31
The Trial
Wounded Knee was never about criminal activities. It was, from the first, a political matter. Did the Fort Laramie Treaty mean what it said? Did the U.S. Constitution mean anything?
Officially, it was the United States versus Russell Means and Dennis Banks. The charges included felonies, ranging from burglary and larceny of the Wounded Knee trading post to three counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and wounding an FBI agent, interfering with law-enforcement officials in the performance of official duties, arson, possession of “unregistered Molotov cocktails,” conspiracy, and auto theft. If our attorneys had tried to defend us by responding to those as ordinary criminal matters, it is likely that the feds, with virtually unlimited resources, would have put Dennis and me away for many years.
Our strategy, however, was to turn the proceedings into a political trial. Our first critical issue was to force a change of venue. Anybody with eyes and ears knew anti-Indian racism in South Dakota was at least as widespread and deep-seated as it had been before and after Wounded Knee I in 1890. The federal court with jurisdiction over western South Dakota was run by that staunch conservative, Judge Andrew Bogue. When AIM had led demonstrations in South Dakota and Nebraska, he had condemned us publicly.
In June 1971, when I was among those arrested for trespassing and dragged off Mount Rushmore, we had cited the Fort Laramie Treaty as the basis of our defense. Bogue owned property in the Black Hills, so he properly recused himself from the case. WKLD/OC now used that recusal to keep him from hearing any case involving AIM defendants. The government transferred our trial to what was then the only other federal court in South Dakota, at Sioux Falls.
Marginally less anti-Indian than the west, eastern South Dakota still remained a hotbed of racism. To prove that, WKLD/OC asked the National Jury Project—a nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation based in New York, which worked to find fair juries for indigent people—to survey South Dakota. The group demonstrated that no Indian could get a fair trial anywhere in the state, much less an AIM leader. Our case was transferred to Saint Paul, Minnesota, to the court of Judge Alfred Nichol, an opinionated Democrat. It wasn’t the best possible venue. Saint Paul draws much of its juror pool from farm country, where people tend to be far more conservative than in Minneapolis. Moving from Sioux Falls to Saint Paul was only jumping from the fire into the frying pan.
In October 1973, lawyers for both sides began to argue pretrial motions. In December, WKLD/OC’s attorneys succeeded in getting one charge dismissed—arson of a motor vehicle. We lost an important round, however, when Judge Nichol ruled against appointing Dennis and me as co-counsels. That was a blow to our strategy. In a political trial, the minutiae of the case are generally much less important to jurors than their perceptions of the justice of the defendant’s cause. Even though we were represented by several other lawyers, having the status of co-counsels would have permitted us to speak without having to mount the witness stand. We had planned to turn the courtroom into a guerrilla theater. While cross-examining witnesses, we could make statements to bring out issues that the rules of evidence would otherwise preclude.
After partying on the Rosebud through most of the weeks before the trial, I drove to Saint Paul with Lillian Little Hawk in her car late one night in early January through a blizzard. An interracial group called I-CARE, funded by Indian Family Services, had been active there for months. It established a receiving facility for visiting Indians and helped find them accommodations. Through the efforts of I-CARE, the manager of a Holiday Inn offered complimentary rooms to Curtis Bald Eagle, who had been assigned as my bodyguard, and me.
The night before jury selection began, I had some business to attend to—Carter Camp. Although his charges for shooting Clyde had been dropped when he refused to testify, Carter had been held in the Sioux Falls jail, in lieu of fifty thousand dollars bond, on Wounded Knee charges. After Carter had spent four months without a trial, WKLD/OC convinced Judge Nichol to issue a writ of habeas corpus because Carter’s right to a speedy trial had been violated. Released on token bond, he came to Saint Paul to observe our trial. AIM leaders thought we ought to present a united front in public. I acceded to the suggestion that we welcome Carter back with a ceremony at the University of Minnesota, but not everyone agreed, and a heated argument ensued.
The discord was exacerbated by a controversy about WKLD/OC funds. Among others, Vernon Bellecourt and Michael Haney had access to that money. There were recurring reports that not everything that came in was properly accounted for. I couldn’t stomach that petty infighting. Rather than be part of it, I announced my resignation from AIM the day before the trial was to begin. Saint Paul was jammed with reporters covering the trial, so my resignation made national news. Early the next evening, I went to a WKLD/OC meeting attended by practically everyone connected with our case, including most AIM leaders. Crow Dog said, “To resign from the American Indian Movement is like resigning from Grandmother Earth. It’s impossible.” He sat down, and everybody looked at me. Feeling very small and foolish, I said, “Can’t you guys take a joke?” Everybody cracked up—and that was the end of my quitting.
