The White House Five Face Their (Heh, Heh, Heh) Peers
They certainly do seem glad to see each other again after all this time away from Washington. The mood is almost reminiscent of one of those old evenings at the White House which featured good Christian Republican fellowship, the Marine Band, California wine and Rose Mary doing her lonely tango. Some of the guests have even promised to sing — but that will come later. Right now, it’s enough just to catch up with old friends and acquaintances.
John Ehrlichman arrives before things have really started to swing, escorting his chipper wife, Jean, and a guest of theirs, a striking older woman with freshly coiffed gray hair, dressed in a basic black turtleneck with a simple but stunning piece of modern gold jewelry around her neck. They amuse themselves by chatting until John Mitchell trudges in, shakes Ehrlichman’s hand and then leans over rather creakily to give Mrs. E. a big buss on the cheek. The place is filling up quickly now, people are starting to mix, so when Bob Haldeman comes in, he kisses Jean and greets Mitchell but walks right past John Ehrlichman, who is standing a few feet away. This causes a few raised eyebrows. But Bob has made small talk with no more than three or four intimate friends when he suddenly spots John in the crowd and walks over to greet him, not wanting John to think for a minute that he was trying to cut him. No hard feelings on John’s part, though; he is just happy to see Bob again, giving him a warm, hearty, lingering handshake.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Parkinson, who used to be the lawyer for CREEP, comes in and nods to a few people. Ken is a pleasant-looking man, blond, hornrimmed, with a quick smile, but he is curiously vague, aloof, doesn’t really seem to know anybody here very well. . . .
Bob Mardian shows up at the last moment. Mardian and Mitchell are great pals, of course, and Mardian used to be very tight with Dick Kleindienst and Barry Goldwater and that whole crowd from Phoenix, where the Mardian brothers have done better than all right in the construction business. The trouble with Mardian is that his drab suits, silver glasses and bald head make him look like the Russian heavy in a James Bond film, and he seems to have worn a permanent scowl ever since he got passed over for the Number Two spot at CREEP in favor of Jeb Magruder back in ’72. Mardian doesn’t look as if he’s much of a one for these big social affairs, but he seems to realize that in Washington you have to put in an appearance at these things now and then, and this one is obligatory. Well, at least he manages to get up a civil word for Mitchell.
In the front of this huge, high-ceilinged, marble-faced, fluorescent-lit Ceremonial Courtroom of Washington’s U.S. Courthouse, the five defendants and their legion of lawyers are so busy waving, kissing, embracing and small talking for the benefit of a press corps searching for signs of widely reported discord, that they hardly have time to notice the 170 prospective jurors who are sitting sullen faced on the benches behind the bar. The jury panel looks like a Palm Sunday congregation of the Seventh Abyssinian Baptist Church; it requires careful inspection to discern a white face among them. In view of the Nixon administration’s record on civil rights, the godawful gist of which has certainly not been lost on the 75% of D.C.’s population which is black, the complexion of the jury panel cannot be very heartening to the five Nixonians who are about to stand trial.
But the jury may be the least of their problems. The sheer weight of the evidence against them is so overwhelming that it is almost impossible to find anyone in Washington who is willing to bet on their acquittal — and that probably includes most of their lawyers. The main reason that they are submitting to this trial instead of throwing themselves on the mercy of the prosecutors is their not-so-faint hope that 70-year-old John Sirica, one of the most reversed judges in the District’s history, will succumb either to exhaustion or to his penchant for dispensing street-corner justice in the courtroom, and will make a reversible error so horrendous that even the liberal Court of Appeals will not be able to ignore it.
In cases like this one, the defendants are usually so desperate that they abandon all the advantages that might be gained from keeping up a solid front and start fragging each other, trying to convince the jury that the other guy did the deed. Which is just the kind of situation that prosecutors dream about. “This case sounds like it might end up like any number of big stock-fraud conspiracies I’ve prosecuted,” says a former prosecutor from another district. “Those kind of people almost never cooperate with each other; they don’t trust one another because they know each other so well. Manycases of this sort are made by the defendants, not by the government — the defendants sew em up. You put your minimum prima facie case in and then let the defendants chew each other to ribbons. In some cases, you hardly cross-examine some of the defendants, because the lawyers for the other guys do the job for you — there’s blood all over the place. It’s sooo effective when you can get up and say, ‘No questions, your honor.’ The jury sort of says, ‘Thanks for not taking up any more of our time, Mr. Prosecutor, we see your point.'”