Q&A with former Nixon counsel, John Dean

Panther Newspaper: From your point of view, what was your involvement with Watergate?

John Dean: "…I'm counsel to the president, I have a disaster dropped on my doorstep, it is handled increasingly poorly for many months, when I finally get around to getting to the president I can't convince him of the mistakes we're making and I'll break rank and blow it up. There it is in a nutshell."

PN: What was your relationship with President Nixon throughout all of this?

JD: "He brags on having the youngest counsel that a president has ever had when I used to see him at reception lines at an event. But he is slow to come to me with the worst problem, which is Watergate, otherwise my actions are pretty mechanical, just getting routine stuff done through the White House. As I described in my lecture, the White House counsel is a midlevel position, you report up through the chief of staff, you get a pretty steady flow of papers up through the president's office, you clear people for conflicts of interest when they're coming into the cabinet, there's a good volume of business. For Nixon, I would follow court opinions, if there was something coming out of the Supreme Court where Nixon would be asked for a reaction, I would have to have a briefing within minutes of it coming down from the court. In the White House, problems are always a crisis that can't be resolved by one of the other departments or agencies. So it's always a hot potato when it comes in and if you drop it then it'll be conspicuous. And other than Watergate, I don't know of anything else we dropped. Watergate did change the relationship but not until I blow it up and depart. What's interesting is when Nixon wrote his memoir, he says I'm the only one who tried to warn him, so he recognized that but he also accuses me of testifying about stuff that should have never been testified about, or not the way he remembers it happening. Fortunately the tapes proved me right."

PN: After he resigned and then later in life, did your relationship change?

JD: "Never saw him. Virtually nobody did, other than Haldeman. Erlichman never did. Some of the others did, but not many. Those who are at the Nixon foundation now, who are all Nixon apologists and found that he did no wrong, had no problem with it."

PN: Once the trial was coming to a conclusion and you were sentenced to jail time, what was that time like?

JD: "I was in the witness protection program the whole time. I never really served time. I stayed within the witness protection program in a safe house. Everyday of the four months I was in confinement I was driven into Washington to the prosecutor's office — not exactly hard time."

PN: Why do you think it's important to continue commemorating Watergate after 40 years?

JD: "Because I think the title was well chosen. It really did, for several generations, set the rule of law as the standard for lawyers. It's what changed the game, that change hasn't been forgotten."

Click here to read the Panther's coverage of Chapman Law Review's panel on the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal.