Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (74 page)

Q: Other than Watergate, what kind of President was Richard Nixon, and will he ever be judged other than through the lens of Watergate?

A: As President, Nixon was remarkably progressive, and for this reason, conservatives have never liked him. He will forever be credited for his China initiative, which also was a highly progressive move, as was his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. But Nixon will always be viewed through the lens of Watergate and his abuses of power. Still, the perspective on those abuses will likely change because of the Bush/Cheney Presidency, which in my view (and I believe history’s as well) will be judged, to borrow a title from one of my books, to have been worse than Watergate.

Q: If you had it to do all over again, what would you do differently?

A: I should have resigned when I told Haldeman, in September 1971, that I wanted to leave. By then I could smell the rot, and wanted to get away from it. Haldeman more or less threatened me if I left, but enticed as well by commenting that I would get better offers after Nixon was reelected. Had I left, I could have been a spectator, rather than a participant.

Q: (This is my question regarding the comment I made that there was nothing I would change in
Blind Ambition
.) Is there anything that I should have included but failed to do so in the original narrative?

A: Yes. When writing
Blind Ambition
, I tried to avoid being self-serving, and I have not changed my thinking about that. But I probably should have included an important fact about why I was ready to do what had to be done, and if it sounds self-serving, I apologize, but it is the way I thought back then and still think today. I talked about this on one occasion, and I probably should have included it in
Blind Ambition.
15
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When you are working for the executive branch of the federal government, you take an oath to “support and defend” the Constitution, not the President of the United States. While the President’s staff serves at his pleasure, the Counsel to the President’s first job is to protect the office of the Presidency, not the man who occupies that office. When I broke rank, I understood that my doing so would be characterized by some as the action of a snitch, a rat, a tattletale, an informant, a stool pigeon, or a whistleblower. Or, as Richard Nixon would have it, a traitor. Ugly labels, for sure. None of them, however, troubled me then or now, because I know what actually happened and why. How others perceive it (so long as they are honest) is not very important, as I shall explain.

Ironically, what I felt I had to do had actually arisen, albeit indirectly, in a conversation with the President on February 28, 1973, when talking about leaks and informants. At that time, the President made a comment about a person with inside information who went public, observing that “everybody would treat him like a pariah. He’s in a very dangerous situation. These guys you know—the informers, look what it did to Chambers. Chambers informed because he didn’t give a Goddamn.” I knew exactly what it had done to Whittaker Chambers, the President’s favorite informant, since he had received the information from Chambers—and it launched Nixon’s political career.

Whittaker Chambers, of course, had testified that he had once been an active organizer for the Communist Party, working the corridors of government power in Washington. But when Chambers learned of the true nature of communism, and of his former friends who still embraced it, he broke rank and became a witness against these people and their thinking. Years earlier, I had read Chambers’s book about being a witness—appropriately titled
Witness
. While I found no similarities between Whittaker Chambers’s life and my own, I had discovered an eloquent writer, and I had not forgotten the message of one passage in particular, which I later discovered I had underlined:

I had begun to understand that to be a witness, in the sense in which I am using the term, means, ultimately, just one thing. It means that a man is prepared to destroy himself, if necessary, to make his witness. A man does not wish to destroy himself. To the full degree in which he is strongest, that is to say, to the full degree of force that makes it possible for him to bear witness at all, he desires not to destroy himself. To the degree that he is most human, that is to say, most weak, he shrinks from destroying himself. But to the degree that what he truly is and what he stands for are one, he must at some point tacitly consent in his own mind to destroy himself if that is necessary.

Nixon had it wrong with Chambers: Chambers did give a damn, and that was why he had taken the actions he did in testifying against Alger Hiss and others. Within a few weeks of that February 28, 1973 conversation, I knew exactly what Whittaker Chambers was talking about.