Courtroom proceedings began with jury selection on January 8, 1974. I spent the night before at a party in Minneapolis. I didn’t know taxi service in the Southside Indian ghetto was horrible, so next morning when I called a cab to take me to Saint Paul, it never came. Eventually, WKLD/OC sent someone after me. I was two hours late, and Judge Nichol was not amused. He chewed my butt in front of the press and threatened to revoke my bond.
Finally he calmed down and we got started. Jury Project research had revealed a lot of bigotry against Indians in Saint Paul, so Nichol granted our motion for individual voir dire. That meant our lawyers could question each potential juror about his ability to be impartial. We got lists of names and addresses the day before each batch was to be questioned. Our investigators tried hurriedly to discover politics and biases by interviewing the potential jurors’ neighbors or employers. Every evening, we went through the lists, flagging names of people we thought were prejudiced and questioning them as they went through voir dire. We could ask that anyone be excused for cause, but we had a limited number of peremptory challenges, by which we could reject people without stating a reason. After we had accepted someone, the Jury Project people conducted a more thorough investigation, trying to get a better picture of the person’s attitudes and inclinations.
Dennis and I also had Phillip Deere to help us. He was an Oklahoma Muscogee medicine man. His technique was to say each name before dropping a pinch of tobacco into a glass of water. If it went in a certain direction after hitting the center, the person was acceptable. If it went the other way, he was not. Usually, Deere confirmed our investigators’ recommendations, but not for a black Saint Paul woman whom our lawyers, Legal Aid workers, and Jury Project investigators wanted on the jury. When the tobacco went the wrong way, Dennis and I were adamant: She was not going to be on the jury, even if it meant using one of our few peremptories. Furious, Mark Lane stomped out of the room. Ken Tilsen rolled his eyes, and Bill Kunstler applied all his powers of brotherly persuasion. Larry Leventhal shrugged his shoulders but didn’t comment. The Jury Project people, who had given us thousands of man-hours, couldn’t believe it. I could tell they all wanted to say, “We can’t run a case on goddamn witchcraft.” They never used those words, but they said it every which way except straight out.
We also had two psychologists studying body language to help decide whether to keep or strike potential jurors. That black woman’s body language was nebulous; the shrinks couldn’t read it. After our lawyers questioned her, they asked us again to let her serve on the jury. We refused, and she was excused on a peremptory challenge. Everyone was pissed at us, but within a few days, Jury Project investigators—no doubt anxious to show how foolish we were to depend on Phillip—brought in a raft of information. The black woman was a reactionary, known widely in her neighborhood as intolerant, and a very strict law-and-order person. Our team learned a good lesson. Not every minority is a liberal. Maybe a few also learned not to scoff at our beliefs or to condemn something because it didn’t square with Eurocentric logic.
Phillip couldn’t be with us on the day a young union worker went through voir dire. Dennis and I both disliked him, and the attorneys agreed. Another potential juror, a blond, crew-cut Young Republican, worried us. Rather than waste a peremptory challenge, we tried to disqualify them for cause. The judge wasn’t going to let us win every time. Both of them got on the jury. So did an elderly white woman named Therese Cherrier. She scared us all because she looked so unhappy. We also lost several people we really wanted to be on the jury.
There were no Indians in the jurors’ pool, so we challenged its racial composition. Our lawyers were very thorough about objecting to everything they could possibly think of. Nearly every objection was overruled, but that was expected. We had to get our challenges on record so we could use them as the basis for an appeal if necessary.
Marlon Brando came by the courtroom during jury selection and later held a press conference. He told reporters, “I’ve come to back the great people who made a stand at Wounded Knee.” During the siege, he had donated twenty-five thousand dollars to WKLD/OC, and had refused to accept his Oscar for The Godfather to protest the way American movies portray Indians. Later in the week, Harry Belafonte came and he, too, held a press conference, to condemn the government for trying us.
