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By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive Magazine
Here is a transcript of an interview with John Dean of Watergate fame.
Dean was Nixon's White House counsel for three years and then testified against him. He is the author, most recently, of "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush." On March 31, Dean testified in favor of Senator Russ Feingold's censure bill. The interview was conducted on April 28 by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine. You can listen to the interview at http://progressive.org/radio_dean06.
Q: Tell me what your lasting impressions are of Richard Nixon.
Dean: In a way, he's a comic figure. In other ways, he's a tragic figure. I have a memory of a very complex man locked in my synapses.
Q: How long did you work for him?
Dean: A thousand days. When you listen to him on the tapes, he would be one person with his chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, he'd be somebody else with Henry Kissinger, he'd be somebody else with me. He had these different personae. I don't think he ever had great administrative skills for the Presidency. He was slow to interact with his staff. He was very stiff. It was kind of like walking onto a set of an Oval Office when I used to first go into see him. But later on I'd walk in and he'd have his feet on the desk and he'd be talking to me around his shoes.
He was uneasy. In fact, one of the interesting things about Nixon is that we had to prepare something called talking papers for him. Anytime we brought someone in the office to meet the President, because he had a zero gift of gab, you literally had to have a few sentences, buzzwords, thoughts, so he could start a conversation with this person. Alex Butterfield, who ushered more people into the office than anybody else, told me that occasionally if Nixon didn't have this he was literally speechless.
Q: And Butterfield was the guy who surfaced the tapes.
Dean: He's the one who, indeed, corroborated the fact that there were tapes. I had speculated in my testimony that I thought I was taped. It was the only speculation I put in that testimony back in 1973, and thank god I did. Because when they were trying to discredit my testimony, they had a system where they fanned out and interviewed all sorts of people, and so they called Butterfield in, and said, "Dean made this amazing statement that he thought he was recorded. Now isn't that impossible?" And Butterfield said, "No, I think he's right." What made me aware of the fact that I was being taped was Nixon's behavior late in the game when he literally goes to the corner of his hideaway office and starts whispering around the potted palm, "I was foolish to do this" or, "I made a mistake when I did that."
Q: Did you ever speak with Nixon after he resigned?
Dean: Never did. I think it would have been very difficult for him. I'm not the only one who never spoke to him. John Erlichman, his chief domestic adviser, never talked to him. Bob Haldeman and he had sort of parted ways. They did patch up before they both passed away.
Nixon actually was very flattering in one sense in his memoirs about me. When he started dealing with me, he'd written in his diary that I've got this bright young guy. But then he said I was obviously a traitor for breaking rank.
Q: How have you dealt with that accusation?
Dean: It doesn't bother me at all because everybody for whom I had any respect I told what I was going to do before I did it. I said, "Listen, I'm not going to lie for anybody. So plan your life around that." I said I was going to go to the prosecutors after I had told the President he was in deep trouble with the so-called cancer on the Presidency conversation. After that, people knew where I stood, and I actually had the support of some of my colleagues who said, "Do it."
What my plan was, I thought my colleagues would do the right thing, that they would stand up and tell the truth and that would end it, and that Nixon might save himself by coming forward and saying, "Yeah, I made some bad mistakes. Here's what I did." But instead he just escalated the cover-up to the point where he had no choice but to resign or be impeached.
Q: Some people think he could have saved his Presidency by apologizing even at the eleventh hour?
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