Blind Ambition: The End of the Story

Blind Ambition:

The End of the Story

John W. Dean

Praise for the Updated Edition

“Faust writes his own story. In the vast literature of those who came to Washington and lived to tell the tale there is nothing else like this. Blind Ambition is not only the best and most enduring book written from inside the Nixon White House, it is a classic of lost illusions. Now, in this new edition, John W. Dean, who has gained his understanding of the past through unsparing honesty, defends history itself from the charlatans and quacks who would distort it.”

Sidney Blumenthal -- Journalist, political editor of
The Daily Beast
, and author of
The Clinton Wars
and
The Permanent Campaign: Inside the World of Elite Political Operatives

“John Dean’s Blind Ambition happily is available again - and with a brilliant Afterword that provides an up-to-date account of the Watergate affair, using new documentation. Dean’s memoir reminds us again of his crucial role in laying bare the sordid facts of Richard Nixon and all the President’s men. He offers a unique accounting of the events and his own role in them. Rare indeed is a memoir so utterly lacking in self-righteousness, false piety, and special pleading. It is a sobering reminder of the perils of ambition.

Stanley Kutler -- Historian and author of
The Wars of Watergate
and
Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes

“Blind Ambition uniquely takes the reader inside the Nixon White House, of particular interest as the Nixon administration crumbled under the impact of Watergate. Blind Ambition was a classic of its kind. Now Blind Ambition has been re-issued with an indispensable Afterword providing further valuable information.”

Jeffery Hart -- Professor Emeritus of English at Dartmouth College, a longtime senior editor at the
National Review
, and occasional speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

“Over the past three and a half decades many historians, journalists and outright fraudulent hacks have attempted to write and even rewrite the history of Watergate. So too have many of the Watergate participants. However, as more and more of the Nixon White House materials continue to be released by the National Archives, no work on this incredible episode has been buttressed more by the evidence than Blind Ambition. John Dean’s memoir is by far the most fascinating, compelling and revealing book that has ever been published on life inside the Nixon White House and Watergate, bar none.”

Thomas Maxwell-Long -- Professor of History at California State University San Bernardino and co-author of
Watergate and the Resignation of Richard Nixon: Impact of a Constitutional Crisis

“Amid the vast wasteland that is political autobiography, John Dean’s was always a thing apart: a literary accomplishment. Now updated with a detailed and illuminating new afterword, it’s one of the best books for one-stop shopping to understand what Watergate was all about and why it still matters.”

Rick Perstein -- Author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Other Books by the Author

Lost Honor
(1982)

The Rehnquist
Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court
(2001)

Unmasking Deep Throat: History’s Most Elusive News Source
(2002)

Warren G. Harding
(2004)

Worse
Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush
(2004)

Conservatives Without Conscience
(2006)

Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches
(2008)

Pure Goldwater
(2008)

CONTENTS

Updated Edition Preface

What was Watergate?
The answer is not simple and could take any of a number of varying legal, ethical, moral, social, historical, and political perspectives. Clearly, Watergate became much more than a hotel, office, and apartment complex alongside the Potomac River in Washington, DC, when, on June 17, 1972, Gordon Liddy’s team of five men dressed in business suits and wearing surgical gloves were arrested in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In a study of how Americans collectively remember Watergate, the complexity of this question was noted by Michael Schudson’s
Watergate In American Memory: How we Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past
(1992). Schudson found, “There is no agreement on what Watergate is. The interesting question becomes how, not whether, we remember Watergate, which face or facet of Watergate we recall and why. Not surprisingly, this varies across different groups.” I came upon the best definition I have yet found when browsing in a bookstore in the mid-1970s. I opened a newly-released dictionary that defined Watergate as “a scandal involving the abuse of high office occurring during the presidency of Richard Nixon.” I no longer recall the dictionary, but I have never forgotten the definition, for it is the way I have used the term “Watergate” in all the years since discovering it. Still, as Schudson pointed out, it is how we remember these events. In the pages that follow, written shortly after the events occurred, I recorded my memory of them.

