Nixon's Secret (65 page)

Dean was crafty and adept at taking ideas and credit from others and pinning blame to another when he was cornered. Although there is substantial evidence to show that Dean originated the Watergate break-in plots, it was Liddy who presented the plots, Mitchell who was approved them, and Magruder who provided oversight. When the Watergate break-ins went awry and the subsequent cover-up fell apart, it was Dean who approached the prosecutors, offering testimony against both Mitchell and Magruder in exchange for his own immunity.

“We have a cancer—within, close to the Presidency, that’s growing,” Dean told Nixon in March 1973. “It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself.”
39

Nixon could not see the cancer. It was standing right in front of him.

“He is an amazing character; I don’t think there is an ounce of morality in him,” said Richard Kleindienst. “To have pulled off what he did—and in the manner in which he did it—is one of the most amazing stories. I think John Dean thought he could pull off almost anything—and he almost did.”
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In the end, Mitchell stumbled. The attention he paid to his mentally fragile wife, coupled with his bold self-assurance in a post he was not well accustomed with, buried him. As Garment said, Mitchell “strode with his overconfidence into his post as attorney general—and into a jungle.” The office that Mitchell walked into was far away from the world of municipal financing from which he had come.

“Mitchell did not pay attention to the dangers and risks of the small stuff—like Liddy’s activities; the campaign chicken-shit stuff,” said former Justice Department official Donald Santarelli. “He should have recognized that the small items are the ones that bring big men down. He didn’t appreciate the degree of long knives, and how fatally they can cut.”
41

Only weeks before the first Watergate break-in attempt, Dean instructed Ulasewicz to case the DNC offices. Ulasewicz later claimed this request only went as high as Dean.

“Dean wants you to check out the offices of the DNC,” Caulfield told Ulasewicz.
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Ulasewicz “complied and simply walked through the offices as a visitor, casing out the location of desks, who sat where, and any other useful information.”
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“I can absolutely flat out tell you that isn’t true,” said Dean, rejecting the theory that he had anything to do with the reconnaissance. But he then added a caveat: “You know, I don’t have any knowledge of ever sending Tony Ulasewicz in. Whether somebody came in to my of—if Caulfield ever came into my office and said, ‘John, I think Tony should go into the office’ and I’m in the middle of somethin’ else and don’t even reflect on it and I say, ‘Whatever you think, Jack,’ uh, you know, which I did a lot. Uh, you know, I just, ‘Go on and do it,’ or . . .”
44

It’s a mystery why Dean laid the blame on Caulfield. This bizarre reimagining begs belief that Caufied devised a plan to scope the layout of a target about which he knew nothing. Ulasewicz was certain Dean was behind the order to conduct a walkthrough of the Watergate. Consider the following exchange between Len Colodny and Ulaswicz:

COLODNY:
Where he’s asking you to do the Watergate thing, do you think it’s the President that wants that?

ULASEWIZ:
Nope

COLODNY:
You know it’s Dean.

ULASEWICZ:
I know it’s Dean.
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In other words, Dean had Ulasewicz stake out the DNC and look for
particular
locations in the offices. Knowing these locations came in handy for Dean when the actual break-ins transpired.

Years later, after he was blamed for authorizing the Watergate break-in, an operation he expressed time and again was not right for the Nixon White House, Mitchell learned of Dean’s order to Ulasewicz to inspect the offices. In the words of Len Colodny, Mitchell “went bananas.”
46

* * *

History has decided that John Dean is the hero of Watergate: the reluctant and courageous young whistleblower who mesmerized the nation; “the human typewriter,”
47
as some writers called him, whose incredible recall and recitation of events that transpired within the White House helped bring down a president. As with the Kennedy assassination however, the version of events accepted by the mainstream media is not the complete truth.

