John Dean Stands Up to the President, Again

By Ann K. Williams
Staff Writer

October 16 -- More than 30 years ago, a young White House lawyer made his mark on American history when he blew the whistle on Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up. Now John Dean’s back in the spotlight, warning the American people of even worse abuses emanating from the Bush/Cheney White House.

Scores lined up more an hour before Dean’s speech began at the Santa Monica Main Library’s King Auditorium Thursday night, eager to hear Dean share his insider’s take on Washington politics as he plugged his new book, “Conservatives Without Conscience.”

“Little microphones pick up my voice with no problem at all,” Dean introduced himself to appreciative laughter, after he’d received a standing ovation in the packed auditorium, while an overflow crowd gathered to watch a video projection of his speech in an upstairs room.

Photo by Robert Graves, Santa Monica Public Library

Dean lost no time launching into his subject.

When the Bush administration moved into the White House, “It struck me that they were down in the basement and they happened to notice an old Nixon playbook,” he said.

“They dusted it off and they said, ‘This stuff looks pretty good, we might even add a few chapters,’ which, in fact, they have done.”

When his warnings about the Bush administration’s practices were ignored, “I quickly realized they could care less, they knew exactly where they wanted to go,” Dean said.

Shortly before his speech, Dean met with his publicist, Charles Lago, and library staff member Robert Graves in a bare, brightly lit conference room doing double duty as a green room. Sampling from cold cuts arranged on a black plastic platter and two-liter bottles of Coke, Dean’s easy good manners came to the fore.

“Authors don’t always get fed,” he teased. The young Dean was still visible in his classic black suit, plain glasses and straight hair neatly combed back.

His sly sense of humor surfaced again when he was handed a stack of books to autograph.

“Only George Bush uses sharpies,” he said, handing the blunt-tipped marker back to be replaced by a finer pen.

A double English Literature/Political Science major at the College of Wooster in Ohio – “I wanted to read a lot” – Dean said he promised himself “that when I turned 60 I would write full-time.”

“Conservatives Without Conscience” is one of an “unplanned trilogy” about the conservatives now in power in Washington, he said.

“Worse Than Watergate,” published in 2004, described “what they are doing.” Conservatives Without Conscience explains “why they are doing it,” and his next book, due out in May, will tell “what the rest of us…can do about it,” Dean said.

Readers will have to wait until May to find out more. Dean didn’t want to “scoop himself” by discussing it now, displaying a lawyer’s caution with his laconic answer.

But he was forthcoming in his remarks to the crowd downstairs about what drove him to write his books.

The preface to “Conservatives Without Conscience” tells of a book, Silent Coup, published by St. Martin’s Press in the early 1990’s with G. Gordon Liddy’s active participation. The book slandered Dean’s wife Maureen, and spun a conspiracy theory about Watergate that Dean said was riddled with lies.

The source for the book, Phillip Bailley, had been institutionalized and at one point believed he’d come from Alpha Centauri, according to Dean. Bailley believed his spaceship had crashed on earth, and he was waiting to be picked up.

“This is not the best source,’ Dean said, but right wing politicians and journalists were buying the theory because they liked the way it explained Watergate.

“How they thought the Deans would not sue, I don’t know,” he said of the book that tried to make a connection between his wife and a call-girl ring. “They picked the wrong fellow.”

“I spent eight years pinning these people to the wall,” Dean said about the lawsuit on which St. Martin’s Press spent $15 million and employed “16 to 17 lawyers.”

Near the end of the suit, he had a conversation with his friend and mentor, Barry Goldwater about the behavior he’d seen coming from the far right.

“I don’t understand why conservatives are acting like this. I’d like to know the answer,” Dean quoted Goldwater. “They’re hurting the party, they’re hurting the nation, they’re hurting the movement.”

They agreed to collaborate on a book, a collaboration cut short by Goldwater’s death. Dean’s work is dedicated to Goldwater and its title is a reference to “The Conscience of a Conservative,’ the Arizona Senator’s influential 1960 work.

After trying unsuccessfully to find the origins of the contemporary extreme right by attempting to define American conservatism in its historic context, Dean’s epiphany came from a 40-year-old body of work on personality types.

“I found the answer in a body of science I didn’t even know existed,” he said.

In an attempt to find out what kind of people followed Hitler and Mussolini, social scientists described the traits of “authoritarian” leaders and followers.

Uncomfortable with the ambiguities of daily life, authoritarian followers “find great comfort” when they submit to a strong leader. They become aggressive in their defense of their leaders’ programs. “Narrow-minded, highly religious and intolerant…once they lock in, you can’t change their minds,” Dean said.

And the leaders, he said, are scarier. Called “social dominators,” they are “overwhelmingly men, oppose equality, manipulate to get power,” and are “amoral, bullying, vengeful, hedonistic” and “cheat to win.”

“They are not backslappers, but rather, backstabbers; they do not serve the public interest, but rather their own,” Dean wrote.

And they have no qualms about cynically manipulating the religious ideals of the Christian right.

Before his speech Thursday, Dean mentioned a book coming out this week called “Tempting Faith,” by David Kuo, a disillusioned former Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Kuo writes that White House strategists call their Christian followers “nuts,” while telling them whatever they want to hear to get their votes, Dean said.

The ethical defects Dean sees now in the Bush/Cheney White House remind him of what he saw in the Nixon White House.

But, as bad as the Nixon White House was, things are worse now, he said.

“People are dying because of the abuses of power. Torture is one that just dumbfounds me. I thought about Nixon in his darkest moods, and I can’t envision him ever tolerating or suggesting that American soldiers…torture to get information.

“I watched (Nixon) up close during…the investigation of the My Lai massacre. He was offended by it, he was deeply troubled by it, and he had no toleration for it.

“That’s why I say that what’s happening is much worse,” Dean said. “I don’t say these things in defense of Nixon. I say them as comparison.”

Calling the actions of Bush, Cheney and their far right followers “proto-fascist behavior,” Dean warns that though we may not be on the road to fascism, “we’re not terribly far from it.”

Though Dean is keeping his own counsel about solutions to the problem until his next book comes out, the closing paragraph of Conservatives Without Conscience may give readers a hint.

“Democracy is not a spectator sport that can be simply observed,” Dean writes. “…its very survival depends on active participation.

“Take it for granted, and the authoritarians, who have already taken control, will take American democracy where no freedom-loving persons would want it to go.

“But time has run out, and the next two or three national election cycles will define America in the twenty-first century, for better or worse.”

For a fascinating, if repellent, look at the underside of the extremist right and a detailed analysis of its leaders’ actions, readers can find “Conservatives Without Conscience” at most large bookstores in Santa Monica.