what did john dean do in watergate
Well let me give you an example. Despite Deans claims, no evidence has surfaced to suggest that either Haldeman or Ehrlichman ordered him to meet with Walters (not once but thrice); indeed, the evidence suggests Dean was operating without their knowledge. Hes a deplorable man, he said. Francesca Orsi, HBOs head of drama series, said Plumbers is exploring the scandal from the point of view of the foot soldiers on the ground.. If I had been told in advance I was going to have to read it all, it would not have been 60,000 words. But newspapers reported on June 10, Heidis lawyer, Phillip Bailey,was arrestedon unrelated prostitution charges with implications to White House employee connections. He wasnt who I thought he was. Ex-stripper Heidi Rikan, aka Kathy Dieter (At the time Silent Coup" was written, we didnt know how she spelled it; Cathy or Kathy), was working for the mob in Washington, DC. It's how she got her start, you see-moonlighting as a nude model while still serving as a private in the U.S. Army in Washington, D.C. Not long after she arrived at her duty station in the nation's capital, she was named "Miss Fort Myer." No, someone would have cracked, just as we did so easily in Watergate. Even though he was referred to as the master manipulator, by the FBI, he pleaded guilty and his prison-sentence was reduced. Dean also told prosecutors about another break-in a year earlier in Los Angeles. What happened? 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. Now, my reaction is kind of interesting. He was convicted and sentenced to two and a half to eight years in prison in 1975, which commenced on June 22, 1977. James Rosen is an investigative reporter for the Sinclair Broadcast Group in Washington and the author of, among other books. The quality of the tapes in general is just awful but Im sitting right over one of the little microphones that had been bored into the desk, so my voice is crystal clear. There it was, the blooming early 1970s, when other Americans his age were practicing EST, enrolling in kung fu courses, listening to the Allman Brothersdoing their own thing!and he was stuck in the West Wing with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, scheming to outsmart the U.S. attorneys office and dying the death of a thousand cuts. One such act was the furtive trio of meetings Dean held, in late June 1972, with the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, General Vernon Walters. And what motives are driving this project? Mitchell was the first (and only) U.S. Attorney General to end up in jail. 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.). My testimony is what I'm going to stand on. 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? Hunt, like Liddy, is a middle-aged man struggling with a flailing career, but he is also navigating a dysfunctional marriage. I had worn contacts during the Cronkite interview and noticed I was just blinking madly. 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). 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. The president had ordered you to go ahead immediately, and you are not to stall anymore. 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. 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). 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. It definitively supports "Silent Coup's" theory that the call girl ring was the reason for the Watergate break-in. Thats an exciting prospect, Dean famously said. 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. As Dan mentioned, in the summer of 1973, former White House counsel John Dean testified as part of the Senate's investigation into the Watergate break-in. In your testimony to the Committee, which I reviewed, let's just take two issues. Finally, at the end, when its clear he is going to do nothing, I say, Well, Mr President, people are going to go to jail for this. He says, Like who? To bring it home, I say, Like me! So he knows his White House counsel thinks hes on his way to jail. April 27, 2023, 5:00 a.m. John Mitchell was charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in April 1974. I can actually hear myself sigh at times, exasperated with the reaction Im getting. This was the gang that couldnt shoot straight. 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. Dean was set free immediately after trial without ever having spent a single night in a jail cell. This is demonstrated by mounds of evidence Richard Nixon. What value this book provides is on the margins. Indeed, Hunt and Liddy are portrayed as being slightly pathetic, but also sympathetic, if in a bumbling kind of way. Hunt, right, seen during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings, went to prison for his part in the break-in. WebJune 25, 1973: White House counsel John Dean recounts his meetings with President Nixon to the Senate Watergate Committee: I began by telling the President that there 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. 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. 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. This Hero Helped Break the Watergate Scandal Which Led to Nixon's Resignation. He has spent most of his career writing books about the Nixon administration. None of this appears in The Nixon Defense. What's more, he's publishing now his latest book about Watergate ("The Nixon Defense"). Like Nixon in his claustrophobic Oval Office, rehashing the same suppositions and evasions for hours at a time, to no discernible benefit, Dean continues to wallow in Watergate. These are the Plumbers, led by E. Howard Hunt, the ex-C. When the supreme court ruled against him, that was it. Dean was convicted of obstruction of justice and served four months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. He recounted his role in Watergate in Blind Ambition (1976) and Lost Honor (1982). After his stint in prison, Dean became an investment banker. 