He served as the personal attorney to United States President Richard Nixon (1968–1973). He became embroiled in the Watergate scandal due to his fundraising activities in the early 1970s, some of which supported undercover operatives directed by senior White House figures under Nixon.
John Wesley Dean III (born October 14, 1938) is an American attorney who served as White House Counsel for United States President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973.
Discreet and studiously low-key, Herbert W. Kalmbach, 52, was the ideal lawyer to handle Richard Nixon's personal affairs. Like the President, he was a self-made and extraordinarily diligent man, both traits that Nixon admired in an aide. Above all else, Kalmbach was an unswerving and unquestioning loyalist.
Who Was Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon was a Republican congressman who served as vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon ran for president in 1960 but lost to charismatic Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. Undeterred, Nixon returned to the race eight years later and won the White House by a solid margin.
John Newton Mitchell (September 15, 1913 – November 9, 1988) was the 67th Attorney General of the United States under President Richard Nixon and chairman of Nixon's 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns.
John Wesley Dean III (born October 14, 1938) is a former attorney who served as White House Counsel for United States 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.
Martha Elizabeth Beall Mitchell (September 2, 1918 – May 31, 1976) was the wife of John N. Mitchell, United States Attorney General under President Richard Nixon. Her frank and revealing public comments and interviews during the Watergate scandal were seen as an embarrassment by the Nixon Administration.
May 31, 1976Martha Mitchell / Date of death
James Walter McCord Jr. (January 26, 1924 – June 15, 2017) was an American CIA officer, later head of security for President Richard Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. He was involved as an electronics expert in the burglaries which precipitated the Watergate scandal.
The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration's continual attempts to cover up its involvement in the June 17, 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Washington, D.C., Watergate Office Building.
April 27, 1994Richard Nixon / Date of burial
The Martha Mitchell effect refers to the process by which a psychiatrist, psychologist, mental health clinician, or other medical professional labels a patient's accurate perception of real events as delusional, resulting in misdiagnosis.
The original Watergate Seven and their legal dispositions were: G. Gordon Liddy — former FBI agent and general counsel for the Committee to Re-elect the President; convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping; sentenced to 6 years and 8 months in prison; served 4½ years in prison.
November 9, 1988John N. Mitchell / Date of death
Dean was the first administration official to accuse Nixon of direct involvement with Watergate and the resulting cover-up in press interviews. Such testimony against Nixon, while damaging to the president's credibility, had little impact legally, as it was merely his word against Nixon's.
He spent his days at the offices of Jaworski, the Watergate Special Prosecutor, and testifying in the trial of Watergate conspirators Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson, which concluded in December. All except Parkinson were convicted, largely based upon Dean's evidence.
Howard Hunt, and revealed the existence of Nixon's enemies list. Archibald Cox, Watergate Special Prosecutor, was interested in meeting with Dean and planned to do so a few days later, but Cox was fired by Nixon the very next day; it was not until a month later that Cox was replaced by Leon Jaworski. On August 2, 1974, Sirica handed down a sentence to Dean of one-to-four years in a minimum-security prison. However, when Dean surrendered as scheduled on September 3, he was diverted to the custody of U.S. Marshals and kept instead at Fort Hola bird (near Baltimore, Maryland) in a special " safe house " primarily used for witnesses against the Mafia. He spent his days at the offices of Jaworski, the Watergate Special Prosecutor, and testifying in the trial of Watergate conspirators Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson, which concluded in December. All except Parkinson were convicted, largely based upon Dean's evidence. Dean's lawyer moved to have his sentence reduced and on January 8, Judge Sirica granted the motion, adjusting Dean's sentence to time served, which wound up being four months. With his plea to felony offenses, Dean was disbarred as a lawyer in Virginia and the District of Columbia.
John Dean in 2008 at the annual conference of the Society of American Archivists. Shortly after Watergate, Dean became an investment banker, author, and lecturer. Dean chronicled his White House experiences, with a focus on Watergate, in the memoirs Blind Ambition (1976) and Lost Honor (1982).
