If Deans transcriptions are someday made available for verification, and if it is determined that he did not omit relevant materialtall hurdles, for sure, and practices uncharacteristic for Dean, as illustrated abovewe would understand that Nixon appears to have known earlier than we thought about the fitful payments of hush money to the burglars and their attorneys, and about how the whole story was destined to end. It also did not take Dean long to discover that the Nixon administration was doing things differently. It was an actual CIA honeytrap. 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.). Deans distortion of this tape is markedand telling. 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. Please enter your email address. 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. Attorney General Richard THE DEEP STATE, MARK ONE: The Watergate Cover-up Never Ends. But this is no Veep II: White House Plumbers is as sad as it is funny. In the barbershop, he just put a bowl on my head and cut it so it was much shorter than people were used to: Oh, hes changing his image!, The same thing with the glasses. Even though he was referred to as the master manipulator, by the FBI, he pleaded guilty and his prison-sentence was reduced. If were hoping to achieve anything, its to get people interested in history in general by making it entertaining. 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. The president gave a final victory sign on the South Lawn before a helicopter spirited him away. 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. Still. Too bad. Now, 40 years later, then some, Dean will return to Capitol Hill to testify before a different Congress about a different president. Ever ambitious and ruthless, he saw Ehrlichmans investigative team, many of whom had moved over to work for Nixons campaign, as his ticket to bigger things. 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. But Watergate remains a singular chapter in American history that has continued political relevance. 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. The latter, who died in May, was the critical link in the chain-of-command for the Watergate break-in. Thats an exciting prospect, Dean famously said. He clearly wanted to engage in criminal behaviour and he would blame everybody but himself. Dean has never been more concerned about American democracy than he is now. But its much easier to write a long statement than it is a short one so I just let it flow. I dont think people are that interested in Watergate, but they are certainly interested in the questions of a deep state and questions of the weaponization of the federal government, Naftali said. 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. It definitively supports "Silent Coup's" theory that the call girl ring was the reason for the Watergate break-in. 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. All your Watergate was for nothing, Hunts wife, Dorothy (Lena Headey) tells her husband after Nixon wins re-election in a landslide in 1972. 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.. It took eight hours to read it.. Not all the Republicans I know are that way but too many of them now think authoritarianism is just dandy because it works, its efficient. But rather than publish complete verbatim transcripts of these excavated conversations, The Nixon Defense presents a highly selective prose narrative of the first half of the Watergate scandal, heavily salted with edited quotations from these new transcripts. Alexander Butterfield, who served as a deputy assistant to Nixon between 1969 and 1973, confirmed Dean's hypothesis on July 16, 1973. Anyone can read what you share. 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. 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. 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 New episodes of Gaslit air Sundays at 8 p.m. EST on Starz. The Rient memorandum did not surface until 1997. 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-up prompted him to take legal action. 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. I. It kept an enemies list. What's more, he's publishing now his latest book about Watergate ("The Nixon Defense"). Theroux said he felt conflicted as he portrayed Liddy. Former White House aide John Dean is sworn in by the Senate Watergate committee chairman, Sam Ervinon, on 25 June 1973. 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. Hes Back in the Spotlight, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/politics/john-dean-watergate-facts-bio.html. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and, facing impeachment, resigned in August 1974. From sustained immersion in Deans canonthe tapes, the testimony, the books, the articles, the interviews, the lectures, the lawsuits, even the made-for-TV miniseries of Blind Ambition (1979), starring Martin Sheen, in which the alert viewer will find embedded some bizarre clues to Deans true role in Watergatethe picture that emerges is of a tragic figure who never transcended, let alone learned from, the epochal event in which he became embroiled at the age of 34, largely through his own initiatives. But Nixon was at best a peripheral figure. 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. First, he told the president everything, and then just two weeks later he went to the prosecutors and offered to testify against the President. The White House would then prepare summaries of the subpoenaed conversations for investigators, which Stennis could authenticate by listening to the tapes themselves. 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. 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. John Mitchell was charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in April 1974. 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). 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. Wonder where she ever got such an idea? 