Date: Fri 15-Mar-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: KAAREN

Quick Words:

Ziefman-Nixon-politics

Full Text:

w/photo: A Key Counselor Sheds Light On The Dark Side Of American Politics

B Y K AAREN V ALENTA

Nearly retired from a long legal career which included more than a dozen years

as a key counsel of the Judiciary Committee of the US House of

Representatives, Jerry Ziefman has written a provocative new book that could

rewrite historians' versions of the Watergate years.

Without Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot

reached the bookstores last month. Mr Ziefman, 70, who lives on Walnut Tree

Hill Road in Sandy Hook, already has embarked on a series of interviews,

including an hour-long radio broadcast with John Dean who wrote the preface to

the book. Preparing to begin a book-signing tour which will take him across

the country, Mr Ziefman visited The Bee this week to discuss the book and why

he waited 20 years to write it."

"I don't think I really understood a lot of what happened until later, after

the establishment of the Church Committee and the revelations that came

through it and other sources," Mr Ziefman said. "I started (the book) well

before Clinton became President, but the problem always has been how to

negotiate the large blocks of time needed to go through all of the material

and condense it."

It was during time that Jerry Ziefman served as the chief of staff and general

counsel of the House Judiciary Committee that the panel was directed to

determine whether a Bill of Impeachment against President Richard Nixon should

be recommended to the full House.

Instead of conducting an investigation, the impeachment inquiry staff headed

by John Doar intentionally orchestrated a charade, using flawed legal theories

and behind-the-scenes maneuvering in an attempt to keep Nixon in office,

"twisting in the wind," until the end of his term to improve the odds of

electing Ted Kennedy as President in 1976, Mr Ziefman said.

The charade also was orchestrated to avoid a thorough investigation of the

Nixon administration, Mr Ziefman charged, because such a probe also could

reveal Kennedy-era wiretaps, burglaries and CIA-sanctioned murders carried out

in the name of national security.

In 1954 an illegal secret agreement was negotiated by the CIA with the

Department of Justice not to prosecute CIA agents for felonies that they were

committing if they were discovered by the FBI. The agreement was first

negotiated by then-CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston, who had been with the

CIA since its inception in the Truman administration, and then-Deputy Attorney

General William Rogers, who eventually became secretary of state under Nixon

and later headed a commission to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal during

the Reagan administration.

Assassination Attempts

In 1960 and 1961, CIA-supported assassination attempts were made on Patrice

Lumumba, premier of the Congo. The CIA also supported plots in the Dominican

Republic that caused the murders of President Rafael Truillo and General Rene

Schneider in the Donimican Republic, President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam,

and Salvador Allende Gossens in Chile. Perhaps the most sensationalized

example of this policy involved assassination attempts against Cuba's Fidel

Castro.

The Houston-Rogers agreement and the policies that it reflected remained in

effect for more than two decades, through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson,

and Nixon administrations until they were revealed in 1976 and rescinded by

President Gerald Ford.

"The theme of my book - from my point of view - is that there has been

something very depressing, wrong, corrupt and immoral in American society from

the Cold War, the concept that felonies can be committed in the national

interest," Mr Ziefman said. "That's a notion we had repudiated in the

Nurenberg trials after World War II, a notion that came into full flower under

Hitler: Acts that are otherwise immoral and illegal could be condoned if done

in the name of nationalism - the end justifies the means."

Mr Ziefman said action taken during the administrations of Richard Nixon, Jack

Kennedy and Robert Kennedy - and even as far back as the Eisenhower

administration when Nixon was vice president - have worked to undermine

traditional American values.

"There's a pervasive attitude, as Leo Durocher once said, that "Nice guys

finish last. If you aren't willing to cut corners, if you comply with the

rules, are honest and straight-laced, you won't succeed. How much of this goes

on in our communities today?"

In the book, Mr Ziefman's journal entries are interpolated with his pointed

analysis of the years preceding, during and after Watergate.

"Watergate's `cancer on the presidency' did not begin - or end - with Nixon,"

Mr Ziefman insisted. "And one thing that caused cancer in American government

- not just the CIA - was the abdication of responsibility on the part of the

Justice Department."

With carefully drawn threads, Jerry Ziefman shows how key players weave in and

out of the picture throughout the past three decades. John Doar, for example,

tapped by Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, D-New Jersey, to serve as

head of the inquiry staff, had been the trusted deputy of Burke Marshall,

assistant attorney general under Robert Kennedy. When Doar became the special

counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, he brought with him Bernard

Nussbaum, another former member of the Kennedy Justice Department, and Hillary

Rodham, a Yale law school graduate and protoge of Burke Marshall.

Mr Ziefman argues that actions during the current Clinton administrations by

Mr Nussbaum (who resigned as White House counsel in 1994 amid charges that he

improperly interfered with the workings of federal agencies) and by Hillary

Rodham Clinton are more examples of this continuing pattern of secrecy and

subterfuge.

"My own view is that on a long-term basis, the impeachment charade, being

ethically flawed, did harm to our future national life and the credibility of

the current leaders of both political parties," Mr Ziefman said.

A Twist Of Fate

Growing up on Long Island, Jerry Ziefman went into the Navy immediately after

high school during World War II. The Navy sent him to Harvard for four

semesters and to officers' school. Finishing his degree at Harvard after the

war, he entered medical school, then changed his mind and earned a law degree

at New York University in 1958.

"I hung out my shingle in a small town on Long Island, but as fate would have

it, I became a ghost writer for Prentice Hall on an esoteric subject: state

taxation of interstate commerce," Mr Ziefman said. "That led to my being

recruited to join the House Judiciary Committee staff for a year - I ended up

staying for 14."

He left to become a professor of law at the University of Santa Clara in

California. In 1980 he moved back East, married Marianne Huebenthal of

Newtown, established a private law practice in Washington, DC, and began

dividing his time between Washington and Connecticut.

Mr Ziefman has high praise for many "fine, honorable" members of Congress whom

he worked with and credits President Ford with exposing and rescinding the

Houston-Rogers agreement. Times have changed, he said, and perhaps people

today will find it "less hard to swallow that the cancer that came into view

at Watergate also existed in the Kennedy administration."

"Today, with the Cold War ended, more of us are coming to an awareness that in

the name of "public good," our highest officials have committed secret crimes,

including murders - and with the help of Congress have lied to cover them up,"

he said. "Perhaps the rising tide of disaffection with Congress, the White

House, and both political parties will elevate our state morality - and reduce

the present dangers that secret crimes hatched in government offices will

breed contempt for law, invite anarchy and bring terrible retribution."

Jerry Ziefman will give a brief talk and sign copies of his book, Without

Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot , Forward

by John Dean, Thunder's Mouth Press, $24.95/hardcover, at the Hickory Stick

Book Shop in Washington Depot on Saturday, March 23, from 2 to 4 pm.