Rushing toward a footnote in history (Published 1973) (2024)

WASHINGTON. As John Dean emerged this spring as a leading protagonist in the cosmic drama called Watergate, and even after his dramatic testimony before the Ervin Committee, he seemed to me to remain a shadowy figure, without background, without depth. Much was written about what he had done, and he demonstrated before the Ervin Committee that he is cool, articulate and cough, but little was said about who he was, or what he was. He had rarely been in the news, preWatergate, and yet he had lived in Washington a dozen years, one of a thousand bright young men scrambling for a place in the political sun. What follows is based on talks with some of his old friends, acquaintances, classmates, colleagues and rivals, some of whom liked him, some of whom didn't, but none of whom ever imagined that thisreserved, polished, ambitious young man would someday be locked in a fight to the finish with the President of the United States.

The President's accuser

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., who taught ethics to Jeb Magruder at Williams College in 1958, has noted Magruder's roots in the apolitical, success‐oriented, “silent” student generation of the nineteen‐fifties. The same might be said of John Dean. In his college days, he appeared the very model of a proper young man of the Silent Generation, preoccupied with the right girls and the right fraternities and the right clothing, the sort of fellow who in time would go back home to Dad's bank or Dad's law firm and take his place as a pillar of some heartland community. Dean was like that, up to a point, but he was different too, for he didn't go back home to Pennsylvania. He was drawn to power and perhaps inevitably he made his way to Washington. He roomed with a Senator's son in prep school and married a Senator's daughter in college. There was a mobility about him, a restlessness that led him to attend four colleges in five years, and soon thereafter to pursue his legal/political career at a job‐a‐year clip. He once told his college roommate that he wanted a footnote in history and, God knows, he has achieved that. He was, as one of his ex‐bosses put it, in a hell of a hurry.

He was in such a hurry that a few months out of law school he invested some of his wife's money in a get‐rich‐quick scheme that caused him to be fired from his first law firm for what his boss called unethical conduct. After that, he entered the political world, where ethical conduct is not always precisely defined, and he became known as a young man who always, always pleased the boss. He pleased so many bosses that when he was 32 years old his boss was the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, and Dean pleased him, too, for a while.

JOHN WESLEY DEAN 3d was born in Akron, Ohio, on Oct. 14, 1938, the only son of an executive with the Firestone Tire Company. The Deans lived in one of Akron's better neighborhoods until young John was in the third grade, when they moved to Evanston, Ill. Later they would move again, to Greensboro, Pa., where the elder Dean was president of the Jamestown Manufacturing and Machine Company. Dean's older sister, Elizabeth Ann, married and settled down Greensboro, but for her brother the town was only a stopping‐off point. When he was ready for high school, his parents sent him off to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, one of the South's better, and better‐known, military schools.

Freshmen at Staunton in those days were called “rats” and subjected to rigorous hazing, but Dean endured the ritual with the expected manliness and went on to distinguish himself on the school's swimming team. His specialty was the backstroke, and despite his slender physique he made himself good enough to be named to a prep‐school AllAmerican team.

Another star of the swimming team, who became Dean's close friend and roommate during their last two years at Staunton, was Barry Goldwater Jr., the son of the Arizona Senator. “John was very competitive about sports and about classwork,” Goldwater, now a Republican member of Congress from California, told me. “He studied hard and he was a good student. He really hasn't changed much since then. But he liked a good time, too. We'd go visit the girls’ schools together on weekends. No, we never talked about politics; not many people did in those days. John and I lost touch after we left Staunton. I thought he'd gone to medical school.”

Dean and Goldwater resumed their friendship in 1969, when Goldwater came to Congress, and they have remained close throughout Dean's present difficulties. Goldwater is perplexed, indeed incredulous, that his old friend and roommate could now face prison for involvement in the most sordid political scandal in American history. I asked him how he thought Dean got into such trouble.

“What has been the atmosphere at the White House that caused this to happen?” he replied. “It's coming out that this is not an isolated situation. This was the approach to government of the crew around the President. I know that John's not that sort of guy. But you put a person in an atmosphere as intense as the White House and there's no telling what can happen. The question is where did John fit in. John is a regular guy, like you or me. He's a great guy. There's nothing unusual about John. He's just a regular, hardworking guy.”