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. 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. Now, my reaction is kind of interesting. And he has used his role in Watergate to make a successful career of writing books and making speeches. The Watergate break-in and cover-up was the result of the disastrous interaction of John Dean with the CIA. Are they purely, or even chiefly, scholarly? What value this book provides is on the margins. 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. 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. The president had ordered you to go ahead immediately, and you are not to stall anymore. In factand not counting the previously quoted conclusion of the WSPF that Dean exercised somewhat more discretiongetting Kalmbach into the picture than he has admittedthere were at least two other, and likely many more, overt acts that Dean committed in furtherance of the Watergate conspiracy, undertaken without informing his superiors and cagily withheld both from the prosecutors, at key junctures, and from readers today. Dean struck up a nifty deal, agreeing to serve as a key witness for the prosecution in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. 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. 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." Its not over. This panicked Dean, who met with the federal prosecutors to insist they bury Bailey, who was sent to an insane asylum. He did not go to prison, serving four months at Fort Holabird, a former Army base in Baltimore. Dean has always maintained that John Mitchell authorized the enlistment of Kalmbach. If I had been told in advance I was going to have to read it all, it would not have been 60,000 words. A 2009 post on nixontapes.org, states that Nixon's White House Counsel, John Dean, said the break-in was executed following a tip that claimed the Democrats were engaging in potentially-illegal fundraising activities: "Dean's new revelation is that the origin of the Watergate break-in was a "tip" that Nixon received about an alleged Democratic Make no mistake. 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. 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. 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. I really liked him, liked playing him, he said, adding: I dont fall in love with his politics or his ethics; I did fall in love with his spirit.. More than two decades after "Silent Coup" was published, Phil Stanford's "White House Call Girl" was published in 2013. 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. He was released on Jan. 8, 1975. 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. (Larry O'Brien, Chairman of the DNC and alleged target of the Watergate break-in. That even so angry, litigious, and dishonest a character should suffer so sad a fate should offer, to the charitable among us, some reason to feel sorry for John Dean. I didnt know much about Hunt; I was 11 when this went down.. Ever since then, Deans true role in Watergate has attracted vigorous debate. 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. This was the gang that couldnt shoot straight. 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. This is demonstrated by mounds of evidence uncovered by writers starting with Jim Hougans inSecret Agenda. But newspapers reported on June 10, Heidis lawyer, Phillip Bailey,was arrestedon unrelated prostitution charges with implications to White House employee connections. He just did some coldblooded stuff back in the day.. Mr. Trump took issue with the story on Twitter, saying on Sunday morning that Mr. McGahn cooperated with his blessing. This Hero Helped Break the Watergate Scandal Which Led to Nixon's Resignation. My testimony is what I'm going to stand on. He knew that and he was worried, maybe, I thought presidents shouldnt do things like that. Hell, the first plan that we got had been initiated by DeanThe target never came from Mitchell.. 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 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. But unknown to Dean, this wasnt any ordinary high-dollar D.C. brothel. He left the role in 1973. I can hear my frustration with this man and Im waiting for his fist to come down on the desk. 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. 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. 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. I did not know that the president had authorised the Brookings operation but I thought it was insane, whoever had authorised it, he says. 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. 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. He captivated the attention of Americans, though, with his televised testimony in June 1973 before the Senate Watergate Committee. 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. No, someone would have cracked, just as we did so easily in Watergate. 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. 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. Hunts wife later died in a plane crash, and the series nods (but only nods) to an old conspiracy theory We didnt want to Oliver Stone it, Gregory said that it might not have been an accident. 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. We didnt do anything; we werent the initiators. 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. 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. 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 may have been 6,000 at max. Thats not in any way to excuse the many stupid things Richard Nixon and his cronies did. Hunt, right, seen during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings, went to prison for his part in the break-in. 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. Is it still the riveting tale of malfeasance that it was 51 years ago? 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. Nothing was happening at the DNC. His testimony and cooperation, though, aided the downfall of Nixon, who resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. 