Interviews & Essays

Interviews

John W. Dean

As we get closer to the release of TRUTH, LIES, AND THE QUESTIONS IN BETWEEN, I’ll be posting interviews with people who lived through or are students of Watergate or the ERA.

I begin with John Dean, the young White House counsel and Nixon-believer who became deeply involved in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in but then turned truth-teller. It was his explosive testimony in the Senate Watergate hearings that broke the scandal wide open. CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl described his testimony this way: “Dean turned the lights on out there in the country. Everything he said was a jolt.”

While a senior writer at the Washingtonian magazine, I interviewed a good number of political and arts celebrities, health experts, and victims of violence whose courage and candor were deeply inspiring. Often, those I braced myself to be controlling or rightly self-aggrandizing given their talents, experiences, or national reputations turned out to be the most modest and welcoming/respectful of my questions. Mr. Dean was one of those remarkable interviews.

He responded quickly and graciously to my request for a conversation I hoped would offer you a summation of the complexities of the Watergate scandal and how he found the strength to break from his party and hero to speak truth to power. The last bit feeling especially relevant to today.

He was warm, self-deprecating, and wryly humorous (note the image of the Watergate complex behind him), incredibly patient with my dogs howling as a thunderstorm rumbled around my house. At 84, he has a no-nonsense honesty and comes across as a man who survived personal catastrophe and actually learned and grew from it, dedicated to sharing that hard-won wisdom, particularly the dangers of political tribalism and win-at-all-cost attitudes. He is still unabashedly in love with his wife of 51 years, who had just married and then stood by him as he had to admit his wrongdoings to the nation and when half of all Americans vilified him as a traitor and liar.

Since then, he’s written a dozen books, beginning with his bestseller Blind Ambition. His latest, Authoritarian Nightmare, is a searingly insightful look at the phenomenon of Trump’s followers and the psychology of “social dominators” and extreme allegiances. I highly recommend both.

Here are Mr. Dean's thoughts on Watergate, how the cover-up initially was really about trying to hide illegal surveillance regarding the Pentagon Papers, and his nation-changing testimony (plus Senator Goldwater’s surprising influence on that 60,000-word “confession.”):

 

How the recent Supreme Court decision on Trump’s immunity would apply to Nixon:

 

Authoritarians, logic/truth not mattering, and the psychological make-up of followers:

Mary McNeil

Now, post Trump’s re-election, the media is beginning to really examine their part in his ascendance. Writes the New Yorker in its series of reflections on the 2024 vote: "Trump's presence has always been a co-creation: his and ours. From the moment when he first came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he was treated as a source of spectacle. Because he was good for television, he was accepted as a legitimate candidate. In the print media, he grew through the doctrine of both-sides-ism: no matter how awful his deeds, his opponent had to be presented as equally bad. This empowered him to be both wicked and normal...again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump's presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side.”

The press issued similar mea culpas after the 1950s Red Scare ruined the lives of thousands of Americans—soul-searching confessionals I found during my research for Suspect Red. When the nation finally shook itself free of Senator Joe McCarthy’s conspiracy theories, witch hunts, loyalty review boards, blacklists, and censorship, the media admitted that they'd fueled his political celebrity and power. They had not debunked his self-proclaimed, bad-boy skunk-hunter persona, or sufficiently challenged his only-I-can-save-you schtick that captivated and drove many Americans to turn on one another. Renowned newsman Wallace Carroll termed it the "tyranny of objectivity," and warned against reporters giving voice to a lie without going deeper into context to explain its falsehood when the next national crisis—Watergate—hit.

We don’t seem to be learning the lesson. 

I had the privilege of interviewing Carroll’s biographer, Mary L. McNeil, a fellow Wake Forest University alum and friend, about her wonderful Century's Witness, and the similarities of today's coverage with that of McCarthyism and the Watergate break-in.

Howard Means

I wanted to interview Howard Means because his 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence is such a beautifully nuanced account of May 4,1970, when National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of anti-Vietnam War protestors, killing four college students and critically injuring nine more. In the best kind of poetic narrative journalism, Howard portrays the heartbreaking perspectives of all people caught up in the tragedy of that day—students, professors, guardsmen, campus officials, local residents—and how those terrible 13 seconds forever changed our nation.

How does that relate to Watergate? The landslide re-election of Richard Nixon—despite growing revelations about the break-in, campaign dirty tricks, and illegal slush funds—was both a culmination of and backlash against the decade leading up to it. So much so, I open TRUTH, LIES with a prologue of quick flashbacks, including Kent State and the horrendous “hard hat riots” that followed it. Nixon exploited these events, promising to control “radicals,” to make the streets safe again for “the silent majority” of love-it-or-leave-it Americans sick of being dismissed or told what to think by “the elite” and “spoiled” college “hippies.”

A gifted editor/writer and colleague of mine at the Washingtonian magazine, Howard before that was a high school English teacher—at one of D.C.’s most prestigious boys-schools, its ranks filled with the sons of high-profile politicians from both sides of the roiling Watergate debate. Having the privilege of speaking often in schools or with educators, I know they feel a tremendous responsibility right now to help students understand and survive our deeply divided and divisive politics—the constitutional crises constantly confronting us during the past eight and now coming four years. I wondered what that had been like during Watergate.

As always, Howard’s insights are wise, honest, and rooted in the human experience of historic events.

Essays

Women's Equality Day: Past and Present