AFTER graduating from Staunton in 1957, Dean went to Colgate for two years, then transferred to Wooster College in Ohio. He did so at the urging of his father's friend and business associate Charles McDermott, who was a Wooster alumnus, trustee and booster. But having made the move, Dean seems never to have cared much for Wooster College, which must have seemed a little small‐time after the more fashionable schools he had attended in Virginia and New York. His roommate at Wooster, James V. Stewart Jr., remembers Dean as someone who seemed a bit standoffish at first, who talked a lot about Brooks Brothers clothes and was often overdressed by the standards of the little Ohio College. Stewart also recalls that Dean worried a lot about losing his hair, and therefore washed it regularly with something called Grandpa's Wonder Soap, which was said to prevent baldness.

Dean majored in political science, was president of the 11‐man Pre‐Law Club, wrote his senior thesis on “The Social Responsibilities of the Political Novelist,” played a minor role in the senior play, “Inherit the Wind,” and had “C” average in his classwork. He didn't make many friends, although, according to his roommate, he would sometimes write themes for other students for $5. He was strongly pro‐Nixon in the 1960 election and watched the Kennedy‐Nixon debates in furious frustration as his hero seemed to be blundering away the Presidency.

After only one semester at Wooster, he went off, under a special program for political‐science students, to spend a semester at American University in Washington, D. C. There he met and fell in love with Karla Hennings, the pretty blonde daughter of Missouri's Democratic Senator Tom Hennings. During his senior year at Wooster, he was driving or flying to Washington every second or third weekend to see Karla. After his graduation in June, 1961, he got a job as lifeguard at the apartment house where Karla and her mother lived (Senator Hennings died in 1960), and that fall he enrolled in American University's Graduate School of Government. He and Karla became engaged at Christmas and were married on Feb. 4, 1962.

Dean had for years thought he would like to be a writer or perhaps a teacher, but one of his graduate‐school professors was encouraging him to enter law school and, married now to a wealthy young woman with contacts in Washington legal political circles, he decided to do so. He enrolled in the fall of 1962 at the Georgetown Law School. He and Karla took a small apartment in McLean, Va., and he drove to his classes each day in his old Volkswagen, sometimes giving a ride to other students and splitting the cost of gas with them. One classmate who sometimes caught a ride with Dean was Mama Tucker, now a Washington lawyer, who recalls Dean as “a very nice guy.”

“Not outstanding, not creative, not a politician, just a nice guy,” she says. “He studied hard and was in about the middle of the class academically. The thing I remembered most about him is that he always looked like he'd just stepped out of the shower, even after a four ‐ hour exam. That's my strongest impression of him, as the cleanest, prettiest guy in the class.

“He read a lot and we used to loan books back and forth. Once he loaned me Frank Harris's ‘My Life and Loves,’ which I've still got, with John's name written inside it; that's about the most colorful thing I remember about John. He was apolitical when I knew him. I always thought of him as an establishment type, a corporation lawyer.

“He came by for a drink a few years ago; I was working for Al Lowenstein then, and he was working for John Mitchell, whom I considered the enemy of everything I believed in. John talked about what a jolly guy Mitchell was and how much he admired him. Later, when John got into all this trouble, all I could think was that he had gotten into the big leagues and he wasn't a big leaguer.”

DEAN was graduated from law school in 1965 and in August of that year became a $7,500‐a‐year associate with Welch and Morgan, a Washington firm that specializes in communications law, an area of the law that, even by Washington standards, is considered highly political and competitive. After only six months with the firm, on Feb. 4, 1966, Dean was fired following an angry dispute with the firm's senior partner, Vincent B. Welch, who charged him with unethical conduct.

In his televised testimony, Dean described his tiring as more a matter of personalities than ethics, but the record of the incident suggests that an ethical question was involved. One of Dean's first assignments had been to do some legal work on a corporation that Welch had set up to begin a UHF television station in St. Louis. Meanwhile, Dean had met Boyd Fellows, a “television management expert” employed by the law firm who was interested in seeking a license for his own UHF station in St. Louis. Fellows's group was formed, with Dean and his mother‐in‐law, Mrs. Hennings, among the backers. In the incorporation papers, Dean listed his net worth as almost a million dollars, although, according to a family member, most of that money was his wife's.