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.. 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. 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. Investigator Len Colodny and journalist Robert Gettlin relentlessly pursued the people who brought down the president. Then as now, D.C. is a rigged town, with very different rules for Republicans as against Democrats. 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. As White House counsel, I got the title I didnt get the job, Dean says wryly. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman resign over Watergate. Consider the following: First, he tells us that Magruder, alarmed by the revived grand jury, simply developed a new version of what really happened at the Watergate, the implication being that Magruders new account was concocted from scratch. 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. Trump, a total incompetent, is bungling and botching his handling of Russiagate.. 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. publicly stated it stood behind the reporting, told the news organization Axios on Sunday. Offers may be subject to change without notice. This is the real story of Watergate. Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. 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. Then as now, D.C. is a rigged town, with very different rules for Republicans as against Democrats. In Every day would be a new decision as to what he does and doesnt turn over from the Nixon archive. Consider his account of a meeting that President Nixon held with H.R. 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. .and you can say that I was the editor and, um . Mr. Dean was White House counsel and a cover-up coordinator. 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. pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice on Oct. 19, 1973, John D. Ehrlichman's and H.R. It was Dean who had reviewed the contents of Hunts White House safe and secreted away his notebooks for later destruction. 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.). Rather than just target DNC chief Larry OBrien though, they went after the secretary of an obscure DNC official,Spencer Oliver. 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. 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. Dean made a deal where he received a reduced sentence for providing key witness testimony and pleading guilty to obstruction of justice. He served four months in prison and was disbarred from practicing law in D.C. and Virginia. Still, some of the higher-level Watergate conspirators didnt actually get a much harsher punishments than Dean. This is extremely important because the false information contained in "Blind Ambition" directly contradicts his sworn testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee. None of this appears in The Nixon Defense. Luckily talk radio and the internet came along and changed things. He pauses to tell us when others made false or myopic statements on the tapes. President Nixon was implicated as well. Nine months into the mushrooming scandal, Dean bargained for immunity and won himself a lenient prison term by delivering the sensational, if deeply flawed, Although he denies it, the evidence suggests that Deans presence at the creation necessitated an outsized presence in the cover-up. 2000- watergate.com 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. I can actually hear myself sigh at times, exasperated with the reaction Im getting. 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? 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. 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. People may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. But she had as many Republican clients as Democrats. In the ward for the criminally insane, no less. It was a barber I had never been to and it was last-minute. 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. Thats not in any way to excuse the many stupid things Richard Nixon and his cronies did. 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. Big Media never tires of repeating two enormous lies -- their versions of Joe McCarthys investigations and the Watergate Scandal. The CIA however, and the Pentagon separately, did not trust Nixon and had quietly organized their ownspy operations against him. America has never escaped Watergate either. 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. Yet elsewhere in the same deposition, Magruder unmistakably continued to implicate Dean as the author of the DNC mission. ), But in your book, you say exactly the opposite. 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. 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. But first Dean got a haircut. All these things that people are going to watch and go, Yeah, that didnt happen Gregory said. Indeed, the White House called him the cover-ups mastermind, The Times reported in June 1973. Dean was part of a gross conspiracy with John Ehrlichman, Bob Haldeman, (Attorney General) John Mitchell - and with 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.. Trump is a poster boy for authoritarianism and the authoritarian followers just fell in line. Meanwhile Alexander Butterfield, Nixons deputy chief of staff, had testified that there was a recording system in the White House. The first set of DNC bugs was placed May 28, 1972, and notes and transcripts made of conversations by Baldwin across the street in Howard Johnsons. They just absolutely did what authoritarian followers do: click their heels, salute, Yes sir!, That leaves him fearing for the future of American democracy. 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. He assembled, with Nixons permission, a White House investigative team, who other than Gordon Liddy, were actually part of the CIA spy team.
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