Liddy and Dean Fight to a Draw

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 21, 2000 | by Mark Davis

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.