In June 1973, John Wesley Dean III, former White House counsel under President Richard Nixon, transfixed the nation with his one week of testimony before…
In June 1973, John Wesley Dean III, former White House counsel under President Richard Nixon, transfixed the nation with his one week of testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin. Dean’s testimony about his and Nixon’s obstruction of justice led to Nixon’s resignation just more than a year later; he was the first U. S. president to do so.
Some have touted Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s onetime lawyer and fixer, as a potential present-day John Dean, capable of bringing down another president. He’ll get his first public opportunity Feb. 7, when he testifies before a House committee, and he may eventually appear in court. But before we put too many eggs in the Cohen basket, we need to contrast the respective situations of Dean and Cohen.
The Republican break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972 resulted in the convictions of its immediate perpetrators, G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, two journeymen spooks, along with a handful of Cuban nationalists who sought to overthrow Fidel Castro. Six months later, we were no closer to the truth that Nixon and his top White House lieutenants had masterminded the cover-up of a wide range of their misconduct — including breaking into the Watergate and the office of a psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, the author of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War.
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But the landscape changed when U. S. District Judge John Sirica, who presided over the trial of Liddy, Hunt and the Cubans, challenged the White House version of events and made clear he thought the actual leaders of the operation were far senior to those convicted.
