I had actually scratched my cornea. Well, at least you can't say you haven't been warned. 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? 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 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 Ever since then, Deans true role in Watergate has attracted vigorous debate. 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. Ever since, the gate suffix has been shorthand for scandal, and Watergate has provided fodder for movies, books, podcasts, commentaries and television. Frequently Dean interrupts his running narrative of the new tapes to tell us what other speakers were thinking when they spoke. A man who called himself Deep Throat was the driving force behind breaking the Watergate Scandal. About to celebrate their 16th anniversary. Nixon aide John Dean testifies at 1973 Watergate I dont recall John Dean talking to me about GEMSTONE after [February 1972], Magruder testified. Dean has always maintained that John Mitchell authorized the enlistment of Kalmbach. Corporationcampaign contribution to the Republican National Committee. First, he told the president everything, and then just two weeks later he went to the prosecutors and offered to testify against the President. John Wesley Dean III appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973. Youre to get it done. Haldeman reminded Nixon that Magruder was a good liar: Hes a hell of a convincing guy, as evidenced by how he got off on the Sirica trial.. A new five-part HBO mini-series may offer answers to those questions. But she had as many Republican clients as Democrats. White House Plumbers is centered primarily on two men who planned the Watergate break-in, played by Woody Harrelson, far right, and Justin Theroux, fourth from right. Indeed, the White House called him the cover-ups mastermind, The Times reported in June 1973. That, of course, is the question before us. I can actually hear myself sigh at times, exasperated with the reaction Im getting. 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.. Though Magruder did offer several different versions of events, this claim endured beyond the spring of 1973, long past the point when there was any need for Magruder to clean himself up for the grand jury. All Rights Reserved. Finally, Dean tells us that Haldeman reminded the president of Magruders skill as a liar. Dean was no bystander, no Brutus seduced by power, but a Cassius, a lead actor in the crime. What value this book provides is on the margins. Do In doing so, he was repeating the story he had told the Senate in 1973, where he had testified that Mitchell was the ultimate authority behind the break-in. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and, facing impeachment, resigned in August 1974. Are they purely, or even chiefly, scholarly? My testimony is what I'm going to stand on. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. "Bob" Haldeman's resignations were announced the same day. All rights reserved. It was a barber I had never been to and it was last-minute. 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.. It took eight hours to read it.. Start your risk free trial with unlimited access. 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. But Nixon was at best a peripheral figure. Well let me give you an example. His testimony and cooperation, though, aided the downfall of Nixon, who resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Later that year Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, was disbarred and served four months; he was in the witness protection programme so never went to prison. I didnt feel vindication or anything of that nature. Nor are Deans displays of triumphalism limited to those who testified opposite him. 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". Mitchell was the first (and only) U.S. Attorney General to end up in jail. George Frampton, another WSPF lawyer, actually concluded that one key meeting Dean had described, deeply damning to Mitchell, apparently didnt take place, adding: We probably would do well simply to omit Deans testimony about this. In the same document, Frampton wrote about California attorney Herbert Kalmbach, the chief fundraiser of the hush money that was delivered to the Watergate burglars and their attorneys. Is it, in fact, truthful that you and John Dean had prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in?. Dean struck up a nifty deal, agreeing to serve as a key witness for the prosecution in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. 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.. Hes Back in the Spotlight, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/politics/john-dean-watergate-facts-bio.html. Indeed, Hunt and Liddy are portrayed as being slightly pathetic, but also sympathetic, if in a bumbling kind of way. He recalls: [White House aide Chuck] Colson brings a recording hes made of Howard Hunt, who was one of the managers of the burglars, and Hunt wants to be paid and if he doesnt get paid, people are going to start talking. A Look Back at John Dean's Testimony : NPR Now, 40 years later, then some, Dean will return to Capitol Hill to testify before a different Congress about a different president. I can hear my frustration with this man and Im waiting for his fist to come down on the desk. Dean writes of Nixons near exhaustingpropensity for engaging in highly repetitive conversations, day after day. As the cover-up was imploding in March 1973nine months after the arrests at the DNC, and notwithstanding the hundreds of hours the president had already devoted to WatergateDean notes that Nixon even at this late date had no real idea of his exposure, possessed no accurate sense of Haldemans criminal exposure nor of anyone elses.. 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. But unknown to Dean, this wasnt any ordinary high-dollar D.C. brothel. Mr. Trump took issue with the story on Twitter, saying on Sunday morning that Mr. McGahn cooperated with his blessing. It was an actual CIA honeytrap. 