CHAPTER 5

“OH MY GOD”

The car ride down I-95 from Baltimore to Washington in George Beall’s sedan was uncomfortable on a number of counts. The temperature was climbing toward ninety on July 3, 1973, and the humidity was already 90 percent. Beall’s Audi 100LS was a boxy affair, without much horsepower and without much air-conditioning oomph, and here were four grown men, one of whom stood six feet five, stuffed into its seats, understandably fidgety and uncomfortable. This was a day George Beall, Barney Skolnik, Tim Baker, and Ron Liebman had been anticipating with equal measures of excitement and anxiety; they were about to meet with the Big Boss of the entire U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

The federal prosecutors stuffed into the Audi had been sitting on a big secret—one with national implications. And the decision on when exactly to tell the attorney general what they had discovered about Agnew had not been an easy one. “On the one hand, as soon as we have evidence against Agnew, it’s perfectly clear to George and to us that this is something you need to report upstairs,” says Tim Baker. “On the other hand, we didn’t want to report it upstairs until we had our case pretty much in hand.”

The Baltimore prosecutors’ instincts had been to take the time to build the case to a point where it couldn’t possibly be taken away from them, but they worried every day that something would leak to the press. A lot of people outside the U.S. Attorney’s office in Baltimore had knowledge of the investigation. Skolnik, Baker, and Liebman had brought a lot of witnesses into the grand jury room, and every one of them had an attorney, or attorneys.

“If Richardson reads this in The Washington Post one morning and hasn’t heard anything from Beall, we’re all in a lot of trouble, and should be,” says Baker.

Near the end of June, with the testimony from Lester Matz in the bag, Beall and his team determined that the case was finally ripe. It was time to tell all to Attorney General Richardson and to ask permission to pick the fruit.

Beall had been trying to get his team on the attorney general’s calendar for almost two weeks and had actually managed to get on that busy calendar a few times. But always, at the last minute, somebody from Richardson’s office had called to cancel. There were other, more pressing matters that took precedence. This was perfectly understandable, what with the two separate Watergate investigations now under way. But Beall and his team were growing impatient.

By July 3, the Baltimore prosecutors were unwilling to wait any longer. When Richardson’s secretary had called in the morning to cancel a meeting scheduled for later that day, Beall refused to be put off. This was an emergency, he told the secretary, one he could not talk about over the phone. The attorney general needed to find some time in his schedule, that day, because the team from Baltimore was on its way. “George decides that no matter what they say, we’re just going to go,” Baker remembers.

Beall and his prosecutors spent the ride strategizing how to present their findings about the vice president to Richardson. They figured they had one shot, and not a lot of time, to make their case to the attorney general. Once they turned their findings over to Nixon’s new handpicked man at Justice, the decision about how to proceed would be out of their control, and the prospects for moving forward would lean toward grim. At least that was how Barney Skolnik saw it.

Watergate investigators were already starting to turn up evidence that implicated Richard Nixon in a cover-up. So there was a perfectly reasonable case to be made that the possibility of criminal charges against a sitting president and a sitting vice president would be too great a shock for the country to absorb. “I had a very conscious realization,” Skolnik says, “not just that it was possible, but that under all the circumstances it was highly likely that [Attorney General Richardson] was going to say—perhaps for the most honorable of reasons—‘shut it down.’ ”

“I mean, he probably wouldn’t say ‘shut it down,’ but he could say words that would amount to ‘shut it down.’ ”

ELLIOT RICHARDSON, at age fifty-two, was a veteran of the Nixon administration. After an upright and distinguished career in Massachusetts Republican politics—including a stint as lieutenant governor—he had become Nixon’s go-to utility player for open cabinet posts in need of urgent filling. His first assignment was as secretary of the now-defunct Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He next took over the Department of Defense, after Nixon decided the previous secretary was insufficiently supportive of the escalation of the war in Vietnam. (Nixon had actually ordered the wiretapping of phones in his defense secretary’s office.)

In May 1973, the president asked Richardson to move again, to what would be his third cabinet job in four years, and easily the most pressure-packed position in the Nixon administration at that moment. During an emotional meeting at Camp David, Richardson later recalled, a visibly depressed Nixon “told me that I was more needed at Justice than at Defense.”

