Books: A Convict and His Prosecutor

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THE WHOLE TRUTH by John Ehrlichman; Simon & Schuster; 444pages; $10.95 CONFESSION AND AVOIDANCE by Leon Jaworski; Anchor; 325 pages; $10.95

The green tide of Watergate-writing cash keeps rolling on. John Dean's Blind Ambition crests in a four-part TV spectacular. Judge John Sirica's refreshingly unjuridical To Set the Record Straight surges onto the bestseller lists. Now comes John Ehrlichman's second novel, The Whole Truth, a racy Washington scandal spin-off aimed at reeling in a movie or TV contract, as did his first, The Company. More modestly, Leon Jaworski offers a spare memoir, Confession and Avoidance, his second Watergate book, which seems pitched in too low a key to unlock any box-office riches.

For a former lawyer and top-level bureaucrat, Ehrlichman writes surprisingly well in The Whole Truth. His Dean-like character, walking into a televised Senate hearing, "had no awareness of moving the parts of his body. He rolled on wheels, pulled by a string." Ehrlichman dwells too much on describing the furnishings of the capital's most notable drawing rooms, apparently in search of credentials as a serious novelist. Yet he knows Washington intimately enough to lure the reader along, even into that "double bed" above the Attorney General's office, which had been "the historic scene of demanding if unofficial activities of Smythe's predecessors, their high-ranking brothers and sundry surrogates." Yes, the rumored past meshes readily with the fictional future as Ehrlichman's President Hugh Frankling faces the danger in 1981 of becoming "the third elected President in a row" to resign from office. Ehrlichman never explains how or why the second, Jimmy Carter, was pushed out.

As fast fiction with a dash of suspense, the novel is fun. But if taken as what it purports to be, a deeper look at Washington morality than Ehrlichman provided in The Company, it falls far short of being anything near, well, the whole truth.

The plot is not complex. A Hollywoodish U.S. conglomerate boss bribes President Frankling with a $250,000 campaign donation to get a White House meeting at which he warns that a leftist government in Uruguay is about to expropriate his assets there. He then suggests that the CIA could stop it. White House Aide Robin Warren is ordered by the President to see what the CIA can do. It, of course, suggests a coup. Frankling gets drunk on his yacht and tells Warren to give the CIA a green light. Alas, the Uruguayan junta learns of the caper. In the international uproar, the President denies ever knowing of such a scheme. Poor Warren then pulls a John Dean. He tells the world that Frankling is lying. Why take on the President? "I was afraid of getting caught in the lies . . . No high-mindedness or purity involved at all—just fear."

Like Nixon, President Frankling discovers that he cannot protect his lies. For one thing, a crewman on the yacht can blow his story. But unlike Nixon, this President does not wait until it is too late. He confesses on television, promising not to seek re-election but pleading to be allowed to finish his term. Clearly, Ehrlichman believes Nixon could have saved himself by making a similar confession before he became fatally entangled in his tapes. Ehrlichman probably is right.