Just because I was involved in a proceeding that might end in the loss of my liberty didn’t mean all I did was go to court—far from it. The trial would take more than eight months to complete, but there were many days when court was not in session, including two weeks when Judge Nichol flew off to attend judicial conferences in Florida and Hawaii. We also got a few recesses when one of our lawyers was obliged to be someplace else. Once, Bill Kunstler had to return to New York to fight a disbarment attempt caused by contempt citations from Judge Julius Hoffman during the trial of the Chicago Seven. Bill had represented several of those arrested in the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Sometimes Dennis and I left town. After San Francisco newspaper mogul Randolph Hearst’s daughter Patty was snatched by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Hearst agreed to pay a ransom of $2 million worth of food to Bay Area poor people. That day, February 18, Dennis jumped on a plane and flew to California. Many impoverished Indians were in the area, and we wanted to make sure they got a share of that food. The next day, Dennis called to ask me to join him.
In those days, when I flew anywhere into Indian country, AIM sent dozens of defenders for security purposes. Every time I got off a plane, the airport would reverberate from the AIM drum and the hallways were lined with guys in red berets, headbands, and vests with an assortment of buttons proclaiming, “Indian and Proud,” “Indian Power,” “Custer Died for Your Sins,” and so forth. They would sing the AIM song and it was always a dramatic moment. Dennis had arranged that kind of reception for me in San Francisco, and all the media came out. It was like a circus.
Dennis said representatives of literally hundreds of organizations, some legitimate but many no more than con men, were flocking to San Francisco to get a piece of the ransom. They had come up with really wild ideas for that food money. We came up with our own concise plan, two pages typed on an AIM letterhead. We said with that $2 million, Hearst should rent trucks, fill them with food, and take them to designated places. We provided maps and suggested distribution points—then in an orderly manner, as the Salvation Army and everyone else does it, just hand it out. We also said they would need plenty of security to keep control of the crowds. That was the plan Hearst chose. In implementing it, however, he canceled the security. The results were predictable—riots and near riots at every giveaway point, and wholesale rip-offs that discredited Hearst and his daughter’s abductors.
During that period, Dennis established a national AIM office in Saint Paul and set about distributing copies of the “Twenty Points” and the AIM credo, raising money and recruiting members. I had even more urgent matters on my hands. I had to do something to end Dick Wilson’s reign of terror on Pine Ridge. By that time, he had illegally transferred an eighth of our reservation—Sheep Mountain Gunnery Range—to the U.S. Department of the Interior and organized his goons into crews of ten or twelve men to keep each community under control. One of his victims was my dear friend Pedro Bissonnette, who was gunned down in October 1973.
Pedro was merely one among many. While Wilson reigned, Pine Ridge became the world’s homicide capital. People were murdered at the rate of 170 per 100,000 population—about nine times that of Detroit and nearly the same as in Chile during Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s brutal regime. That figure does not include those who “disappeared”—people who have yet to be accounted for. Sixty-nine AIM people were killed and more than 350 others were shot, stabbed, stomped, burned by arson fires, beaten with tire irons or baseball bats, or seriously injured when their cars were run off the road. Those acts are covered by the Indian Major Crimes Act, which gives the FBI exclusive jurisdiction over felonies on Indian reservations. The feds refused to investigate any of those incidents, claiming a lack of manpower. In fact, in 1973, 1974, and 1975, more than twenty-five hundred agents were assigned for some significant period to the Rapid City office. In that time, there were never fewer than two hundred agents and other FBI personnel there. In one six-month period, there were more than 350—far more than in San Francisco, Seattle, Cleveland, or Atlanta. Yet the FBI never solved any murder of an AIM member or supporter, or even an alleged supporter.
Wilson was coming up for reelection in February of 1974. I was drafted by the Lakota people to run against him. During jury selection, I went home nearly every weekend to campaign. Except for an enclave around Pine Ridge Village and the White Clay district in the southwestern part of the reservation, I was fairly safe from goons as long as I was with armed escorts. Wilson’s bullies usually attacked only people who couldn’t defend themselves. Nevertheless, I took precautions.
Severt Young Bear was sort of my campaign manager and took me around to each of the communities. My rallies were always packed, even in the most remote parts of the reservation. Although there were often rumors of goon activity, these thugs laid low, wherever we went to speak, so I was able to cover virtually every district without hindrance. On weekends when I couldn’t get home, Severt and some of the most prominent people on the reservation campaigned for me, including Ed McGaw from the White Clay District, who spoke there in my stead.
