Cognition, 9(1), 122. . The coverage includes testimony from James McCord and E. Howard Hunt, two of the men arrested for breaking into the Watergate complex; John Dean, White House counsel from July 1970 to April 1973, who detailed the extent of the Nixon administration's involvement in the burglary and subsequent cover-up; Chief of Staff H.R. TV NEWS : Search Captions. Borrow Broadcasts : TV Archive : Internet John Dean's Wife, Maureen Dean: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know This revised plan eventually led to attempts to eavesdrop on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., and to the Watergate scandal. Dean served as White House Counsel for President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. Howard Hunts lawyer sought assurances through Nixons Special Counsel Chuck Colson that Hunt would not spend years in prison if he pled guilty in the trial before Judge Sirica in January 1973. [13] It was alleged[who?] WATERGATE: In 1972, the underlying crime was a bungled break-in, illicit photographing of private documents and an attempt to bug the telephones and offices of the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, with plans to do likewise that same night with Nixons most likely Democratic opponent Senator George McGovern, which because of the arrests of five men at the Watergate, did not happen. I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency. Howard Hunt told me it would have exonerated Prez Nixon. I would like to address a few of the remarkable parallels I find in the Mueller Report that echo Watergate, particularly those related to obstruction of justice. [10][pageneeded]. Traduo Context Corretor Sinnimos Conjugao. [4], After graduation, Dean joined Welch & Morgan, a law firm in Washington, D.C., where he was soon accused of conflict of interest violations and fired:[2] he was alleged to have started negotiating his own private deal for a TV station broadcast license, after his firm had assigned him to complete the same task for a client. Featuring New Interviews with John Dean, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein . The books present documents, reliable sources, and official Watergate testimony by John Dean as persuasive arguments. PRESIDENT: Thats a problem. Stay up to date on new exhibits, special collections, projects, and more. Records are described at an item level and all records contain brief descriptions and subject terms. Chairman Nadler, Ranking Member Collins, the last time I appeared before your committee was July 11, 1974, during the impeachment inquiry of President Richard Nixon. Using Altemeyer's scholarly work, he contends that there is a tendency toward ethically questionable political practices when authoritarians are in power and that the current political situation is dangerously unsound because of it. . In the 1979 TV mini-series Blind Ambition, Dean was played by Martin Sheen. John Dean's memory: A case study - ScienceDirect They don't know if they're a part of a conspiracy that might unfold. [17] Dean failed to recall any conversations verbatim, and often failed to recall the gist of conversations correctly. His guilty plea to a single felony in exchange for becoming a key witness for the prosecution . MCGAHNS DILEMMA TESTIFYING BEFORE THIS COMMITTEE. VS. HALDEMAN, 559 F.2D 31 (D.C. CIR. In 2006, Dean testified before the Senate Judiciary Commit . [15], Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice before Watergate trial judge John Sirica on October 19, 1973. The complete Watergate timeline (it took longer than you realize) Cooper asked Dean, whom the FBI dubbed the "master manipulator" of the Watergate scandal when he flipped to cooperate with prosecutors against Nixon, how high the bar must be for the Justice Department to pursue the charges against Trump. His coverage of the television industry has appeared in TV Guide, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, Fortune, the Hollywood Reporter, Inside.com and Adweek. Dean had originally been a proponent of Goldwater conservatism, but he later became a critic of the Republican Party. In an exchange with me on March 21, 1973, Nixon conceded such a use of the pardon power was improper: DEAN: Well, thats the problem. Full text: Watergate's John Dean gives statement on - POLITICO For those of you who lived through Watergate, his name is synonymous with the political intrigue of the 1970s. John Dean - Watergate.com - Correcting the historical record Shortly after Watergate, Dean became an investment banker, author and lecturer based in Beverly Hills, California. But he was told by his immediate boss, John Ehrlichman, that his post-White House career would be difficult if he left. CNN Original Series Returns to the Scene of the Crime in "Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal," Debuting Sunday, June 5. And that destroys the case.. The following year, he became an associate deputy in the office of the Attorney General of the United States, serving under Attorney General John N. Mitchell, with whom he was on friendly terms. MUELLER REPORT RE APPOINTMENT/REMOVAL OF THE SPECIAL COUNSEL (PP. For high school, he attended Staunton Military Academy with Barry Goldwater Jr., the son of Sen. Barry Goldwater, and became a close friend of the family. Richard Nixon's Political Scandal: Researching Watergate in the It also came out that Gray had destroyed important evidence Dean entrusted to him. For those of you who lived through Watergate, his name is synonymous with the political intrigue of the 1970s. [12], On March 23, the five Watergate burglars, along with G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were sentenced with stiff fines and prison time of up to 40 years. Later Nixon worked directly with Henry Petersen, the top Justice Department official