The Man to See by Evan Thomas

Author:Evan Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter Twenty-Five

WILLIAMS NO LONGER HAD any interest in defending mobsters and gamblers. He wanted a big role in the main event, the emerging Watergate scandal. As the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office began rummaging through the dark closets of the Nixon administration, the indictments spilling out provided employment for about forty defense lawyers around Washington. Since Williams had been virtually a prosecutor himself in the DNC case against the Committee to Re-Elect the President, he could not defend the principal Watergate defendants. But he did have some gratuitous after-the-fact advice for Richard Nixon. “I would have burned the tapes on the White House lawn at a press conference,” Williams told reporters, who listened incredulously to this ethically dubious plan. “Then I would have apologized.” Nixon should have explained that while his intention had been to “record history,” he could now see that releasing the tapes to the public carried too great a risk of “embarrassing foreign leaders” to whom the president had talked—and talked about—in the Oval Office. Privately, Williams added with a smile, “then I would have put my nose down and my ass up and hunkered down.”

Many of the cases emanating from the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office in 1973 and 1974 involved illegal campaign contributions to the Republicans’ vast slush fund. Not surprisingly, the wealthy donors accused of giving these illegal contributions queued up to hire Ed Williams. The first in line was also the most shadowy, fugitive financier Robert Vesco. In May 1973, Vesco was indicted, along with former attorney general John Mitchell and CREEP chairman Maurice Stans, for obstructing an investigation into whether he had given the Republicans $200,000 to make his problems with the SEC go away. After hiring Williams, Vesco never had to set foot in a U.S. courtroom. Williams and his associates managed to block attempts to extradite Vesco from his island holdout in the Bahamas by arguing that the crimes Vesco stood accused of were not covered by extradition treaty.

One of the bankrollers of American politics was Dwayne Andreas, a soybean magnate who ran an agribusiness conglomerate out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Andreas covered his bets by giving some to Republicans, but he gave most of his money to the Democrats. He was a natural target for Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who wanted to show that he was a nonpartisan corruption fighter. In December 1973, Andreas was indicted for making $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions to Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign.

Andreas was eager to avoid a messy public trial. He told Williams to “ just get rid of” the case by pleading guilty to a single count. There was little risk of jail, since judges were not sentencing CEOs to prison for illegal corporate contributions. Williams, however, told Andreas that he could win. He wanted to avoid a jury trial; jurors, he believed, would regard Andreas as a fat cat trying to buy political influence and find him guilty no matter what the law said. But he believed that he could convince a judge that Andreas had done nothing legally wrong.

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