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.. 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. But in the new book, he frames the exchange thus: While I could not play the sycophant, as [special counsel Charles] Colson did, nor could I be a brittle and nasty son of a bitch, like [associate counsel] Tom Huston, both of whom I knew Nixon admired, I could play the admiring staffer in my own way, which I did with a couple of appreciative remarks, such as Thats an exciting prospect.. All of which raises fundamental questions: Where else in The Nixon Defense does Dean play so fast and loose with his summaries of Watergate conversations? When it suits his purposes, the author halts the tape-centric narrative to second-guess virtually all the presidents men: to chide them for broaching a subject not too subtly, to gloat over their convictions and incarceration, to dismiss their recollections as invented after the fact, to boast that my analysis would later prove correctto anoint himself, in short, sole arbiter of what happened in Watergate, renderer of final verdicts. A new five-part HBO mini-series may offer answers to those questions. Frequently Dean interrupts his running narrative of the new tapes to tell us what other speakers were thinking when they spoke. I didnt feel vindication or anything of that nature. 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. He was one of the first officials in the Nixon administration to speak out. This Hero Helped Break the Watergate Scandal Which Led to Nixon's Resignation. Okay? 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.. The interview was so damaging to Dean that he tried to kill it by having me, Click on Book to View the Evidence Package, Authors Note: Dean took complete ownership of "Blind Ambition.". 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. Forty years later, the former wunderkind is still suffering that death, over and over again, doomed to an eternity of evidentiary sifting and kneading. James Rosen thinksHunt, McCord and otherswere trying to infiltrate Nixons circle before the 1968 campaign even began. Production on White House Plumbers was delayed by the Covid pandemic, which occurred amidturmoil, division and disruption in the country. In 1973, John Dean was the star witness in the Watergate hearings. At Deans urging, Magruder and Liddy came up with a massive spying plan for the 1972 election, called Gemstone, which John Mitchell, the campaign manager, soundly rejected. 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. Deans initial reaction was different. John Dean Dean went into business for a while and tried to leave Watergate behind but a 1991 book that alleged he and his wife, Maureen, masterminded the cover www.watergate.com: Home of "The COLODNY COLLECTION", John Wesley Dean III, Counsel to the President (Official White House Photo), *** Page two of the Dean section contains a lengthy interview with John Dean (01/05/1989), in which he contradicts himself on many key subjects, including his role in the famous Nixon "smoking gun tape". Trump is a poster boy for authoritarianism and the authoritarian followers just fell in line. Did John Dean go to jail after Watergate? That, of course, is the question before us. 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. Deans distortion of this tape is markedand telling. Dean himself had to intervene to squash an outlandish plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution, a thinktank in Washington where classified documents leaked by Ellsberg were being stored. 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. But, when youre near broke, its amazing how tastes can change. Im sad to say, you probably have a lot of people that have no idea that there was Watergate, he said. In his second Watergate book, Lost Honor (1982), Dean described his life after prison, and how he soon recognized his financial dependency on the scandal that put him there: [I]t became clear that my knowledge of Watergate was still my most employable assetI did not relish the prospect of continuing to make a career out of WatergateI had told myself, after leaving the White House, that I would never again work on anything I found distasteful, even if I went broke. Its over. He also famously told Nixon in a conversation taped by the president in the Oval Office, We have a cancer within, close to, the presidency, that is growing. As the Watergate investigation intensified in 1973, Mr. Dean cooperated with the Senate committee. 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. WebJohn Wesley Dean III, Counsel to the President (Official White House Photo) John Dean admits "Blind Ambition", his autobiography, contains false information Why This Is Significant: This is extremely important because the false information contained in "Blind Ambition" directly contradicts his sworn testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee. . 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. 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. Nixon is seen in these pages relentlessly going over the same terrain, struggling to master the origins, players, and arc of the scandal that would ultimately engulf him. It had approved a September 1971 burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defence analyst who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam war known as the Pentagon Papers. And he has used his role in Watergate to make a successful career of writing books and making speeches. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst also resigns, and John Dean, the White House counsel, gets fired. While Dean stated in the foreword to Blind Ambition that writing the book required him to review an enormous number of documents as well as my own testimony, he later admitted: Im going to be very honest with you. 