More vicious than Tricky
Dick
John Dean says the Bush team's leaks are
even viler than his former boss's -- and that
Plame and Wilson should file a civil suit.
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By John W. Dean
Oct. 3, 2003 |
I thought I had seen political dirty tricks as
foul as they could get, but I was wrong. In
blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie
Plame to take political revenge on her
husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for
telling the truth, Bush's people have
out-Nixoned Nixon's people. And my
former colleagues were not amateurs by any
means.
For example, special counsel Chuck Colson, once considered the best hatchet-man of
modern presidential politics, went to prison for leaking false information to discredit Daniel
Ellsberg's lawyer. Ellsberg was being prosecuted by Nixon's Justice Department for
disclosing the so-called Pentagon Papers (the classified study of the origins of the Vietnam
War). But Colson at his worst could barely qualify to play on Bush's team. The same with
assistant to the president John Ehrlichman, a jaw-jutting fellow who left them "twisting in the
wind," and went to jail denying he'd done anything wrong in ordering a break-in at Ellsberg's
psychiatrist's office, where the burglars went and looked for, but did not find, real
information to discredit Ellsberg.
But neither Colson nor Ehrlichman nor anyone else I knew while working at the Nixon
White House had the necessary viciousness, or depravity, to attack the wife of a perceived
enemy by employing potentially life-threatening tactics.
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