Nixon had gone through two attorney generals by then, both victims of the Watergate scandal. His first, John Mitchell, was eventually convicted and sent to prison for his role in the cover-up. His replacement, Richard Kleindienst, was forced from the job in Nixon’s purge of the scapegoats at the end of April 1973—the same purge that saw the exit of the felons-to-be John Dean, H. R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman.

“He knew that Nixon was under a cloud,” recalls one of Richardson’s closest aides at the time, a young lawyer named J. T. Smith. “He knew that the mood in the White House on the part of the president and his staff was quite bleak.”

Richardson took the job, in spite of the outlook. There was no shortage of hot seats in Washington during the second term of the Nixon administration, but none was hotter than the attorney general’s. Watergate was already a three-alarm fire when Richardson took office in May 1973, and by early July the blaze had grown considerably worse.

President Nixon’s recently canned White House counsel, John Dean, had begun his dramatic testimony in front of the Senate Watergate Committee on June 25, 1973. Dean’s six-hour, 245-page opening statement was akin to a crime novel, and the author fingered Nixon as one of the culprits. The president knew of the burglary, Dean explained, and a slew of other dirty tricks against his political opponents, and had been complicit in obstructing the investigations into the crimes. Dean had begged absolution for his old boss. “It is my honest belief, that while the president was involved, that he did not realize or appreciate at any time the implications of his involvement. And I think that when the facts come out, I hope the president is forgiven.” But Congress did not seem to be in a forgiving mood; it had direct evidence that the president had abused the power of his office for personal ends. And Congress wasn’t alone.

Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor Richardson had just appointed, was beginning to work up a serious case against the president, too. And he was very interested in Dean’s assistance for his own investigation. Worried about death threats against the former Nixon aide, Special Prosecutor Cox had asked the U.S. marshals to keep Dean and his wife under armed, round-the-clock protection.

That was the lay of the land at noon, on July 3, 1973, when Richardson learned there were four officials from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland waiting anxiously in his anteroom, and apparently there with news about an entirely new “emergency.”

“So we get there, we’re ushered up to the attorney general’s office, which to say ‘impressive’ is to understate it,” remembers Ron Liebman. “And we wait and we wait.”

Until, finally…

“Richardson comes in and he’s annoyed,” Tim Baker says. “You know, ‘What’s so important that you’re interrupting my day and you won’t even tell my secretary what it’s about? What’s so important?’ ”

Beall started talking fast, executing the strategy the four men had finalized on the ride down. He began his presentation by introducing his team, one by one, detailing their résumés so Richardson wouldn’t get hung up on the team’s obvious youth.

“George talks about himself,” Liebman recalls, “University of Virginia Law School, he knew his brother was a senator. He turns to [Barney] says, ‘This is Barney Skolnik.’ And Elliot Richardson is making notes: ‘Barney Skolnik went to Harvard College, Harvard Law School, was in the Justice Department, senior prosecutor, very experienced.’ ‘This is Tim Baker.’ He looks at Tim Baker, starts making notes: ‘Tim Baker went to Williams College. He went to Harvard Law School. He was on the Harvard Law Review. He clerked for the chief judge of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. He clerked for the chief justice of the United States.’ Richardson is making notes. [George] says, ‘This is Ron Liebman.’ And George said, ‘He went to Western Maryland College,’ and before he even got to University of Maryland Law School, Richardson puts his pen down and looks at me. Stops taking notes. And to my dying day, I will remember thinking, ‘He’s looking at me; he’s thinking one of two things: either ‘what the hell are you doing here?’ or ‘good for you!’ And I didn’t know which, but he stopped taking notes!”

“He’s sitting there,” Tim Baker says, “but then more doodling and more and more impatient! And just at the point where we’re sure [George is going to get to Agnew], the secretary comes in and gives him a note! He just up and leaves, no explanation, just gets up and leaves.”

