THE ULTIMATE TRIAL OF EDWARD BENNETT WILLIAMS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000706940042-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 20, 2010
• Sequence Number: 42
• Publication Date: April 9, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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WASHINGTON POST
9 April 1985
STAT
The Ultimate Trial of Edward Bennett Williams
The Relentless Defender Wages His
Fiercest Battle Outside the Courtroom
First of two articles
By David Remnick
Washington Past Staff Writer
ful, yet losing, parabola.
Edward Bennett Williams is wondering aloud if the
president of the United States has not cast a hex on the
Baltimore Orioles. "I'm glad he came," he says, "but
every time he does, we lose."
Williams, whose obsession with the Orioles has
deepened with every year he has owned the team, sits in
his box, working the muscles in his fleshy face, wringing
the knotty tension from his huge, powerful hands. No
wonder It's Monday, opening day, bottom of the eighth,
Baltimore trailing 6-4, bases loaded. Ernie Camacho is
pitching for the Indians, Rick Dempsey is batting for the
Orioles. Williams wants to win, his whole body wants to
win. He stands. Sits down. Stands again. He tries to talk
away the nervousness:
"Dempsey could be a hero here ... You know, my
pitchers are getting shelled all day, and all Dempsey says
he wants to do is talk to the president about Libya ...
He can pull it out ... All he's got to do is hit a blooper
into the outfield ... A little blooper, for chrissakes ...
That'll clear the bases."
Camacho wings a fast ball at around 90 mph over
the outside corner. Dempsey turns and gazes at it, as if
an unexpected visitor had walked through his door.
Strike 1 called.
Williams shuts his eyes:
"Damn."
Strange that at 65 Williams is so caught up in the
tension of games. He made his name in more severe
competitions, representing some of the most infamous
hooligans, pols and mountebanks of his time-Joe
McCarthy, Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Costello, Sam Giancana,
Robert Vesco, Adam Clayton Powell, Bobby Baker, the
Birdman of Alcatraz, even a Russian spy named Igor
Malekh.
He does not look like the most celebrated trial law-
yer of his time in the way that, say, Robert Frost looked
like the bard of New England. Williams could easily be a
New York flatfoot or a retired club fighter with a decent
job at a brokerage house. He is a big man with a broad
belly and a shimmying jowl. When he speaks it is with
precise, fori:ial syntax but a slightly pained pitch, as if his
shoes were too tight and his breakfast coffee cold.
Camacho delivers another fast ball. Dempsey swings
the bat badly, as if he were wielding a small, leafy tree
instead of a flame-smoothed splinter of ash. He strains
and connects, but pitifully, with a ping, not a crack, and
the ball begins to rise lazily, describing in the air a grace-
Before the ball reaches its peak, Williams reaches
his; a mighty disappointment brings him to his feet. He
waits out the pop-up in the vain hope that a professional
shortstop will bobble the ball and lift an old man's heart.
No such luck. The shortstop closes his glove and the Ori-
oles lose their best chance of the day.
Williams used to own a piece of the Redskins, but it
seems that did not provide adequate occasions for agony:
"In football you only have 16 vulner-
able days for depression. In base-
ball, it's practically every day."
The buffed and blazered guests in
the owner's box are making a show of
their displeasure, wondering at great
volume if a pinch hitter would have
won the day and what the loss por-
tends about the remaining 161 games
on the schedule. Even before the
ninth inning begins-it could only be
an anticlimax-Williams is trying not
to make too much out of a few hours
of sport on an April afternoon.
"Life doesn't begin on opening day.
Baseball does," he says. "The rest of
life just goes on somehow."
After lunch Williams folds himself
into his car for the drive out to Dulles
to meet his client Marvin Davis, a bil-
lionaire Denver oil magnate. Since
Davis sold 20th Century-Fox to
Rupert Murdoch last year, he has
become "incredibly liquid," says Wil-
liams, and he needs advice in his
search for investments to shelter his
cash-a recent effort to buy CBS
failed. When the stakes are so high,
Williams and Davis do not trust the
phone lines.
Sitting in the back seat of a car with
Williams, one wonders about the awe
he inspires in so many of his clients
and colleagues. He seems to them
something far more than just an out-
standing trial lawyer; he is almost a
mysterious force of nature. "As a
young lawyer," says former colleague
Pierce O'Donnell, "being in the room
with Ed Williams was somewhat akin
to having your breath sucked out by a
tornado."
"I've always wondered," says David
Webster, another former colleague,
"how Ed Williams can make grown
men tremble. Fear is too much of an
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imposition. It's not threat or fear or
bluster or bluff. It's something engen-
dered in yourself He has special
insight into your weaknesses and
knows how to use them." At the firm,
people try to anticipate Williams'
thoughts, his moods. Tamake life eas-
ier, Williams' secretary used to keep a
"mood meter" by the elevator. When
the meter pointed to "basement," it
was time to watch out.
