Political archaeologists will have plenty of specimens and fragments to examine in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. The incivility that greeted the Supreme Court nominee was among the worst in modern times—no small achievement while the Haynsworth, Bork, and Thomas hearings live in memory. We have grown accustomed to these (one-sided) partisan spectacles and must assume that they will endure as long as they serve a purpose.
What intrigued me about the Democratic strategy, however, was not a difference of opinion, or some procedural tactic, but a personnel choice. For among the witnesses called to impugn Judge Kavanaugh’s character, and warn the faithful of the dire consequences of Justice Kavanaugh, was a face and voice from the past: John W. Dean III.
In some respects, the choice of Dean as witness was logical enough: He had once served in the White House as counsel to the president, and Kavanaugh had once served as an associate in the same office. But there the similarity ends: Whereas Kavanaugh in 2003 proceeded from the counsel’s office to White House staff secretary and then the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Dean in 1973 proceeded from the counsel’s office to disbarment to conviction for obstruction of justice—and on to tenure in federal prison.
It is, perhaps, a measure of the fury animating Senate Democrats that they should have summoned such a person as John Dean to make their case against Brett Kavanaugh.
Then again, Dean has been historically useful for such purposes. It was Dean’s sensational 1973 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities—otherwise known as the Watergate Committee—that laid the groundwork for the resignation of President Richard Nixon the following summer. But that memorable season of televised proceedings was 45 years ago! In chronological terms, Dean’s relevance to the Kavanaugh hearings is roughly comparable to a Watergate witness recruited from the era of Teapot Dome.
As a baby journalist, I attended a handful of Watergate hearings—including Dean’s testimony—and then as now, my curiosity about a veteran of Teapot Dome would have exceeded my interest in Watergate. But it would have been difficult, even for me, to draw any useful or informative connection between the 1920s lease of federal oil reserves in Wyoming (Teapot Dome) and a 1970s break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee (Watergate).
Now, clearly, Dean’s purpose and significance for the Kavanaugh nomination is symbolic: Democrats associate him with a shining hour of political success still fixed—with approximate accuracy—in folklore. And Dean himself, while once a faithful Republican soldier, long ago transformed into a Democratic warrior. Still, it bears repeating that any resemblance between the conduct of Dean in the Nixon White House and Kavanaugh’s behavior in the Bush administration—apart from their comparable ages at the time—is nonexistent.
Yet Dean is symbolic in other ways as well. The Nixon era—and the Watergate Committee hearings, in particular—produced a handful of ancillary celebrities who have managed to maintain themselves in the public eye: Among others, Diane Sawyer, the ABC newsreader, was once a deputy to the White House press secretary; and Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who pilfered and distributed the Pentagon Papers, emerges from the mists whenever national-security leaks are in the news. The late Fred Thompson, senator from Tennessee, television D.A., and presidential candidate, began his upward climb as minority counsel on the Watergate Committee.
Dean, however, was perceived in his heyday as a serial opportunist—ingratiating himself with the Nixon apparatus, designing and conducting the Watergate cover-up, conveniently jumping ship—and has done little since to dispel that perception. To be sure, life’s options are limited for disbarred lawyers fresh from time spent in federal custody. But Dean, upon his release, settled comfortably in Beverly Hills and while ostensibly employed as an investment banker spent his time on two memoirs, with mixed results. The first one, the bestselling Blind Ambition (1976), ghostwritten by Taylor Branch, had the virtue of a nominally engaging subject (Watergate)—unlike the second, Lost Honor (1982), about Dean’s post-imprisonment adventures.
In the decades since, Dean has not only benefited from the embrace of his new friends in progressive ranks—just short of his 80th birthday he remains a fixture on the Watergate nostalgia circuit—but profited from their cousins in publishing as well.
To be sure, the caliber of Dean’s scholarship is predictable. The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court (2001) mixed personal betrayal with conspiracy theory, and the old Kennedy mythologist Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. turned to Dean for a brief biography of Warren G. Harding (2004) in Schlesinger’s presidential series. Dean’s manic trilogy on George W. Bush—Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (2004), Conservatives Without Conscience (2006), and Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches (2007)—probably tells us more about the author than his subjects.
Politics is an honorable calling, but it is no surprise that the rewards of political life and public office appeal to the lesser angels of our nature as well as to the statesmen in our midst. John W. Dean III’s place in the pathology of our times is secure. To Democrats of the Watergate era, Dean was heroic only in the sense that he served as a means to an end. In the half-century since, that crucial distinction seems irretrievably lost.