He was sufficiently concerned about the propriety of what he was doing to seek outside legal advice, and he was told that his action was proper, so long as he resigned from Welch and Morgan before his group's license application was filed. However, Welch found out what was afoot—a secretary noticed the incorporation papers on Dean's desk—and Dean was summarily fired.

In 1967, Welch declared on a Civil Service Commission form that he had fired Dean for “unethical conduct,” which he defined as Dean's working “in direct conflict with the interests of the firm and a client thereof.” In October, 1968, however, when it seemed likely that Dean would be in the forthcoming Nixon Administration, Dean sent an emissary to Welch and asked him to withdraw or soften his statement. Welch sent a follow‐up letter to the Civil Service Commission which said that his calling Dean's conduct unethical might have been an overstatement.

Welch's change of heart was, however, far in the future in early 1966. The reality then was that Dean process. Some people say John's shallow, but he knew a lot and he was quite articulate.”

Surrounded by men older and more learned in the law than he, Dean soon made himself popular and valuable. He pulled the right political strings to get the commission excellent office space in downtown Washington. He won the affection of one colleague, a newcomer to Washington, by helping him find a house in the right neighborhood and the right schools for his children. Most of his new colleagues were liberals, but there were never any political disagreements between them. Most people recall Dean as “not ideological,” or “conservative, but mainly a pragmatist,” or “just starting to soak up ideas.”

Louis Schwartz recalls one instance when Dean did a complete about‐face when confronted with ideas he had not considered before:

“We needed a paper on capital punishment. I wanted a review of all the evidence by someone Poff and the conservatives would listen to. I knew John favored capital punishment, so I gave the assignment to him. He worked on it for six weeks, and when he turned in his paper, he said, ‘I've changed my mind —I'm against capital punishment now.’ Of course, he may have changed his mind since then. . . . Poff was furious. He thought I'd brainwashed the guy.”

The commission job paid well and wasn't terribly demanding. But it was only temporary, and Dean told his colleagues he wasn't sure what he'd do next—practice law or perhaps teach law. He seems always to have had in the back of his mind an image of himself as a writer or teacher, but, nonetheless, in mid‐1968 he began some political moonlighting that led to his next giant step up the Washington ladder.

HE became part of a group of young Republican lawyers on Capitol Hill who helped write the crime‐related position papers that Richard Nixon used in his 1968 “law‐and‐order” campaign. Others in this group, like Dean, later entered the Nixon Administration in crime‐related jobs: Donald Santarelli, who is now the head of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration; Richard (Pete) Velde, who is now Santarelli's deputy at L.E.A.A.; and Brian Get tings, who is now the U. S. Attorney for northern Virginia.

There was a good deal of rivalry and sometimes hostility among these ambitious young men, and Dean's was the fastest ‐ rising star in the constellation. After Nixon was elected, the new Deputy Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, told Dean he wanted him as one of his key assistants, to work on legislation. Dean has said that he protested that he was too young for the job, but he took it. Kleindienst proved not to have much interest in the details of legislation, and Dean was soon working directly with Attorney General John Mitchell on the Administration's crime bills and drug‐control bill. Dean later told the Ervin Committee that he and Mitchell developed a fatherson relationship.

Dean was the middleman in the complicated process of putting together new legislation. He would find out what Mitchell wanted, get ideas from Congressional allies like Poff and Hruska, work on the drafting with the various divisions of the Justice Department, touch base at the White House with John Ehrlichman's aide, Egil (Bud) Krogh Jr., and sometimes work with Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan on the Presidential message that would accompany the new bill. His job demanded tact, political instinct and a fine sense of how far he could go, and he seems to have performed it well. One of his Justice Department colleagues says of him:

“In Europe, you'd consider John the perfect functionary. He always knew how far he could go. He had warning devices built in. I've seen him ask Mitchell, ‘May I do this? May I say that? How far can I go?’ He would outline every possible alternative, every possible compromise. If Mitchell said, ‘Do what you think best,’ John would say, ‘But what options do you prefer?’ He always protected himself. He was so concerned about his career. That's why it's absolutely inconceivable to me that John would mastermind a cover‐up without specific authorization from his boss.”