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. Although he denies it, the evidence suggests that Deans presence at the creation necessitated an outsized presence in the cover-up. MAUREEN DEAN FIRE Anyone can read what you share. I and others have argued that the true motivation for these criminal acts by Dean, and for his false claim to have acted only at the direction of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, was that he was working feverishly to conceal a larger, authorial role in the original crime: the break-in and wiretapping at the DNC. But, when youre near broke, its amazing how tastes can change. It would be very different today, primarily because of Fox News, which would be mounting a fulsome defence of him. The idea that Nixon would have put his fate in the hands of this group is one of the great mysteries of that era.. 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. Now, my reaction is kind of interesting. The HBO series wont tell you any of this, but its easy enough to find out. And what motives are driving this project? Hes a deplorable man, he said. Still. This led to years of research, immersing himself in the tapes and making peace with the subject. But first Dean got a haircut. Please enter your email address. 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. McCord dragged out the operation and left so many clues it was impossible the burglars would not be caught. 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. For his part, Mr. Dean has long maintained his colleagues sought to make him a scapegoat. Too bad. Thats not in any way to excuse the many stupid things Richard Nixon and his cronies did. Dean was part of a gross conspiracy with John Ehrlichman, Bob Haldeman, (Attorney General) John Mitchell - and with Former White House aide John Dean is sworn in by the Senate Watergate committee chairman, Sam Ervinon, on 25 June 1973. John Dean 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. The White House would then prepare summaries of the subpoenaed conversations for investigators, which Stennis could authenticate by listening to the tapes themselves. He attacks other peoples Watergate memoirs when they are seemingly contradicted by the tapes. Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA, and proven in open court with a series of John Dean-Gordon Liddy lawsuits that ended in complete victory 20 years ago inWells v. Liddy. The problem of Deans self-interest recurs throughout The Nixon Defense and fatally undermines it as a work of scholarship; at more than 700 pages of text and source notes, Opus de Self-Justifio would have been the more apt title. Mr. Dean was White House counsel and a cover-up coordinator. . The series portrays G. Gordon Liddy (Theroux, left) and E. Howard Hunt (Harrelson) as devoted to their cause and somewhat pathetic. 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. 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. Alexander Butterfield, who served as a deputy assistant to Nixon between 1969 and 1973, confirmed Dean's hypothesis on July 16, 1973. This was the gang that couldnt shoot straight. President Nixon was implicated as well. I had worn contacts during the Cronkite interview and noticed I was just blinking madly. It turned out that the secretary, Ida Wells, was the call-girl arranger. 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. He wants them now. Hunt is a relatively bland character, particularly compared with Liddy, whom Mandel described as anut-ball. But Harrelson found himself fascinated by, if not terribly sympathetic to this shadowy symbol of the Watergate era. What's more, he's publishing now his latest book about Watergate ("The Nixon Defense"). Dean has never been more concerned about American democracy than he is now. This is demonstrated by mounds of evidence John Dean speaks on the 1972 Watergate break-in and why he has never been more concerned about US democracy than now, Ive never escaped Watergate, says John Dean, as once again he allows the years to melt away, the old faces to crowd in and the secret tapes to whirr in his mind. 50 years after the Watergate break-in, John Dean relives But this is not your fathers All the Presidents Men, as Rich put it. Hunt, right, seen during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings, went to prison for his part in the break-in. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. It kept an enemies list. in Watergate Theroux said he felt conflicted as he portrayed Liddy. It definitively supports "Silent Coup's" theory that the call girl ring was the reason for the Watergate break-in. Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities Trump, a total incompetent, is bungling and botching his handling of Russiagate.. Okay? Consider his account of a meeting that President Nixon held with H.R. As White House counsel, I got the title I didnt get the job, Dean says wryly. Dean lies to Haldeman, and lures Nixon in to Dean's cover up of the Watergate break in. Easily manipulating Nixons deputy campaign manager, the squishy Jeb Magruder, Dean got him to push a bugging operation into the Watergate offices of the DNC -- Heidis biggest customer contact. 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. 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 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. Dismissed by the White House press secretary as a third-rate burglary, the break-in set off a chain of events that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in August 1974. 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. Theres just no choice. Nine months into the mushrooming scandal, Dean bargained for immunity and won himself a lenient prison term by delivering the sensational, if deeply flawed, testimonybefore the klieg lights of the Senate Watergate committee (1973), the House Judiciary Committee (1974), and the trial of U.S. v. Mitchell (1974)that helped convict Nixons top former aides: former Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Chief of Staff H.R. 