in charge of the Watergate investigation, once I had broken with the White House. But the litigation gave Dean access to files from the Watergate special prosecution archives, intensifying his expertise, and he entered the pundit class that emerged when cable news expanded in the mid-1990s. 7 min read. Opinion: The essential difference between Nixon and Trump, according to First, he is a key witness in understanding the Mueller Report. His testimony during the Watergate scandal helped bring down Nixon. Dean's testimony before the House was watched by some 80 million Americans. But Deans inside knowledge on how the bungled burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972, ultimately revealed an organized-crime-type mind-set within the Nixon administration has kept him on the contact list of TV news guest bookers for decades. Mr. McGahn is the most prominent fact witness regarding obstruction of justice cited in the Mueller Report. I think Richard Nixon had a conscience, said Dean. Certain aspects of the scandal came to light before Election Day, but Nixon was reelected by a landslide. I was always interested in government. On their second break-in, on the night of June 16, hotel security discovered the burglars. An . Michael and John dig deep into Watergate, January 6th, and DOJ. Evidence: In a taped interview for the book "Silent Coup", when Dean was . [8][pageneeded], 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). The Watergate Hearings, 50 Years Ago: Truth Was Not Up for Debate . Neither of the two volumes are formally titled, but the first sentence of the second paragraph, on page 1 of Volume II states its focus: Beginning in 2017, the President of the United States took a variety of actions towards the ongoing FBI investigation into Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election and related matters that raised questions about whether he had obstructed justice. Volume II concludes on page 182: [I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. However, the Special Counsels office was unable to reach that conclusion, so the report neither alleges criminal behavior by the president nor, as the report states, does it exonerate him. (SEE MUELLER REPORT, VOL. His guilty plea to a single felony in exchange for becoming a key witness for the prosecution ultimately resulted in a reduced sentence, which he served at Fort Holabird outside Baltimore, Maryland. It was a very sympathetic and very believable portrait, said Graff. In White House Plumbers, an upcoming HBO limited series, Dean is portrayed by Domhnall Gleeson. He could be embarrassed. John Dean was born in Akron, Ohio, and spent a significant part of his life in Marion. His first memoir, Blind Ambition, was turned into a TV movie in 1979. Mea Culpa: Rupert Murdoch Throws His Own Company Under the Bus + A John Dean's Watergate Whitewash - Commentary Magazine II, P. Dean's testimony to the senators and at the 1974 trial of the chief conspirators (excepting the President) did not get him totally off the hook. Dean had had suspicions that Nixon was taping conversations, and he tipped prosecutors to question witnesses along this line, leading to Butterfield's revelations. Such testimony against Nixon, while damaging to the president's credibility, had little legal impact, as it was merely his word against Nixon's. In his testimony, he implicated administration officials, including Mitchell, Nixon, and himself. Nixon met with me privately on the evening of April 15, 1973, to try to influence how I would relate the events, particularly our conversation of March 21, 1973, when I warned him of the cancer on the presidency. In the March 21 conversation, I tried to convince him to end the coverup, pointing out that paying hush money and dangling pardons constituted obstruction of justice, and that people were going to go to jail, myself included. They don't know what they're looking at. John Dean's memory: A case study. I havent and maybe Im not creative enough, Dean said. A full cast of characters is available in our Gavel-to-Gavel exhibit. All rights reserved. In 2006, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating George W. Bush's NSA warrantless wiretap program. John Dean, the White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon who was once dubbed the "master manipulator" of the Watergate scandal by the FBI, predicts . Its a fascinating place to see whats going on.. Mea Culpa welcomes back a very special guest, John Dean. Dean served as White House Counsel for President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until Ap. March 21, 1973: Dean tells Nixon there is a "cancer" on the presidency. By April 15, Nixon tried to tell me he was kidding about finding $1 million in hush money to pay the burglar defendants to maintain their silence. The Watergate Hearings - American Archive Chapter 14 in the book titled "The Lies, The Thefts," divulges the entire memorandum John Ehrlichman, Nixon's Domestic Affairs Advisor, wrote to Treasury Secretary David M. Kennedy and makes for an interesting read. [24] Also in 2006, Dean appeared as an interviewee in the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, about the Nixon administration's efforts to keep John Lennon out of the United States. 