Dean entered public view briefly in 1969 when he was the Justice Department negotiator with the antiwar groups that were planning a huge march from the Capitol to the Washington Monument on Nov. 15. By some reports, he was a rigid negotiator, one who actually had little power since the shots were being called offstage by Kleindienst and Mitchell. Dean announced at a press conference in early November that the Government would not allow the demonstrators to march down Pennsylvania Avenue, and he then refused to answer reporters’ questions.

The next day, he read reporters a report from the “Interdivisional Information Unit” to the effect that Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society and assorted crazies intended violence during the march. As it happened, the Government backed down and let the demonstrators use Pennsylvania Avenue. The incident is perhaps significant, for the pattern was to be repeated. Dean was the obliging young man who could be put out front, given his lines to speak and then repudiated if necessary.

NOT MANY of Dean's old colleagues in the Nixon Administration are anxious to talk about him these days, at least not for attribution. Some seem to feel that if they say anything favorable about him, they will anger the President, and if they say anything unfavorable, they might anger Dean, who has been pointing the finger at a lot of people lately and just might decide to point at them.

Nor are Dean's old colleagues getting more talkative as the days pass. One Friday I called Pat Buchanan and asked for an appointment to talk about Dean. Buchanan noted that Dean was a friend of his and said I should come by the next Monday. But that weekend leaked stories appeared saying Dean would testify that he had personally informed Nixon about the cover‐up. At that point it was clear, if it had not been before, that Watergate was coming down to Dean's word against Nixon's. And on Monday morning Buchanan confessed to a change of heart, saying maybe he'd better not talk about his old friend after all.

On that same Monday, Dean's former boss, Kleindienst, also declined an interview, leaving me with this parting thought: “All I know about Dean is good, and all I know about the President is good. . . . So I think, Mr. Journalist, that you'd better excuse the former Attorney General of the United States. O.K.?” But after Dean's Senate testimony, Kleindienst challenged some of Dean's assertions.

Two men who worked closely with Dean, both at Justice and the White House, agreed to talk if their names were not used. One seemed genuinely sympathetic to Dean's present plight; the other, a sometime‐rival of Dean's, admittedly loathes him. The first had this to say:

“John had a unique ability to satisfy those people he was responsible to, and at the same time a unique ability to dissatisfy those people responsible to him. People who worked with John will tell you that he didn't know what he was talking about, but had the ability to adopt other people's work as his own.

“Personally, I thought he had sound judgment, rather conservative, always on the side of caution. If you ask me how a guy like John, a Middle‐American who went to Wooster College and wore a flag in his lapel, got into a fix like this, I'd have to say he went too far, too fast, with too little experience. And he didn't understand what was expected of him in that position. Or maybe he understood all too well. History will have to decide that.” Dean's colleague/critic said of him:

“I don't know the real John Dean. I don't know if there is a real John Dean. He was always. so careful in guarding himself that you never got through to substance. He had no guiding principle except self‐promotion. He was an idea thief. He sought aggrandizement at the expense of others. His only goal was to please the boss, right or wrong.

“Do you know why he got that job in the White House? Because he is pretty! Those ad men in the White House wanted someone who looked good, an. All‐American boy. When Dean went to the White House, I told people he wouldn't last six months there, because he's incompetent. He's never been in court and he's never tried a case. The thing I didn't count on is that there is no machinery to second‐guess the President's lawyer.”

There seems, however, to have been something more to Dean's move to the White House than his looks. John Ehrlichman had been Counsel to the President, but was surrendering that post to become the President's domestic‐affairs czar. According to some sources, Nixon aides Robert Finch and Herb Klein wanted White House aide Len Garment to become Counsel to the President, but Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman resisted, fearing that Garment might become a threat to their power. They turned instead to John Dean who, so it seemed then, could never be the slightest threat to them. By one report, Ehrlichman said he was looking for a “straw man.”

In June, 1970, Dean therefore got an unexpected call from Egil Krogh, Ehrlichman's aide, asking if he was interested in a White House job. Dean has said that he expressed reservations, knowing of the pressures in the White House, but a few days later he got a call from Ehrlichman asking him to fly to San Clemente to talk with the President. He did, and he was greeted with a four‐hour grilling by Haldeman, after which he was granted a brief audience with his new boss, the President. When Dean broke the news to his old boss, Mitchell, the Attorney General, grumbled, “I wonder if Ehrlichman will put his foot on you.”