Twelve people entered the January 22 primary. I got the most votes—534—and Wilson was second with 457. He controlled the election machinery and we knew he would do anything to steal the February 7 runoff, so we asked the BIA and the Department of Justice to send poll watchers. That is entirely within the government’s responsibilities as “trustees” of the Indian people. Under U.S. law, we are all wards of the nation. But the same government that had sent observers to Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia—and to Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and other countries around the world—refused to send them to South Dakota on the ground that it had no right to interfere in the internal workings of a sovereign entity. Of course, the United States invokes the facade of Indian self-determination only when it serves its own purposes.
Nor could we have our own poll watchers. BIA cops kept everyone except voters and election officials at least fifty yards away from each ballot box. We couldn’t see what was going on inside the polling places. I spent election night in Porcupine, and stayed awake until dawn waiting for the returns. I got 1,714 votes. Wilson got 1,514. But he won. The system imposed by the BIA is winner-take-all by district—the candidate who wins the most districts is elected. Taking a page from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s book, Wilson’s goons voted early and often, stuffing ballot boxes with votes from ghosts, drunks, hospital patients, recent corpses, and relocated people who hadn’t set foot on Pine Ridge in years. Big-city machine politics was successful on an Indian reservation.
The networks covered the election, and CBS had its own chartered jet to bring out film. Dennis and I hitched a ride to Denver on that plane and went to the Federal Office of Civil Rights to file a complaint about the election. Tim Coulter, a Potawatomi lawyer from the Great Lakes area, headed an investigation that soon uncovered evidence of massive illegalities and fraud. I sued the United States, demanding a new election. I won that case, but too late. By the time the suit worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, Wilson had been defeated by Al Trimble in an honest election supervised by independent and government poll watchers.
Back in Saint Paul, it took more than a month to pick twelve jurors and three alternates. The evidence phase of the trial began on February 12. My mother came to court for that first day. There I was, in the worst trouble of my life, with the government calling me every vile name and newspapers filled with the worst that rednecks and reactionaries could dream up about me—and she finally thought that through all of my activities I was doing something right. It was strange, but it felt good.
When Judge Nichol strolled in that morning, he was startled to see fifty or sixty Pine Ridge elders, including five of our chiefs, sitting in spectator seats. They were dressed in traditional finery—men in buckskins and feathered war bonnets, women in beaded dresses with colorful designs across shoulders and down sleeves. He couldn’t have failed to notice that when those important visitors had arrived in their chartered bus, they were honored outside the courthouse with appropriate ceremonies, including a sacred drum, singing, and dancing.
Judge Nichol surveyed the courtroom and said, “I want to see all the lawyers and the defendants in chambers.” He turned on his heel and left. There he said, “This is all off the record, but I’m not going to allow my courtroom to be turned into a circus. I want all the Indians in those costumes out of here. If they want back in, they’re going to have to wear regular clothes.” Dennis and I, wearing our usual ribbon shirts, silently studied Nichol. We had been looking at him daily for more than a month, trying to figure out this wiry little Methodist. As prosecutors smirked in their chairs, Mark Lane and Bill Kunstler tried to explain that the elders, by wearing traditional regalia, were paying homage to the judge, that the “costumes” were our Indian equivalent of white ties and tuxedos—the best clothing they had.
Nichol was grimly adamant. “No way,” he said.
It got very quiet. Breaking the strained silence, Severt Young Bear, our interpreter, rose to speak. He looked at Nichol and in broken but serviceable English said, “Judge, I wouldn’t talk like that if I wore a black dress to work.”
Dennis and I laughed. Our lawyers looked away and struggled to contain themselves. Nichol sat thinking. After a long moment, he split a little grin. Then he chuckled. Finally he let it all out—laughing from deep in his belly. When he could speak again, he said, “Okay, let’s start the trial.”
Before the government could begin its case, Dennis and I stood up and asked Nichol to reconsider his previous ruling against our appointment as co-counsels. “Same ruling,” he said. Sitting at the defendants’ table, Dennis and I had a quick whispered conference. We got up again and said, “Your honor, we’ve just fired our lawyers.” We hadn’t talked it over with anyone, so our attorneys were just as amazed as the judge. He ordered them to talk some sense into us, but when we huddled, I told them, “Every time a prosecutor opens his mouth, we’re going to object. We’re not going to let them finish a sentence during this entire trial.”
“You can’t do that,” said Lane.
“Yes, we can, we’re defending ourselves. It’s our lives, not yours,” I said.
“Fellows, wait—” begged Kunstler.
