Given Charlie's anti-war background, it's highly unlikely he was CIA...
...or dean might be aware that his bro was cia after all...
Legacy could be the White House
by DAVE HART, The Chapel Hill News
newsobserver.com
CHAPEL HILL -- In 1968, Charlie Dean, one of four brothers of a prominent New England family, supported Richard Nixon in his campaign against Hubert Humphrey because, a colleague said, he believed Nixon's campaign pledge to end the war in Vietnam.
When Nixon failed to live up to that promise immediately, Dean bolted. He was a freshm an at UNC-Chapel Hill that year, and, as the conflict in Vietnam ground on, Dean threw himself into the antiwar movement.
By the 1972 presidential campaign, he had become a fierce devotee of the Democratic candidate, George McGovern. He served as chairman of the local student McGovern campaign, where he led, by all accounts, an energetic and effective effort.
"Charlie was very much against the war, and when Nixon didn't end it, Charlie felt terribly betrayed," said Karen Gray, who served as the financial coordinator of the local McGovern campaign. " Orange County was the only county in the state that went for McGovern, and I think Charlie Dean had a lot to do with that."
More than 30 years after Charlie Dean worked in support of a Democrat running for president with an antiwar message, his older brother, Howard Dean, is himself a Democrat running for president with an antiwar message.
That Charlie Dean met a mysterious, tragic end halfway around the globe just two years after he led the local McGovern campaign only heightens the juxtaposition. His loss was what Newsweek's Howard Fineman called "the defining crisis" of Howard Dean's life, a blow that may have played a role in nudging Howard toward public service in the first place.
"Charlie's death focused his older brother and gave him a sense of mission that he carries with him to this day," Fineman wrote in a July profile.
Passion for politics
Charlie Dean arrived in Chapel Hill as a freshman in 1968. Gerry Cohen, a Raleigh lawyer who lived in Hinton James dormitory with Dean in 1969 and 1970, said that when the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, Dean became deeply engaged in electoral politics. When McGovern emerged as the Democratic candidate in 1972, Dean moved to the forefront of the local campaign effort.
"He had an enormous amount of energy," said Cohen, who credited Dean's Orange County voter registration drives for helping elect Cohen to the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen in 1973. Cohen now is head of bill drafting in the N.C. General Assembly.
Dean was the only paid staffer in the McGovern organization, Gray said. He promptly signed every paycheck back over to the campaign.
In the election of 1972, McGovern fell to Nixon in a landslide, losing 49 of the 50 states. Charlie Dean, Gray said, was devastated. "He was very upset, very disillusioned," she said. "He had applied to go into the Peace Corps and do work with them in Nepal, but he'd deferred his entry to work on the campaign.
"When it was over and he was so disillusioned, he decided to travel for a while before he went to Nepal. I knew it was cold there, so before he left I made him a hand-embroidered scarf to help keep him warm."
She and most of Dean's other friends lost track of him after he left the United States. Evidently he took a freighter to Japan, made his way to Australia and eventually wound up in Laos. In fall 1974, he and an Australian friend were on a boat going up the Mekong River when apparently they were seized by members of the Pathet Lao, the communist government of Laos.
"I completely lost track of him after he left until the summer of 1974," Cohen said. "I was working with the Orange County Board of Elections when this application for an absentee ballot arrived from Charlie. It asked that a ballot be sent to Kat mandu, Nepal. So apparently he was on his way to Nepal when he was captured. We sent the ballot, and I wrote a letter and sent it, too. I never received a reply, and the ballot never came back."
A friend told Cohen that Charlie Dean was missing, and Cohen wrote to the State Department for information. Early in 1975, he said, he received a reply: According to the best information, Charlie Dean and his companion had been executed by the Pathet Lao in late 1974. |
