I heard Dean speak at a university in Canada in the early 80's when he was on the road promoting a book.

I and another student confronted him on his real role in the Watergate affair and just how he manipulated the events as they unfolded.

We likened his testimony in Congress to Captain Renault's shock over the gambling taking place in Rick's Cafe in the movie "Casablanca".It should have been apparant to a bright guy like him that all was not kosher in Nixon's White House yet he only raised concerns when it was clear events were getting out of hand......

His response was muddled and baffled. He quickly opted for softballs someone else was asking....

He exposed himself as the self-serving opportunist he clearly is.....this article is just more the same from this slimeball...

it should be apparant that facts are not as powerful as belief to those who place ideology before truth.

John Dean has misrepresented his actions in Watergate so many times that he can't keep them all straight. He does it again here.

He fails to address the facts at the core of the Times story. The transcripts don't match the tapes. The way Stanley Kutler has handled the tapes and written the various narratives for the March 13-21, 1973, time period adheres to the history he and Dean have presented earlier. But they don't match reality. Anyone who cares to listen to the tapes that were posted with the Times story or that are kept at nixontapes.org, a fine site compiled by Dr. Luke Nichter at Tarleton State University, can see and hear for themselves what happened.

Dean mentions his lawsuit against Len Colodny and St. Martins Press. That suit was settled at the insistence of Dean and his attorneys. They were going to lose, and the court said Dean couldn't talk about the settlement. Dean also fails to mention is that he fought testifying in the case for years, and when he finally testified under oath he was forced to disavow his own Watergate memoir, Blind Ambition, because it didn't match the sworn testimony he gave in other forums. Instead, John Dean accused his ghost writer, the eminent historian Taylor Branch, of making things up. That's despite Dean's own foreword that said he had scrupulously gone through the record as he writing Blind Ambition and that everything in it was accurate.

Dean has thrived on his undeserved reputation as a Watergate truth teller for more than 35 years. But now that reputation is under legitimate attack, as more people can see the available evidence. James Rosen exposed more of the truth last year in his excellent book, The Strong Man. He examined the testimony in the Dean lawsuit and found numerous examples of Dean's inconsistencies. If others had paid more attention to that case when it was happening, much of this information would be common knowledge and Dean's record would have been exposed even earlier.

For too long, the establishment tied to the official Watergate history have tried to silence those with other interpretations, often labeling them as revisionists or wackos. Dean tries it again with Peter Klingman. However, it simply appears that Klingman did what so many others who have researched Watergate did not. Klingman examined the tapes and compared them to Kutler's transcripts. Patricia Cohen did that as well, and she talked to experts who had listened to the tapes for years. Is Dean saying Fred Graboske, the longtime Nixon archivist, is a crackpot?

The tapes and the transcripts speak for themselves. Kutler must have done this deliberately. Kutler knew about problems with them as far back as 1998, when he denied to The Tampa Tribune that it could have happened. He never did anything to address the issue, and his comments to the Times show he would rather attack his questioners than deal with the problems at hand.

John Dean is no different. In the end, all Dean has going for him is name calling. He has long lost contact with the truth, and his latest smear attempt fails miserably.

Peter Klingman's central charge -- that Stanley Kutler deliberately altered the historical record -- is unjustified. Kutler made honest mistakes in transcription, but so has everyone who's ever published a book of White House tape transcripts.�

Ever since John Dean turned state's evidence in 1973, Nixon's partisans, from the president on down, have attempted to portray the stool pigeon as Watergate's chief culprit. But the Nixon tapes prove that the chief culprit was the president himself, at least from the time he authorized the wiretapping of political rivals in May 1971.

I mention the May 1971 tape because it is one that Kutler left out of his book, Abuse of Power,�although it establishes that, regardless of whether Nixon specifically authorized the wiretapping attempt by his campaign operatives at the Democrats' Watergate headquarters, he had authorized political wiretapping in general and thus bears responsibility for the crime that precipitated his downfall.

Far from stacking the evidence against Nixon, Kutler did not even manage to squeeze all the taped evidence of the president's guilt into his book. There is as little reason to think that Kutler left tapes out of his book to exonerate Dean as there is to believe that he left out tapes to exonerate Nixon.�

Klingman claims that if Kutler had published transcripts of the tapes from March 13 to March 20, 1973, readers might conclude Dean was more active in the cover-up that Kutler had indicated. Well, if anyone ever publishes transcripts of all of the tapes from February 16, 1971, to July 12, 1973, readers will have to conclude that Nixon bore a far greater role in his administration's wrongdoing (and his campaign's)�before and after Watergate than any historian, Kutler included, has ever fully established.

