That's why all that shit got in there. At the time I thought it was right and it was understandable because I knew he couldnt govern with Watergate hanging over him. Now an investment In it the man who helped bring Nixon down draws a direct line from the Watergate break-in on 17 June 1972 to the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, taking stock of a half century that has seen the media fragment, the Republican party embrace authoritarian tendencies and presidents become less accountable. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman resign over Watergate. In 1973, John Dean was the star witness in the Watergate hearings. A lawyer, he was disbarred from practicing in Washington D.C. and Virginia. None of this appears in The Nixon Defense. Frequently Dean interrupts his running narrative of the new tapes to tell us what other speakers were thinking when they spoke. I can actually hear myself sigh at times, exasperated with the reaction Im getting. I cant imagine, in a similar situation, Trump complying with a court order from the supreme court saying turn over your tapes., Dean was working for the justice department when he was recruited to the Nixon White House. Along with the Vietnam war, it marked the end of an era in which a presidents words were met with automatic trust rather than default scepticism. When the supreme court ruled against him, that was it. It may have been 6,000 at max. In my book on Watergate, published six years ago, I wrote: The tapes unmasked Nixon not as the take-charge boss of a criminal conspiracy but rather as an aging and confused politician lost in a welter of detail, unable to distinguish his Magruders from his Strachans, uncertain who knew what and when, what each player had told the grand jury, whose testimony was direct, whose hearsay. Not only do the hundreds of hours of desultory conversation recounted in The Nixon Defense confirm this; Dean himself admits it. On January 27, 1972, Dean, the White House Counsel, met with Jeb Magruder (Deputy Director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CRP and CREEP) and Mitchell (Attorney General of the United States, and soon-to-be Director of CRP), in Mitchell's office, for a presentation by G. Gordon Liddy (counsel for CRP and a former FBI agent). Mr. Dean, former White House counsel to President Richard Nixon, was a central figure in the Watergate investigation. Dean struck up a nifty deal, agreeing to serve as a key witness for the prosecution in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. He has also been called upon by the media and Congress to provide expert analysis during scandals in the Clinton and Trump administrations. First working for Ted Kennedys private eye,Carmine Bellino, then in the summer of 1973, ready to appear for George Bush, the new RNC head, to blow the lid off Watergate. But we couldnt do it. Imagine if Robert E. Lee had outlived Ulysses S. Grant by 45 years and determinedly made use of each new communications platform in that time framethe telegraph, the direct-dial telephone, radio, the talkiesto smooth out his account of Appomattox. Dean got fired from his role as the White House counsel on April 30, 1973. He was released on parole for medical reasons in January 1979. So if the soft curves and round, plump nipples offend your sense of historical propriety, just take a deep breath and think of it as documentary evidence because that's what it is. It was an actual CIA honeytrap. Dismantling decades of lies, Silent Coup tells the truth. But newspapers reported on June 10, Heidis lawyer, Phillip Bailey,was arrestedon unrelated prostitution charges with implications to White House employee connections. But we only get the HBO series with Liddy and Hunt as a Deep State Laurel and Hardy. There has been no shortage of Washington intrigue and scandal since Nixon resigned, including the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, the impeachments of presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, and the Iran-Contra arms-for hostages scandal that shadowed Ronald Reaganssecond term. Deans treatment of the tapes themselves is no less misleading. The scandal reaches the White House, as senior White House aides H.R. The idea that Nixon would have put his fate in the hands of this group is one of the great mysteries of that era.. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst also resigns, and John Dean, the White House counsel, gets fired. But at a time when a former president has been indicted on charges of funneling hush money payments to an adult film star, does Watergate still shock? What happened is, the editors got real excited, interesting wanted to make it more intriguing. Case in point: Deans approving responses to Nixons full-throated suggestions, in an Oval Office meeting in September 1972 when the cover-up was succeeding, that the White House should use the second term to target the presidents enemies more aggressively. Liddy also went to prison, in Danbury, Conn. (The reporter who wrote this story also covered his release in 1977; he is in the background over Liddys left shoulder.). But this is not your fathers All the Presidents Men, as Rich put it. document.getElementById("year").innerHTML = date; | Terms and Conditions, "The Colodny Collection", is the largest private collection of Watergate and Nixon related materials, including exclusive interviews with almost all the key players in the Watergate scandal. Distractify is a registered trademark. A new HBO slapstick tragedy mostly avoids the Oval Office in favor of the men who actually executed the infamous burglary that brought down a president. By 2009, the New York Times was acknowledging the existence of rival visions of Dean: He was either a flawed but ultimately courageous man reluctantly sucked into the scandal or a primary architect of the cover-up who saved himself by deflecting guilt. In fact, numerous scholars, myself included, have argued that the great mass of evidence that emerged after 1974 shows that Dean was motivated to assume his central role in the Watergate cover-up not because he suffered from blind ambition (the title of his 1976 memoir) but because he wanted to conceal his role in authorizing the ill-fated break-in and wiretapping operation at Democratic National Committee headquarters. So why dramatize a small slice of a historical event people no longer seem all that interested