Liddy and Dean Fight to a Draw

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 21, 2000 | 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 advanced 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.