--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: kthomasSee the remarks toward the bottom on "smoking cannon" -------------------- Blind ambition meets blind justice -------------------- Who's that ratting out Richard Nixon again, this time over his Supreme Court choices? Why, it's John Dean. By Charles Leroux Tribune staff reporter October 31, 2001 `I bet you didn't know that Richard Nixon put together a Cabinet committee on terrorism, or that he was the first to have air marshals on flights," said John Dean. "Nixon has been viewed through the lens of everything that went wrong." Dean was there when things went bad. He is 63 now, but remains fixed in the national memory as the ambitious, 30ish Nixon White House counsel and world class snitch who testified against his boss in the Senate Watergate hearings. According to him, Nixon was in on the coverup of the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters on June 17, 1972. He admitted his own culpability as well, resigned and served 127 days in prison. Subsequently, he made a career of recalling the Nixon White House, writing books and screenplays on that tumultuous era. Dean was here a few days ago to speak at Northwestern University and -- in rimless glasses, gray V-neck sweater, white shirt, gold tie, black sport jacket, brown suede shoes -- was looking professorial. Between talks, he was enjoying the nippy weather, the red and yellow leaves, ("In Beverly Hills, where we live now, it's just always summer") and cruising Evanston's Oak Avenue hoping to spot the house his family lived in for a year when he was 8 . "It had a solarium," Dean said. "I could roller skate indoors." But that portal to his past was closed, it turned out, obliterated by the subsequent construction of a huge apartment complex covering the block where he had lived. Dean has found another route back to an earlier time in his life. Thanks to lawsuits filed by University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Kutler, 420 hours of conversations secretly taped by Richard Nixon now are coming out of hibernation. (Dean began one of his Northwestern talks by joking, "I see there's a microphone on the podium. I've learned these things pick up my voice quite easily.") The release of the tapes, a substantial portion of which dealt with how Nixon had nominated William Rehnquist for the Supreme Court, gave Dean the thought to write an article on the nomination of Rehnquist, who today serves as Chief Justice. Dean traveled to the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md., put on a headset and began to listen. The voices carried him back to 1971, a few years before Ehrlichman and Haldeman and Mitchell and Dean became notorious household names. He heard Atty. Gen. John Mitchell steaming ("not so much his words but the tone of his voice") when put into conflict with presidential assistant John Ehrlichman. Says Dean, "Nixon understood well the dynamics of playing his people." Serious then, hilarious now Some of the things said then came across now as hilarious. "At one point," Dean said in an interview, "Nixon was talking about how Supreme Court justices work in close contact with each other, and he said you'd no more put a woman [on the court] than you'd put a woman on a spaceship. "When I heard that, I burst out laughing." Dean decided that the tapes, when added to his own files and some 3,000 pages of White House documents, could yield a book on what has turned out to be one of Nixon's most enduring and far-reaching decisions. Also the documentation of the Rehnquist decision presented a unique opportunity to tell the sausage-making story of how Supreme Court justices are often chosen in this country, a story that, in this particular case, was one even its beneficiary was almost entirely unaware of. Dean wanted to tell the story partly to ease feelings of guilt over his involvement -- more on this later. Also, it was a story that could be told primarily in dialogue, giving the tale a liveliness history seldom attains. Dean was somewhat surprised to see that "The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court" is labeled "American history" on its back cover, a hint to bookstore shelvers where to display it. It also was a further hint to Dean -- another was his lecture earlier in the day to NU undergrads who had not been born when Watergate happened -- that his hot-shot days had moved to the History Channel. Between Sept. 17, 1971, when Justice Hugo Black resigned because of poor health, and Oct. 21 of that year, when Nixon went on television to announce the nominations of Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist to the high court, the president was in the delicious position of filling two of the four Supreme Court vacancies he would go on to fill before his 1974 resignation. He hoped to pack the court with what he called "strict constructionists" by which he seemed to mean jurists tough on crime and not active on civil rights. The decision to name Powell was straightforward, but Rehnquist's nomination was