"Bless Nixon for Those Tapes” -- An Interview with John Dean

Early in the summer, as the news from the White House grew to be ever more Twilight Zone-strange, it seemed as though an interview with John W. Dean III might be timely. After all, Dean—once Richard M. Nixon’s White House Counsel—is the great expert on presidential misconduct and its consequences. It was his whistleblowing to the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973 that helped to precipitate the process that led ultimately to Nixon’s August 1974 resignation. What is similar? What is different?

Today, Dean, who is seventy-nine and lives in Beverly Hills, writes books about history and politics. His eleventh and most recent title, The Nixon Defense, appeared in 2014. This week, though, Dean returns to Washington, D.C., where he will be testifying at the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the US Supreme Court. One of the issues under senatorial scrutiny will, no doubt, be that Kavanaugh once questioned whether the Supreme Court should have forced Nixon to relinquish those secretly recorded White House tapes….

Claudia Dreifus: Have you, as a veteran of Watergate, been watching the evening news and thinking, as Yogi Berra once said, “It’s déjà vu all over again?”

John Dean: Well, I’m not one of those people who believes that history repeats itself. But we do see parallels and similarities in the processes that are unfolding. How it will end, I don’t have a clue.

Do I believe that Trump’s in a whole world of trouble? I do! Do I think Trump will resign? Not likely! And unlike Nixon, who honored the rule of law and actually in his bones believed in it, I think Trump is the kind of guy who would do anything to get around the rule of law.

He’s spent his entire life trying to avoid responsibility, and he’ll do the same here.

How would you compare the personalities of Trump and Nixon?

They are both authoritarians. They have that in common. Nixon was an authoritarian behind closed doors. Trump is authoritarian both behind closed doors and on the public stage.

Trump has lately been tweeting about you. On August 19, he called youa “rat.” 

Listen, he takes cheap shots at everybody. I’m just the cheap shot at the moment. I feel honored to be in his pejorative invective club.

Who knows what he’s really talking about? I suspect he has minimal, if any, knowledge of Watergate. This is a man who knows virtually no history. I don’t think he’s aware that before going to the prosecutors, I had informed Nixon, through John Erlichman and H.R. Haldeman exactly what I would be doing there. And there’s a tape where Ehrlichman, the assistant to the president for domestic affairs, reports to Nixon on my session. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, called me from Air Force One the night before my meeting with prosecutors to remind me, “Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s very difficult to get it back in.”