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 -. Finally, Dean tells us that Haldeman reminded the president of Magruders skill as a liar. 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. 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. Dean was appointed as the White House counsel in 1970. Unfolding with the suspenseful pace of a le Carre spy thriller, it reveals the personal motives and secret political goals that combined to cause the Watergate break-in and destroy Richard Nixon. Liddy had an odd fixation with the Nazis; at one point we see him raising his arm in a Nazi salute. It was an actual CIA honeytrap. Anyone can read what you share. Not coincidentally, Olivers dad was a private investigator who worked atRobert Mullen & Co., a CIA front connected to Howard Hughes, and also the daytime employer of Howard Hunt. Magruder came back to Liddy, claiming it was approved. According to History, Dean was the first member of the Nixon administration to mention the taping system former U.S. President Richard Nixon had installed in the White House. Then John Dean decided to come clean. 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. Now a grandfather living in Beverly Hills, California, he quips: My speciality, I guess, is presidents in deep trouble., But if something like Watergate happened in the 2020s, he does not believe it would necessarily bring down a president again. 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. What happened is, the editors got real excited, interesting wanted to make it more intriguing. Rikan was roommates with Mo Biner, the gal Dean would later marry. HALDEMAN: And that what really happened on the Watergate was that all this planning was going on and Dean set it up and was involved in it and in getting the planning worked out, and they had the plan all set but they were not ready to really start with it, and then Strachan, Gordon Strachan, called him or went through or something and said: Haldeman has said that you cannot delay getting this operation started any longer. Dean recounts Nixon musing aloud about resigning, just throwing myself on the sword, and letting Agnew take it, in April 197316 months before the dawn of the Ford presidency. 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. Is it still the riveting tale of malfeasance that it was 51 years ago? This is the true story of betrayal at the nation's highest level. I had actually scratched my cornea. Similarly, its readers would never know that the staff lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) privately dissented from the myth that the Nixon tapes wholly corroborated Deans account of Watergate. Dean got fired from his role as the White House counsel on April 30, 1973. Maybe somebody could option Mo Biner Deans 1980s potboiler novel Washington Wives, ghostwritten withLucianne Goldberg, (D.C. really is a small town), the story of a slutty young woman from the wrong side of the tracks, who comes to Washington and is befriended by another woman who runs an international espionage/blackmail operation using a call girl ring at a famous D.C. hotel. Then as now, D.C. is a rigged town, with very different rules for Republicans as against Democrats. A: RightI thought this was a good popular and commercial explanation of the events, a good portrait and dramatization of it, butits not absolutely accurate. The White House would then prepare summaries of the subpoenaed conversations for investigators, which Stennis could authenticate by listening to the tapes themselves. 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. If you didn't know before what it takes to get into the jet set party girl business, well, now you've got a pretty good idea. He set his private investigators looking intoXaviera Hollander'sblack book. His testimony and cooperation, though, aided the downfall of Nixon, who resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. When Ehrlichman moved on,John Deangot to be White House counsel, thanks to his connections to the Goldwater family. And make a career of Watergate he did. I didnt even reread my testimony when I wrote my book., Likewise Dean never mentions the 2,000 pages of deposition testimony he gave in September 1995 and January 1996. Magruder was the youthful campaign aide who received the final order to move against the Democratic National Committee, issued to him by a more senior political figureDean himself, as I and others have argued, and as he deniesand transmitted it to G. Gordon Liddy and his squad of ex-spooks, who carried out the operation. Please enter your email address. He has also been called upon by the media and Congress to provide expert analysis during scandals in the Clinton and Trump administrations. When the U.S. assistant attorneys turned the case over to the special prosecutors, they pointedly warned them that Dean had withheld the incriminating role he played with regard to Walters.. 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. And Dean said: Dont discount Magruder as a witness; hes a hell of a convincing guy, as was evidenced by how he got off on the Sirica trial.. As White House counsel, I got the title I didnt get the job, Dean says wryly. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Deans treatment of the tapes themselves is no less misleading. (Larry O'Brien, Chairman of the DNC and alleged target of the Watergate break-in. Watergate.com has for almost two decades been operating as an informational site for Watergate and Nixon related stories and materials. The blockbuster hearing in June was watched by millions on television. Big Media never tires of repeating two enormous lies -- their versions of Joe McCarthys investigations and the Watergate Scandal.
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