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 House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II. Its a slapstick tragedy in the words of Frank Rich, an executive producer for the show, and a former executive producer of Veep. (A former New York Times columnist, hes also an executive producer of Succession.). John Daniel Ehrlichman ( / rlkmn /; [1] March 20, 1925 February 14, 1999) was an American political aide who served as the White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon. The latter gets another bad history treatment this May with HBOsWhite House Plumbers. Jeb Magruder, for example, repeatedly fingered Dean as a progenitor of Operation Gemstone: the code name Gordon Liddy assigned to the DNC mission and his other covert projects. This is the real story of Watergate. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. Forty years later, the former wunderkind is still suffering that death, over and over again, doomed to an eternity of evidentiary sifting and kneading. 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. 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. Its not over. Russell, you might guess, was also the security man for Heidis Columbia Plaza brothel, and he was apparently looking to get paid by everybody on both sides. agent played by Justin Theroux. Watergate.com has for almost two decades been operating as an informational site for Watergate and Nixon related stories and materials. Dean was out of the country on the day of the Watergate break-in but instantly guessed who was behind it. 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. What else, in the corpus of old or new tapes, was stricken, condensed, rendered inaccurately? That's why all that shit got in there. 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 served his prison sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Ala., a minimum-security federal prison. The president had ordered you to go ahead immediately, and you are not to stall anymore. He then publicly turned against Nixon by testifying to the Senate Watergate committee becoming the first White House official to accuse the president of being directly involved in the cover-up. Dean needed government employment because he was fired from his law firm a few years earlier for betraying client information. Nine months into the mushrooming scandal, Dean bargained for immunity and won himself a lenient prison term by delivering the sensational, if deeply flawed, New episodes of Gaslit air Sundays at 8 p.m. EST on Starz. Although Dean has recounted this meeting many times before, this riff on it is new, and it hints at the compulsive score-settling to be found in The Nixon Defense: the delight that Dean, armed with the results of his long trawl through the National Archives, takes in belittling his former colleagues, most of them deceased. 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. 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. After all, at the time Dean summoned the deputy director to the Executive Office Building, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had already met directly with CIA Director Richard Helms, importuned him to use the agency to block the FBIs nascent Watergate investigation, and been rebuffed. 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. The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch! (Woodward has more recently praised Fords act as one of courage.) He wasnt who I thought he was, says Dean. While all this was going on, Hunt and the younger Oliver even discussed putting in a bid to buy Mullen. What happened is, the editors got real excited, interesting wanted to make it more intriguing. 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. Dismantling decades of lies, Silent Coup tells the truth. Dean was set free immediately after trial without ever having spent a single night in a jail cell. America has never escaped Watergate either. 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. It also did not take Dean long to discover that the Nixon administration was doing things differently. When President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a full pardon in September 1974, Bernstein exclaimed to Woodward: Youre not gonna believe it. Today the luxury Watergate hotels phone number ends in 1972 the year of the burglary and callers are greeted by a message that begins: Theres no need to break in, as well as recordings of President Richard Nixon. He was one of the first officials in the Nixon administration to speak out. This months 50th anniversary of the break-in is being marked by books, exhibitions, TV dramas and a four-part CNN documentary series, Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal, narrated by Dean himself. Dean has since been able to listen back to the conversation thanks to Nixons secret recording system at the White House. The Watergate break-in and cover-up was the result of the disastrous interaction of John Dean with the CIA. 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. 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. 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.. The Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974. 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. His main theme in books and speeches is to sound the alarm about presidential abuses. At the time I thought it was right and it was understandable because I knew he couldnt govern with Watergate hanging over him. 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. 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. 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.

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