In fact, Dean had a big title—the title was the best thing about the job, he testified—a big salary of $42,500 and very little real authority. He rarely saw the President. He .worked out legal briefs to support the Administration's preordained positions on such things as executive privilege and impoundment of funds. He worked on the plans for the Richard Nixon Library, on the murky financing of the President's San Clemente property, on the finances of Tricia's wedding. He has said that the first occasion on which the President called him was the time one of his daughters needed help on paper on Presidential succession.

DEAN'S marriage to Karla Henning had come apart while he was at the Justice Department, and they were divorced by the time he reached the White House. When I called Mrs. Hennings to ask about her former sonin‐law, she commented only: “I wouldn't want to discuss John's character, because there's a chance it's changed since I knew him.”

While he was between marriages, Dean emerged as something of a man‐abouttown. He dated, a lot and, for the Nixon Administration, was a somewhat dashing figure with his Porsche, his stylish clothes and his boyish charm. However, when a young woman commented to him that the press should be writing about him, not Henry Kissinger, as the Administration's most eligible bachelor, Dean solemnly replied that it was important for men who served the President to keep a low profile.

Dean sometimes doubledated with his former brother‐in‐law, McCandless, who was also between marriages, and some evenings they would play Scrabble or, more recently, backgammon. Dean would also occasionally see Barry Goldwater Jr., then another of Washington's most eligible bachelors. Goldwater, a suntanned outdoorsman, worried that Dean was working too hard in the White House, that he looked drawn, as if he never saw the sun. Dean's personal style was reserved, somewhat withdrawn; “always uptight,” one colleague called it, and “a little old‐maidish,” another said. Some of his former associates recall that he had no sense of humor, at least on the job, but during his Senate testimony he often displayed a nice sense of irony and a dry wit.

Eventually, Dean's attentions focused on Maureen Biner Kane, called “Mo,” a plumply pretty, high‐spirited blonde of 27 who was, like Dean himself, always stylishly dressed. Maureen, whose first husband was killed in an automobile crash, had worked for an insurance company, but got into the Government when Dean's friend Michael Sonnenreich, staff director of the Commission on Marijuana and Dangerous Drugs, hired her as his executive assistant. Dean and Maureen were married last October and the young couple's prospects could hardly have seemed brighter, although he had already warned her that there might be trouble ahead. Dean had his high‐paying, prestigious job, and he was looking ahead to the day when, like many other young men of both parties who have served in the White House, he would open the Washington law office that would enable him to capitalize on his experience

But that was not to be. Dean set off on a wedding trip ,to Florida with the “borrowed” $4,850 of campaign funds which would later, once again, raise questions about his personal ethics. For him, the honeymoon was almost over. He and Maureen had to break off their trip so he could return to Washington to face the gathering Watergate storm.

If much of Dean's White House work had been trivial, there was one area in which he was considered something of an expert. He had served at the Justice Department, he knew the F.B.I., its men and files, he knew about wiretapping and bugging and intelligence‐gathering, he understood the dire threat that the Yippies and the Weathermen and the Black Panthers posed to the national security. So it was natural that he would be called into the meetings on the original bugging plan, and then into the coverup, and that when the whole house of cards came tumbling down he would be one of those trapped in the wreckage.

IT has not been the purpose ‘of this article to detail Dean's involvement in the Watergate burglary and cover‐up; he has done that quite well himself on national television. The point now is that it has come down to Dean's word against Nixon's. One of them is a liar. Dean has made his charges and given his evidence and the nation must now choose between the two men, one struggling to stay out of prison for the obstruction of justice, which he has admitted, and perhaps for other crimes, the other struggling to stay in the Presidency. The Nixon forces have not been idle; they have brought out their big guns to try to discredit Dean.