No one disputes that Dean played an important role in the cover-up -- not even Dean. But his was a subordinate role -- subordinate to Nixon's two top aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and�to Nixon himself.�

I wish only to make the following comments for now concerning John Dean's response to the New York Times article:

1) The evidence upon which the article is based is available for anyone who wishes to evaluate it and make up his or her own mind. I exposed Stanley Kutler's conflating of two taped conversations. That was, and is, the issue in my article that is of prime importance.

2) I will not discuss details until the America Historical Review has rendered a decision concerning my submission.

3) I will state categorically that Mr. Dean is mistaken about prior submissions. Although this article has been solicited for publication, I chose to submit to the American Historical Review, and they have chosen to consider it.

4) Of course Mr. Dean's role is controversial. Were it a simple matter of agreement, there would be no controversy. Mr. Dean referred to my 2002 article. In it I began by stating that until all the tapes are released, no one's interpretation can be guaranteed to remain intact. That clearly includes me. Were that not true, historians would be remanded to the role of stenographers only, not of the teachers, the explainers, and/or the interpreters of past events we all strive to be.

5) I will point out to your readers that this is not the first time, nor am I the first person, who has been attacked ad hominem by John Dean over issues regarding his role in Watergate and the way in which the story has been covered in the intervening years. My personal opinion is that I am in good company.

Thank you for posting my reply.

Respectfully

John Dean... the real revisionist...

The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate by James Rosen, a superb book on Nixon's Attorney General who became the fall guy for Watergate. Rosen worked for many years to uncover the true story of Watergate. He revealed throughout the book that a reexamination of the tapes showed that John Dean was at the heart of Watergate and worked to place the blame on Mitchell and others around Nixon.

I sued St. Martin's Press, following their publication of an earlier revisionism effort, which claimed she too was involved in Watergate. It was a vicious, hurtful story, and after St. Martin's spent nine years and $15 million fighting our lawsuit, they realized we were not going away, and the case was settled out of court. - John Dean

Suing the press into submission is not winning this confessed Watergate co-conspirator any favor in my book. I just wonder whether the whole constructed downfall of Pres. Nixon, deservedly or else, was not an inside intelligence job that continues to this day by misinforming the public.

Dean, Richard Clark, Scott Ritter, etc etc. dicredit the whistle blower. Big surprise. Where have all the real journalists gone. NYT's is writing stories about watergate when they could have blown a dozen watergates wide open the last 8 years.

From the NYT article: "In one conversation...Mr. Dean tells Nixon that Gordon Strachan, a White House aide, knew about the break-in before it happened. During hearings of the Senate committee investigating Watergate in the months to come, Mr. Dean would testify that there had been no prior White House knowledge of the break-in."

Now in Dean's The Daily Beast column, if I read him correctly, Mr. Dean admits, and calls "most underwhelming," the assertion that he and Nixon both knew about Strachan before Dean's Congressional testimony in which he denied prior Whitehouse knowledge. Am I reading this right? How to explain?

I believe that John Dean has been so effective at educating the public about abuse of power (see his appearances on KO and Rachel), that the right wing is desperate to discredit him. Using Karl Rove tactics, they are trying to transform Mr. Dean's strength (speaking truth to power) into a weakness. Problem for them, we're on to their pathetic ways.

As I read John Dean's explanation, I thought about how difficult it will be to explain each and every mindless attack on the economic recovery package. They will never stop trying to baffle us with BS!

NIXON WAS LOOKING FOR A FALL GUY. HE PANICED WAS PARONIOD,HATED THE PRESS AND DEAN WAS THE MOST EXPENDABLE. IT WAS INCONCIEVABLE THAT DEAN WAS GOING TO SIGN ANYTHING IMPLICATING HIM LET ALONE TAKE THE BLAME. NIXON DID SO MANY GOOD THINGS AND TO BE IN A STATE OF MIND THAT THIS CRAZYNESS WOULD HELP HIM WAS BEYOND BELIEF. HE HAD A DOUBLE DIGIT LEAD GOING INTO THE ELECTION AND THE OUTCOME WAS THE BIGGEST VICTORY OF ANY PRESIDENT WINNING EVERY STATE EXCEPT MA.WHAT A SHAME. A PRESIDENT SURROUNDED BY THUGS BECOMES ONE HIMSELF. I BELIEVE NOW THEY ASSOCIATE THAT WITH THE RICO ACT.JOSEPH CAPRIO