John Dean relives life-changing Watergate scandal in docuseries
After John Dean gave his historic 1973 testimony on the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down the Nixon White House, he wanted to move on with his life.
An obstruction of justice conviction prevented the former White House counsel from practicing law in Washington, D.C., and Virginia. He moved to Los Angeles with wife Maureen, took business courses at UCLA and worked as an investment banker during the 1980s.
But Dean’s inside knowledge on how the bungled burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972, ultimately revealed an organized-crime-type mindset within the Nixon administration has kept him on the contact list of TV news guest bookers for decades. He has been a go-to talking head whenever a presidential scandal is brewing, and the twice-impeached former President Donald Trump has kept him busy as a CNN contributor.
“I never dreamed I would have to live in this bubble,” Dean, 83, said in an interview.
There is no one alive closer to the Watergate scandal than Dean, and now he is offering a definitive and deeply personal look at the events that changed his life forever in the four-part documentary series “Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal.” The program recently premiered on CNN and concludes on June 12.
Dean has written several books related to Watergate and the overreach of presidential powers. His first memoir, “Blind Ambition,” was turned into a TV movie in 1979. But the CNN series is the first time
he has told his story in a documentary, which drills down into how and why Richard Nixon looked for dirt on his opponents and detailed accounts of his criminal actions to cover it up.
The program, produced by Herzog & Company, delves into the archive of Watergate-related material Dean has accumulated and stored in his California home, including his 60,000-word testimony to a Senate subcommittee originally written in longhand on yellow legal pads.
Dean, an executive producer on the CNN project, helped wrangle some of the participants, including Alexander Butterfield, now 96, the deputy chief of staff who dropped the bombshell that Nixon had a taping system in the White House, which ultimately led to the president’s resignation in August 1974. Journalists Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Lesley Stahl also offer their recollections on the story that helped make their careers.
Despite his courageous decision to testify against a sitting president, the series does not give Dean a free pass for his role in the Nixon administration’s nefarious activities. Elizabeth Holtzman, a former
member of Congress who served on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, said in her interview he “was an essential part of the criminal enterprise.” Dean himself talks about how he “crossed a moral line” early in his White House tenure.
The program also includes one of the few current day public figures who can fully understand what Dean went through — Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, who went to prison for tax evasion and campaign finance violations.
Dean insisted that
Cohen be included in the series. “You can’t look at Watergate today without looking through the lens or at least a filter of the Trump presidency,” Dean said.
Vintage video clips supplement Dean’s story in the CNN series, showing the news divisions of the three major broadcast networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — at the peak of their powerful hegemony in the 1970s. It also prompts the interview subjects to note how the public based their opinions on Watergate on an agreed upon set of facts, a major difference from today’s polarized and partisan media landscape.