in? Dustin Hoffman, left, and Robert Redford portrayed the Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in All the Presidents Men, the 1976 film based on the reporters book. He called inthe two [campaign] lawyers, yesterday, and said: Heres the situation. Although he denies it, the evidence suggests that Deans presence at the creation necessitated an outsized presence in the cover-up. Thats an exciting prospect, Dean famously said. I had done an interview with Walter Cronkite and my hair was curling over my shoulders. April 27, 2023, 5:00 a.m. Starz's 'Shining Vale' Tells the Strange Tale of a Writer Will There Be a Season 2? And if all else fails, they can always call you crazy-which is what happened to a young lawyer named Phillip Bailley, one of the principal witnesses to this roundly ignored bit of American history. Mr. Dean sat at a table in a tan suit and signature horn rim glasses, his wife, Maureen, behind him and told the senators that Nixon was directly involved in the Watergate cover-up. ~ Len Colodny, Pull up the searchable PDF of Chapter 6, "The President's Private Eye" from "Silent Coup". Five men had been arrested in the bungled operation to bug and steal documents from the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex a dirty tricks operation aimed at sinking would-be challengers to Nixon in that years presidential election. More importantly, though, the photo should lend some flesh and blood substance to the life of a woman whose ghost has hovered over the Watergate saga for years now. WebJohn Dean served as the White House Counsel for former president, Richard Nixon and is best-known for his deep-seated association in the events leading up to the Watergate crimes and the ensuing, Watergate scandal. And he occasionally works to explain away uncomfortable moments on the tapes where his own conduct, stubbornly resistant to his deep massage of the record, interferes with his long quest for rehabilitation. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and, facing impeachment, resigned in August 1974. Watergate meets "Veep" in "White House Plumbers," an at-times-surreal HBO limited series that occasionally feels a little too over the top, mostly because the real-life characters actually were. When President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a full pardon in September 1974, Bernstein exclaimed to Woodward: Youre not gonna believe it. McCord dragged out the operation and left so many clues it was impossible the burglars would not be caught. First and foremost, it was a great story with larger-than-life characters and astonishing twists and turns, Gregory said. He has now clarified his memory and figures that hes got tohes now got toif theyre going to haul everybody up [to the grand jury], hes got to clean himself up, too. It would have consumed his presidency but so I understood it, but in the long run it codified the memo that was prepared then re-prepared during the Clinton presidency, that a sitting president cant be indicted. But first Dean got a haircut. In reality, Haldeman told the president that Magruder had clarified his memory.. The president had ordered you to go ahead immediately, and you are not to stall anymore. Case in point: Dean repeats his longstanding claim that Haldeman or Ehrlichman, Nixons two closest White House aides, either instructed or approved my every move in Watergate. Therell be no end to it and Nixon has got to get out in front of it and we all have got to stand up and account for the mistakes weve made., Dean went to see Nixon in an effort to convince him that the cover-up would destroy his presidency. The Watergate Scandal is so deeply embedded in the psyches of Americans that anytime something remotely Magruder came back to Liddy, claiming it was approved. But Nixon was at best a peripheral figure. Needless to say, this is not part of the Watergate story that has come down to us over the decades. He just did some coldblooded stuff back in the day.. Hunt and Liddy are true believers, serving their president and, in their view, protecting the country from Communism and the political turmoil of the era. Wary that he would be turned into a scapegoat, Dean began cooperating with Senate investigators. Robert Maheu, one-time Howard Hughes executive and the real-life inspiration for Jim Phelps of Mission Impossible, would often set these up for the agency during his time there. Magruder insisted the team go back in. Then as now, D.C. is a rigged town, with very different rules for Republicans as against Democrats. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. The White House would then prepare summaries of the subpoenaed conversations for investigators, which Stennis could authenticate by listening to the tapes themselves. In an interview in The Times last year, Mr. Dean said he had warned his White House peers at the time: The jig is up. He set his private investigators looking intoXaviera Hollander'sblack book. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell the trio the Richard Nixon Foundation describes as the architects of the Watergate break-in served 18, 18, and 19 months in prison, respectively. Dean, who happened to have his molars removed that day, cannot recall any particular emotion. I would recommend Phil Stanfords more recentWhite House Call Girl, which is an excellent introduction to the disaster, but also has a huge amount ofnew details about Heidi Rikan and the Deans. James Rosen thinksHunt, McCord and otherswere trying to infiltrate Nixons circle before the 1968 campaign even began. What happened? Dean lies to Haldeman, and lures Nixon in to Dean's cover up of the Watergate break in. A man who called himself Deep Throat was the driving force behind John D. Ehrlichman's and H.R. And he has used his role in Watergate to make a successful career of writing books and making speeches. The president gave a final victory sign on the South Lawn before a helicopter spirited him away. Even the Plumbers creators acknowledge that the Watergate offenses seem quaint compared to, say, Donald Trumps effort to overturn an election that he lost by about 7 million votes. But Nixon was at best a peripheral figure. All rights reserved. Theroux said he felt conflicted as he portrayed Liddy. Are they purely, or even chiefly, scholarly? A second such act came in January 1973, when Dean destroyed a vital piece of evidence of which both Haldeman