Blind Ambition: The White House Years
was first published over three decades ago in 1976. It has been out of print for two decades. Since reading it in galleys and then page proofs, I had (until now) never re-read it from cover to cover, although I should add I have never re-read any of my other nine published books either. The reason is that I am intimately familiar with their contents. Books are like children, and you know your own well. Frankly, in re-reading this material after all these years, I was surprised at my own candor. I pulled no punches, and made no effort to spare myself. My thinking at the time was why bother to tell a story like this except with complete candor? Otherwise, I knew my story would not be much use to anyone else in avoiding mistakes similar to those I made then. Given the feedback I have received over the years, I believe my being honest and open did help, and I have not changed a word of my original account. I am republishing that account because I have something to add, information and insights I did not possess when it was first written. Since then, I have learned the answers to many questions about the events that ended the Nixon presidency, and for a time changed the American presidency for the better.

For reasons that are more fully apparent in the new Afterword, the time has come for me not only to fill in a few blanks, but also to call attention to the sham efforts by a few to falsely rewrite this history with which I am so familiar. In addition, it is clear that the lessons of Watergate, which were real and which influenced the operations of government for the better during several decades afterwards, have been lost. As I have written in other books, those lessons and the positive influence of Watergate ended when George W. Bush became president and, during his tenure in office, subscribed to the efforts of Vice President Dick Cheney to remove all the restraints and responsibilities that Watergate had imposed on the presidents who had followed Nixon.
1
*

Since this book went out of print, I have been approached several times about republishing it, but there seemed to me no point in doing so until I had something I thought needed to be said. In 1980, I published
Lost Honor
, where I discussed the aftermath of Watergate as it played out during the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. However, after the Carter Administration, I stopped talking about Watergate publicly, because I was involved in private business and wanted to lower my public profile.

During the mid-1980s, I began hearing about efforts to rewrite the Watergate story, but I ignored this revisionism at that time because it struck me as absurd. Accordingly, when I was asked to review the first book revising the Watergate story, Jim Hougan’s
Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA
(1984), I passed. At the time, I was unaware that Hougan’s work was merely the first effort of many, for a number of Nixon’s apologists, including many of my former White House colleagues, were busy inventing another totally new – and patently false – account of Watergate, turning history upside down by claiming that virtually everything I had written in the following pages was false, as was my testimony.

According to these revisionists, I had fooled the FBI, the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Impeachment Inquiry, and the Watergate Special Prosecutors, not to mention countless journalists and historians – everyone except a retired liquor salesman in Tampa, Florida: a man with limited formal education, but an endless supply of conspiracy theories. When St. Martin’s Press published his remarkable and fabricated story,
Silent Coup: The Removal of a President
, it became impossible to ignore, for it sensationalized Watergate by making my wife, Maureen, who had nothing whatsoever to do with these events, the central part of a sordid and grossly false new account. We filed a defamation lawsuit and aggressively pursued it. After nine years in which the defendants spent $15 million of insurance company money fighting us and trying to make us go away, and during which time we used the power of subpoenas to uncover and discover a great deal of new information about Watergate along with overwhelming evidence to prove the revisionists’ account was bogus, we agreed to settle our lawsuit. But I am getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that because of this nine-year effort, I actually know more about Watergate today, and understand it better, than when I lived through it.

Had I not uncovered all this new information and had I not discovered how the public memory of these events has almost totally faded, I would not be reissuing
Blind Ambition
. I am republishing this account now in order to add information that is not widely known, to share the rest of the story, and to provide solid information to those who missed these remarkable events and are curious about this sorry chapter of American history. Finally, I believed that those in government who believe historical truth is important, need to understand that there are individuals trying to distort that truth for their personal reasons. Our government works best when it understands true history, not when our history is distorted, particularly for a chapter as significant as Watergate.