Too bad. His testimony and cooperation, though, aided the downfall of Nixon, who resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. 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.. But the WSPF concluded: Mitchells logs and schedule suggestDean exercised somewhat more discretion himself to forge ahead with getting Kalmbach into the picture than he has admitted.. He did not go to prison, serving four months at Fort Holabird, a former Army base in Baltimore. But this is not your fathers All the Presidents Men, as Rich put it. Other cameos of note include the All the Presidents Men star Robert Redford (actually Redfords voice), in a scene where Woodward is heard calling Hunt. While at one point in the book he describes himself, with a straight face, as a Nixon historian, Dean was Nixons White House counsel and the admitted desk officer of the Watergate cover-up. I had worn contacts during the Cronkite interview and noticed I was just blinking madly. As White House counsel, I got the title I didnt get the job, Dean says wryly. He captivated the attention of Americans, though, with his televised testimony in June 1973 before the Senate Watergate Committee. one issue was the Larry O'Brien, to which you passed over as being a peripheral issue to your office. A pivotal figure in the Watergate investigation, John W. Dean, was dragged back into the limelight on Sunday with President Trumps defense of the current White 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. James Rosen thinksHunt, McCord and otherswere trying to infiltrate Nixons circle before the 1968 campaign even began. Naturally, Dean never trains on himself the unsparing ex post facto scrutiny he applies to his ex-colleagues. David Mandel, who directed the series, said he learned about Watergate when he was growing up from All the Presidents Men, the book and movie about how two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, broke the scandal that brought down Nixon. Lost your password? What else, in the corpus of old or new tapes, was stricken, condensed, rendered inaccurately? 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. Dean claims to have identified several hundred Watergate conversations on tape segments that only he, working with a team of students, has freshly reviewed and transcribed. What surprised me most is he spent a lot of time conspicuously trying to impress me., On one occasion, Dean recounts, Nixon told him that he was reading a book about President Johns F Kennedys ruthless streak. John D. Ehrlichman's and H.R. Nor are Deans displays of triumphalism limited to those who testified opposite him. What Magruder had to say in March 1973 about the origins of the DNC operation was of critical interest to the president. When it appeared that he might be foolish enough to blow the whistle on Heidi and her call girl ring, he was locked up at St. Elizabeth's, the District of Columbia's mental hospital. John Dean on Capitol Hill on 10 June 2019. The FBI and the CIA let it be known they would not do the black-bag jobs and political capers, they formerly did for the Kennedys and LBJ. Whatever Deans true role, there can be no doubting that today, at age 76, he is one of the last surviving major figures of the Nixon presidency and remains, now more than ever, a decidedly interested party in Watergate, with an extant version of the affair, if not several competing ones, that he wishes to see cemented in history. The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch! (Woodward has more recently praised Fords act as one of courage.) But its much easier to write a long statement than it is a short one so I just let it flow. Back then, there was no effective broadcast opposition to dispute the falsehoods. Dean has never been more concerned about American democracy than he is now. Mr. Dean told the news organization Axios on Sunday, in response to Mr. Trumps tweet, that he was actually honored to be on his enemies list as I was on Nixons when I made it there., This is a president I hold in such low esteem, he said, I would be fretting if he said something nice., Remember John Dean of Watergate Fame? On Saturday, The New York Times published an article online about Mr. McGahns extensive cooperation with the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. How many bites at the Watergate apple should one central participant be accorded? 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. I have never really worn contacts since I had that experience., Dean read from a mammoth prepared statement that took almost the entire first day. Theres just no choice. But we couldnt do it. Watergate didn't bust them up. Naively imagining that the proposal would mollify his enemies, Nixon said he would turn over the relevant recordings to Senator John C. Stennis, a conservative Democrat from Mississippi. The White House would then prepare summaries of the subpoenaed conversations for investigators, which Stennis could authenticate by listening to the tapes themselves. Finally, Dean tells us that Haldeman reminded the president of Magruders skill as a liar. Now, four decades later, John W. Dean III, a central figure in the Watergate saga, has arrogated the same authority to himself, with The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (Viking, 784 pp). Well, a post-president cant be indicted when hes pardoned.. After John Dean gave his historic 1973 testimony on the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down the Nixon White House, he wanted to move on with his life. Such is the notoriety that the -gate suffix has been applied to dozens of controversies, from Sharpiegate (Donald Trump showing a map altered using a black marker pen) to Deflategate (allegations that Tom Bradys New England Patriots used deflated footballs) to Partygate (British prime minister Boris Johnsons social gatherings that flouted Covid-19 restrictions). 