helter-skelter, atypical of a White House that usually ran in an orderly fashion. Art doesn't mirror life "It wasn't at all like `The West Wing' on TV," Dean said. "If it was, the president would have come out in the hall with a shotgun and fired at everyone. Although I like Martin Sheen (who plays the president and who, earlier, portrayed Dean in a 1979 TV movie of Dean's Watergate book, "Blind Ambition"), they play the West Wing as a train station, all hustle and bustle. Really, it was more like a library." But the Supreme Court nominations were different. "I think," Dean said, "that was because it never, in all the years justices had been nominated, fell into a system. It seems especially true of presidents who, like Nixon, had been lawyers. They seem least likely to delegate the decision." At first, it wasn't much of a decision. Though a lot of names were put forward, that of Congressman Richard Poff seemed best to fill the bill. He was a Southerner, but someone not identified with Deep South racism. He was popular with members on both sides of the aisle and likely to pass Senate confirmation. (Nixon had struck out with the Senate on two previous nominees and didn't want another screw-up.) But, as a Dean chapter heading notes, "Poff Goes Poof." Poff withdrew for personal reasons Oct. 2 leaving the president with a chair to fill and a clock striking midnight. The Supreme Court traditionally gets down to business the first Monday in October. Nixon was under more pressures than time. Both Martha Mitchell and Patricia Nixon were pushing their husbands to designate a woman candidate, thus creating a comic-opera situation in which both men were floating a concept neither wanted. "For Christ sakes!" Nixon shouts, "I don't even think women should be educated." But Nixon came around to seeing the possibility of a female Supreme Court justice as a potential political plus and not much of a minus. Also he seemed intrigued by the chance to be the first president to put a woman on the court. At one point, a male jurist is mentioned and Nixon says all he'd need to be perfect is a sex change. Ehrlichman can be heard commenting, "Takes too much time." As more and more strategies went sour, and more and more candidates fell, Nixon suddenly decided to cut everybody out of the process, grab the reins and make the decision on his own. "You can hear on the tapes," Dean said, "that this now is a guy having fun." Pleasing the boss Dean had supported Poff, but had to look for another name to float. He decided that William Rehnquist, an assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel, "would sure please the boss." He planted the idea with Richard Moore, special counsel to the president, just before Moore, an old friend of Nixon's, was called by the president to discuss the open chair. The meeting took place Oct. 20. Nixon had met Rehnquist just once. The lawyer who, as chief justice, would have gold stripes sewn onto his robes, was then wearing a psychedelic tie and Hush Puppies. "John," Nixon asked Dean as they left the meeting, "who the hell is that clown?" Because of the pressures and the strange twists of the process, "that clown" became Nixon's last-minute choice. Nixon told Rehnquist the good news the morning of the day he made the announcement, Oct. 21, just one day after his meeting with Moore. He didn't forewarn the chief justice, Warren Burger, or White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman or, apparently, Mrs. Nixon. When Nixon announced his decision of a male nominee, Dean said, "the gossip around the White House was that Pat gave him hell." In "A Note to the Reader" at the beginning of his latest book, Dean writes, "I have some regrets about my role in this story. I have decided that the least I can do is tell it." The regrets are over his planting the idea of Rehnquist. "He was never vetted," Dean said. "There wasn't time." Had there been time for a thorough inspection, Dean thinks, another choice might have been made. Among many reasons Dean gives are two especially damaging memos authored by Rehnquist. In the first, Rehnquist brushed aside the 1st Amendment, Dean writes. The second Dean calls "a smoking cannon." It was a 19-page memo unsympathetically outlining the Warren Court's expansion of civil liberties and protections of the rights of the accused. Rehnquist suggested rewriting the Constitution. During confirmation hearings, the administration was able to keep the possibly explosive memos under wraps by invoking lawyer-client privilege. 