Former Nixon Counsel John Dean Indicts Bush White House Secrecy

‘Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.’ Although this observation came from President Woodrow Wilson, former Nixon White House counsel John Dean recognizes the same secretive behavior in Washington these days that he saw Nixon employ to cover up the Watergate break-in’behavior that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation 30 years ago. In his book ‘Worse Than Watergate’ (Little Brown), Dean, now 64, characterizes the Bush-Cheney administration as operating with obsessive, unjustified and disproportionate secrecy, ‘far worse than Watergate.’ While he told nearly 200 members and guests of the Palisades Democratic Club Sunday afternoon that he unabashedly calls his book a polemic’a first-person, strongly felt, and relatively brief form of discourse’he eschewed writing a diatribe. Instead, he has provided detailed documentation systematically tracking 11 potential areas of scandal’from Bush’s character issues and prior business conduct, to civil rights violations in squelching dissent and his misleading Congress regarding war with Iraq. After his White House years, which he described in his best-selling account ‘Blind Ambition,’ Dean wrote numerous books and has read deeply on the American presidency. He recently retired from a career as a private investment banker, fulfilling the promise he made to himself that ‘when I turn 60, I would turn my attention to writing.’ Perhaps the comparison Dean makes between Richard Nixon and George W. Bush is most revealing and largely unknown to the American public. ‘Bush and Nixon seem like very different personalities,’ Dean said, but then proceeded to describe many shared traits. ‘Both Nixon and Bush invested greatly in projecting carefully crafted public images. Nixon appeared the master of extemporaneous speaking, when in fact such talks were the product of great diligence, for he had all but memorized his material.’ Bush, he suggests, is not as intellectually handicapped and inarticulate as many think. ‘Bush is ignorant by design, not stupid. He is not a particularly good speaker, but has gotten better at reading the teleprompter.’ Dean notes that both men learned from other presidents how to do (Continued on Page 5) the job’Nixon from President Eisenhower, Bush from his father. ‘But neither of them quite fills the shoes of the men they learned from and are rather uncomfortable in the job, which explains the secrecy and attention to image.’ Each of these men also politicized the office, bringing a posse of advisors in media manipulation with them into the White House and running ‘a perpetual campaign.’ But it is the issue of secrecy that has even more serious consequences, according to Dean. ‘No president can govern in a fishbowl, but there is a difference between privacy and secrecy, and with Bush and Cheney there has been intentional concealment, beginning with their backgrounds. Dick Cheney and George Bush would have trouble passing a full-fledged FBI investigation to work in the White House,’ each having taken their past personal and business life off the table. Each man brought a lot of baggage that the media decided to ignore, Dean said. To achieve secrecy, it is necessary to control all means of communication both in and out of the White House, something the current administration managed from the outset, Dean said. ‘They have shrink-wrapped the White House, which operates on a need-to-know basis. ‘I would have expected the Fourth Estate to jump in and dig some of this out. It has happened in the prisoner scandal [Abu Ghraib and Guant’namo], but nowhere else.’ Dean asserts that at no time in our history has the vice president held so much power, stating that Cheney has even set up a shadow National Security Council, equipped with a staff of experienced national security experts, which is part of the Executive Office of the President with zero accountability. Cheney dismays Dean, whom he calls ‘a man with a dark view of human kind and a distressingly secretive man by nature.’ He questions the legality of his relationship with the oilfield service company Halliburton, which he served as chief executive officer before becoming vice president, and wonders about the stability of his health. A registered Independent, Dean told the highly partisan group that he is a social liberal and a fiscal conservative but since the beginning of 2004 has become ‘an outspoken critic of George W. Bush,’ who ‘worries about the safety of our Constitution.’ He writes: ‘My goal is to raise several important, if not critical, issues now being hidden from the public and place them on top of the table of public discussion.’