The Book of Bastards (19 page)

If nothing else John Connally was a survivor. He was a decorated veteran of World War II, successful Texas lawyer, early protégé and longtime ally of President Lyndon B. Johnson, secretary of the navy for President John F. Kennedy, and two-term governor of Texas. Connally went on to switch political parties and serve President Richard M. Nixon as treasury secretary through his administration, including during the height of the Watergate scandal.

By all accounts had Nixon not been worried about a bruising confirmation battle in the Congress, he would have nominated Connally as his vice president when Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace. In that version of history Connally and not Gerald Ford would have been president after Nixon's resignation. But weighed down by the looming Watergate scandal, Nixon needed someone with Ford's squeaky clean image who could sail through his nomination. With his baggage Connally might have had as much trouble getting confirmed as Agnew had just being vice president.

Oh, and Connally took bribes. Lots of them.

Connally was even captured on some of the White House tapes discussing “oil money” that certain interested parties in Texas would make available for Nixon's disposal should he require it. These tapes would later haunt Connally during his infamous “Milk Money” trial.

In that 1975 scandal, Connally was hauled into court on charges that while working as treasury secretary he took a $10,000 bribe from representatives of the dairy industry. Connally's lawyers managed to suppress the tapes of their client discussing bribe money with Nixon, but only just barely. Connally called a stream of character witnesses from former First Ladies Jackie Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson to the popular evangelist Billy Graham. He was acquitted.

He“ later said of the incident, “To be accused of taking a goddamned $10,000 bribe offended me beyond all reason.” The joke around his law office was that Connally was outraged at being accused of taking such an insignificant amount as a bribe; in Texas, they said, $10,000 was considered a “tip.”

Connally ran for president in 1980, but his Watergate association made him unpalatable to Republican voters. He lost the nomination to Ronald Reagan. Connally died in 1993 of pulmonary fibrosis (he was a heavy smoker), never having spent a day in jail. He was, however, broke by this time, having been ruined in the S&L scandal of the late '80s.

New York native William J. “Big Bill” Casey was many things over the course of his long life: a World War II — era spy, a '60s-era corporate lawyer, a Republican Party operative, and the head of the CIA during the Reagan administration. Casey likely got away with a campaign “dirty trick” that helped deliver the White House to Ronald Reagan. It is one of history's ironies that he serves in death as the scapegoat that no one had ever succeeded in making him in life.

New York Times
columnist William Safire coined the term “Briefingate” for a political scandal without the satisfying conclusion of its Watergate cousin. It started when someone stole materials President Jimmy Carter was using to prepare for the October 28, 1980, presidential debate with his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan. The pilfered briefing book gave Reagan advance notice about the issues Carter intended to cover during the debate. Unsurprisingly Reagan demolished Carter; he painted himself as the better prepared and more at-ease of the two candidates.

The matter did not come to the public's attention until the 1983 publication of Laurence I. Barrett's
Gambling with History: Reagan in the White House
. The revelation caused quite an uproar in the press. The Justice Department interviewed Reagan's senior campaign staff and transition team in response to the resulting public outcry. Michigan Congressman David Stockman, who went on to become Reagan's budget director, admitted using the purloined papers to help Reagan prepare. A later FBI inquiry turned up hundreds of pages of the documents in Stockman's files and in the archives of the conservative Hoover Institute.

According to Stockman he had gotten the documents from James A. Baker III, a campaign staffer who became Reagan's White House chief of staff in 1981 and treasury secretary in 1985. Baker in turn claimed that he had received them from Reagan campaign manager Casey.

The longtime party operative adamantly denied this allegation. No amount of coercion succeeded in getting the former spy to change his story. Did Baker take the files? Did Casey swipe them? The unanswered questions — which Safire named Debategate — presented the Justice Department with a stone wall. The investigation ran out of steam.

It is important to note that Casey also went on to serve in the Reagan administration, as Stockman and Baker had before him. Some coincidence, huh? Turns out that the guy accused of passing along Carter's debate notes actually had an “intelligence” background dating back to OSS (the CIA's forerunner) service during World War II!

Casey was director of the CIA from 1981 until his death from cancer in 1987. His health began to fail in the years before that, and several longtime friends noted a decline in his mental faculties in the year or so leading up to his death. During the Iran-Contra mess he was posthumously hung out to dry by those involved. Perhaps the sullying of Casey's reputation was warranted, since he was supposedly the linchpin in the whole scheme. Or perhaps it was simply some sort of karmic balancing of the scales for whatever Casey did to get his hands on Jimmy Carter's debate notebook.

Either way the scandal soon lost the attention of the public. After being caught asleep at the switch in Watergate's wake, the media had initially pursued the Debategate story with a vengeance, but dropped it several weeks later. And of course Ronald Reagan suffered absolutely no political fallout as a result of it.

Come to think of it, neither did “Big Bill” Casey. But then again, he was dead.

