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John Wesley Dean III (born October 14, 1938) is a disbarred American attorney who served as White House Counsel for U.S. President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. Dean is known for his role in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal and his subsequent testimony to Congress as a witness. His guilty plea to a single felony in exchange for becoming a key witness for the prosecution ultimately resulted in a reduced sentence, which he served at Fort Holabird in Southeast Baltimore, Maryland. After his plea, he was Disbarment.
Shortly after the Watergate hearings, Dean wrote about his experiences in a series of books and toured the United States to lecture. He later became a commentator on contemporary politics, a book author, and a columnist for FindLaw's Writ.
Dean had originally been a proponent of Barry Goldwater, but he later became a critic of the Republican Party. Dean has been particularly critical of the party's support of Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and of neoconservatism, strong executive power, mass surveillance, and the Iraq War.
Dean married Karla Ann Hennings, the daughter of Senator Thomas C. Hennings Jr. of Missouri, on February 4, 1962; they had one child, John Wesley Dean IV, before divorcing in 1970. Dean married Maureen (Mo) Kane on October 13, 1972.
Dean was employed from 1966 to 1967 as chief minority counsel to the Republicans on the United States House Committee on the Judiciary. Dean then served as associate director of the National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws for approximately two years.
In late March in Florida, Mitchell approved a scaled-down plan. This revised plan eventually led to attempts to eavesdrop on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., and to the Watergate scandal. The burglars' first break-in attempt in late May was successful, but several problems had arisen with poor-quality information from their bugs, and they wanted to photograph more documents. Specifically, the burglars were interested in information they thought was held by DNC head Lawrence F. O'Brien. On their second break-in, on the night of June 16, hotel security discovered the burglars. After the burglars' arrest, Dean took custody of evidence and money from the White House safe of E. Howard Hunt, who had been in charge of the burglaries, and destroyed some of the evidence before investigators could find it. Blind Ambition, by John Dean, Simon & Schuster 1976; Watergate, by Fred Emery, Touchstone Publishers 1994.
White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman later claimed that Nixon appointed Dean to take the lead role in coordinating the Watergate cover-up from an early stage and that this cover-up was working very well for many months. Certain aspects of the scandal came to light before Election Day, but Nixon was reelected by a landslide.
On March 23, the five Watergate burglars, along with G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were sentenced with stiff fines and prison time of up to 40 years.
On April 6, Dean hired an attorney and began cooperating with Senate Watergate investigators, while continuing to work as Nixon's Chief White House Counsel and participating in cover-up efforts, not disclosing this obvious conflict to Nixon until some time later. Dean was also receiving advice from the attorney he hired, Charles Shaffer, on matters involving the vulnerabilities of other White House staff.
Dean continued to provide information to the prosecutors, who were able to make enormous progress on the cover-up, which until then they had virtually ignored, concentrating on the actual burglary and events preceding it. Dean also appeared before the Watergate grand jury, where he took the Fifth Amendment numerous times to avoid incriminating himself, and in order to save his testimony for the Senate Watergate hearings.
When Nixon learned that Dean had begun cooperating with federal prosecutors, he pressed Kleindienst not to give Dean immunity from prosecution, telling him that Dean was lying to the Justice Department about his conversations with the president. On April 17, 1973, Nixon told Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen (who was overseeing the Watergate investigation) that he did not want any member of the White House to be granted immunity from prosecution. Petersen informed Nixon that this could cause problems for the prosecution of the case, but Nixon publicly announced his position that evening. It was alleged that Nixon's motivation for preventing Dean from getting immunity was to prevent him from testifying against key Nixon aides and Nixon himself.
Neisser found that, despite Dean's confidence, the tapes proved that his memory was anything but a tape recorder.Schacter, D. L. (1996). Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and the Past; Basic Books. Dean failed to recall any conversations verbatim, and often failed to recall the gist of conversations correctly. Neisser did not explain the difference as one of deception; rather, he thought that the evidence supported the theory that memory is not akin to a tape recorder and instead should be thought of as reconstructions of information that are greatly affected by rehearsal, or attempts at replay.
In 1992, Dean hired attorney Neil Papiano and brought the first in a series of defamation suits against G. Gordon Liddy for claims in Liddy's book Will and St. Martin's Press for its publication of the book Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin. Silent Coup alleged that Dean masterminded the Watergate burglaries and the Watergate coverup and that the true aim of the burglaries was to seize information implicating Dean and the former Maureen "Mo" Biner (his then-fiancée) in a prostitution ring. After hearing of Colodny's work, Liddy issued a revised paperback version of Will supporting Colodny's theory. This theory was subsequently the subject of the 1992 A&E Network Investigative Reports series program The Key to Watergate.Dean, John Doing Legal, Political, and Historical Research on the Internet: Using Blog Forums, Open Source Dictionaries, and More , Findlaw, September 9, 2005. Taylor Branch states : " Blind Ambition (ghostwriter for John Dean) (Simon & Schuster: 1979)" under the heading "Past Writing".
In the preface to his 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience, Dean strongly denied Colodny's theory, pointing out that Colodny's chief source (Phillip Mackin Bailley) had been in and out of mental institutions. Dean settled the defamation suit against Colodny and his publisher, St. Martin's Press, on terms that Dean wrote in the book's preface he could not divulge under the conditions of the settlement, other than that "the Deans were satisfied." The case of Dean vs. Liddy was dismissed without prejudice. Also in 2006, Dean appeared as an interviewee in the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, about the Nixon administration's efforts to keep John Lennon out of the United States.