Joseph Alsop has written column after column calling Dean a liar. (No man whom Joseph Alsop calls a “bottom‐dwelling slug” can be all bad.) William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times columnist, published a bit of doggerel called “Gunga Dean,” which concluded that Dean had “betrayed” a far better man than himself. Former White House aide Charles Colson and other Nixon loyalists have made many statements intended to discredit their old colleague. Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott called Dean a turncoat, and Senator Edward Gurney, the Nixon loyalist on the Ervin Committee, did his best to tear Dean's testimony apart before the TV cameras.

Certainly nothing in this article is intended to exonerate Dean. He was deeply and willingly involved in the most despicable business. My dossier or yours may have crossed his desk, and there is no reason to doubt that he would have sent the burglars and the buggers after us if that would have pleased his boss. Yet, there is reason to believe, too, that had he served in a better Administration, he might have applied the same zeal to civil liberties, if that would have pleased his boss. He was always the chameleon.

Now that he has had his moment, with his days on the televised stage before the worldwide audience over, he faces the possibility of prison. Whatever happens, he will no doubt in time drift from public view perhaps to the teaching or writing he always said he wanted to do. He has his footnote to history, and the rest of his life will probably be anticlimactic. ■

Dean had set out to show his wife and mother‐in‐law what a canny businessman he was, and, for his trouble, he'd been bounced from his first job and his legal career had been placed under a cloud. He went for advice to his friend and brother‐in‐law, Washington lawyer Robert McCandless, a folksy, shrewd Oklahoman who'd come to Washington to work for Senator Robert Kerr and had married Senator Hennings's older daughter, Sue. Dean and McCandless were to remain close friends after both had been divorced from the Hennings sisters, and the Washington‐wise McCandless has been one of Dean's lawyers and advisers in his battle with the White House. (McCandless is, for whatever it is worth, surely the only man in Washington to have on his office wall autographed pictures of both John Dean and Larry O'Brien.)

“John came to me for advice,” McCandless recalls of the 1966 episode. “He was wondering if he ought to go to the ethics committee of the Bar Association for a full airing of the matter. I told him the best thing to do was to get new employment immediately. That way you get your mind off your troubles and you have no gap in your employment record.”

Dean followed the advice. Rather than try his luck with another law firm, he looked to Capitol Hill. The ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, William McCulloch of Ohio, was like Dean, an alumnus of Wooster College. Dean went to him about a job, and McCulloch was impressed by Dean's intelligence and satisfied with his explanation of why he had left the law firm. So Dean was hired as the $7,800 chief counsel to the minority, or Republican, members of the House Judiciary Committee. McCulloch, a crusty old political pro who was known as a hard taskmaster, never regretted having hired Dean, although he would remark in later years, “He was an able young man, but he was in a hell of a hurry.”

After his traumatic firing from his first job, Dean seemed always to be a man who lived by one Golden Rule: Please the boss. At Judiciary and at the two other jobs he held on the way to the White House, he was known as a perfect staff man, a man who always touched base, who always protected himself, who never, never exceeded his authority.

ONE of Dean's Democratic coworkers on the Judiciary staff recalls: “John and I had a good, harmonious working relationship. He was able, professional and nonabrasive. A good staff man needs a certain faceless anonymity, an ability to adjust his positions, and John had that. He had a certain chameleonlike quality. Or there's another term I could use: He was a pilot fish. You know, the little fish who swim beside the sharks.”

Dean's key contact on Capitol Hill was to be Representative Richard Poff of Virginia, a high‐ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee and a conservative of national reputation. When the then Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, proposed a National Commission on the Reform of Federal Criminal Law, Poff picked up on the idea, steered the enabling legislation through Congress, and became vice chairman of the commission. Dean helped Poff with the legislation and in mid‐1967 he left Judiciary to be Poff's eyes and ears on the commission staff, with the title of associate director and a salary of some $25,000 a year, roughly three times what he'd been making. The staff's director was Louis B. Schwartz, a professor of criminal law at the University of Pennsylvania, who recalls:

“I had to set up a staff and John was sort of wished on me. He was there to represent the conservative wing of the commission, McClellan, Hruska and Poff. I found John to be bright, smooth, likable, very ambitious and very flexible. He adapts. He was so perceptive about the legislative process that I urged him to write a book about it. John could write a hell of a good book. He knew exactly how a bill could be hustled through and what the obstacles were. I'd be glad for John to come to our law school and lecture on the legislative