Of the Washington Post, he sneers, Much of their information was wrong; and he accuses the celebrated Judge John J. Sirica, who presided at both major Watergate trials, of acting as both prosecutor and judge and of practicing judicial extortion with his heavy sentencing. Attorney General Richard He was released on parole for medical reasons in January 1979. Is it still the riveting tale of malfeasance that it was 51 years ago? The sixth of Deans books about the Nixon presidency, and his fifth about Watergate, The Nixon Defense offers a day-by-day account of the scandal over the course of 13 months, from the arrests of June 1972 through the dismantlement of Nixons taping system in July 1973. What value this book provides is on the margins. Starz's 'Shining Vale' Tells the Strange Tale of a Writer Will There Be a Season 2? You can just write completely straight dialogue and let it sit there, and it will be funny., White House Plumbers Revisits the Fringes of Watergate, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/arts/television/white-house-plumbers-hbo-watergate.html. The HBO series wont tell you any of this, but its easy enough to find out. 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. Hes Back in the Spotlight, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/politics/john-dean-watergate-facts-bio.html. .and you can say that I was the editor and, um . 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. Dean has always maintained that John Mitchell authorized the enlistment of Kalmbach. Watergate This is demonstrated by mounds of evidence uncovered by writers starting with Jim Hougans inSecret Agenda. Big Media never tires of repeating two enormous lies -- their versions of Joe McCarthys investigations and the Watergate Scandal. White House Plumbers Revisits the Fringes of Watergate . This led to years of research, immersing himself in the tapes and making peace with the subject. Dean was part of a gross conspiracy with John Ehrlichman, Bob Haldeman, (Attorney General) John Mitchell - and with Frequently Dean interrupts his running narrative of the new tapes to tell us what other speakers were thinking when they spoke. He was one of the first officials in the Nixon administration to speak out. We didnt do anything; we werent the initiators. He did not go to prison, serving four months at Fort Holabird, a former Army base in Baltimore. Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities Did John Dean go to jail after Watergate? In the ward for the criminally insane, no less. 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. All Rights Reserved. If you thought it through now, what would you sayto a direct question, Who told you to go back in [to the DNC]?, Magruders answer: It had to be either Dean or Strachan and probably, in this case, more likely Dean, becauseI wouldnt have [issued the order to Liddy] probably, even if Strachan had told meI would have checked with Dean. Six months later, Magruder went further and claimed that Mitchell, who had been his boss at the Committee to Reelect the President, had played no role in Operation GEMSTONE: All Mitchell did was just what I didacquiesce to the pressure from the White House. He assembled, with Nixons permission, a White House investigative team, who other than Gordon Liddy, were actually part of the CIA spy team. President Nixon was implicated as well. Weekend Edition revisits The Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974. 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. Watergate Deans distortion of this tape is markedand telling. 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. Start your risk free trial with unlimited access. As Dean quotes Ehrlichman saying of him in April 1973: He has an almost unlimited capacity to dredge up anecdotes from a dim and murky past, and were just going to have to handle it one by one. And so we are. But newspapers reported on June 10, Heidis lawyer, Phillip Bailey,was arrestedon unrelated prostitution charges with implications to White House employee connections. Second, Dean tells us, with studied vagueness, that Magruders new version of what really happened at the Watergate was that the DNC mission, as Dean summarizes, had been cooked up at the White House. In reality, Haldeman had been far more specific: He said Magruder was now charging 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. Why was the second half of Haldemans sentencethe part about the origin of the Watergate break-in, where Magruder identified Dean as the one who set it up and got the planning worked outdeleted from Deans summary? John Wesley Dean III appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973. Mr. Dean, former White House counsel to President Richard Nixon, was a central figure in the Watergate investigation. Liddy began to think he was being duped when McCord told him they somehow could not record the telephone calls they were hearing. *** 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". 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. Its very lucky that the system worked as it was designed., He continues: Its very hard to look at Watergate without looking through the lens of Trump where it didnt work, or hasnt yet. It is also only fair to point out that virtually all the more conventional Watergate histories-but especially the more-or-less official version as propounded by the Washington Post-dismiss it out of hand as dangerous "revisionist" history. He just did some coldblooded stuff back in the day.. 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 and Liddy are true believers, serving their president and, in their view, protecting the country from Communism and the political turmoil of the era. Starring Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, and Dan Stevens in the lead roles, Gaslit on Starz offers a glimpse into the extraordinary life of Martha Mitchell, the socialite who was kidnapped in an attempt to stop her from breaking the news about the Watergate break-in. Perhaps people would learn from history if it were served up as a cheeseburger instead of an undressed arugula salad., White House Plumbers is a descendant of another HBO Washington series: the caustic comedy Veep. Huyck and Gregory were mainstays of that satires writers room and Mandel was a showrunner. 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.. Look Back at John Dean's Testimony It was frankly too good a title at 31 years of age to pass up, although I knew I would be doing the grunt work.. In a February 1990 interview, he was asked about the fateful moment when he ordered G. Gordon Liddy to re-enter the DNCs Watergate officethe ill-fated mission whose disruption by the police touched off the great scandal. The complete Watergate timeline (it took longer than you Make no mistake. The problem, of course, is that Dean is no disinterested party. My testimony is what I'm going to stand on. The Watergate break-in and cover-up was the result of the disastrous interaction of John Dean with the CIA. Haldeman related to the president the gist of a conversation that a pair of lawyers for the Nixon reelection campaign committee had had with Jeb Magruder. Liddy presented a preliminary plan f 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). 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. This is extremely important because the false information contained in "Blind Ambition" directly contradicts his sworn testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee. Haldeman in the Oval Office on the morning of March 27, 1973, when the cover-up was rapidly unraveling. Just ask Hunter Biden. 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.. 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. 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. A Look Back at John Dean's Testimony : NPR That's why all that shit got in there. At those meetings, Dean pleaded in vain for the agency to supply hush money to the Watergate burglars. Here is how Dean, employing the first-person (in utterly dreadful prose), summarizes the Nixon-Haldeman conversation in The Nixon Defense: Because [Watergate burglar James] McCord had claimed I was aware of the Watergate break-in, I would be called to the grand jury, and my testimony would not jibe with Magruders. But she had as many Republican clients as Democrats. 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. When President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a full pardon in September 1974, Bernstein exclaimed to Woodward: Youre not gonna believe it. In a taped interview for the book "Silent Coup", when Dean was confronted with the contradiction between his book and his sworn testimony, he accused his editor of making up the false material in the book. What happened? John Dean - Wikipedia Given Deans advanced age, The Nixon Defense should mark his final stab at shaping the record of Watergate; but I wouldnt bet on it. The scandal reaches the White House, as senior White House aides H.R. Luckily talk radio and the internet came along and changed things. The story of Hunt and Liddy and their associates is the story of a federal government gone wild of a president using federal power to hurt people who disagree with him.. Plumbers is based in part on a book by Egil Bud Krogh Jr., a Nixon White House staff member who served time for authorizing the Ellsberg psychiatrist break-in.