HomeNixon FoundationNixon Center

John Dean And The Tapes

July 10, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under John Dean At The Nixon Library, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library events, Nixon in the News, TV News Personalities, The New Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate, Yorba Linda 

No, not those tapes.

A little over two weeks ago I posted about one of the webpages of the groundbreaking and very informative nixontapes.org site run by Luke Nichter, an assistant professor of history at Tarleton State University in Texas. This page, at the time I posted, included links to two audio files in which John W. Dean III, White House counsel during the Nixon administration, was featured.

In one file, from a recording of a telephone conversation made in 1989, Dean could be heard explaining that when writing his book about Watergate, Blind Ambition, “I never actually went back and re-read my [Senate Watergate Committee] testimony.” This was by way of explaining why some passages in the book described events in a way somewhat different from what Dean told the Committee two years earlier. A second audio file was an excerpt from a recording made of Dean’s appearance last month at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, to promote the reissue (with a lengthy new afterword) of Blind Ambition.

However, if anyone goes to that part of nixontapes.org now, he or she will find a notice from Professor Nichter stating that these sound files have been removed as a result of a notice from Dean threatening legal action if they remained on the site. (However, the 1989 conversation can still be heard at watergate.com, the site founded by Silent Coup co-author Len Colodny.)

An article at FoxNews.com by Joseph Abrams delineates the situation further. “I merely wanted to bring these contradictions to light and thought I was doing a service, but Dean was absolutely mortified when he found out that I had these materials,” Professor Nichter explains, and notes that his modestly funded site does not have the resources to contest Dean in court.

Indeed, Dean’s previous legal actions against the authors and publisher of Silent Coup and Watergate figure-turned-radio host G. Gordon Liddy have made some journalists nervous. Jim Hougan, whose 1984 book Secret Agenda was the first work to raise substantial questions about Dean’s role in Watergate, refused to comment to Abrams at all about Dean.

But Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen, author of the 2008 biography of John Mitchell The Strong Man, which contains the most meticulously documented and groundbreaking research into Dean’s role in Watergate to see print thus far, has not been cowed. He told Abrams:

“My book speaks for itself, and I think it’s noteworthy that Dean has entirely avoided engaging its substance. Dean himself is well aware that his historical reputation has suffered enormously in the last two decades, and so he resorts to frivolous litigation and bullying tactics to rehabilitate himself. Not since Albert Speer [Hitler's architectural and technological mastermind] has a historical figure so assiduously used his post-prison writings to muddy and distort the historical record of the events in which he was culpable.”

Although Dean was one of the younger figures to be involved in the Watergate scandal, he is 70 now, so one wonders for how much longer his story of what happened will continue to go unchallenged by many journalists and historians.



Comments

5 Responses to “John Dean And The Tapes”

  1. MK on July 11th, 2009 7:30 am

    Thanks for posting this, Bob. I’m very sorry to see that this has happened with Professor Nichter, someone whom I respect for the work he has done with the Nixon White House tapes. I would have handled this differently, had I been John Dean. Of course, I’m not a lawyer, I’m a historian. Still, I’m a federal employee, a public servant. And I know something of what it is like to see yourself portrayed in ways that do not match your interpretation or view or recollection of your actions.

    When that happens, you can talk lawsuits. Or you can think about why your image is what it is among a broad spectrum of observers (some admiring, some not, some simply ambivalent). You can accept that it goes with the territory (especially after one becomes a public figure). Or you can fling mud at those who comment on your actions. Or you can chill, except in the cases of the most egregious and outrageous actions.

    I had not anticipated this response when I read Luke Nichter’s essay. I didn’t pick up on any negative motivations in Luke’s piece, just a desire to sort out some of the issues related to Watergate and books and speeches about Watergate. He’s a historian — that’s what historians do. (I would love to see other Nixon historians come to Luke’s defense, including, yes, Stanley Kutler.)

    Points of law related the right to post audio clips aside, I’m not at all convinced it was necessary to use the threat of lawsuits against Luke. But hey, we all decide how we roll. To each his own. Actions and decisions which pick up pluses from some observers can pick up minues from others.

    This situation with Dean, his speech at the Nixon Presidential Library, and the aftermath does present the Nixon Foundation with some opportunities. The jury still is out on whether the Foundation and NARA can work together to ensure that RN’s tapes and documents are released according to law. I’m less optimistic that that can occur than I was a year ago. For one thing, John Taylor no longer is involved in the process. And I had come to see John as someone who had matured into a person who understood that blame games don’t always pay off. And might even be counterproductive.

    My other concern centers on the fact that there has been a change of administration in Washington since I started reading this site and using it to assess the Nixon Foundation and Nixonites. I see flashes or anger or resentment in some of the essays posted here on TNN since the election. Perhaps I’m just reflecting on what previous archivists went through, but to me, anger and resentment point to potential difficulty in working with NARA. Nixon’s lawyers once tried to paint the Supervisory Archivist in charge of Nixon tapes processing as biased against RN. But it was not his fault that RN said and did what he did. And that the records came into NARA’s care. Argue bills of attainder and laws and regulations all you like. But treat NARA’s managers and the staff they supervise with the fundamental respect their mission deserves.

    I was disappointed that no one representing the Foundation commented on Bob Bostock’s essay here on TNN in June on Tim Naftali and Dean’s speech. I can’t even tell whether representatives of the Foundation read the comments posted there. I would like to think that NARA and the Foundation will be able to work through archival disclosure issues. Still, since reading Mr. Bostock’s essay, I’ve come to worry whether reactions to current political conditions and a possible backlash against NARA, not for its archival actions, but because of resentment against the current head of the executive branch, will affect those efforts. Crossing my fingers that this is not where the Foundation is headed! Dean’s actions already disappointed me, I hope the Foundation’s don’t, as well. At any rate, I’m following how the Foundation reacts to Dean and to NARA with great interest.

  2. Jonathan Movroydis on July 11th, 2009 9:06 am

    Well said — and as always fair and balanced — MK. Though I can assure you there is no anger or resentment to the current administration. –JM

  3. MK on July 11th, 2009 9:47 am

    Thanks, Jonathan, much appreciated. I appreciate also that John Taylor made me so welcome here on TNN (one of the reasons I came to respect John as much as I do), and that you, too, exude the same welcoming qualities that encourage engagement. Way to go, man!

  4. Len Colodny on July 13th, 2009 3:25 pm

    The 1989 tape was not a conversation. It was an interview, the last of six
    interviews on the record, that took place between 1987 until January 1989.

    This interview contains many serious contradictions between Dean’s
    Senate testinony and his book. Including his advising Nixon to
    use the CIA to block the FBI. The event that would end Nixon’s Presidency.

    He discusses his role laid out in the book, of Haldeman ordering him to investigate in 1971 the link between Howard Hughes and Larry O’Brien the alleged target of the watergate break in.

    Dean clamied that “shit” was put in his book by his editors to make the book more interesting.

    Len Colodny

  1. Free adult video.

Got something to say?