“This is a huge moral and spiritual duty,” he said of his activism. “You have to fight your hardest to do what’s right, know that you’re serving a higher good, and be ready to die with your boots on. And then you have to understand that it’s all out of your hands. After all,” he concluded, “the Spanish Armada was defeated by a bad wind.”
—Judith Lewis
Deep Water
John Dean stands nextto a lectern in the auditorium at the Glendale Public Library, strangles the cord of the microphone, and tells the audience that it brings back memories of tiny listening devices. “If you’re over 45 years old, you know what I’m talking about.” The standing-room-only crowd erupts in laughter.
With a furled American flag hidden in the corner of the stage behind him, Dean is dressed crisply in a red tie and gray suit. He speaks calmly without prepared notes and without the self-righteousness of his fellow whistleblower, Richard Clarke. Other than his gray hair, Dean looks and sounds just as he did at the Watergate hearings 30 years ago.
Still possessing what he terms that “freakish memory for detail,” he recounts that the turning point of the Nixon administration occurred in June 1971, on a Sunday, the day after Nixon’s daughter Tricia had gotten married, the day that the Pentagon Papers story leaked to the press. What had been in his mind an “open administration” until then turned into a dirty-tricks, paranoid presidency, accountable to no one.
The Bush administration, by contrast, has from day one led a “path of concealment . . . of obsessive secrecy,” says this former golden-boy counsel to Nixon.
Dean, author of the recent best-seller Worse Than Watergate, announces that he is an independent, but adds, “All I can tell you is I hope I don’t have to write Volume 2 of this book.” According to Dean, the Bush administration has “dusted off the Nixon playbook . . . from a sub-basement of the White House.” He adds, “Having been in the belly of the beast of an imperial presidency, I can tell you it is a dangerous presidency.”
He remembers the name Karl Rove being mentioned by a Watergate task force investigating campaign illegalities. Even then Rove was “on their radar.” But he disputes that Rove is Bush’s brain. “Bush is no naif,” he says, pronouncing naif with a hard “a” and a silent “i.” He adds that Bush apparently is “a human encyclopedia on baseball. If someone had made him baseball commissioner, we wouldn’t have all the problems we have today.”
Now in his 60s, Dean is no Luddite. He embraces the Internet and cites the Web when he says that “information and truth has its own way of getting out.”
After speaking for 30 minutes, he fields questions. The most titillating inquiry is about Deep Throat. Dean, who has written a book on the subject, refers to Bob Woodward’s fabled source by the intimate “Throat” and says that over the years he has narrowed the possibilities down to three people.
Who? Who? They were all in the White House, he tells us, then throws out a long-forgotten name — Ray Price, one of Nixon’s speechwriters at the time. He adds that Price was a bachelor back then, although how that implicates him I don’t know.
The second name is juicier, Bill Safire, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for The New York Times, who was also one of Nixon’s speechwriters and, according to Dean, a unique kind of character.
Finally, the third man . . . Pat Buchanan, noted bulldog TV commentator and presidential candidate, also a Nixon speechwriter at the time. The crowd murmurs. Dean says he confronted Buchanan about this at one point. “I can’t tell you how slow he was to deny it,” says Dean. There is another peal of laughter.
—Robert David Jaffee