Incredibly, Dean has sought to control the historic narrative of Watergate established by Woodward and Bernstein after his careful orchestration of events in the Senate Watergate Hearings. In fact, John Dean’s testimony directly contradicts his own book,
Blind Ambition.
His version of events is self-serving, evasive, deceptive, and is designed to deflect his own responsibility for the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

On April 17, 1973, Nixon summoned the White House press corps. One of his announcements on that day was that no one in his administration would receive immunity from prosecution. Two days later, Dean, who had to that point been in his own words to the president, “all over this thing (the cover-up) like a blanket,”
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immediately released a statement. “Some may hope or think that I will become a scapegoat,” the statement read. “Anyone who believes this does not know me, know the true facts, nor understand our system of justice.”
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Dean bartered for immunity, and it fast became apparent he would sacrifice anyone for it. “Having struck out when he used Haldeman and Ehrlichman as bait, Dean now began to dangle a larger prize—the president,” wrote the Senate Watergate Committee’s Chief Minority Counsel, Tennessee attorney Fred Thompson. “News stories indicating that Dean would implicate Nixon began to trickle out.”
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In a tactical maneuver to whet the appetite of the public, it was Dean’s team that leaked the stories to newspapers and magazines.
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As the chief witness for the Watergate Senate Committee, Dean turned state’s evidence in return for a minimal sentence. Despite coauthoring Gemstone with G. Gordon Liddy, despite playing
the
key role in the cover-up, Dean served only four months in prison. The less culpable John Mitchell served nineteen months, Haldeman and Ehrlichman both served eighteen months, Magruder did seven months, and G. Gordon Liddy, who was sentenced to
twenty years,
was imprisoned for nearly fifty-two months.

Interestingly, Watergate saboteur Jim McCord also served only four months in prison, substantially less than his counterparts.

“Let me tell you,” said Dean. “All those guys are pissed off that I stood up and blew the whistle . . . I fucked up their lives . . . which was good.”
52

The move was classic Dean, using others to his own benefit. “John doesn’t have a circle of friends,” a Dean associate told the
New York Times.
“He never has and he never was liked. He doesn’t have the bonhomie or camaraderie. Everything he does is done with a point or a purpose with his peers and it shows. He tends to use them for an advantage.”
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Dean was lauded for his testimony, yet it was filled with inaccuracies. It didn’t matter: Dean was the lone witness to connect the crimes of Watergate to the highest offices of the White House. “It seemed obvious that the committee members considered Dean such an important witness that it was unwise to risk his displeasure,” wrote Fred Thompson. “And that was not the only advantage Dean obtained in his dealings with the committee: not until the morning of his public testimony did we receive his 245-page statement and the fifty documents he submitted with it. As a result, we found ourselves racing through the material he offered at almost the same time that he was reading it to the nation. There was no chance to analyze it, or to prepare questions based on it.”
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* * *

In the years following Watergate, new details have emerged adding context to the break-ins, and specifically Dean’s role in them. In 1976, when John Dean released his blockbuster tell-all book covering his years in the Nixon White House, the Watergate break-ins and the aftermath, it was greeted as a brave and authentic retelling of the times.
Blind Ambition
was a work of “unsparing honesty,”
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in the words of former Clinton aide and journalist Sydney Blumenthal.

Dean trumpeted his own veracity in the opening pages. “This book is a portrait—not a black-and-white photograph—of five years of my life. It represents my best effort to paint what I saw and reproduce what I heard. I have included detail, texture, tone, to make this history more vivid—though, I trust, no prettier. I prepared for the writing of
Blind Ambition
the same way I prepared to testify before the Ervin Committee, before the special prosecutors, and in the cover-up trial.”
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“To reconstruct what occurred, I reviewed an enormous number of documents as well as my own testimony,” Dean continued. “To borrow my lawyer’s phrase: ‘
I’m ready to get on the box—take a lie-detector test”
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(emphasis added).

For a decade, this was an accepted truth. Then it started to unravel.

