Bailley going back to 1969. But they found in their association with him that his conduct was bizarre at times and that he would say one thing and turn around the next moment and deny that he had ever said any such thing.

Colodny also found in Bailley’s federal case file letters from two psychiatrists, retained by Bailley, who said that he was a sexual deviant who found gratification in “humiliating” or “degrading” women. One doctor noted that Bailley had alcoholic blackouts that occurred during the very time period for which Colodny relied on Bailley’s memory. Colodny told John Ehrlichman, who was cooperating fully on his project, “I mean you cannot believe how sick this guy is, he has this thing about women, he hates women.” No less a witness than Bailley’s own sister confirmed this fact:

Colodny: Because, Sheila, everyone who knows him says he hates women.

Sheila: I, I think, I’d say that’s true, the way he’s been treating all of us, I, I, that’s real evident to me.

It’s no surprise, then, that Colodny had little trouble getting Bailley to make false statements about my wife. Colodny spent more time talking to Bailley about
Silent Coup
than he did talking to anyone else about the book, except perhaps for John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell. Mitchell had died before Colodny got to the Watergate material, but when Colodny mentioned Hougan’s call-girl story to Mitchell, Mitchell correctly thought it a hoax. It was, however, material that had been given to Mitchell by Hougan about the alleged call-girl operation—material that was sent to Colodny after Mitchell’s death—that triggered Colodny’s interest again. In addition to conducting many conversations with Bailley, Colodny asked for and received a number of tape recordings from Bailley, which were rambling, semi-coherent monologues and which constituted powerful evidence that Bailley was a very sick man.

Notwithstanding the fact that Bailley might have been the worst source in the annals of history, Colodny and Liddy still relied on him as their principal (and in many instances,
only
) source for their preconceived story about my wife and me.
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Colodny relied on Bailley, it appears, because his behind-the-scenes collaborator, Liddy—who was helping Colodny make all the pieces of his story worked—kept pushing him to include the charges against Maureen. Less than six months before
Silent Coup
was published, Liddy and Colodny had the following exchange:

Liddy: But why are we backing off on [Maureen] being a hooker?

Colodny: Well, we’re not, the, it isn’t a question of backing off per se. It’s a question of not being able to flat out state it cause we don’t have the evidence. In fact, the girl in Houston [attorney Candace Cowan who knew Maureen during the relevant time period] hurt me more than helped me. I thought she was talking about Mother Theresa when she got through telling me about [Maureen].

About a month later, Liddy again asked Colodny: “You still don’t have Maureen doing tricks yet?” Colodny answered: “No.” At his deposition in our lawsuit, Liddy was asked why it was important that Maureen be involved with a purported prostitution ring with a connection to the DNC, the point he kept pushing:

Q: Mr. Liddy, prior to the publication of
Silent Coup
and Postscript to your book, do you recall telling Mr. Colodny on more than one occasion that you wanted him to be sure to get the information relating to Maureen Dean being a prostitute into his book?

A: Yes.

Q: Why did you tell him that?

A: Because the significance of Maureen Dean being a prostitute is that it provides the motivation for doing what [John Dean] did.

When
Silent Coup
was published, it did not claim any direct connection between Maureen and any call-girl operation, but it was written with heavily vetted innuendo to give the reader the impression that Maureen had ties to just such an operation. Liddy determined that if St. Martin’s would not risk it, he would. Accordingly, he met personally with Phillip Bailley, declared him sane and a reliable source, and began repeating Bailley’s story (as he did in the monologue I inserted earlier). Liddy’s promotion of
Silent Coup
pushed it onto the
New York
Times bestseller list, and his attacks on me and my wife earned him his own talk-radio show, plus he sold a few more copies of the reissued paperback edition of
Will
. For Liddy, trashing my wife and me proved a positive career move, and he is not a man likely to have second thoughts about destroying the lives of innocent people in the process. Not only did he severely damage my wife, he also turned on Ida Maxie Wells—whose life he had already disrupted by bugging her telephone when she worked at the DNC in 1972. He had gone to jail for that activity, and seemed to hold against her the fact that she had testified against him. Liddy likes his revenge however he can get it.

The Settlement and Ida “Maxie” Wells’s Lawsuit

In February 1972, the then 23-year-old Ida “Maxie” Wells joined the staff of the DNC as a secretary to Spencer Oliver. Having her telephone bugged, however, had not been a pleasant experience. She left the DNC in July 1972 to take a vacation to get away from it all. In September, however, she was called back to testify before a grand jury in Washington—for she had been the victim of Liddy’s criminal behavior. After the 1972 Presidential campaign, Maxie moved to Atlanta, and in 1976, she joined the Presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter, becoming his personal secretary and the traveling companion to Mrs. Carter. When President Carter was elected, Maxie served as his personal secretary during the transition and then, following a full-field FBI security check (which surely would have revealed whether she had done anything like what Liddy and Bailley claimed), she joined the White House staff, where she served the President and First Lady in a host of capacities during Carter’s term in office. In 1986, after working at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Wells decided to return to college to seek a Ph.D. in Twentieth Century American Literature. She was a graduate student at Louisiana State University when we deposed her in our lawsuit.