78-90, 113-133): According to Muellers account, Don McGahn played a critical role in interdicting the Presidents express efforts to fire Special Counsel Mueller. The Jan. 6 committee's hastily scheduled hearing for Tuesday "better be a big deal," said a key Watergate scandal figure. When Dean read that testimony in the summer of 1973 in front of a massive TV audience, he became the face of the Watergate conspiracy for most of America, according to Garrett Graff, author of Watergate: A New History.. After hearing of Colodny's work, Liddy issued a revised paperback version of Will supporting Colodny's theory. While I was an active participant in the coverup for a period of time, there is absolutely no information whatsoever that Trumps White House Counsel, Don McGahn, participated in any illegal or improper activity to the contrary, there is evidence he prevented several obstruction attempts. I always envisioned going in and out of government. Dean's testimony before the House was watched by some 80 million Americans. The investigation revealed that Nixon had a tape-recording system in his offices and that he had recorded many conversations. . MUELLER REPORT RE TERMINATION OF COMEY (PP. In it, he asserts that post-Goldwater conservatism has been co-opted by people with authoritarian personalities and policies, citing data from Bob Altemeyer. It's time for John Dean to tell the truth about Watergate PRINTING OFFICE, 2019). The Words Of Watergate | AMERICAN HERITAGE Mr. Trump asked Comey to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation by saying so to the public. 1976); AND IMPEACHMENT OF RICHARD NIXON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY (WASHINGTON, D.C: GOV. It's written with Bob Altemeyer, and it's titled Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. In short, McGahns loyalty is to his client, the Office of the Presidency, not the occupant. Petersen informed Nixon that this could cause problems for the prosecution of the case, but Nixon publicly announced his position that evening. If the Watergate scandal happened today, Dean believes Fox News and other conservative outlets would give more oxygen to Nixons defenders and perhaps enable the disgraced president to at least finish out his term instead of resigning. . (Following Coxs firing, a dozen plus bills calling for Nixons impeachment or creating a special prosecutor were filed in the House. He was convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and sentenced to one to four years in prison. John W Dean, who served as Mr Nixon's White House . Granted immunity, Dean laid out in stunning detail . II, p. 1 that one of the reasons the Special Counsel did not make charging decisions relating to obstruction of justice was because he did not want to potentially preempt [the] constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct. The report then cites at footnote 2: See U.S. CONST. We were in his Executive Office Building office late on a Sunday night when he got up from his chair and walked to the corner of the room and in a stage-whisper asked me, I was wrong to offer clemency to Hunt, wasnt I? I responded, Yes, Mr. President, that would be an obstruction of justice. As I later testified, at the time it struck me his moving across the office and whispering was to keep what he was saying from being picked up by a hidden microphone in the room. Liddy was ordered to scale down his ideas, and he presented a revised plan to the same group on February 4, which was also left unapproved. II, P. 32); his chief of staff Annie Donaldson made contemporaneous notes of McGahns conversations with the president (e.g., MUELLER RPT, VOL. According to Dean, modern conservatism, specifically on the Christian Right, embraces obedience, inequality, intolerance, and strong intrusive government, in stark contrast to Goldwater's philosophies and policies. The program, produced by Herzog & Company, delves into the archive of Watergate-related material Dean has accumulated and stored in his Beverly Hills home over the years, including his 60,000-word testimony to a Senate subcommittee originally written in longhand on yellow legal pads. So this means that John Dean either lied under oath or is lying to his readers in his autobiography. The program also includes one of the few current day public figures who can fully understand what Dean went through Trumps former longtime attorney Michael Cohen, who went to prison for tax evasion and campaign finance violations. In 1991, the publisher released Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, which included an unfounded allegation that Dean ordered the break-in to remove information about a call-girl ring that serviced Democratic Party members. [26], His next book, released in 2006, was Conservatives without Conscience, a play on Barry Goldwater's book The Conscience of a Conservative. In the summer of 1973, former White House Counsel John Dean testified as part of the Senate's investigation into the Watergate break-in. 98-103): According to the report, in June 2017 after emails setting up a June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Russians became known in the White House, the President engaged in efforts to prevent disclosure of the emails and then dictated a false or misleading statement characterizing the meeting as about adoptions in order to protect his son, Don, Jr. WATERGATE: On the weekend that the Nixon reelection committee men were arrested in the DNC offices at the Watergate, Nixons campaign manager, and former attorney general, John Mitchell, along with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman and former White House Counsel, John Ehrlichman, drafted a false press release about the men arrested at the Watergate. Mea Culpa welcomes back a very special guest, John Dean. June 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 was a cancer growing on . Each days hearings are broken up into multiple parts, which are linked together and named as such. He has been a go-to talking head whenever a presidential scandal is brewing, and the twice-impeached Donald Trump whose desperate attempt to stay in the White House after losing the 2020 election remains under investigation has kept him busy as a CNN contributor. [15] A sharp critic of studying memory in a laboratory setting, Neisser saw "a valuable data trove" in Dean's recall.