In the eighties, when historians Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin began work on the book that would become
Silent Coup
, an unparalleled investigative analysis of the Watergate scandal, their research did not begin in the Nixon White House. In fact, the book the two men originally intended to write was a look at
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward in the years following Watergate. Colodny and Gettlin tracked Woodward’s career back to his job working in naval intelligence as a briefer for Alexander Haig. Woodward by way of his work for Haig led Colodny and Gettlin back to the White House, to Watergate, and eventually, to John Dean.

According to Colodny, Dean was initially ecstatic about a couple of writers coloring in his years at the Nixon White House, even suggesting that he would be a prime candidate to pen the foreword to the book.
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Colodny and Gettlin then focused their research on Watergate, interviewing top men in the White House during that much-maligned period. Dean quickly became skittish. “Len, it’s too painful,” Colodny recalled of Dean’s reply. “I’ve been through this, I don’t want to talk about it any more, it’s over. Read everything that I said in the courts, in the Senate Committee, what I wrote in
Blind Ambition,
and the White House tapes.”
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“For the next year, that’s all I did,” Colodny continued, “was sit there and read everything he said. Not verbatim, but by subject matter. And low and behold, in four different venues, sometimes five different venues, he never told the same story twice and by the time he got to his book
Blind Ambition
, he would actually drop the lies.”
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Colodny found many contradictions between Dean’s testimony and his book, between things Dean told Colodny and others and what actually transpired: the pressing of Caulfield for an intelligence plan and the perpetuation of Sandwedge after it was snuffed by Mitchell; pushing Liddy to create Gemstone, ordering Ulasewicz to case the Watergate; initiating the cover-up; handing the FBI files to Gray, some of which had to do with Watergate, and urging the bureau to destroy them.

Interviews with Ehrlichman, Magruder, Caulfield, Ulasewicz, and Mitchell painted a much different picture. Caulfield told a particularly interesting story about Dean’s duplicity. In January of 1973, Dean contacted Caulfield with a very important three-pronged message to be delivered to Jim McCord:

“A year is a long time;”

“your wife and family will be taken care of;”

“You will be rehabilitated with employment when this is all over.”
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Dean’s message to McCord was simple: plead guilty, save the president, and you will be granted executive clemency and taken care of when the Senate Committee is adjourned. On March 13, 1973, Dean blatantly lied to President Nixon about initiating the offer of clemency to McCord. Caulfield covered this in his remembrance of the Watergate scandal in
Shield #911-NYPD:

“Dean deceived the president when he reported that McCord initiated the so-called commutation subject: “Uh, McCord did ask to meet with somebody and it was Jack Caulfield” . . . (It was Dean who) initiated that specific commutation subject with McCord via a telephone call to me . . .

So, that was the type of sophisticated evasion of the facts in which Dean was engaged at that moment, further, what is now retrospectively clear is that both Dean and McCord were, in fact, the historical catalysts that initiated a rapidly descending “funnel cloud” (a.k.a. Watergate) and sent it heading directly for the White House.”
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If these Nixon White House men are taken at their word, John Dean had been the prime mover behind both the Watergate break-in and the cover-up. Colodny felt compelled to ask Dean about his own blatant conflicts of memory. Dean’s response was incredible, to say the least.

“I’m gonna be very honest with you,” Dean told Colodny in a 1989 telephone interview. “I didn’t even reread my testimony when I wrote my book.”
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This astonishing assertion by Dean directly contradicts his foreword to his own book.

Colodny then presented Dean a specific example. In Dean’s Senate testimony, the young counsel stated that the White House “didn’t have much to do with DNC Chairman Larry O’Brien”; while in
Blind Ambition
, Dean wrote, “The O’ Brien inquiry lay dormant, but it was not lost from his [Haldeman’] memory, or from mine. The president began planning for his reelection campaign and reached out in a new direction—one that later merged with a new O’Brien investigation.”
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If this lone example amongst many was correct in the book and erroneous in testimony, Dean had perjured himself. As we have shown, the White House
did
have a fixation with O’Brien.