John Dean also gave the idea for the Watergate break-in, if that boook “Silent Coup” is to be believed. Pres. Nixon knew practically nothing about the break in, but he did want to protect his staff.
“Pres. Nixon knew practically nothing about the break in, but he did want to protect his staff.”
Even Democrat arch-partisan Chris Matthews readily acknowledges that Nixon didn’t know anything about the Watergate break-in until after it had occurred. Matthews says Nixon’s only Watergate fault was trying to conceal it after he learned of it.
Nixon thought he was protecting AG John Mitchell. Mitchell thought he was protecting Nixon.
“Silent Coup” is convincing enough that it converted G Gordon Liddy. Liddy, who had gone to jail thinking he was being loyal to Nixon, now thinks that Dean was behind it all.
“Silent Coup” authors Colodny and Gettlin were not Nixon partisans. They claimed to be political liberals. Their goal was to write a “harmony of the gospels”, to make sense out of all the first person accounts written by Watergate participants.
When they began researching the book Dean was actually their adviser. But the more that they worked on their material the more everything seemed to come back to John Dean. When they asked him to clarify some points he turned on them, and that’s when they first began to suspect that he was the mastermind behind Watergate.