Dean retired from investment banking in 2000 while continuing to work as an author and lecturer, becoming a columnist for FindLaw's Writ online magazine.
In 2008, Dean co-edited Pure Goldwater, a collection of writings by the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, in part as an act of fealty to the man who defined his political ideals. His co-editor was Goldwater's son Barry Goldwater, Jr.
Historian Stanley Kutler was accused of editing his transcripts of the Nixon tapes to make Dean appear in a more favorable light.
On September 17, 2009, Dean appeared on Countdown with new allegations about Watergate. He said he had found information via the Nixon tapes that showed what the burglars were after: information on a kickback scheme involving the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida. Dean also asserts that Nixon did not directly order the break-in, but that Ehrlichman ordered it on Nixon's behalf.
In speaking engagements in 2014, Dean called Watergate a "lawyers' scandal" that, for all the bad, ushered in needed legal ethics reforms.
His next book, released in 2006, was Conservatives without Conscience, a play on Barry Goldwater's book The Conscience of a Conservative. In it, he asserts that post-Goldwater conservatism has been co-opted by people with authoritarian personalities and policies, citing data from Bob Altemeyer. According to Dean, modern conservatism, specifically on the Christian right, embraces obedience, inequality, intolerance, and strong intrusive government, in stark contrast to Goldwater's philosophies and policies. Using Altemeyer's scholarly work, he contends that there is a tendency toward ethically questionable political practices when authoritarians are in power and that the current political situation is dangerously unsound because of it. Dean cites the behavior of key members of the Republican leadership, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich and Bill Frist, as clear evidence of a relationship between modern right-wing conservatism and this authoritarian approach to governance. He places particular emphasis on the abdication of checks and balances by the Republican Congress and on the dishonesty of the conservative intellectual class in support of the Republican Party, as a result of the obedience and arrogance innate to the authoritarian mentality.
After it became known that Bush authorized NSA wiretaps without warrants, Dean asserted that Bush is "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense". On March 31, 2006, Dean testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during hearings on censuring Bush over the issue. Senator Russell Feingold, who sponsored the censure resolution, introduced Dean as a "patriot" who put "rule of law above the interests of the president." In his testimony, Dean asserted that Nixon covered up Watergate because he believed it was in the interest of national security. This sparked a sharp debate with Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who repeatedly asserted that Nixon authorized the break-in at Democratic headquarters. Dean finally replied, "You're showing you don't know that subject very well." Spectators laughed, and soon the senator was "sputtering mad".
Dean's 2007 book Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches is, as he wrote in its introduction, the third volume of an unplanned trilogy. In this latest book, Dean, who has repeatedly called himself a "Goldwater conservative", built on Worse Than Watergate and Conservatives Without Conscience to argue that the Republican Party has gravely damaged all three branches of the federal government in the service of ideological rigidity and with no attention to the public interest or the general good. Dean concludes that conservatism must regenerate itself to remain true to its core ideals of limited government and the rule of law.
In February 2018, Dean warned that Rick Gates's testimony may be "the end" of Trump's presidency.
In September 2018, Dean warned against Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the United States Supreme Court, a main concern being that the appointment would result in "the most presidential-powers-friendly court" in modern times.
On November 7, 2018, the day after the midterm elections, Trump forced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign. Dean commented on the removal in colorful terms, saying it "seems to be planned like a murder" and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller likely had contingency plans, possibly including sealed indictments.
In early June 2019, Dean testified, along with various U.S. attorneys and legal experts, before the House Judiciary Committee on the implications of, and potential actions as a result of, the Mueller report.
In 2022, Dean said the January 6 Committee had an overwhelming case against Trump. In 2024, Dean said the Trump v. United States ruling essentially affirms Nixon's famous statement during the Nixon interviews: "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." Dean said Nixon "would have survived" the Watergate scandal under the ruling "because the evidence against him was based on official acts the Supreme Court has deemed immune from prosecution." Dean called the ruling “a radical decision by a radical court” and “judicial activism on steroids.” Dean elaborated his thoughts on the ruling:
“Well, there’s actually two rulings in this decision. There’s a 6-3 for presumptive immunity, but there’s also a 5-4 on you can’t even have the evidence of official conduct come to play… This is very…this to me, appears to certainly influence the existing law on presidential conduct and what’s available…evidentiary speaking. Amy Coney Barrett said she didn’t think that it should be so restricted as the decision of the court itself was, so I think that Nixon would have survived. I think he would have walked under this ruling.”
Dean had previously said Nixon might have survived that same scandal if Fox News had existed during that time (1970s). He said:
“I think there’s more likelihood (Nixon) might have survived if there’d been a Fox News.”
In the 1979 TV mini-series Blind Ambition, Dean was played by Martin Sheen. In the 1995 film Nixon, directed by Oliver Stone, Dean was played by David Hyde Pierce. In the 1999 film Dick, Dean was played by Jim Breuer. In the 2022 TV mini-series Gaslit, Dean was played by Dan Stevens. In the 2023 TV mini-series White House Plumbers, Dean was played by Domhnall Gleeson.
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