MONDAY, JUNE 25 | DAY 156

For months, John Dean had stopped short of directly implicating the president in the crimes of Watergate. He had begun his journey into apostasy by refusing to support the lies of Jeb Magruder, the man he had coached to commit perjury. During his meetings with Justice Department prosecutors, he had leveled accusations against Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman but had avoided answering questions about Nixon’s culpability. His restraint finally vanished with his own dismissal as White House counsel on April 30. When he learned that FBI agents had been sent to his office to seal his files, he immediately blamed the president. “This is like something out of the Third Reich,” he told his lawyer. Nixon, he concluded, was “capable of anything.”

His dance with the prosecutors continued a few more days, until it became clear that they would refuse his demand for immunity. They felt it would be unfair to allow someone so central to the cover-up to escape punishment while other, more peripheral people were sent to jail. Charlie Shaffer reminded them that they were not “the only game in town.” The Senate select committee also had authority to grant witnesses immunity—not the complete “transactional immunity” in the power of the Justice Department, but a more limited “use immunity.” Testimony that Dean gave to the committee could not be used against him in court. If the prosecutors wanted to bring charges against him, they would have to find independent witnesses. This route would give Dean the opportunity to speak directly to the American people. In return, however, he would have to be completely honest. He could hold nothing back.

A deal was quickly struck. Accompanied by Maureen, Dean retired to a beach house on the Maryland shore to compile a narrative history of Watergate, both before and after the break-in. He dredged through piles of old newspaper clippings to assemble a detailed chronology. He inserted the complete list of all his meetings and telephone conversations with the president that he had obtained from the White House archivist. He then combined all these materials with documents he had succeeded in smuggling out of the office. He drew on his own extensive but occasionally faulty memory to fill in the details. By the time he finished, six weeks later, he had written sixty thousand words, the length of a short novel. He also repaired some of the damage to his marriage caused by the strains of Watergate. The relaxed atmosphere of the oceanfront house and deserted beach—with no television and no reporters hammering at the door—provided a much-needed break for both him and Maureen. While she had not yet fully recovered, she “looked happier” than she had for many weeks.

Dean’s account of his inside knowledge of Watergate still fell short of the standard set by the select committee for granting immunity. The committee’s chief counsel, Samuel Dash, complained that he had failed to “tell all.” He would not make a credible witness if he shifted all the blame onto others, minimizing the significance of his own actions. As an example, Dash pointed to a passage about helping Magruder prepare for his grand jury appearance while avoiding any mention of his own role in suborning perjury.

“Did you know, in advance, that Magruder was going to lie to the grand jury?” Dash asked.

“Sure,” said Dean.

“That’s what I want you to put in the statement,” said Dash.

Dean was stung by the criticism, but Shaffer supported Dash. He told his client to delete the “self-serving crap” in his statement. If Dean was going to cooperate with the committee, he would have to tell them “every last fucking thing” he did, “no matter how bad or lousy it sounds.”

He agreed to rework the draft. Fortunately, there was still time to make improvements. The committee postponed its public hearings by a week to avoid upstaging a U.S.-Soviet summit meeting. While Nixon played host to Leonid Brezhnev in San Clemente, Dean put the finishing touches to his statement. Press speculation about what he might say mounted by the day, along with incoming hate mail. A few days before he was due to testify, the committee received an anonymous note that read, “JOHN DEAN WILL NEVER BE A WITNESS. HE WILL BE DEAD.” The committee requested round-the-clock protection for their star witness. A team of U.S. marshals moved into Dean’s house and accompanied him whenever he appeared in public.

At 10:00 a.m. on June 25, Dean rose to take the oath beneath the chandeliers and klieg lights of the packed Caucus Room. Police guarded the entrance doors. Every seat was taken; scores of spectators stood at the back, jammed between the Corinthian columns. Facing the witness behind a wide green baize table were the seven members of the select committee led by the Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a grandfatherly figure with white hair and bushy eyebrows. Dean and his attorneys had thought through every detail of his television appearance. He sat at the witness table alone to emphasize the confidence with which he was telling his story. He kept his voice as neutral as possible so as not to sound melodramatic. To assume a gravitas beyond his thirty-four years, he dispensed with his contact lenses and put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He had his hair trimmed “nice and clean” before the hearing to avoid the shaggy look that had marred some of his television appearances. The most memorable touch was to position Maureen directly behind his right shoulder. An ice-cold beauty with a pained expression on her perfectly groomed face, her golden hair pulled back severely, she would become the eternal symbol of the loyal, long-suffering Washington spouse. “Exhibit number one,” Shaffer called her.

John Dean testifies before the Senate Watergate Committee with his wife Maureen in the background.

Heeding his lawyer’s plea to sound humble and contrite, Dean began by saying it was difficult for him “to testify about other people.” It would be “far easier” to describe the way he had obstructed justice, “assisted another in perjured testimony,” and “made personal use of funds that were in my custody.” This was a reference to a story in The New York Times, a few days before, that he had “borrowed” $4,850 from a Nixon campaign fund to pay for his honeymoon the previous year. The apologies out of the way, he launched into a lengthy account of Nixon administration misdeeds, from wiretaps of reporters and the plot to bomb the Brookings Institution to the destruction of forged State Department documents and the payment of hush money to the Watergate conspirators. In a flat, emotionless tone, he described the moment when Nixon had asked “how much it would cost” to keep the Watergate defendants happy. “I told him I could only make an estimate, that it might be as high as a million dollars or more. He told me that that was no problem.” His narrative culminated with his Oval Office meeting with Nixon on March 21.

“I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and if the cancer was not removed that the president himself would be killed by it,” he recalled.

To counter Dean’s testimony, which continued all week, the White House released a long memorandum that put a totally different interpretation on the same set of facts. According to this version, it was Dean who initiated the cover-up, Dean who proposed destroying politically sensitive documents, Dean who dragged his feet on informing Nixon about the mortal threat to his presidency. When Dean finally gave the president “a more complete but still laundered version of the facts” on March 21, Nixon was “so surprised” that he jumped out of his chair.

The charges and countercharges caused the senior Republican on the committee, Howard Baker, to reduce everything he had heard to a central issue: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” For the moment, there was no definitive answer to this deceptively simple question. It all depended on whom to believe: John Dean or Richard Nixon.