“Look, we’re not lawyers, we just know what’s right,” I said. Tilsen and Lane tried to tell us we didn’t know how to act as lawyers. Dennis cut them off. “We can act any way we want because we know what’s right for us,” he said. “If the judge doesn’t like our lawyering, he can disbar us.”
We got back up and said again, “We fire our lawyers.” Nichol had a short fuse, but was just as quick to calm himself and never lost his temper. Red-cheeked and obviously exasperated, he rolled his eyes and pulled a “what next?” face as he ordered us back into chambers.
What bothered the judge more than the notion of reversing himself was that to ensure a fair trial, he would be responsible for teaching us some of the rudiments of courtroom protocol if we insisted on representing ourselves. Attorneys being what they are, the prosecutors would always seek to bend rules, so he would have to jump in with objections because we wouldn’t know what to do. He would have to do double duty as defense lawyer and judge, and that would extend the trial for months. It would also color the daily proceedings, while laying significant grounds for an appeal if we were convicted. When we refused to back down, Nichol reluctantly appointed us co-counsels. Then, of course, we rehired our legal team. Discussing his reversal with a reporter, Nichol quoted Emerson—“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”
From our first meeting, I neither liked nor trusted Nichol. He had gone to a South Dakota law school, served as Washington secretary to that state’s Senator Herbert Hitchcock, then briefly as his law partner in Mitchell, South Dakota. Nichol had been a county prosecutor and then a state prosecutor in Minnesota, and had served a few terms in the legislature. As an assistant U.S. attorney in Saint Paul, he had become very buddy-buddy with the FBI and other federal agencies. Nichol got himself elected circuit judge in 1959. Six years later, Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the federal bench. He seemed like the enemy to me.
Fortunately, I was dead wrong about him.
The political character of the trial was not lost on the government. According to legal documents that later emerged, FBI agents visited the publishers’ offices of the St. Paul Dispatch and the Pioneer Press, and leaned on them to reassign reporters then covering the trial and to replace them with people the FBI thought were more suitable. Both papers complied. So much for the First Amendment! We also suspected, but could never prove, that to discourage Indian political protest, the FBI, the BIA, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the National Tribal Chairman’s Association had pressured the two main wire services, Associated Press and United Press International, to suppress the truths coming out at our trial. Everybody denied it, of course.
As our trial started in Saint Paul, the defense table was on the right of the courtroom, facing the judge, with a three-man team of prosecutors and, usually, the assistant U.S. attorney, Richard D. Hurd, on the left. The jury box was to their left. Dennis and I sat side by side, with our five attorneys around us. Larry Leventhal sat on the far left of the table amid huge piles of papers, the contents of two enormous square briefcases plus whatever he could tuck under an arm. He was tall, thin, gawky, almost thirty, but looking as though he might still be an undergraduate, filled with nervous energy, very Jewish in appearance, with thick, curly black hair. At the time, I thought he was eccentric, and maybe he is—but the truth is that Larry is a genius. It was months before we realized that besides all the pro bono research and courtroom work he was doing on our case, he also was paying his bills by working for other clients, burning his candle at both ends to help us and to keep himself afloat. After court adjourned every day, he went to his office and worked until all hours of the night. Every once in a while he would appear to nod off in court, his head actually clunking on the table. Then everything would stop until someone shook him. Much more often, Larry’s head would go way down, almost to the desk, then he would catch himself and jerk back up. More than once as I watched him bobbing up and down, just at the right moment his eyes would open, his back would straighten, and he would say, “Objection,” and cite the right rule or case. How the hell he could sleep and listen to the trial at the same time I’ll never know.
Mark Lane sat on Dennis’s left. He had started out as my lawyer, but Ramon Roubideaux withdrew because he needed time with his family. He returned to South Dakota to represent Sarah Bad Heart Bull and David Hill in their trials for the Custer courthouse fracas so I let Dennis have Mark. That suited everyone. Bill Kunstler was my lead attorney, and Mark’s outsized ego wouldn’t subordinate itself to him. Mark was six feet tall, slim and fit, with spectacles framing a pug nose over what I called a raccoon beard—like a Vandyke but running all the way up to his sideburns, with gray hair on either side of his chin. He was very quick on his feet, both literally and when it came to humor and fast thinking. Mark had represented Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy, until Oswald was murdered. Then Mark went to New Orleans as one of District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigators. By the time he came to Saint Paul, he had written a best-seller, Rush to Judgment, and had championed the case of James Earl Ray, convicted killer of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Dennis’s third attorney was Doug Hall, who played the role of elder statesman of the combined defense team. A balding, bespectacled, professorial pipe smoker with a long, aquiline nose and a ponytail, he was an exceptionally honorable man, very knowledgeable about criminal law and quite well regarded in the Twin Cities area. He, too, had a very healthy ego.
