John Wesley Dean, III | Biography

John Dean was born on October 14, 1938, in Akron, Ohio. He attended Staunton Military Academy and graduated from the Georgetown University Law School in 1965. In June 1970, Dean was appointed counsel to President Nixon. Of the key Watergate figures, John Dean was among those most responsible for bringing about the president's downfall, and he is attributed with one of the most enduring quotes from the Watergate saga.

The Watergate scandal was triggered by the burglary of Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. by individuals connected to the White House. Subsequent White House attempts to cover up the break-in and other illegal activities were revealed in congressional and law enforcement investigations whose scope was defined by Senator Howard Baker before a federal congressional committee in June 1973: "What did the president know and when did he know it"" Key to answering those questions was John Dean, who decided to cooperate with investigators and testify before Congress.

Dean had been intimately involved with covert and illegal activities from the beginning. According to testimony by Jeb Stuart Magruder who had been the deputy campaign manager for the Committee for Re-election of the President (CREEP), Dean and others had discussed various plans regarding the Watergate burglary with John Mitchell, who headed CREEP. Dean then assumed a central role in initial attempts to cover up the burglary. In a July 20, 1972 conversation with Nixon, chief-of-staff H.R. Haldeman said that "Dean is watching it on an almost full-time basis and reporting to me and [assistant for deputy affairs John Ehrlichman] ... There's no one else in the White House that has any knowledge of what's going on there at all." Dean attempted to involve the Central Intelligence Agency in the cover-up and was involved in pay-offs to the Watergate burglars for their silence. But Dean became disturbed by the cover-up and, in a pivotal conversation on March 21, 1973, he told the president everything he knew about the cover-up which, Dean said, was "a cancer within the presidency."

On April 23, 1973, as the scandal was beginning to break, three key White House staffers resigned and Dean was fired. He testified before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Activities in June, and although his testimony was detailed and potentially damaging, there was initially no corroboration for it. That changed dramatically when another presidential aide revealed in July that White House telephone calls and conversations had been taped since 1971. Nixon's refusal to comply with subpoenas for the tapes prompted a struggle of epic constitutional proportions between the executive and congressional branches, but the tapes were eventually surrendered, and their contents proved so damaging that the president ultimately resigned on August 14, 1974. Dean was sentenced to one to four years for conspiracy to obstruct justice, but served only four months. Dean wrote the book Blind Ambition about the Watergate affair. Later, he was an investment banker and business executive.