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Why John Dean Talked: The Counsel Who Broke the Cover-Up
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
John Dean knew where every secret was buried — because he'd helped bury them. In this chapter, discover why Nixon's White House counsel became the witness who unravelled the Watergate cover-up.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There's a question that gets overlooked in almost every account of Watergate. It's not about the burglars, or the tapes, or even the resignation.
Dean joined the Nixon White House in nineteen seventy as counsel to the president. He was thirty-one years old.
What followed the arrests wasn't a moment of principled deliberation inside the Nixon White House. It was a scramble.
While the cover-up was being assembled, two reporters at the Washington Post were doing something the rest of the press corps largely wasn't. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were treating this story as though it mattered.
By the summer of nineteen seventy-three, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities had opened public hearings. The country was watching.
John Dean testified before the Senate committee in late June of nineteen seventy-three, before the tapes became the central issue. He testified for five days.
Nixon understood the danger the tapes represented. On October twentieth, nineteen seventy-three, he ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, the independent attorney who had been pressing hardest for access to the recordings.
The tapes that were finally produced contained the evidence that made Nixon's position untenable. One recording in particular, a conversation from June twenty-third, nineteen seventy-two, just six days after the Watergate arrests, showed Nixon explicitly approving a plan to use the CIA to obstruct the FBI's investigation of the burglary.
John Dean had understood the full architecture of what Nixon was doing earlier than almost anyone else. He'd understood it because he'd helped build parts of it.
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