Dean/Colodny Interview Transcript and Tape - January 5, 1989. While his footnotes frequently cite Blind Ambition, he never mentions that he has elsewhere admitted he never read his own book cover to cover prior to publication. He has also been called upon by the media and Congress to provide expert analysis during scandals in the Clinton and Trump administrations. Thats an exciting prospect, Dean famously said. In But at a time when a former president has been indicted on charges of funneling hush money payments to an adult film star, does Watergate still shock? Hunts team, including James McCord, ex-CIA, and Alfred Baldwin, McCords ex-FBI friend, began bugging the DNC offices. White House Plumbers comes roughly a year after another high-end Watergate series: Gaslit, a stylish Starz thriller that featured Sean Penn as John Mitchell, Nixons attorney general, and Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell. White House Plumbers, premiering Monday, recreates the events that riveted a nation and upended American politics, focusing not on the usual characters no Nixon, Woodward or Bernstein on the screen here but on the men behind the crime. Dismantling decades of lies, Silent Coup tells the truth. Now 79, John Wesley Dean III served as White House counsel to Nixon from July 1970 until he was fired in April 1973. And what motives are driving this project? Dean writes of Nixons near exhaustingpropensity for engaging in highly repetitive conversations, day after day. As the cover-up was imploding in March 1973nine months after the arrests at the DNC, and notwithstanding the hundreds of hours the president had already devoted to WatergateDean notes that Nixon even at this late date had no real idea of his exposure, possessed no accurate sense of Haldemans criminal exposure nor of anyone elses.. Its become a fact of life.. A 2009 post on nixontapes.org, states that Nixon's White House Counsel, John Dean, said the break-in was executed following a tip that claimed the Democrats were engaging in potentially-illegal fundraising activities: "Dean's new revelation is that the origin of the Watergate break-in was a "tip" that Nixon received about an alleged Democratic So why dramatize a small slice of a historical event people no longer seem all that interested in? As part of that deal, Mr. Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and was disbarred from legal practice in Virginia and the District of Columbia. It took eight hours to read it.. The story of Watergate has until now been typically told from the vantage point of the Oval Office and the Washington Post newsroom. By 2009, the New York Times was acknowledging the existence of rival visions of Dean: He was either a flawed but ultimately courageous man reluctantly sucked into the scandal or a primary architect of the cover-up who saved himself by deflecting guilt. In fact, numerous scholars, myself included, have argued that the great mass of evidence that emerged after 1974 shows that Dean was motivated to assume his central role in the Watergate cover-up not because he suffered from blind ambition (the title of his 1976 memoir) but because he wanted to conceal his role in authorizing the ill-fated break-in and wiretapping operation at Democratic National Committee headquarters.