During the last ten days of March 1973, a confluence of events forced my decision. I had told Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the President that I had no solution to the problems of Watergate, but that I believed that the President had to end the Watergate cover-up. Then on March 23, 1973, U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica, who had been presiding over the Watergate criminal cases, revealed in open court the letter from James McCord charging that he and others involved in the Watergate break-in were under political pressure to plead guilty and remain silent, that perjury had been committed during his criminal trial, and that higher-ups were involved in the break-in. It had long been anticipated that McCord would do something like this. It was no surprise. We knew that he was correct, but we also knew he had no hard evidence to support his charges. He was relying on hearsay from Gordon Liddy, who would likely kill McCord before he would corroborate his allegations.

When McCord blew the whistle, it was time for my decision. Could the cover-up go on? Absolutely. Could it succeed? Almost for certain, particularly if the cover-up were justified for “national security” reasons, and if, when called to testify, I had supported the earlier testimony by Mitchell and Magruder (which was false) about the meetings with Liddy in the Attorney General’s office—by lying. In short, my options were clear: either I could go forward and live the lie or I could do exactly what Whittaker Chambers accurately described—consent to the inevitable self-destruction that would be necessary to tell the truth. While I thought about it carefully during a long visit to Camp David, I knew before I started where I would come out. I really had no choice. I was disgusted with my own behavior, I was deeply troubled by the pervasive criminality within the Nixon White House, and I believed Americans deserved better from those in the White House. I made the decision that, regardless of the consequences, I was going to tell the truth, and, as they say: The rest is history.

Because of the great number of persons who have political, economic, and emotional ties to any President, when you tarnish that President, his followers feel that you tarnish them as well; when you harm that President, you harm them as well; and when that President strikes out to defend himself against you, his followers will do likewise. When you do the kind of damage I found necessary to do, the attacks against you never end, because Presidents, and those who have hooked on to a President’s star, are not only concerned with protecting his incumbency but his legacy as well. I have little doubt that those who want to refurbish Nixon’s deeply tarnished image will never stop attacking me. It is the price I must pay for having told the truth and for continuing to do so.

Updated Edition Acknowledgements

While Polimedia Publishing is a new publisher, I have been working with the organization’s principles – Charles Lago and Chris Johnson – for many years, for they have assisted with book promotion tours, principally in California, with my last four books, arranging events and selling books. They know the book business well and because they frequently were asked if Blind Ambition was available for sale, they helped convince me that it should not remain out of print. Charles and Chris have handled the technical matters of reproducing this book like old hands, for which I am appreciative. Family friend David Cason, whose design talents have long been invaluable to the Deans, assisted with the new cover.

Special thanks to wife Maureen, who made the initial read of the new Afterword. In addition, I requested my FindLaw editor Julie Hilden to run her sharp eyes over this new material, and as always, she had helpful suggestions. Ms. Samantha Greenhill did a nice job of copyediting and updating the index to include the Afterword. Finally, David Dorsen, whose name you will recognize from the narrative of the Afterword, offered several helpful suggestions for the Afterword, as did Thomas Long, with whom I am working on a book about the Watergate cover-up trial for the University of Kansas Press. As always, however, all errors are mine, not those who helped me assemble the book.

About the Author

Before becoming Counsel to the President of the United States in July 1970 at age thirty-one, John Dean was Chief Minority Counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, the Associate Director of the National Commission on Reform of the Federal Criminal Laws, and Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States. He served as Richard Nixon’s White House lawyer for a thousand days.

Dean did his undergraduate studies at Colgate University and the College of Wooster, with majors in English Literature and Political Science. He received a graduate fellowship from American University to study government and the presidency, before entering Georgetown University Law Center, where he received his JD in 1965. After having retired at age sixty from a successful career as a private investment banker (acquiring, merging and later selling middle-market companies), he returned full-time to writing and lecturing.

John, who regularly appears on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” has been described as one of the most knowledgeable and candid commentators about the ways of Washington and the workings of our government. He writes as a guest columnist for a number of publications (The Huffington Post, Truthdig, The Daily Beast – to mention a few) and has written a regular a bi-weekly column for FindLaw.com for the past nine years. He is currently working on his next book.
He lives in Beverly Hills, California with his wife Maureen.