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. Big Media never tires of repeating two enormous lies -- their versions of Joe McCarthys investigations and the Watergate Scandal. He set his private investigators looking intoXaviera Hollander'sblack book. Mr. Trump took issue with the story on Twitter, saying on Sunday morning that Mr. McGahn cooperated with his blessing. Dean was appointed as the White House counsel in 1970. Questioned about these statements in an August 1995 deposition, Magruder claimed he had been quoted out of context. Not so much Trump but now the whole Republican party has shifted into this authoritarian stance. Hunt, like Liddy, is a middle-aged man struggling with a flailing career, but he is also navigating a dysfunctional marriage. White House Plumbers comes roughly a year after another high-end Watergate series: Gaslit, a stylish Starz thriller that featured Sean Penn as John Mitchell, Nixons attorney general, and Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell. The Watergate Scandal is so deeply embedded in the psyches of Americans that anytime something remotely Please enter your email address. And they were prepared to break the law to do it; the series follows their clandestine effort to run a secret band of Cuban American political saboteurs at the behest of the Nixon re-election campaign. This is demonstrated by mounds of evidence Deans distortion of this tape is markedand telling. 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. What happened? Needless to say, this is not part of the Watergate story that has come down to us over the decades. In later testimony to Congress, Dean explained: I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed that the president himself would be killed by it.. The heart and soul the psyche of the show is about these two men and the way their decisions and choices they made had wider ramifications for themselves and their families, she said. Hunts team, including James McCord, ex-CIA, and Alfred Baldwin, McCords ex-FBI friend, began bugging the DNC offices. 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. It wasnt just Stenniss infirmities, of course, that rendered Nixons proposal laughable at the time; it was the suggestion that the president, by then identified as an actor in the Watergate saga, could be trusted to appoint the sole arbiter of the critical evidence in the case. On Sunday, The Times reported that Mr. Trump, who is said to be obsessed with the role Mr. Dean played as an informant during Watergate, was jolted by the idea that he did not know what Mr. McGahn had shared with the special counsels investigators. Ive often thought he did that to impress upon me that all presidents are ruthless to a degree because Im the one who had blown up the the plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution. I was pretty much in the dark about all this stuff, Harrelson said. Then John Dean decided to come clean. April 27, 2023, 5:00 a.m. 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. He pauses to tell us when others made false or myopic statements on the tapes. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and, facing impeachment, resigned in August 1974. Well, Mussolini ran the trains on time, didnt he but at some expense., Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without Trump, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. It also did not take Dean long to discover that the Nixon administration was doing things differently. McCord dragged out the operation and left so many clues it was impossible the burglars would not be caught. WebJohn Dean admits "Blind Ambition", his autobiography, contains false information Why This Is Significant: This is extremely important because the false information contained in As part of that deal, Mr. Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and was disbarred from legal practice in Virginia and the District of Columbia. Start your risk free trial with unlimited access. 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. There are, in fact, those who disagree so vehemently with this version of events that they've sued-unsuccessfully, as it's turned out-to prevent it from being discussed in print. He has also been called upon by the media and Congress to provide expert analysis during scandals in the Clinton and Trump administrations. Taylor Branch denied making up anything in Blind Ambition. In 1973, John Dean was the star witness in the Watergate hearings. 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. Hunt and Liddy are well-known to historians and Watergate buffs, but they are compared to a Dean, Haldeman or Mitchell secondary players in a scandal that toppled a presidency and whose particulars have faded from the popular memory over five decades. Kathleen Turner plays the International Telephone and Telegraph lobbyist who, in this telling, is spirited out of Washington at the orders of the Nixon White House so she wouldnt give damaging testimony about an alleged quid pro quo involving an I.T.T. John Mitchell was charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in April 1974. Although he denies it, the evidence suggests that Deans presence at the creation necessitated an outsized presence in the cover-up. First, he told the president everything, and then just two weeks later he went to the prosecutors and offered to testify against the President. Indeed, the original Watergate prosecutors, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert, concluded that Dean stood at the center of the criminality. He vehemently denies having ordered the Watergate operation and has spent much of the last two decades litigating or threatening to litigate, without success, against historians and others who have so argued. John Wesley Dean III appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973. Anyone can read what you share. The Watergate break-in and cover-up was the result of the disastrous interaction of John Dean with the CIA. 