A deep dive into Watergate

Forty years ago Saturday, Richard M. Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign from office, just one step ahead of his likely impeachment for his role in covering up the burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate hotel and apartment complex.

Much of the nation had watched on television as star witness John Dean, Nixon’s legal counsel, told a Senate Watergate hearing about conversations he had with Nixon about the scandal right in the Oval Office. Four decades later, Dean is still Watergate’s star witness, and last Thursday he revealed his deepest testimony yet to a crowd at the Philadelphia Free Library. A packed house of about 375 people — with maybe two people under 40 — listened to Dean promote his new book, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (Viking), and tell of the new scandals he discovered from digitizing and transcribing 1,000 Watergate tapes.

From what he described, there are no new smoking guns here. (We were shocked, shocked to hear that an ambassadorship was for sale.) But the new transcriptions mean there are now four million words of Nixon on Watergate. Dean is 75, still slim and ever a natty dresser, but now he’s white-haired and partially bald. Dean clearly knows what people want to know, and he delivers in the same clear-as-a bell voice, speaking in long paragraphs rather than sentences.

He told the crowd that his editor at Viking wanted to know, as the 40th anniversary of Watergate approached, if there were still any unanswered questions. Dean said he thought about that query and decided it was this: “How could someone as politically shrewd as Nixon have blown his presidency in this way?”

“I think the answer might be in the tapes,” Dean said he told his editor.

Thus, he began what is no doubt the deepest dive yet into what the president knew and when he knew it — the famous central question posed by the late Sen. Howard Baker at the Watergate hearing.

At the Free Library, Dean played excerpts from several tapes, and at one point showed an image of Nixon relaxing with his feet on his desk in the Oval Office. He said that was often how the president appeared when Dean was talking to him.

As Dean famously told him, “We have a cancer … close to the presidency” and outlined his case, point by point, Dean says, “Nixon slowly drew his feet off the desk,” and planted them firmly on the floor. Thus, in addition to the conversations, we get a glimpse of a very human reaction.

Dean maintains that he wasn’t aware at the time of the sound-activated taping systems in the Oval Office, Executive Office Building, Camp David and even a phone in the White House residence. He says he believes Nixon often forgot the systems were there.

As for the famous 18-and-a-half minute gap in one tape — one that supposedly required Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods to contort in a way that would make a Circe du Soleil performer jealous — Dean says he is sure of what was once there because other tapes from that week were filled with conversation about the cover-up.

“It is very clear there was a passing reference of some kind that this had to be covered up,” he asserted.