‘Nixon Defense’ fascinates, as gathered by John Dean

Vick Mickunas of Yellow Springs interviews authors every Friday at 1:30 p.m. and on Sundays at 11 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, go online to www.wyso.org/programs/book-nook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.


The book

“The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It” by John W. Dean (Viking, 746 pages, $35)

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Vick Mickunas of the Book Nook interviewed John Dean, author of “The Nixon Defense.” Your newspaper brings you articles and columns written by experts who can get close to the people behind the stories.

Richard M. Nixon resigned as president of the United States on Aug. 9, 1974, 40 years ago this week, and what happened has gained new attention. John Dean has just published “The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It.”

Dean was legal counsel to President Nixon and was deeply involved in the coverup of what is known as the Watergate break-in. The scandal that ensued following a bungled break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee by the so-called Watergate plumbers precipitated Nixon’s fall from power.

President Nixon had a secret recording system inside the White House.

Within the president’s inner circle of advisors only H.R. Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff, was aware that Nixon was tape recording conversations. These secret recordings proved Nixon’s involvement in the attempted coverup of Watergate. Their existence destroyed his presidency.

John Dean has gone through all the available tapes and written the definitive history. He explained to me that “I needed to know everything to answer the question that started the whole thing, which was how could anybody as intelligent and politically savvy as Richard Nixon let what happened to his presidency happen?”

He explained “one tape led to the other. I had to finally go back and do them all. It turned out there were about a thousand conversations, maybe 600 of which nobody probably outside the national archives has ever listened to. So the book is chock full of new information. Its not a book of transcripts, of course, but it became the basis for the narrative and dialogue.”

As we read “The Nixon Defense” we realize that Nixon didn’t authorize the Watergate break-in but when he heard about it he tried to cover it up. Dean, a middle level staff lawyer, was dragged into the orchestration of the coverup.

This makes for fascinating reading and listening. There are audio clips of 30 conversations embedded into the e-book version. Included are the three so-called “smoking-gun” conversations of June 23, 1972, that ultimately sealed President Nixon’s fate.

Dean reflected that “its amazing listening to this stuff all these years later and hearing what they had to say about me. Nixon is also very flattering … he thinks the world of me. And obviously that will change when I break rank and refuse to lie for him.”

The tapes eventually reveal a Nixon flummoxed by Dean: “he doesn’t know how to handle me because I make it pretty clear I’m not going to lie.

“I’m very up front with him about my process of breaking rank where I have one foot in each camp initially. Where I tell him I’m going to hire a lawyer and I’m going to send that lawyer down to the prosecutor’s office, see what’s involved in cooperating and ending this thing because I’m naive enough at that point to believe that they’ll all do the right thing — just somebody starting the process I think will start others to say; ‘Well, yeah, we have made mistakes, let’s just go in and take the medicine.’ And that’s what we should have done.”

“And Nixon might have survived if everybody had done it, including him, being candid: ‘I didn’t realize I was getting across the line, I didn’t know what obstruction of justice was.’ I think candor could have prevailed. In fact there never should have been a coverup in the first place had he not had his rather strange view of what a coverup is.”

You can hear my interview with John Dean this Sunday at 11 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3).

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