Skip to main content
Book

The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It


Average Rating:
Not yet rated
Categories:
Counseling |  John W. Dean
Author:
John Dean
License:
Never expires.


Description

Based on Nixon's previously overlooked secret recordings, a revelatory new look at Watergate by one of its key figures.
Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA's wide­spread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after he was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of Nixon's involvement in Watergate.
In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon's secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President Nixon know and when did he know it?
Through narrative and contemporaneous dialogue, Dean connects dots that have never been connected, including revealing how and why the Watergate break-in occurred, what was on the mysterious 18.5 minute gap in Nixon's recorded conversations, and more.
In what will stand as the most authoritative account of one of America's worst political scandals, The Nixon Defense shows how the disastrous mistakes of Watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time.

Author

John Dean's Profile

John Dean Related Seminars and Products


Before becoming Counsel to the President of the United States in July 1970 at age thirty-one, John Dean was Chief Minority Counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, the Associate Director of a law reform commission, and Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States. He served as Richard Nixon’s White House lawyer for a thousand days.

He did his undergraduate studies at Colgate University and the College of Wooster, with majors in English Literature and Political Science. He received a graduate fellowship from American University to study government and the presidency, before entering Georgetown University Law Center, where he received his JD in 1965.

John recounted his days in the Nixon White House and Watergate in two books, Blind Ambition (1976) and Lost Honor (1982). He lives in Beverly Hills, California with his wife Maureen, and now devotes full time to writing and lecturing, having retired from his career as a private investment banker. His 12th book (10th since retiring), The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (2015), returns to Watergate and is based on the new material now available. It was this material that prompted John and Jim to develop their Watergate CLE series.