“The Nixon Defense” by John W. Dean – The Architect's Testimony

The Watergate Scandal certainly remains one of the most infamous moments in U.S. Presidential history, marking a moment where a President was ousted from power not through force, but through exposition and law.

Despite the extensive investigations and inquiries made by numerous parties into the affair, there are still many question marks pending to be answered, in great part due to the complexity of the entire cover-up that followed.

John W. Dean was the White House Counsel at the time of the events and was labeled by the FBI as being “the master manipulator” in charge of covering the whole thing up. After he lost position for obvious reasons in 1973, Dean began publishing numerous books about his experiences in the White House, and most recently he published The Nixon Defense, examining that infamous scandal and aiming to answer the question as to what Nixon actually knew.

To begin with, this is the type of book which will most likely only cater to those who are truly devoted to uncovering the truth behind the scandal, or at least want to learn, quite literally, as much as possible about the events and their surrounding circumstances.

Why is that?

Well, this whole thing is a day-by-day account (of course, many days were omitted, but more on that a bit later) of what transpired in the White House during Dean's service there, based on thousands of conversation transcripts and hundreds of thousands of document pages from both the National Archives and the Nixon Library.

He really didn't gear this book towards entertainment value, preferring to deliver cold, hard facts in a matching way. There are many instances of conversations being basically repeated from day-to-day, and certain points are being hammered in to death; in other words, there is a certain amount of tedium to go through here.

However, when you actually sort through the superfluous you come face-to-face with some rather interesting facts and theories in regards to some of the more inexplicable moments of the whole ordeal.

For instance, a decent amount of light is shed on the true motivations of the perpetrators of the break-ins, in addition to which the rather infamous 18 ½ minute gap is hypothesized about, yielding a rather plausible theory.

Though it isn't bursting at the seams with new information about Watergate, it certainly is a very detailed and comprehensive look as to what happened during that time and contains more than enough data to make one knowledgeable on the subject.

Now, with all of that being said, I believe it is important to take the things said here with a grain of salt, because after all, Dean is the one who was orchestrating the cover-up. In other words, it is very possible that he still has some sort of agenda to maintain in this regard, something that feels a bit likelier considering the bits he left out, such as the conversations of September 13th , 16th, 17th and 18th , the ones that show Dean to have convinced Nixon to participate in the cover-up. Otherwise said, the information found in the book certainly does seem useful, but it shouldn't be taken as gospel due to the identity of its author.

All in all, as was mentioned before, those who are seeking to learn as much as possible about the Watergate Scandal and are dedicated enough to the matter to be willing to read through dry transcripts in search of facts rather than entertainment will certainly find some interesting information in here. Otherwise though, I do suggest you skip this book and look for something more refined and less dry on the subject.

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John Wesley Dean III John Wesley Dean III most notably served as White House Counsel for Richard Nixon, from 1970 to 1973, and incidentally was in the midst of the Watergate burglaries. The FBI had referred to him as the master manipulator behind the cover-up. He wrote many books based on his years spent in the White House, with some of the more notable ones being Conservatives without Conscience and The Nixon Defense.