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.
After investigators found his phone number in address books belonging to the Watergate burglars, they connected the dots between the burglary, President Nixon and his re-election campaign.
One of Richard Nixon’s defense lawyers claimed recently that Tricky Dick didn’t receive due process because “the prosecutors cheated.” Now Geoff Shepard, 76, has filed an official complaint of attorney misconduct with the federal Department of Justice against Watergate prosecutors — 47 years after the fact.
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.
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.
Nixon then ordered the Solicitor General of the United States, Robert Bork, as acting head of the Justice Department, to fire Cox. Both Richardson and Ruckelshaus had given personal assurances to Congressional oversight committees that they would not interfere, but Bork had not.
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Ehrlichman was a key figure in events leading to the Watergate break-in and the ensuing Watergate scandal, for which he was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and served a year and a half in prison.
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.
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.
Leonidas "Leon" Jaworski (September 19, 1905 – December 9, 1982) was an American attorney and law professor who served as the second special prosecutor during the Watergate Scandal.
After days of negotiation with Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski and Watergate Trial Judge Gerhard Gesell, Colson pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice on the basis of having attempted to defame Ellsberg's character in the build-up to the trial in order to influence the jury against him.
After he left the Nixon administration in April 1973, Haldeman was tried on counts of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice for his role in the Watergate cover-up. He was found guilty and imprisoned for 18 months.
The police apprehended five men, later identified as Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio MartĂnez, and Frank Sturgis. They were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications.
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.
April 27, 1994Richard Nixon / Date of burial
May 31, 1976Martha Mitchell / Date of death
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 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.
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.
Colgate University. College of Wooster ( B.A.) Georgetown University ( J.D.) 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 ...
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.
Dean was born in Akron, Ohio, and lived in Marion, the hometown of the 29th President of the United States, Warren Harding, whose biographer he later became. His family moved to Flossmoor, Illinois, where he attended grade school. For high school, he attended Staunton Military Academy with Barry Goldwater Jr., the son of Sen. Barry Goldwater, and became a close friend of the family. He attended Colgate University and then transferred to the College of Wooster in Ohio, where he obtained his B.A. in 1961. He received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1965.
On June 26, 1973, the growing Watergate scandal was already a year old, and John W. Dean III, President Richard M. Nixon’s former White House counsel, was in his second day of testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee when Herman Talmadge, a Democrat from Georgia, directed his attention to exhibit 34-47.
The FBI called Dean the “master manipulator of the Watergate cover-up.”. When it came to names and dates, meetings and roles, Dean was the man in the middle. He knew it all. Ehrlichman put Krogh in charge of the Plumbers in 1971.
Legal ethics and professionalism played almost no role in any lawyer’s mind, including mine. Watergate changed that—for me and every other lawyer.”. After Watergate, schools began to make legal ethics a required class. Bar examinations added an extra section on ethics.
THE EARLIEST BREAK-IN. Watergate actually was the culmination of a chain of events that began months before the failed break-in at the Democratic Party offices. In March 1971, presidential assistant Charles Colson helped create a $250,000 fund for “intelligence gathering” of Democratic Party leaders.
Nixon fired Dean on April 30. Two months later, the nation watched as Dean testified live before the Senate Watergate Committee, becoming the first witness under oath to directly connect the president to the illegal activity. In October, Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.
In a 1998 law review article tracing attitudes toward lawyers, Marc Galanter, now a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that public regard for lawyers was at an all-time high in the 1960s, when lawyers were viewed as fighting for justice and civil rights in real life and in the movies.
But in the winter of 1971, Krogh refused to approve additional wiretaps sought by Liddy and the Plumbers. Eventually Krogh was re assigned to the post of undersecretary of Transportation. Krogh and Dean admit they were too young, too naive, too willing to do anything for their president.
HIS ROLE: Once described as “the most powerful man in the Cabinet,” the notoriously gruff and fiercely loyal Mit chell was Nixon’s attorney general before he resigned in 1972 to become director of the Committee to Re-elect the President. According to testimony in the Watergate hearings, Mitchell approved the break-in and bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
John Dean. HIS ROLE: Serving as White House counsel from 1970 to 1973, Dean helped cover up the Nixon administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in and illegal intelligence-gathering. But as the investigation was closing in, he had warned fellow staffers, “The jig is up.
HIS ROLE: As special advisor to the president, Colson was the mastermind behind many of the “dirty tricks” and political maneuvers —including spying on political opponents—that brought down the Nixon administration. As Colson told E. Howard Hunt in a recorded telephone conversation, he would write in his memoirs that “Watergate was brilliantly conceived as an escapade that would divert the Democrats’ attention from the real issues, and therefore permit us to win a landslide that we probably wouldn’t have won otherwise.”
One of the tapes included a now-famous 18-and-a-half-minute gap, which was later revealed to include a conversation between Haldeman and Nixon. Haldeman was also implicated in the so-called “smoking gun” tape, in which Nixon talked about using the CIA to divert the FBI’s investigation of Watergate.
HIS ROLE: A former CIA operative, Hunt was a member of the so-called “Plumbers,” an informal White House team tasked with preventing and repairing information “leaks” such as the 1971 release of the top-secret Pentagon Papers. After investigators found his phone number in address books belonging to the Watergate burglars, they connected the dots between the burglary, President Nixon and his re-election campaign.
H.R. Haldeman. HIS ROLE: The Nixon administration White House chief of staff— known as the gatekeeper” to the Oval Office who once called himself "the president's son-of-a-bitch"—became a key figure in the Watergate probe as investigators zeroed in on tape-recorded conversations of White House meetings.
HIS ROLE: As deputy White House chief of staff to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973, Butterfield controlled the secret taping system Nixon had installed in the Oval Office. He revealed the existence of the tapes when he was questioned by the Senate Watergate Committee, effectively sealing Nixon’s fate.
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. His guilty plea to a single felony in exchange for becoming a key witness for the prosecution u…
Dean was born in Akron, Ohio, and lived in Marion, the hometown of the 29th President of the United States, Warren Harding, whose biographer he later became. His family moved to Flossmoor, Illinois, where he attended grade school. For high school, he attended Staunton Military Academy with Barry Goldwater Jr., the son of Sen. Barry Goldwater, and became a close friend of the family. He attended Colgate University and then transferred to the College of Wooster in Ohio, where he ob…
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.
Dean was employed from 1966 to 1967 as chief minority counsel to the Republicans on the Unit…
Dean volunteered to write position papers on crime for Richard Nixon's presidential campaign in 1968. The following year, he became an associate deputy in the office of the Attorney General of the United States, serving under Attorney General John N. Mitchell, with whom he was on friendly terms. In July 1970, he accepted an appointment to serve as counsel to the president, after the previous holder of this post, John Ehrlichman, became the president's chief domestic adviser.
Dean frequently served as a guest on the former MSNBC and Current TV news program, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and The Randi Rhodes Show on Premiere Radio Networks.
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.
• Dean, John W. (1976). Blind Ambition: The White House Years. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-22438-7.
• Dean, John W. (1982). Lost Honor: The Rest of the Story. Los Angeles: Stratford Press. ISBN 0-936906-15-4.
• Dean, John W. (2001). The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0 …
• Dean, John W. (1976). Blind Ambition: The White House Years. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-22438-7.
• Dean, John W. (1982). Lost Honor: The Rest of the Story. Los Angeles: Stratford Press. ISBN 0-936906-15-4.
• Dean, John W. (2001). The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-2607-0.