I had worn contacts during the Cronkite interview and noticed I was just blinking madly. All these things that people are going to watch and go, Yeah, that didnt happen Gregory said. The scandal reaches the White House, as senior White House aides H.R. As it happens, there's a good deal of evidence that a call girl operation Heidi was running in 1972 triggered the infamous break-in that led to the downfall of the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. 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. The latter, who died in May, was the critical link in the chain-of-command for the Watergate break-in. Magruder came back to Liddy, claiming it was approved. The timing was bizarre. All your Watergate was for nothing, Hunts wife, Dorothy (Lena Headey) tells her husband after Nixon wins re-election in a landslide in 1972. 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. His main theme in books and speeches is to sound the alarm about presidential abuses. 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. Case in point: Deans approving responses to Nixons full-throated suggestions, in an Oval Office meeting in September 1972 when the cover-up was succeeding, that the White House should use the second term to target the presidents enemies more aggressively. President Nixon was implicated as well. 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. 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.. Given Deans advanced age, The Nixon Defense should mark his final stab at shaping the record of Watergate; but I wouldnt bet on it. 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 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. 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.. I can hear my frustration with this man and Im waiting for his fist to come down on the desk. America has never escaped Watergate either. People may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Is it true that John Dean was one of the people in the White House that was pushing for the GEMSTONE plan? he was asked. 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. (For instance, he had supervised payments of hush money to the Watergate burglars.) 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. The president had ordered you to go ahead immediately, and you are not to stall anymore. Here's what we know about him. Dean, who happened to have his molars removed that day, cannot recall any particular emotion. Is it still the riveting tale of malfeasance that it was 51 years ago? 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. 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. 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. 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. I hope that will turn him but all it does is turn him against me because now Im radioactive., What were Deans impressions of Nixon the man? Wonder where she ever got such an idea? Even today, as we go about celebrating the fortieth anniversary of that long-ago political scandal, there is a nasty little argument among Watergate scholars, not to mention all the others who have axes to grind, over what role, if any, she played. Im sad to say, you probably have a lot of people that have no idea that there was Watergate, he said. As White House counsel, I got the title I didnt get the job, Dean says wryly. And Dita Beard! 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). Along with the Vietnam war, it marked the end of an era in which a presidents words were met with automatic trust rather than default scepticism. 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. And for all the attention paid to Watergate over the decades, Plumbers finds some lesser-known corners of this story to explore. The blockbuster hearing in June was watched by millions on television. WebNixon. 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? 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. 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. 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. At those meetings, Dean pleaded in vain for the agency to supply hush money to the Watergate burglars. 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. Weekend Edition revisits Copyright 2023 Distractify. While all this was going on, Hunt and the younger Oliver even discussed putting in a bid to buy Mullen. The Watergate break-in and cover-up was the result of the disastrous interaction of John Dean with the CIA. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. But we couldnt do it. The latter gets another bad history treatment this May with HBOsWhite House Plumbers. 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. The interview was so damaging to Dean that he tried to kill it by having me criminally prosecuted; he failed. 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.. I dont recall John Dean talking to me about GEMSTONE after [February 1972], Magruder testified. 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. Nine months into the mushrooming scandal, Dean bargained for immunity and won himself a lenient prison term by delivering the sensational, if deeply flawed, He clearly wanted to engage in criminal behaviour and he would blame everybody but himself. But he soon discovered that John Ehrlichman would remain the presidents top legal adviser. Richard Nixon. 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 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. Start your risk free trial with unlimited access. 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. In the ward for the criminally insane, no less. 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. Haldeman, and domestic-policy chief John Ehrlichman. 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. Ever since then, Deans true role in Watergate has attracted vigorous debate. 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. 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.. (Larry O'Brien, Chairman of the DNC and alleged target of the Watergate break-in. 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. He was one of the first officials in the Nixon administration to speak out. . 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. LOS ANGELES On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the 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. 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. More than two decades after "Silent Coup" was published, Phil Stanford's "White House Call Girl" was published in 2013. 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.. These White House Plumbers carried out the break-in of Daniel Ellsbergs psychiatrist office, on the hunch that Ellsberg was a Soviet agent, as opposed to just being a world-class jerk. And he has used his role in Watergate to make a successful career of writing books and making speeches. pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice on Oct. 19, 1973, Mr. Trump took issue with the story on Twitter, saying on Sunday morning that Mr. McGahn cooperated with his blessing. He left the role in 1973. 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. Late in life, he continues to try to reviseWatergate history in his own favor. 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.). This is the real story of Watergate. It was an actual CIA honeytrap. 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. Dean needed government employment because he was fired from his law firm a few years earlier for betraying client information. He just did some coldblooded stuff back in the day.. 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. 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. 