A Convict and His Prosecutor

By Ed Magnuson

THE WHOLE TRUTH by John Ehrlichman; Simon & Schuster; 444pages; $10.95 CONFESSION AND AVOIDANCE by Leon Jaworski; Anchor; 325 pages; $10.95

The green tide of Watergate-writing cash keeps rolling on. John Dean's Blind Ambition crests in a four-part TV spectacular. Judge John Sirica's refreshingly unjuridical To Set the Record Straight surges onto the bestseller lists. Now comes John Ehrlichman's second novel, The Whole Truth, a racy Washington scandal spin-off aimed at reeling in a movie or TV contract, as did his first, The Company. More modestly, Leon Jaworski offers a spare memoir, Confession and Avoidance, his second Watergate book, which seems pitched in too low a key to unlock any box-office riches.

For a former lawyer and top-level bureaucrat, Ehrlichman writes surprisingly well in The Whole Truth. His Dean-like character, walking into a televised Senate hearing, "had no awareness of moving the parts of his body. He rolled on wheels, pulled by a string." Ehrlichman dwells too much on describing the furnishings of the capital's most notable drawing rooms, apparently in search of credentials as a serious novelist. Yet he knows Washington intimately enough to lure the reader along, even into that "double bed" above the Attorney General's office, which had been "the historic scene of demanding if unofficial activities of Smythe's predecessors, their high-ranking brothers and sundry surrogates." Yes, the rumored past meshes readily with the fictional future as Ehrlichman's President Hugh Frankling faces the danger in 1981 of becoming "the third elected President in a row" to resign from office. Ehrlichman never explains how or why the second, Jimmy Carter, was pushed out.

As fast fiction with a dash of suspense, the novel is fun. But if taken as what it purports to be, a deeper look at Washington morality than Ehrlichman provided in The Company, it falls far short of being anything near, well, the whole truth.

The plot is not complex. A Hollywoodish U.S. conglomerate boss bribes President Frankling with a $250,000 campaign donation to get a White House meeting at which he warns that a leftist government in Uruguay is about to expropriate his assets there. He then suggests that the CIA could stop it. White House Aide Robin Warren is ordered by the President to see what the CIA can do. It, of course, suggests a coup. Frankling gets drunk on his yacht and tells Warren to give the CIA a green light. Alas, the Uruguayan junta learns of the caper. In the international uproar, the President denies ever knowing of such a scheme. Poor Warren then pulls a John Dean. He tells the world that Frankling is lying. Why take on the President? "I was afraid of getting caught in the lies . . . No high-mindedness or purity involved at all--just fear."

Like Nixon, President Frankling discovers that he cannot protect his lies. For one thing, a crewman on the yacht can blow his story. But unlike Nixon, this President does not wait until it is too late. He confesses on television, promising not to seek re-election but pleading to be allowed to finish his term. Clearly, Ehrlichman believes Nixon could have saved himself by making a similar confession before he became fatally entangled in his tapes. Ehrlichman probably is right.

As a morality tale, The Whole Truth takes such a sour view of Washington's public and private lives that all distinctions are lost. Not a single member of Ehrlichman's Washington press corps is properly concerned about the dangers of deception from the Oval Office. Instead, out of pure spite, "the press turned on Frankling like a rabid dog and sank its fangs deep." Not a single member of a Senate committee cares about the true origins of the CIA coup; all are either out to get or to protect the President. While Ehrlichman nicely catches the mannerisms of Sam Ervin ("As he shook hands his wattles quivered"), his chairman accepts a bribe to lay off the President, and then reneges. Yet there were some good guys in Watergate, including Jaworski and, yes, Ervin. It is too bad that Ehrlichman, who can write with some humor, has let his prison perspective blot them all out.

In Confession and Avoidance, Jaworski takes a detached view of his career. "No matter how the case ends," he notes, "although the client may be going to prison or beyond, a lawyer is only going back to the office." Basically a collection of sprightly anecdotes tracing his 54 years as a lawyer, the book moves briskly from his beginnings in Waco, Texas (where he was shunned for defending a black man accused of killing a white couple, only to discover he had naively and wrongly believed in the defendant's innocence), but bogs down in a plodding explanation of the complex Korean bribery scandal.

In between, Jaworski grew increasingly sophisticated as he handled the high-stakes legal problems of Texas Oil Millionaire Glenn McCarthy and Lyndon Johnson, prosecuted U.S. and Nazi soldiers accused of crimes against civilians, prepared to prosecute Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett for stalling integration at Ole Miss, headed the Texas investigation into President Kennedy's assassination for the Warren Commission and prosecuted Watergate. As he reviews those historic cases, the gentlemanly Jaworski sometimes looks back in anger.

Handling some of the lower-level Nazi trials, Jaworski recalls that "I felt, as I have not felt before or since, a cold rage." Jaworski blasts "the crackpots and the gullible" who accept conspiracy theories in the Kennedy assassination, particularly the notion that Oswald was a Soviet agent. "If the KGB selects its spies from such material, then the wrong Marx--Groucho, not Karl-- founded Communism."

On Watergate, Jaworski recalls that when he first heard the tapes, the evidence of Nixon's lies was obvious. Even worse, Jaworski concluded that "a paranoid and vindictive man had dishonored the presidency." Contends Jaworski: "There are tape recordings unrelated to Watergate that have still not become public, but eventually may, that will show even more clearly the extent to which Richard Nixon abused his office . . . The abuses of power, on the scale practiced by the Nixon White House, did begin with Watergate."

While both books are well worth reading, both are also disappointing. Increasingly competent at his new craft, Ehrlich man is still trying to smash back at what he saw as his oppressors. A shrewd and tough lawyer, Jaworski is too intent on dissecting evidence to draw perceptive conclusions on what he has learned from such a rich career in the law. Ehrlichman's message twists in the winds of his bias. Jaworski, at least in this book, delivers none.

Excerpts

"Robin Warren experienced a thrill. This is how it must have been done when Kennedy embargoed Cuba, and Nixon invaded Cambodia, and Ford rescued the Mayaguez. Those moments in recent history began with a few men in these very rooms, deciding life and death; now he was one of those men. It was not so much a feeling of pride; it was fulfillment. . . He wondered if they always felt high when they dealt with these issues of life and death. -- The Whole Truth

I felt sympathy for some of the men around Nixon, especially John Mitchell. He was a gruff bear of a man who had been outstanding in the narrow field of bond law. He was an interesting fellow, cordial, in contrast to the cold and forbidding image many had of him. He went off to prison without a whimper, with a certain poise and dignity. The costliest mistake John Mitchell ever made was taking the job of Attorney General. He simply was not qualified for it." --Confession and Avoidance

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