Bill Kunstler sat on my right. Then in his early fifties, he was a little more than six feet tall, with long waves of unruly graying hair above a lantern-jawed face. His trademark was his reading glasses, usually worn atop his high forehead like a set of aviator’s goggles. He had been hassled by sheriffs while representing Freedom Riders in Mississippi in the early 1960s, and was inside Attica during the violent prison revolt there. Bill got involved with Indians after some Six Nations steelworkers in Philadelphia were framed in the death of Leon Shenandoah, the Onondaga who had represented the entire U.S. Army in John Kennedy’s funeral cortege. Bill got them all off. When Wounded Knee started, Oren Lyons, the Onondaga leader, suggested that Pedro Bissonnette call Bill. He responded immediately and was often inside the Knee, offering very good advice. Very wise and, unlike many high-powered lawyers, willing to listen to anyone, Bill had a deep, sonorous bass voice and was a master of courtroom theater.
My other attorney was Ken Tilsen. I called him a banty rooster. He was short and stocky and balding, a fiery Jewish intellectual in eyeglasses. A brilliant defense attorney, Ken was a bulldog who fought tenaciously for what he thought was right. He grew up in a racially mixed Saint Paul neighborhood and became active in leftist politics in high school. He represented black University of Minnesota students who took over Morell Hall. Among them was a young Mississippi woman, a Congress of Racial Equality organizer whom Ken and his wife had practically adopted. They were targeted by COINTEL and repeatedly arrested. During the Vietnam War, he probably handled more draft-board cases than anyone between the coasts. Ken and I didn’t meet until Wounded Knee, but he had represented Clyde often during the period when Minneapolis cops arrested him every week.
After the jury had been seated, the government began its case. In the 1880s, Congress passed the Indian Major Crimes Act to give itself jurisdiction on reservations. From it came a body of case law applying only to Indians. The charges against us alleged violations of those laws, so the government’s first task was to prove that we actually were Indians. That required the government to trot out the blood-quantum test, an often conflicting list of criteria that boils down to judging a pedigree. I was shocked to learn that the BIA had listed me as 15/32 Indian. That, I learned, was because it had ignored my great-grandmother, a full-blooded Crow. Thus I discovered another BIA wrinkle. On certain reservations, ancestors from other Indian nations don’t count. If a Cheyenne and a Sioux have children, the BIA counts them as half-bloods. It dismisses half of someone’s heritage with a stroke of the pen. When the BIA “experts” testified about Dennis’s ancestry, they even got his birth-date wrong. According to the BIA, he was born five years after his mother had brought him into this world.
The trial was shocking to me in another way. I wasn’t prepared to see and hear handsome, clean-cut, all-American white men in short haircuts and IBM-blue suits get up on a witness stand, swear to their One True God on the holiest document of their faith—the Christian Bible—“to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and then lie. They didn’t try to shade things. They didn’t try to keep their testimony near the truth. They flat out lied. They put words in my mouth and in Dennis’s that we never said. They denied doing things that had been done. They withheld evidence supporting our innocence, and claimed it didn’t exist. They spoke in perfectly correct English and answered every question so smoothly it was obvious that they had been rehearsed. They lied in front of the media of the world and in front of a packed courtroom. Even when defense lawyers caught them in a lie, they lied again and denied that they had ever lied.
And they didn’t even seem ashamed.
I was thirty-four years old and had been through what I thought was a whole lot—but what came out of the mouths of FBI agents and U.S. attorneys during the months of testimony simply blew me away. Even today, I find it hard to believe. I still thought the government could be forced to live up to its own laws. As far back as I could remember, it had been hammered into my head—the white man has the civilized society. But it’s impossible for an honorable culture to continue when its people are willing to lie to their god. After a while, I didn’t even listen to the testimony. I just looked at the liars and thought about what I was watching. It began to register in my mind why the United States of America doesn’t keep its treaties. I had always believed that those who were running things really wanted to follow them. Now I was seeing that they had never intended to. I realized that Watergate was unusual only because so many high-ranking officials got caught. America was a society built on lies and deceit.