At the moment, Williams is in good
humor. The car pulls up to the private
jetport at Dulles. An attendant says
Davis' plane will be at least a half-hour
late. Computer trouble. Williams, who
owns an Israeli-made Westwind,
knows about such troubles; he takes a
seat in the lounge. The place is crawl-
ing with powerful acquaintances. John
and Annie Glenn are on their way
home to Ohio. The Glenns and Wil-
liams chat about planes. Minutes lat-
er, Mobil's public relations guru, Herb
Schmertz, ambles by. The two are
adversaries in the Tavoulareas-Wash-
ington Post libel case, but they, too,
talk like old friends.
"Hey Eddie, you giving an inter-
view? Maybe you want my side of the
story?"
"Freedom of speech, Herbie. Go
ahead."
They laugh. They shake hands. The
establishment does not raise its voice
in public. Williams is a long, long way
from a poor childhood in Hartford,
Conn., and he knows how to play the
Washington game, he knows the
appropriate tone at the given
moment, and he has nothing but suspi-
cion for those who do not. Williams, a
member of the Metropolitan Club, a
former treasurer of the Democratic
National Committee, a friend or
acquaintance of nearly every major
figure in Washington from Reagan on
down, long ago shed his outsider's
pugnacity. You don't get any more
inside than Ed Williams.
And there is an insider's decorum,
to observe that is no more flexible
than the Ten Commandments or the
"code" of Williams' old client, mobster
Frank Costello. An insider does not
like to be humbled or surprised. A
man of fierce loyalties, Williams likes
that loyalty returned. He appreciates
it, for example, when Edward Kenne-
dy thinks to tell him in advance of his
announcement that he will not run for
president in 1988.
Conversely, Williams did not much
care for the way Jimmy Carter
expressed his disdain for him and the
Washington establishment. He had
served on the Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board under Gerald For ; e
had no idea that his post would be ter-
minated. Carter banned the board,
sending Williams and the otner mem-
bers photocopied letters firing them,
with attached forms for unemploy-
ment compensation.
"That took some nerve," says Wil-
liams.
"If I could psychoanalyze myself, I
thought I was deeply offended by
Carter's contempt for this city and its
people-my friends. I believe he had a
deep, deep contempt for what you call
the Washington establishment, the
people I've grown up with as adults
who have been active in Democratic
politics for years and years. He shunt-
ed them aside and treated them with
an arrogance that I thought was
unparalleled."
A few years later Williams led the
movement to "open" the 1980 Demo-
cratic convention in order to unseat
Carter and promote a Henry Jackson
candidacy.
Williams' loyalties to friends such as
Buchwald and Post Executive Editor
Benjamin C. Bradlee and the attor-
neys in his firm are extreme. If he
sees that loyalty going unreciprocat-
ed, he can be inconsolable. He will
weep. He will rant. When a colleague
decided one day to go to another firm,
Williams cried that night and then
never spoke to that lawyer again.
Last year he sold his 14.7 percent
share of the Redskins to Jack Kent
Cooke for an estimated $8 million to
$10 million and elected to stop doing
any of Cooke's legal work. They no
longer speak, friends say. But Wil-
liams will not comment. In fact, in
many hours of interviews there were
only two subjects he met with a "ono
comment": his devotion to the Catho-
lic Church and his split with Jack Kent
Cooke. "Ed and Cooke definitely don't
like each other," says Larry King. "Ed
doesn't like Cooke's style. He's not his
kind of guy." The fact that Cooke has
often talked of bringing a major league
baseball team to Washington-and
thereby challenging the Orioles' hold
on D.C. fans-cannot have improved
the situation.
Williams' imposing presence sur-
faced at a follow-up interview in his
office. As he slowly denuded a Clark
bar, he peered up from behind his
immense desk and expressed "dis-
agreement" with something done in
the course of reporting. He said he
thought that since he was not running
for office, since he's "never been at
the public trough," it was improper for
the reporter to have called his doctor,
Jerome DeCosse.
At the end of a long day, Williams
rides home to Potomac. His first wife
Dorothy Adair died of respiratory ail-
ments in 1959 when she was 34. A'
year after her death Williams married
Agnes Neill, a top lawyer in his firm.
He has three children from his first
marriage, four from his second.
Agnes Williams has always insisted
that the children not work for their
father, and for the most part they
have not. They are computer pro-
grammers, administrators, teachers
and college students. One daughter,
Dana, left her job at a newspaper in
Hagerstown to help her father write
an "update" of his 1962 memoir, "One
Man's Freedom." Williams says that
even while one of his sons, Ned,
"would be great" at running the Ori-
oles, he has not worked him into the
piness.
His public life in politics has mainly
been a series of no-thank-yous and
might-have-beers. He considered run-
ning for the U.S. Senate in Maryland
but finally decided agaiijt it; he
turned down Gerald Ford's invita
to run t re CIA because of the havoc it
would bring on the firm; he rebuffed
LBJ's invitation to be the first mayor
of Washington,
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