and Ehrlichman were totally unaware: the Hermes notebook that break-in planner E. Howard Hunt later described as his operational diary of the DNC mission, as well as the pop-up address book that showed all his contacts. He pauses to tell us when others made false or myopic statements on the tapes. I know, that's why I came -don't you - I wanted to be fair this is a difficult enough book to write and you don't nor -. He served his prison sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Ala., a minimum-security federal prison. It was foolish., He adds: Its only later [in March 1973] when Hunt starts extorting me personally for money that I said the same things going to happen to everybody its going to follow us the rest of our lives. Season 1, Episodes 6 and 7 of Gaslit capture the testimonies Martha, John Dean (an attorney who served as the White House counsel between 1970 and 1973), and others gave in front of the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee in 1973. We were polarised during Watergate but not to the degree we are today., Dean will be watching this weeks January 6 hearings on Capitol Hill intently but reckons that Republicans, at least, face less accountability than they once did. A man who called himself Deep Throat was the driving force behind breaking the Watergate Scandal. Please enter your email address. (For instance, he had supervised payments of hush money to the Watergate burglars.) The Watergate break-in and cover-up was the result of the disastrous interaction of John Dean with the CIA. Hunt, defeated and incarcerated for his role in Watergate, learns that Nixonhas resignedby overhearing two fellow inmates talking as he is folding T-shirts in a prison laundry. At first the incident seemed comically inept and inconsequential but, when it emerged in court that the lead burglar, James McCord, had worked for the CIA, journalists such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post sprang into action. All your Watergate was for nothing, Hunts wife, Dorothy (Lena Headey) tells her husband after Nixon wins re-election in a landslide in 1972. Youre to get it done. And that Magruder has chosen to say he believes [that] to be the actual fact now, and he told these two lawyers this. And what motives are driving this project? He was convicted and sentenced to two and a half to eight years in prison in 1975, which commenced on June 22, 1977. The burglary was bungled by McCord, who kept disappearing that night to confer with his employee, the disgraced former FBI man,Lou Russell. What Magruder had to say in March 1973 about the origins of the DNC operation was of critical interest to the president. I took him through every problem he had and, to my amazement, he had an answer for everything I thought was a problem. But its much easier to write a long statement than it is a short one so I just let it flow. For one thing, there were four attempted break-ins at the Watergate, including two unsuccessful dry-runs and a return visit to repair a failed bug. I had just gotten married and I said, Holy cow, were in trouble! So I decided then Ive got to make the cover-up work and thats when I dove in with both feet. White House Plumbers, premiering Monday, recreates the events that riveted a nation and upended American politics, focusing not on the usual characters no Nixon, Woodward or Bernstein on the screen here but on the men behind the crime. He assembled, with Nixons permission, a White House investigative team, who other than Gordon Liddy, were actually part of the CIA spy team. .and you can say that I was the editor and, um . But he soon discovered that John Ehrlichman would remain the presidents top legal adviser. Meanwhile Alexander Butterfield, Nixons deputy chief of staff, had testified that there was a recording system in the White House. Explore the scintillating May 2023 issue of Commentary. one issue was the Larry O'Brien, to which you passed over as being a peripheral issue to your office. This assertion is offered in support of Deans complaint that Nixon and his men were bent on elevating me from a message-carrier to the mastermind of the cover-up once Dean had turned on them. Late in life, he continues to try to reviseWatergate history in his own favor. In reality, Haldeman was quoting Dean. Theres just no choice. Ever since then, Deans true role in Watergate has attracted vigorous debate. At those meetings, Dean pleaded in vain for the agency to supply hush money to the Watergate burglars. While The Nixon Defense is chiefly a vehicle for introducing snippets of new transcriptions by Dean and his researchers, the book also reprises some familiar tapesunless they further inculpate Dean. If you experience technical problems, please write to, Secret Agenda. John Dean on Capitol Hill on 10 June 2019. Mitchell was the first (and only) U.S. Attorney General to end up in jail. Sadly, he died mysteriously before Bushs scheduled news conference. I was never worried about the country and the government during Watergate but from the day Trump was nominated, I had a knot in my stomach and, until he left, I never got rid of it, Dean, 83, tells the Guardian via Zoom from a Washington hotel. In a February 6, 1974, memorandum, WSPF lawyer Peter F. Rient identified 20 instances in which Deans testimony before the Senate diverged materially from what was on the tapes. Dean needed government employment because he was fired from his law firm a few years earlier for betraying client information. Then as now, D.C. is a rigged town, with very different rules for Republicans as against Democrats. Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. And make a career of Watergate he did. Despite its star power, that show failed to make much of a ripple in ratings or awards, earning four technical Emmy nominations and no wins. There, he accused the ghostwriter of Blind Ambition, the future Pulitzer Prizewinner Taylor Branch, of having decided in the case of one critical passageat odds with Deans Senate testimonyto absolutely make it up out of whole cloth., Q: As I recall your testimony, Mr. Dean, when asked about particular passages in Blind Ambition, you have explained them in various ways, as either pure Taylor Branch, out of whole cloth, conjecture, speculation, writers language, reconstruction for the purpose of speculation, brush strokes beyond testimony..
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