Have you heard this one before? The attorney general of the United States — a trusted inner-circle counselor to the sitting president and a cabinet member — runs into some “ethics” problems and gives his notice under political pressure, but he never serves a day in jail for what he did. No, we're not talking about Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales, here. We're talking about Reagan lawyer and later leading light of the Cultural Conservative moment, Edwin “Ed” Meese III.

Meese was born and raised in Oakland, California, the son of a longtime Alameda County treasurer. He finished a stint in the military and graduated law school. Afterwards Meese worked as both a civil attorney and criminal prosecutor before joining the staff of California Governor Ronald Reagan in the 1960s.

Meese served Reagan as legal affairs secretary, executive assistant, and chief of staff before he followed Reagan to Washington D.C. He then became counselor to the president and was on Reagan's National Security Council. While in the White House, Meese, Chief of Staff James Baker III, and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver were the “Troika,” or Reagan's three closest advisors. He became attorney general in 1985 and held that post until 1988.

Although never charged with a crime, Meese was dogged by scandal. Most famous were claims that he had been involved in Iran-Contra and the Wedtech Scandal. Meese's participation in Iran-Contra was shadowy at best, but he managed to cover it up for quite some time. His involvement in the Wedtech Scandal, however, was more personally taxing.

Unlike Iran Contra, this one had Meese's fingerprints all over it. He couldn't account for some “financial improprieties” arising from his tenure as a lobbyist for the Department of Defense contractor Wedtech Corporation. He also couldn't prove that he hadn't participated in “influence peddling” that gave Wedtech a $32 million contract to make engines for the Army, in spite of the Army's conclusion that the company didn't possess the infrastructure or capabilities to produce the engine.

In 1988, Meese resigned after the Justice Department released a report in which he was found “insensitive to the appearance of impropriety.” Questions were raised about his failure to file income tax returns showing how much money he actually made from Wedtech.

Meese later served on the Iraq Study Group co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton. He has called for a return to a “jurisprudence of original intent” by the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also alleged to have subjected judicial nominees to a “litmus test” based on their view of Reagan's policies, most notably abortion. Of course he never spent a day in jail, and continues to be a darling of social conservatives.

How about a litmus test that doesn't allow scandal-plagued former U.S. attorneys general to lecture law-abiding federal judges about their judicial ethics and judgment? Bastard.

Sometimes it takes a group to make a proper “bastard.” This was surely the case with the group of congressmen looking to line their pockets in what later became the scandal known as “ABSCAM.”

It began during the late 1970s as an FBI investigation into allegations of trafficking in stolen property. The FBI set up a shell company called Abdul Enterprises, Ltd. — hence the name “ABSCAM.” A Middle Eastern businessman named Kambir Abdul Rahman ostensibly ran the decoy. The FBI set up meetings with public officials claiming that “Rahman” wanted, among other things, to buy assistance moving his money out of his country and asylum in the United States.

The sting netted U.S. Senator Harrison “Pete” Williams of New Jersey; he was later convicted on nine counts of bribery and conspiracy. Williams protested his innocence and appealed his conviction. It got him nowhere. He and all of the other politicians caught up in the ABSCAM investigation were secretly videotaped.

No U.S. Senator (aside from those from Southern states who supported the Confederacy during the Civil War) had been expelled from the Senate since William Blount in 1797. There had been senators since who were threatened with expulsion though, and they had all resigned. Once convicted of a felony Williams's course of action was clear: he resigned from the Senate on March 11, 1982. He served four years in first a minimum-security prison and then a halfway house (on whose board of directors he sat for the rest of his life). Shortly before his death in 2001 Williams petitioned outgoing President Bill Clinton for a pardon. He was rebuffed.

Also convicted of bribery and conspiracy for their roles in the scandal were Congressmen John Jenrette (D–SC), Richard Kelly (R–FL), Raymond Lederer (D–PA), Michael “Ozzie” Myers (D–PA), and Frank Thompson (D–NJ). All five congressmen either resigned or were expelled from office.

Kelly was the only Republican caught up in the sting. He insisted that he had actually spent part of the money he received to keep up a “cover” and that he was taking the bribes to investigate the matter on his own. He was convicted but won a new trial on appeal (the only politician nailed in the Abscam scandal to do so), but was convicted again. The videotape of the handoff was particularly damning, as he'd been caught on tape stuffing $25,000 in cash into a coat pocket, then asking one of the men who had just bribed him, “Does it show?”

A fellow Republican, Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota, refused a bribe on tape, saying, “Wait a minute, what you are suggesting may be illegal.” But he also did something about it. Pressler, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran and Rhodes Scholar, then went to the FBI and told them of his contact with the undercover FBI agents. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite later called Pressler a “hero” on national television.

Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania was named as an un-indicted coconspirator in the scandal and testified against the other defendants. Murtha refused an offer of a bribe on tape, and insisted later that he was seeking potential investment in his struggling Pennsylvania Congressional district.

That sort of “chamber-of-commerce” activity is something every congressman has done at one time or another. Stuffing your pockets full of cash and then wondering whether the resulting bulge ruins the line of your suit, on the other hand, not so much!