You should get yourself a copy of Silent Coup, see if it affects your perception of John Dean. John's wife Mo was once a call girl working for Xaviera Hollander. The call girl ring operated out of a desk in the Watergate complex, in the headquarters of the DNC. Apparently someone working at the White House knew of the ring and decided to place a bug in that desk, to get dirt on Democrats. When Nixon and his aides learned that the break-in had originated from the White House, they chose a junior White House lawyer to investigate so that they could control the situation and keep it from being discovered. They chose John Dean.
The two authors of Silent Coup, who claim to be political liberals, had asked Dean to help them with their proposed book on Watergate. The book originally was intended to be a "harmony" of the many accounts of Watergate that had been written by prinicipals in the event. Dean was helpful until they started uncovering a thread that consistently led back to Dean, at which point Dean became uncooperative.
The authors think the Watergate burglary was thought up by Dean. Nixon's bad luck was to pick Dean to coordinate the internal White House investigation. Dean was the White House official most acutely aware of what the Watergate committee might learn. When it became apparent that they might uncover his role in the affair, Dean went to the committee and told them "I can give you the President". The authors think Dean was able to throw a sitting President overboard in order to save his own hide. By carefully tailoring his testimony to the committee, Dean was able to conceal his own role without the committee members suspecting it. They became too fascinated by what he was telling them about Nixon, Mitchell, and the rest to think that John Dean could have been concealing anything.
The authors presented their evidence to Gordon Liddy, the only principal who hadn't written his own account at the time of their book, to see what his opinion would be. Liddy's opinion is that he had unwittingly spent his time in prison protecting John Dean, rather than Richard Nixon as he had intended. It's a fascinating book, I've never seen anyone take its thesis apart. |
