Dean talks Watergate, Trump-Nixon parallels
‘Trump seems to have zero knowledge of Watergate and what was unacceptable’
SAN JOSE >> John Dean, the White House counsel who famously testified against Richard Nixon’s inner circle and helped blow the lid off the Watergate scandal, addressed an auditorium full of Santa Clara County prosecutors as part of his post-retirement career promoting legal ethics, and lamented the Trump Administration’s corruption scandals that he called “too similar” to his experience.
Echoing sentiments he has made as a cable-news commentator, Dean, now 80, said he is deeply troubled by the parallels he sees between Trump’s current conduct and Nixon’s handling of the Watergate office break-in and cover-up that led to the only presidential resignation in U.S. history.
“It’s too similar … Trump seems to have zero knowledge of Watergate and what was unacceptable during that period, and he seems not even interested in learning,” Dean said Tuesday. “We’re just going down the same road we once went.”
Dean did say Trump or his advisors appear to be taking at least one lesson from Watergate, in resisting
calls from political allies to neutralize or fire Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department to investigate possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
He alluded to the “Saturday Night Massacre,” where Nixon ordered the firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which spurred the resignations of the U.S. attorney general and his deputy over their refusal to do so. Eventually, Solicitor General Robert Bork — who would later achieve infamy for his rejected Supreme Court nomination — carried out the order, which was later deemed to be illegal.
“I think people on (Capitol)
Hill have told him, ‘If you do this, it will be the beginning of the end,’ as it was for Nixon,” Dean said.
Dean traveled to San Jose at the invitation of District Attorney Jeff Rosen and his chief assistant, Jay Boyarsky, as part of a periodic series of lectures and speeches for the office’s prosecutors. Last April, famed Holocaust survivor and activist Renee Firestone spoke to the same gathering. Tuesday’s session was a variation of a certified continuing legal education course that Dean has taught across the country for the better part of a decade.
Tuesday was a court holiday, in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, so Rosen said he wanted to the use
the opportunity to bring in Dean, whose experience as an ambivalent participant in the Watergate cover-up, then later as a star witness for the prosecution, was a flashpoint for American legal ethics.
After Watergate, the ethical canon changed to compel attorneys in Dean’s position to report wrongdoing to their superiors or even law enforcement if necessary. Dean added Tuesday that the White House counsel role evolved to serve the Office of the President above the actual seatholder, in cases of potential presidential misconduct.
“We’re always trying to get the lawyers and investigators in our office to think about ethics, to think about the rule of law, to think about doing the right thing even when it’s difficult,” Rosen said. “I think that John Dean’s an example of somebody who did the right thing in very difficult circumstances.”
As he has since he emerged from a short prison term for obstruction of justice in the wake of Watergate, Dean’s talk Tuesday offered a self-deprecating but largely flattering self-portrayal as an overly ambitious lawyer in his early 30s who saw the offer to become White House counsel at such a young age impossible to resist. He said he soon saw with his own eyes what some of his superiors in the Justice Department had warned him about: that Nixon and his most trusted advisors and acolytes, highlighted by chief of staff H.R Haldeman, senior counsel John Ehrlichman, and former Attorney General-turned-campaign director John Mitchell, ran an operation akin to a “zoo.”
Dean offered his overview of Watergate, drawing from pop-culture touchstones like “All the President’s Men” and, most prominently, the 37 conversations he had with Nixon about the president’s role in the conspiracy and cover-up of a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters amid the 1972 election campaign that Nixon won in a landslide. The conversations between Dean and Nixon were among numerous exchanges that were surreptitiously recorded in the Oval Office and the president’s executive office that helped doom Nixon’s presidency.
“Watergate was the only thing we ever did talk about,” Dean said.
Dean acknowledged his role in “putting out fires” amid various operatives committing political sabotage on behalf of Nixon, most notably former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, who helped engineer an earlier break-in at the office of the psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsberg, the current East Bay resident famous for the release of the Pentagon Papers that exposed massive government deception about the Vietnam War and other military actions in Southeast Asia. Dean also remembers quashing a plot to firebomb the Brookings Institution, the longtime Washington, D.C. think tank.
But the taped conversations with Nixon have stuck with Dean, and he recalled how he learned the president’s true involvement in the scandal as Nixon grew more comfortable with him.
“I didn’t know until I listened to all the tapes that he really was involved in every key decision,” he said, later adding, “It was pretty clear to me that we were in violation” of conspiracy and obstruction statutes.
Over four decades later, his primary takeaway remains.
“Prompt disclosure is the only solution in a cover-up situation,” he said.
Decades later, Dean found some humor in those infamous Nixon tapes, and on Tuesday described the toll of spending four-anda-half years transcribing them for a book project.
“I ruined my hearing,” he said. “Midway through, I told my wife, I said, ‘You know, I think I’m losing my hearing, and god forbid the last voice I hear is Richard Nixon!”