A Monument to Deceit: Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars

16 | Reckless Disregard

16 —————————— RECKLESS DISREGARD Westy Raises White Flag,” the New York Daily News screamed. A cartoon in the San Francisco Chronicle depicted a mad scramble for the last helicopter lifting off the U.S. Courthouse roof: “Westmoreland Declares Victory and Pulls Out,” the caption read. At Regine’s nightclub, 59th and Park, a huge celebration was held on short notice. CBS rented the place for the occasion, and over the din of disco music lawyers and network executives mingled with trial witnesses and invited guests who had been flown in from all over. There were trays of food to eat and drinks in abundance. The club was crowded with people strolling around and glad-handing one another. Bernard Gattozzi went up to Mike Wallace. “Hi, I’m Bernie Gattozzi.” “Bernie Gattozzi! Bernie Gattozzi!” Wallace exclaimed. “I don’t know how many nights I went to bed with your deposition under my pillow. I couldn’t believe what you were saying but, you know, it all turned out to be true.” “You went to bed with my deposition under your pillow?” Gattozzi asked. “Are you some kind of weirdo?” “No,” Wallace answered, “I just kept reading and re-reading it and thinking about it.” “Well, thank you,” Gattozzi said, taken aback, “It’s kind of a compliment.”1 David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Brightest, was also among the partygoers. Halberstam was, like Adams, Harvard ’55, yet the two had not known each other at college; it was only years later when Halberstam learned of his classmate’s odyssey at the CIA and beyond. “We ended up late in life at exactly the same place but got there by different paths; funny, because I never knew Sam at all,” Halberstam said. When Halberstam 278 Hiam_A MONUMENT TO DECEIT_text_Layout 1 1/28/14 9:43 AM Page 278 finally learned of Adams’s story, though, “I felt that Sam was burning with the truth.” Halberstam had followed the trial with interest and, while he was approached by Westmoreland, his sentiments were biased toward the defense and in favor of agency people such as his friend George Allen. Halberstam looked around Regine’s, however, and he saw the witnesses talking with the lawyers and realized that this had been, after all, just another lawsuit. “It was weird,” he recalled. “There were these CIA men who did this for the passion, and then there were the defense lawyers who could easily have been for the other side.” Anne Cocroft stood by Adams’s side as he graciously greeted wellwishers . “It was kind of a grotesque huge party,” she remembered, “and there were ice sculptures saying CBS and people were walking around saying ‘Congratulations’ and ‘Good job’ and this sort of thing; where actually it was dreadful because if you were to ask them ‘Who won?’ they would have said ‘CBS, or was it Westmoreland?’ It was such an unclear ending, and I think for Sam it must have been tremendously disappointing.” * By March, Anne was two months’ pregnant. She and Adams were planning a trip to Machu Picchu but Adams, having assessed the Shining Path guerrilla threat, decided that Costa Rica would be safer. During their two weeks in Costa Rica the couple traveled to the cool heights of the cloud forest, to the sultry Caribbean coastline, and to the arid Pacific shore. Adams talked little of the trial, yet the stress of that ordeal had left its mark. Now fifty-two, Adams for the first time in his life looked his age: His neatly trimmed hair (he always cut his own hair) had turned entirely gray, and he was also fast gaining weight. He was still a handsome man, though, and while walking through a Costa Rican neighborhood he caused quite a stir among a giggling group of uniformed schoolgirls. In trepidation one of them finally came up and asked in halting English, “Are you Paul Newman?” * The couple returned from Central America and to the little house in Purcellville. Space would somehow have to be found for baby when he or she arrived. “My files are 50 linear feet of paper,” Adams explained to an inquiring graduate student. “And yes, in answer to your question, they are Reckless Disregard 279 Hiam_A MONUMENT TO DECEIT_text_Layout 1 1/28/14 9:43 AM Page 279 pretty well indexed. The files include 5 feet of transcripts of the trial, 10 feet of...