The Right and the Power: The Prosecution of Watergate

New York; Houston: Reader's Digest Press; Gulf Publishing Company, 1976. First edition. Fourth printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good in good dust jacket. Price clipped. DJ has some wear, soiling edge tears and chips.. [14], 305, [1] p. Index. From Wikipedia: "Leonidas "Leon" Jaworski (September 19, 1905 December 9, 1982) was the second special prosecutor during the Watergate Scandal. He was appointed to that position on November 1, 1973, soon after the Saturday Night Massacre of October 19-20, 1973, that resulted in the dismissal of his predecessor, Archibald Cox. Jaworski was born in Waco in central Texas, a child of German-speaking parents; his mother, Marie (nee Mira), was an Austrian immigrant, and his father, Joseph Jaworski, was a Polish immigrant who was an evangelical minister. He was named after ancient Spartan king Leonidas, and had a brother named Hannibal. An earnest student who studied at night by the light of oil lamps, he was a champion debater at Waco High School, and graduated from Baylor Law School and received his master's degree in law at The George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. In 1925, he became the youngest person ever admitted to the Texas bar. After starting out defending bootleggers during Prohibition, in 1931 he joined the Houston law firm that became Fulbright & Jaworski, one of the largest law firms in the United States. During World War II, he prosecuted the Johannes Kunze murder trial, where five German prisoners of war were accused of beating to death a fellow prisoner for being a "traitor". On the night of August 14, 1944, the Fort Lawton Riot between African-American U.S. soldiers and Italian prisoners of war at Fort Lawton near Seattle resulted in the lynching of Italian prisoner of war Guglielmo Olivotto. Thereafter, Jaworski prosecuted forty-three African-American soldiers, of which twenty-eight were convicted, in what was the longest U.S. Army court-martial of World War II. War crimes prosecutor[edit]After the war, Jaworski served as a war crimes prosecutor in Germany. He was involved in a case where eleven German civilians were accused of murdering six American airmen forced down over Germany in the Russelsheim massacre. However, he declined to participate in the Nuremberg Trials on the grounds that the prosecution there was based on laws that did not exist at the time of the culpable acts. He became a colonel, and subsequently, in his law firm, he was commonly addressed as "Colonel Jaworski." He was a friend of fellow Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson, whom he successfully represented in a 1960 lawsuit filed to prevent Johnson from campaigning for the U.S. Senate against Republican John Tower at the same time that Johnson was running for Vice President of the United States on the John F. Kennedy ticket. However, Jaworski did not always support Democratic candidates. He supported Richard Nixon and voted for him twice, contributed to George H.W. Bush in his campaign for the presidency in 1980, and after Bush conceded the nomination he became treasurer of "Democrats for Reagan" during the 1980 general election campaign. Having been convinced of his integrity, in 1980, Jaworski aided former Nixon staffer Egil "Bud" Krogh, whom he had sent to prison in 1973, in Krogh's request to be reinstated to the bar in Washington State. At the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City, which nominated Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Jaworski, who was not a candidate, still received the vote of one delegate. Jaworski's greatest fame came from his tenure as Watergate Special Prosecutor, when he managed a protracted contest with President Nixon to secure evidence for the trial of former senior administration officials on charges relating to the Watergate cover-up. Initially believing that only Nixon's aides had committed misconduct, he learned that Nixon had discussed the Watergate cover-up with the accused on numerous occasions and that these conversations had been recorded by the White House taping system. This discovery caused Jaworski to request tapes of sixty-four presidential conversations as evidence for the upcoming criminal trial, but Nixon refused to release them, citing executive privilege. After unsuccessful.