30 years on the bench "As it turned out," Dean said, "he didn't need to rewrite the Constitution; he just needed 30 years on the bench." Dean said Rehnquist's definition of "strict constructionist" has become clear. "It's someone who favors criminal prosecutors over criminal defendants and civil rights defendants over civil rights plaintiffs," Dean said. "It's not good for persons of color, women, people of lesser circumstances." He said that Rehnquist, who would go on to write the majority decision in Bush vs. Gore and preside over the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, hasn't responded to the book. Dean doesn't expect he will. "It may be that the thing he likes least is finding out that he owes his job in part to John Dean." Dean served in the Nixon White House about 1,000 days, "more of them good than bad," he said. "They were heady days. I was a midlevel staff guy running all over the country vetting people to be a Supreme Court justice." After resignation and jail, Dean moved to California with his wife, Maureen "Mo" Dean, the woman with pulled-back blond hair on whom the cameras lingered when the Watergate hearings were televised. He registered as an Independent, became an investment banker, wrote "Blind Ambition" in 1976 and "Lost Honor" in 1982, and wrote screenplays. He's starting work on a book on Warren G. Harding, part of a presidential series to be edited by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Deep Throat data base Dean has built up a data base on Deep Throat, the informant who leaked Watergate secrets to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. "I started out with 3-by-5 cards," Dean said. "I'd put down by date every bit of information given Woodward, and then I'd go through and see who could have known that information at that time. I got down to a small field. I thought it was Alexander Haig, but he denied it. "Recently my interest was renewed when I got what Woodward used to call a `holy ----' tip, somebody who had slipped under my radar. Anyway I want to put that tip and my data together with the database that [former Tribune investigative reporter] William Gaines has had his students at the University of Illinois assemble. We hope that between now and June 19, 2002, the 30th anniversary of the first conversation between Deep Throat and Woodward, we'll know who it was. We're going to take a shot and it's going to be a good shot." Excerpts from the Nixon tapes A few choice snippets from recently released Watergate tapes in which Richard Nixon discusses his options for Supreme Court nominee: - Nixon: "I'm not for women, frankly, in any job. I don't want any of them around. Thank god we don't have any in the Cabinet. But I must say the Cabinet's so lousy we [might] just as well have a woman [there] too." - Another lively and repeated discussion was sparked by confusion about Bureau of the Budget director Caspar Weinberger: Ehrlichman: "[He's] an archconservative, he's a good lawyer. And that's good. Also, he's from California." Nixon: "And also basically he's considered to be Jewish." Ehrlichman: "Sure." Haldeman: "He isn't, I'm sure." Ehrlichman: "He's Episcopalian." Haldeman: "Apparently he's part Jewish." (Ehrlichman then claims that the president would get credit for placing a Jew on the Court if he nominated Weinberger, a Three Stooges routine over Weinberger that comes up several times in the tapes. Nixon: "You know, it's too bad we don't have an Italian, an honest Italian judge that I know of. Wish we did, wish we had a Pole." - A woman jurist, Mildred Lillie, was being considered for the Supreme Court. Nixon is on the phone with John Mitchell: "You know, John, it just must make you feel happy that you will be the attorney general to have made the first recommendation of a woman on the court. Doesn't it just make you feel great? Doesn't it. How proud you can be back at your old college in New York." Mitchell: "Yes sir, when I get with that new woman's lib, why I'll be their hero." Nixon: "John, that's Haldeman laughing in the background here." - When William Rehnquist's name was put forth as a possible Supreme Court nominee, Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee still was under consideration. Nixon: "The unknown thing with Rehnquist is going to really not wash good. If he was high in his class, was he first or second or something like that?" Mitchell: "He was first in his class." Nixon: "You think he was first?" Mitchell: "He was first, yes sir." Nixon makes mumbling, thinking noises. Mitchell: "Phi beta kappa, of course." Nixon: "Phi beta kappa, first in his class, law clerk to one of the great judges of this century, and practiced law as a lawyer's lawyer and so forth. Damn it, I really think we ought to go that way." Mitchell: "All right, well, I'll turn Baker off." The Nixon tapes can be heard by appointment at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md. Selections from the tapes have been posted by Northwestern University political science professor Jerry Goldman at www.hpol.org. John Dean's book, "The Rehnquist Choice" (Free Press, $26) also is available in CD and cassette formats (the six-hour CD version is $30) with Dean reading some parts and sections from the Nixon tapes included. Copyright (c) 2001, Chicago Tribune -------------------- Improved archives! Searching Chicagotribune.com archives back to 1985 is cheaper and easier than ever. New prices for multiple articles can bring your cost down to as low as 30 cents an article: http://chicagotribune.com/archives --- End forwarded message ---
