Reporter
Colonel of Truth
How my grandfather, Leon Jaworski, saved America.
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Given that I regarded the Colonel as a national hero—and, more acutely, as my hero—I did not view his role in Watergate as that of a rain cloud drenching a morality parade. I was just shy of sixteen the night I returned home from a Halloween party and was promptly led into the den by my mother, who sat me down and quietly informed me that her father, my grandfather, had just accepted one of the most difficult jobs in America. From the following morning until almost exactly a year later, I began each day reading what strangers had to say about the man who had taught me how to throw a knuckleball, gut a catfish, and revere the courtroom. Not all of the words were kind. And when I saw him over Christmas of 1973—and later in March 1974, when my brother John and I spent our spring break living with him and our grandmother at the Jefferson Hotel, in Washington—the Colonel, though unfailingly an exuberant grandfather, wore a mask of keen loneliness as his singular burden became weightier with each grim revelation.
"He succeeded in remaining mysterious to us absolutely to the end," says one of my grandfather's favorites among the young prosecutors, Carl Feldbaum. He and the others never saw the other side of Leon Jaworski. Their boss was an outsider, a Polish peon who had not been permitted membership to Houston's poshest country club. He had proudly defended bootleggers and indigent blacks, and when he accepted then-attorney general Robert F. Kennedy's assignment to prosecute Mississippi governor Ross Barnett for barring a young black man from attending Ole Miss, clients left his firm in protest and letters appeared in his mailbox bearing messages such as, "I hope your daughter has a nigger baby." He had forfeited his own youth for the sake of an early career and thus lived vicariously by gravitating to young people, among them his five shaggy-haired grandsons. A year before he left for Washington, he lost his eldest and favorite, eighteen-year-old Mike Moncrief, in a car accident. One of the Colonel's big lawyer friends had once told Mike, "You ought to be an attorney someday, young man. Attorneys, you know, have a lot of power." Mike replied that this was precisely why he did not wish to be a lawyer. The Colonel repeated this story with relish for years thereafter. It is likely that he heard Mike, and the echoes of his own alienation, in the bravado of his Watergate deputies. And that was the unseen side of Leon Jaworski that made all the difference.
ONE DAY IN 1998, CLINTON WHITE House aide Paul Begala telephoned me and asked what my fax number was. Within minutes, I was holding in my hands a speech given by the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, at a lawyers' convention in San Antonio. In his speech, Starr spoke of his fellow Texan "Colonel Jaworski" as a kindred spirit and cloaked his investigation in the noble robes of Watergate. Begala's gambit did not succeed in provoking me to write a Ken-Starr-You're-No-Leon-Jaworski screed. But I did spend the rest of the afternoon pondering the differences between the two men and their work. Jaworski, after all, quit his $200,000-a-year law practice to work full-time on Watergate at a salary of $38,000. Starr kept his lucrative day job, which involved representing Republican clients hostile to Clinton. Jaworski's office was so airtight that when a single news leak did occur, he ordered every staffer to sign an FBI affidavit. Starr's staff, by contrast, served as a clearinghouse of anti-Clinton propaganda for the news media. While preparing a report to the House Judiciary Committee on Nixon's conduct, Jaworski rejected the first three drafts his assistants submitted because, as he said, they were "full of accusations against Nixon. . . . We had to prepare one without any accusations. . . . Let them draw their own conclusions and their own deductions from what we were passing on to them." The notorious Starr Report, with its bawdy descriptions of Clinton's peccadilloes, exhibited no such self-restraint.
Thanks in part to the checkered performance of Starr, Iran-contra counsel Lawrence Walsh, and other recent government investigators, Jaworski and his staff are viewed today as the gold standard of prosecutorial fairness. In 1973 then-Texas Observer editor Molly Ivins penned a vicious cover story denouncing the Colonel's appointment; a quarter century later, Ms. Ivins wrote admiringly of "Jaworski's slow building of his case" and of his leakproof operations.
The stakes themselves remain incomparable. After all, in 1973 the issue was not whether a sitting president had lied about cheating on his wife but whether he had approved burglaries and spying operations on his political opponents, ordered that the burglars be plied with hush money, urged his aides to perjure themselves on the witness stand, directed that the CIA suppress an FBI investigation into the whole matter, and then lied for two full years about his involvement. Piercing this dense web of criminality presented awful challenges. How to compel a president of such arrogance and venality to vacate his post? How to achieve this with a minimum of trauma to the nation? And how to do it fairly?
Miraculously, history records that these imperatives were satisfied. But the unrecorded miracle is that all of this was accomplished by an unlikely alliance that began in the file room of 1425 K Street on November 5, 1973, when Archie Cox's orphans and the solitary Texan saw every reason to give up on each other—but, for the country's sake, did not.
THEY KEPT WAITING FOR HIM to bring in his Texas boys. But weeks passed and Jaworski had not imported so much as a secretary. And though the boss never called another general meeting after that initial disaster and eschewed Archie's free-form philosophical discourse in favor of smaller and more businesslike discussions, the senior staffers could be seen emerging from Leon's office with cautious smiles. Far from interfering with their work, he was exhorting them: Do it now. "Archie was a difficult act to follow, but there was always a naiveté about him," says Richard Davis, who headed the Political Espionage Task Force. "Leon was more practical in deciding about indictments."
But fairly. In contrast to the Whitewater staff's gang-tackling of Monica Lewinsky, Jaworski did not waylay Nixon's secretary when he learned that she had admitted responsibility for an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in a crucial White House tape. Instead, he took the matter to U.S. district judge John Sirica, who conducted a hearing to ensure that no other tapes would be mishandled. To avoid any appearance of impropriety, Jaworski recused himself from the task force investigating former U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connally's role in an illegal contributions scandal involving the dairy industry. (This infuriated some of Connally's friends, who had nurtured hopes that the Colonel would shut down the investigation.) And for those Nixon aides who expressed contrition and provided cooperation, Jaworski continued Cox's policy of offering plea agreements, beginning with Egil "Bud" Krogh, the young right-hand man to Nixon's top domestic counsel, John Ehrlichman. During a long meeting, Jaworski suddenly turned the subject to his days as prosecutor of the Nazi war crimes trials. "He asked if I knew the name Albert Speer," Krogh recalls. "He mentioned that while the gravity of Speer's actions was vastly different from mine, there's a principle at stake in both cases, which is that a person is responsible for his actions and can't justify them by the orders he's been given. Those who prosecuted Speer felt he made an honest effort to take responsibility for his actions."
Jaworski had seen the same quality in Krogh. Not long after the former Nixon aide had completed his prison sentence, in 1974, my grandfather wrote a letter of recommendation urging that Bud Krogh be reinstated to the Washington State bar.
ON DECEMBER 12, 1973, SEVERAL ASSISTANT prosecutors huddled in Richard Ben-Veniste's office to listen to the first of the White House tapes. And there was the president's voice, as factual as death itself: "You could get a million dollars. . . . You could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten. . . . Just be damned sure you say, 'I don't remember. I can't recall.'"
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