After graduation, Dean joined Welch & Morgan, a law firm in Washington, D.C., where he was soon accused of conflict of interest violations and fired: he was alleged to have started negotiating his own private deal for a TV station broadcast license, after his firm had assigned him to complete the same task for a client.
In 2001, Dean published The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court, an exposé of the White House's selection process for a new Supreme Court justice in 1971, which led to the accession of William Rehnquist to the United States' highest court.
On March 22, 1973, Nixon requested that Dean put together a report with everything he knew about the Watergate matter and even invited him to take a retreat to Camp David to do so. Dean went to Camp David and performed some work on a report, but since he was one of the cover-up's chief participants, the task placed him in the difficult position of relating his own involvement as well as others'; he correctly concluded he was being fitted for the role of scapegoat by higher-ups. Dean did not complete the report.
Richard Nixon was a Republican congressman who served as vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon ran for president in 1960 but lost to charismatic Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. Undeterred, Nixon returned to the race eight years later and won the White House by a solid margin.
Nixon's early life was hard, as he characterized by saying, "We were poor, but the glory of it was we didn't know it.". The family experienced tragedy twice early in Nixon's life: His younger brother died in 1925 after a short illness, and in 1933, his older brother, whom he greatly admired, died of tuberculosis.
The health scares prompted Eisenhower to formalize an agreement with Nixon on the powers and responsibilities of the vice president in the event of presidential disability; the agreement was accepted by later administrations until the adoption of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1967.
In a three-way race between Nixon, Humphrey and independent candidate George Wallace, Nixon won the election by nearly 500,000 votes. He was sworn in as the 37th president of the United States on January 20, 1969.
The 1960 presidential campaign proved to be historic in the use of television for advertisements, news interviews and policy debates, something that would play right into Kennedy's youthful hands. Four debates were scheduled between Nixon and Kennedy, and Nixon had his work cut out for himself from the beginning.
While the exchange (later dubbed the "Kitchen Debate") had little bearing on the United States/Soviet rivalry, Nixon gained popularity for standing up to the "Soviet bully," as Khrushchev was sometimes characterized, and greatly improved his chances for receiving the Republican presidential nomination in 1960.
Nixon's campaign exploited notions about Voorhis's alleged communist sympathies, a tactic that would recur throughout his political life, and it worked, helping Nixon win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1946.
Two years later, Mr. Kalmbach stood by his candidate when Nixon lost a race for California governor and prematurely declared his political career to be over. Nixon's election to the White House in 1968 — and his choice of Mr. Kalmbach as his private attorney — propelled Mr. Kalmbach's legal practice and burnished his personal prestige.
Mr. Kalmbach insisted that he had counted on the reputations of Nixon aides, including former White House counsel John W. Dean III, who he said had ordered the payments during a conversation on a park bench in Washington’s Lafayette Square less than two weeks after the break-in.
On that day, five burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington as part of a scheme to spy on Nixon’s political enemies. The operation and attempt to cover it up were linked to high-ranking Nixon administration and campaign officials.
Mr. Kalmbach was identified as an authority who controlled the fund underwriting those activities. The felony charges against him related to $3.9 million that he raised through an under-the-table campaign committee, with no chairman or treasurer, and that was funneled to congressional candidates in 1970.
Mr. Kalmbach said that he might have been used by Dean , former White House chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, former domestic policy adviser John D. Ehrlichman and former attorney general John N. Mitchell, all of whom went to prison for their roles in the misconduct collectively referred to as the Watergate scandal.
Herbert Kalmbach, ‘most mysterious figure’ in the Watergate scandal, dies at 95 - The Washington Post. Herbert Kalmbach, President Nixon's personal lawyer, leaves the U.S. District Court after a hearing in Washington on Feb. 26, 1974. (Associated Press)
A California lawyer, he was by all accounts a loyal servant to the president, low-key and capable in matters political as well as private, and was virtually unknown to the public before the Watergate investigation that drove his client from the White House.