It had been 25 years since John Dean stepped into the federal courthouse here, during historic and inauspicious days for him and the nation.
It was 1974, and Dean testified in the conspiracy trial of former President Richard Nixon’s top aides: former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman. They were all convicted of the Watergate cover-up and now, like Nixon, they’re all dead.
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“Were you involved in the Watergate matter?” a Justice Department attorney asked him a week ago in the same building.
“Sadly, unfortunately,” he responded. “I was involved in the cover-up.”
Dean, who became Nixon’s White House counsel in 1970 at the ripe young age of 31, back in that era had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Though he blew the lid off Watergate and came away as one of the few truth-tellers, he was sentenced to 120 days in the custody of U.S. marshals and has not practiced law since.
Still, his life has been a success. Now 60, he remains married to Maureen Dean, the striking woman who got lots of attention during the height of Watergate. They live in California. He’s involved in private investment and maintained a reputation as a forthcoming, cordial man who resurfaced as a regular cable television analyst during the House impeachment hearings and Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton.
It was fitting that Dean, whose famous words about a “cancer on the presidency” are part of the Watergate lexicon, returned as an opponent of Nixon, or at least of the late president’s estate.
The estate is involved in a vigorous battle over money with the federal government, a battle which Dean acidly refers to as akin to “a robbery in progress” by the Nixon clan and its large phalanx of attorneys.
The estate seeks more than $200 million as compensation for the 1974 seizure of Nixon’s papers and tapes. The government says the estate is owed little or nothing, given the fact that those materials were meant to be a proper historical archive.
In part, the estate’s position is based on a claim that the collection of 44 million separate items was valued at about $35 million back in 1974 and that compounded interest would sharply raise that figure. In addition, it contends that estimates should be made for potential commercial use of those materials as books, videos, docudramas, you name it.
The legal dispute has bounced around the courts for quite a while and is now back before a trial judge. Opening day was Dec. 2, and there have been 63, mostly snoozy days of testimony. Fortunately, they’ve included the playing of some never-before-heard Nixon Oval Office tapes, some suggesting just what a small-minded, petty, bigoted soul Nixon could be.
Dean’s relevance to the case largely involves certain duties he fulfilled when he served as Nixon’s in-house lawyer between July 1970 and his forced resignation amid the mounting Watergate mess in April 1973.
Nixon and Haldeman were concerned that there was no rational system for dealing with Nixon’s papers and correspondence. They wanted Nixon to ultimately have a fine library and museum, and they wanted to make sure that a way to coherently deal with and collect his materials was in place.
Dean was given the task. It is his testimony about that task that proved important to the Justice Department lawyers in the current trial.
In sum, Dean argues that even though it was his legal opinion that Nixon had a personal property ownership of the materials, it was crystal clear that there was never any thought given to making money off the papers (of course, he didn’t know back then about any tapes).
Whomever he spoke with about the papers, whether Nixon himself, family or White House aides, nobody ever mentioned turning a buck out of the materials, according to Dean.
Since Dean was spending so much time in Washington last fall as a TV analyst, he decided to stick around for Thanksgiving to be with some family in the area, then head to the National Archives in nearby College Park, Md.
There, “I was able to find documents for every point they (the government) wanted to make, which made it difficult for the estate to cross-examine me.” And he reminded the government of the difficulty of getting documents declassified, which meant that putting a value on the 44 million items in 1974 verged on sophistry.
“I was surprised that the Nixon estate never deposed me,” Dean admitted. “The only thing I can think of is that they somehow thought the government was bluffing. They (the estate) didn’t have a clue as to what I knew.”
In preparation for this testimony, he listened at the archives to several, still publicly unreleased tapes related to his testimony.
“He’s obviously not your average researcher since he was actually there at the time of Watergate,” said Carl Weissenbach, director of the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives.
“He was a player,” he continued. “That separates him from the average researcher. Most come to learn what happened. Dean was there. And I’ve found him to be a very honorable individual.”
One conversation he heard at the archives, and heard again during his testimony, was held 11 days after Haldeman and Ehrlichman had resigned in 1973. Nixon is heard suggesting that the two men get jobs at the Nixon Foundation, where presumably they would be the overseers of his records.
“Who the hell is going to write the history of the first four years?” he asks Haldeman. “Are we going to let (Secretary of State) Henry (Kissinger) write it?”
Dean found the tape to play on two levels.
“On one, it talks about the president’s interest in his foundation,” Dean said last week during a conversation. “But it also speaks to the fact, and this is what I heard in Nixon’s voice, that he had just fired Haldeman and Ehrlichman, along with me, and Ehrlichman had made clear this was a disaster for him financially.
“So I saw this as Nixon stroking his two former aides so they wouldn’t turn on him. Nixon would take care of his boys and this was how he would do it.”
Dean also caught a certain emotional dissonance in the Nixon-Haldeman conversation. “They were so distant and arm’s length, even having worked together for years. Even at their conspiratorial best, there’s a distance between this man (Nixon) and everybody. Nixon was still playing with him (Haldeman). It was weird.”
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As he sat in the courtroom, it was hard not to think back 25 years, when he testified before Judge John Sirica in the cover-up trial. The country was watching.
“People were climbing off the rafters, looking for seats.”
It’s different these days in the courtroom of Judge John Garrett Penn. The action is so slow, there are days when not a single reporter shows. Some days, with the rumor of something vaguely notable to play out, there’s a minor rustling.
“Now it was just a few history buffs and a few reporters like yourself,” Dean said.
With his impeachment pundit duties and his preparing to testifying, Dean has spent more time in Washington than he had in the previous 25 years. He has visited lots of old friends, gotten a new feel of the city.
“Procedurally, nothing much has changed, once you know the city and how it operates,” he said last week. “There are lots more media, but the White House and Congress still work the same way.”
The only big difference, he discerns, is the whole atmosphere.
“It’s more acidic than when I was here. It’s a nasty place, he said.”
“I know both Republicans and Democrats and the Republicans tend to be a bit more negative than the Democrats. But it’s become a `Gotcha!’ city. It’s the same with my friends in your business (the press).
“The best story is not the good one, but the one that causes conflict. That’s much different than it once was.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.