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. Well, at least you can't say you haven't been warned. New episodes of Gaslit air Sundays at 8 p.m. EST on Starz. He captivated the attention of Americans, though, with his televised testimony in June 1973 before the Senate Watergate Committee. Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. No, someone would have cracked, just as we did so easily in Watergate. In reality, Haldeman was quoting Dean. 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. Wed been at battle. Mitchell was the first (and only) U.S. Attorney General to end up in jail. I know, that's why I came -don't you - I wanted to be fair this is a difficult enough book to write and you don't nor -. All these things that people are going to watch and go, Yeah, that didnt happen Gregory said. It kept an enemies list. Distractify is a registered trademark. Dismantling decades of lies, Silent Coup tells the truth. At those meetings, Dean pleaded in vain for the agency to supply hush money to the Watergate burglars. By 2009, the New York Times was acknowledging the existence of rival visions of Dean: He was either a flawed but ultimately courageous man reluctantly sucked into the scandal or a primary architect of the cover-up who saved himself by deflecting guilt. In fact, numerous scholars, myself included, have argued that the great mass of evidence that emerged after 1974 shows that Dean was motivated to assume his central role in the Watergate cover-up not because he suffered from blind ambition (the title of his 1976 memoir) but because he wanted to conceal his role in authorizing the ill-fated break-in and wiretapping operation at Democratic National Committee headquarters. Its a wonder that this group wasnt caught sooner, said Timothy Naftali, an historian and the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. The interview was so damaging to Dean that he tried to kill it by having me criminally prosecuted; he failed. He wants them now. But we only get the HBO series with Liddy and Hunt as a Deep State Laurel and Hardy. In the ward for the criminally insane, no less. But first Dean got a haircut. 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. The first to crack was John Dean. The latter, who died in May, was the critical link in the chain-of-command for the Watergate break-in. 2000- watergate.com In the series, John Dean ends up in jail which is exactly what happened in real life. It was Dean who had reviewed the contents of Hunts White House safe and secreted away his notebooks for later destruction. He wasnt who I thought he was. What happened is, the editors got real excited, interesting wanted to make it more intriguing. 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. But it was not until after the president won re-election in November 1972 that Dean felt himself sucked into the cover-up, arranging hush money for the Watergate burglars. 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.). He served his prison sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Ala., a minimum-security federal prison. WebNixon. I said that is just not a good look; Id better get that neck cleaned up or my mother will be all over me. April 27, 2023, 5:00 a.m. Meanwhile Alexander Butterfield, Nixons deputy chief of staff, had testified that there was a recording system in the White House. David Mandel, who directed the series, said he learned about Watergate when he was growing up from All the Presidents Men, the book and movie about how two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, broke the scandal that brought down Nixon. Enter White House Counsel, John Ehrlichman, Air Force hero of WWII and wealthy Seattle zoning lawyer, but a man totally ill-suited for the sensitive post he was given. 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. The president gave a final victory sign on the South Lawn before a helicopter spirited him away. I can hear my frustration with this man and Im waiting for his fist to come down on the desk. 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 What Magruder had to say in March 1973 about the origins of the DNC operation was of critical interest to the president. 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. Nine months into the mushrooming scandal, Dean bargained for immunity and won himself a lenient prison term by delivering the sensational, if deeply flawed, Dean was no bystander, no Brutus seduced by power, but a Cassius, a lead actor in the crime. I had worn contacts during the Cronkite interview and noticed I was just blinking madly. 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. While his footnotes frequently cite Blind Ambition, he never mentions that he has elsewhere admitted he never read his own book cover to cover prior to publication. 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. At the time I thought it was right and it was understandable because I knew he couldnt govern with Watergate hanging over him. But he soon discovered that John Ehrlichman would remain the presidents top legal adviser. THE DEEP STATE, MARK ONE: The Watergate Cover-up Never Ends. It turned out that the secretary, Ida Wells, was the call-girl arranger. 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.. When Ehrlichman moved on,John Deangot to be White House counsel, thanks to his connections to the Goldwater family. 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. Nothing was happening at the DNC. The latter gets another bad history treatment this May with HBOsWhite House Plumbers. On Saturday, Mr. Dean tweeted: Nixon, generally very competent, bungled and botched his handling of Watergate. 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. 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. pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice on Oct. 19, 1973, 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). He attacks other peoples Watergate memoirs when they are seemingly contradicted by the tapes. James Rosen thinksHunt, McCord and otherswere trying to infiltrate Nixons circle before the 1968 campaign even began. This is demonstrated by mounds of evidence uncovered by writers starting with Jim Hougans inSecret Agenda. 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? Although he denies it, the evidence suggests that Deans presence at the creation necessitated an outsized presence in the cover-up. Theroux said he felt conflicted as he portrayed Liddy. 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. Mr. Dean was worried he was being set up by his former boss to take the blame for the June 1972 break-in by five men at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington. 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.. 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. 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. 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? Then as now, D.C. is a rigged town, with very different rules for Republicans as against Democrats. 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 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. Still. "Bob" Haldeman's resignations were announced the same day. That's why all that shit got in there. If were hoping to achieve anything, its to get people interested in history in general by making it entertaining. 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. 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.. Indeed, the White House called him the cover-ups mastermind, The Times reported in June 1973. Finally, at the end, when its clear he is going to do nothing, I say, Well, Mr President, people are going to go to jail for this. He says, Like who? To bring it home, I say, Like me! So he knows his White House counsel thinks hes on his way to jail. As a result, Magruder had told the committees lawyers, aware they would tell others, that he had a new version of what really happened at the Watergate. He was claiming that the plan had been cooked up at the White House, that it was triggered when [Haldeman aide] Gordon Strachan told him, Haldeman has said that you cannot delay getting this operation started any longer. 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. He has spent most of his career writing books about the Nixon administration. Deans initial reaction was different. Wonder where she ever got such an idea? But newspapers reported on June 10, Heidis lawyer, Phillip Bailey,was arrestedon unrelated prostitution charges with implications to White House employee connections. 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. Is it still the riveting tale of malfeasance that it was 51 years ago? Now here is the relevant excerpt of the same conversation as published by Stanley Kutler, the (left-wing) University of Wisconsin professor who edited the last compilation of Watergate transcripts, widely used by researchers, entitled Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (1997): HALDEMAN: Magruder has apparently told Dean that hes thought this whole thing through and hes nowno, he didnt tell Dean. The White House would then prepare summaries of the subpoenaed conversations for investigators, which Stennis could authenticate by listening to the tapes themselves. Now, 40 years later, then some, Dean will return to Capitol Hill to testify before a different Congress about a different president. So this means that John Dean either lied under oath or is lying to his readers in his autobiography. Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.