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. He was trying to do a little tutorial on me.. I didnt feel vindication or anything of that nature. Dean also told prosecutors about another break-in a year earlier in Los Angeles. 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. 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? 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. When the supreme court ruled against him, that was it. The Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974. WebNixon repeatedly declared that he knew nothing about the Watergate burglary, but former White House counsel John Dean III testified that the president had approved plans to cover up White House connections to the break-in. I had done an interview with Walter Cronkite and my hair was curling over my shoulders. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. We are far more polarised today than we were. I had actually scratched my cornea. Theroux said he felt conflicted as he portrayed Liddy. Eager to cover his tracks, Dean then had Magruder do the June 17 DNC break-in to see what Oliver and the Democrats might know about him. In October 1973, with impeachment proceedings looming as a result of the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon proposed a compromise to the courts and to members of Congress, who were demanding access to the secret tapes of Nixons conversations with aides. That was an era in which people could still be shocked that this kind of behavior went on in politics, said Peter Huyck, who created the show with Alex Gregory. 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. The existence of his taping system had been publicly disclosed in July and was swiftly triggering a constitutional clash over executive privilege and its limits in the context of a pending criminal investigation. All your Watergate was for nothing, Hunts wife, Dorothy (Lena Headey) tells her husband after Nixon wins re-election in a landslide in 1972. Deans initial reaction was different. A lawyer, he was disbarred from practicing in Washington D.C. and Virginia. Distractify is a registered trademark. 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. The inaugural mission by the Plumbers was a June 1971 break-in at the Beverly Hills office of Daniel Ellsbergs psychiatrist, in a fruitless search for information to discredit Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. 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. The president gave a final victory sign on the South Lawn before a helicopter spirited him away. The photographer who covered the event asked her if she'd like to do something a little more interesting, and as so often happens, one thing led to another. But she had as many Republican clients as Democrats. And while that may not be a typical career path for an aspiring photographer's model-or stripper, which was Heidi's next big career move-you can see how it might have worked for her. (For instance, he had supervised payments of hush money to the Watergate burglars.) Now here is the relevant excerpt of the same conversation as published by Stanley Kutler, the (left-wing) University of Wisconsin professor who edited the last compilation of Watergate transcripts, widely used by researchers, entitled Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (1997): HALDEMAN: Magruder has apparently told Dean that hes thought this whole thing through and hes nowno, he didnt tell Dean. The biggest political scandal of the 20th century, and the only one to cause a presidential resignation, has become a byword for lost innocence and lost faith in institutions. And what motives are driving this project? And in case you haven't figured out the game yet, you might want to take a peek at one of her earlier nude photos, circa 1957 or 58-which is to say, roughly fifteen years before she either did or didn't get involved in the Watergate affair. But unknown to Dean, this wasnt any ordinary high-dollar D.C. brothel. WebIn a 245-page statement, which Dean read on June 25 to the special Senate committee investigating Watergate, he implicated Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman in acts of perjury and obstructing justice. But John and Maureen Dean are married. Literally you just said, "Ya know, we didn't have much to do with Larry O'Brien." But it was not until after the president won re-election in November 1972 that Dean felt himself sucked into the cover-up, arranging hush money for the Watergate burglars. Its not over. The interview was so damaging to Dean that he tried to kill it by having me criminally prosecuted; he failed. If I had been told in advance I was going to have to read it all, it would not have been 60,000 words. Gradually they and others would trace a complex web that connected operatives known as the plumbers to the Committee to Re-elect the President (Creep) to senior White House officials and, finally, to Nixon himself. Hes Back in the Spotlight, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/politics/john-dean-watergate-facts-bio.html. Wed been at battle. Then he looked into the operationHeidi Rikanwas running right there next to the Watergate at the Columbia Plaza. His main theme in books and speeches is to sound the alarm about presidential abuses. Thats not in any way to excuse the many stupid things Richard Nixon and his cronies did. Frequently Dean interrupts his running narrative of the new tapes to tell us what other speakers were thinking when they spoke.