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. I did not know that the president had authorised the Brookings operation but I thought it was insane, whoever had authorised it, he says. Not so much Trump but now the whole Republican party has shifted into this authoritarian stance. No, someone would have cracked, just as we did so easily in Watergate. He served his prison sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Ala., a minimum-security federal prison. WebCounsel to President Nixon, John W. Dean III became famous as the first White House official to accuse the president of direct involvement in the Watergate cover-up. Thats not in any way to excuse the many stupid things Richard Nixon and his cronies did. On Saturday, Mr. Dean tweeted: Nixon, generally very competent, bungled and botched his handling of Watergate. Im living in the bubble. 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. 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. 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). 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. Mr. Dean, former White House counsel to President Richard Nixon, was a central figure in the Watergate investigation. 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. The supreme court ordered the release of a smoking gun tape confirming Deans claim that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary. But this is not your fathers All the Presidents Men, as Rich put it. Liddy presented a preliminary plan f Ever since, the gate suffix has been shorthand for scandal, and Watergate has provided fodder for movies, books, podcasts, commentaries and television. The book also contains the occasional flat-out lie. He knew that and he was worried, maybe, I thought presidents shouldnt do things like that. 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.. 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. All rights reserved. The White House would then prepare summaries of the subpoenaed conversations for investigators, which Stennis could authenticate by listening to the tapes themselves. 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. 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. My testimony is what I'm going to stand on. "White House Call Girl" tells how a call girl operation she was running at the time led to the Watergate break-in, which brought down Tricky Dick Nixon himself. I said that is just not a good look; Id better get that neck cleaned up or my mother will be all over me. Every day would be a new decision as to what he does and doesnt turn over from the Nixon archive. John Wesley Dean III appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973. In this, there are no jokes., The situation is organically absurd, he continued. It turned out that the secretary, Ida Wells, was the call-girl arranger. James Rosen thinksHunt, McCord and otherswere trying to infiltrate Nixons circle before the 1968 campaign even began. It kept an enemies list. 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. 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. Rather than just target DNC chief Larry OBrien though, they went after the secretary of an obscure DNC official,Spencer Oliver. Hunt, right, seen during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings, went to prison for his part in the break-in. Mitchell and his wife, Martha, opted for separation in September 1973 months after Martha gave a testimony to the U. S. Senate Watergate Committee. 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. Its become a fact of life.. If were hoping to achieve anything, its to get people interested in history in general by making it entertaining. James Rosen is an investigative reporter for the Sinclair Broadcast Group in Washington and the author of, among other books. 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. Please enter your email address. When Ehrlichman moved on,John Deangot to be White House counsel, thanks to his connections to the Goldwater family. 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. Although he denies it, the evidence suggests that Deans presence at the creation necessitated an outsized presence in the cover-up. Dean has always maintained that John Mitchell authorized the enlistment of Kalmbach. He called inthe two [campaign] lawyers, yesterday, and said: Heres the situation. 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. This Hero Helped Break the Watergate Scandal Which Led to Nixon's Resignation. 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. 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.. Magruder insisted the team go back in. It also did not take Dean long to discover that the Nixon administration was doing things differently. 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. Dean got fired from his role as the White House counsel on April 30, 1973. But first Dean got a haircut. 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. He has spent most of his career writing books about the Nixon administration. 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. Further, he attacked The Times over the article, saying the news organization had falsely implied Mr. McGahn was a John Dean type RAT. (The Times publicly stated it stood behind the reporting.). A man who called himself Deep Throat was the driving force behind breaking the Watergate Scandal. 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). The Times also reported that Mr. McGahn told people he was determined to avoid the fate of Mr. Dean, former White House counsel for President Richard Nixon. 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. Dean was out of the country on the day of the Watergate break-in but instantly guessed who was behind it. Thats an exciting prospect, Dean famously said. 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. 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. 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. 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. 2000- watergate.com Frequently Dean interrupts his running narrative of the new tapes to tell us what other speakers were thinking when they spoke. John Dean on Capitol Hill on 10 June 2019. This led to years of research, immersing himself in the tapes and making peace with the subject. 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. 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. Indeed, Hunt and Liddy are portrayed as being slightly pathetic, but also sympathetic, if in a bumbling kind of way. 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 Still. In the series, John Dean ends up in jail which is exactly what happened in real life. THE DEEP STATE, MARK ONE: The Watergate Cover-up Never Ends. 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. John Dean testifying for the second day before the Senate Watergate Committee. He said he was sure that President Nixon not only knew about the Watergate cover-up but also helped try to keep the scandal quiet. President Richard Nixon might have gotten away with it if it weren't for John Dean. Okay? He has written several books, including two about Watergate, and teaches a Watergate-related course for lawyers. Dean has never been more concerned about American democracy than he is now. Make no mistake. Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA. John Mitchell was charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in April 1974. 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. Yet elsewhere in the same deposition, Magruder unmistakably continued to implicate Dean as the author of the DNC mission. 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. 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. But unknown to Dean, this wasnt any ordinary high-dollar D.C. brothel. Even though he was referred to as the master manipulator, by the FBI, he pleaded guilty and his prison-sentence was reduced. 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. Dean also told prosecutors about another break-in a year earlier in Los Angeles. He was released on parole for medical reasons in January 1979. Former White House aide John Dean is sworn in by the Senate Watergate committee chairman, Sam Ervinon, on 25 June 1973. 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. He did not go to prison, serving four months at Fort Holabird, a former Army base in Baltimore. var date = new Date().getFullYear(); 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.