“The minute he leaves,” Liebman says, “of course we’re saying, ‘George, say this, say that!’ ”

Richardson returned several minutes later, and Beall launched into a circuitous explanation of the Baltimore County investigation. “When George gets a little closer to the vice president,” says Liebman, “another note comes in. Elliot Richardson gets up and he leaves. Doesn’t say ‘excuse me.’ ”

Richardson eventually acknowledged that he was summoned to the phone in the first instance by Alexander Haig, Nixon’s new White House chief of staff, and in the second instance by Nixon himself. Nixon was furious. The president had seen news reports that Richardson’s handpicked special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was nosing around Nixon’s private real estate deals. Nixon wanted Richardson to order Cox to put out a press release denying that he was looking into the financing of Nixon’s purchases of his properties in Key Biscayne, Florida, and San Clemente, California. Pronto!

“That’s all going on outside of our hearing,” Liebman says. “And the attorney general of the United States has got these guys in there—three of whom are kids—from Baltimore. And he came back in, and finally George got to the meat of the matter.”

“We have evidence that Vice President Agnew took bribes as county executive, governor, and even as vice president,” Baker recalls Beall saying.

Richardson perked up at that. Even as vice president. Finally, they had the attorney general’s full attention.

“It was my job to lay out the evidence we had,” remembers Baker. “And [the attorney general] is very interested in the evidence. What he, of course, wants to know is, how good a case is this? And it’s a good case. I mean, we’ve got good stuff and we know it. I just start banging away on ‘so-and-so will testify, and he’s got documents, and he’s backed up by…’ Nail after nail after nail after nail.”

While Baker talked, the rest of the team was trying to get a read on Richardson. “If you’re asking me if I got the impression that he was surprised, the answer is no,” says Barney Skolnik. “If you were sentient in those days, you had a sense of what kind of a human being the vice president was. And Elliot Richardson, to put it mildly, was sentient.” Unsurprised, perhaps, but clearly far from sanguine about what he was hearing.

“I read [Richardson’s] expression as saying, ‘I need this right now like I need another hole in the head,’ ” says Liebman.

At that moment, a little after noon, July 3, 1973, Elliot Richardson had been in the job of attorney general for a grand total of thirty-nine days and was already overseeing the most sensitive criminal probe, maybe, in the history of the Justice Department. And here were these barely out-of-law-school prosecutors, none of whom he had ever laid eyes on before, saying, “We know you’re investigating the president, but we need you to investigate the vice president as well.” They needed his blessing for a freaking criminal investigation against Spiro T. Agnew, the most combative man in the White House. (And that was saying something in 1973.) Anybody watching the vice president in action the last five years knew he was sure to fight back like a cornered marmot.

If you were the attorney general, how many pitched battles would you be willing to fight at the same time? What would you do?

Here’s what Elliot Richardson did: He told the prosecutors that “he was greatly concerned for the nation if these allegations proved to be accurate, particularly in view of the Watergate matter,” Tim Baker wrote in a memo to file after the meeting. “However, he unequivocally stated that the allegations must be fully investigated.”

“What he did,” says Liebman, “was, he started crawling into the case. ‘What about this? What are you going to do about that?’ Like he was a collaborator with us, which he was. It was extraordinary.”

Elliot Richardson’s momentous decision, made without hesitation, has stuck with the prosecutors, even decades later. “We don’t know him,” Skolnik remembers. “I mean, I’ve heard good things about him, but we don’t know him, and it’s very much with a great sense of anxiety that we are going to say to him, ‘Here, what do you want us to do?’ and then, figuratively speaking, hold our breath until he tells us what he’s going to tell us.”

Fighting back tears, Skolnik continues, “I knew—I think we all knew—that we were in the presence of a very special human being.”

Richardson was taking on the responsibility of overseeing active criminal investigations into the president and the vice president…at the same time. This was two entirely separate cases. This was Nobody Is Above the Law, squared. The Baltimore office would continue to work the case, Richardson said. Beall and his team needed to keep going, keep digging, keep building the case against Agnew. But he wanted it done in absolute secrecy. Nobody outside this room, Richardson implored, could know. The clear mission, while never explicitly voiced, was to pry the vice president of the United States from office before it was too late. Before he could ascend to the presidency.

“We were all about now: You’ve got this completely corrupt guy as vice president of the United States,” says Baker. “We’ve got to do this right; we can’t make any mistakes here.”

Richardson’s own top aide, J. T. Smith, has very clear memories of that day also. Most vivid of all is Richardson coming out of the meeting when it was finally over, shell-shocked, muttering something nobody was meant to hear: “Oh my God.”