Replies

The only people who would recognize Mo Dean as a call girl were people who would implicate themselves if they had talked about it.

I see that however old you are you haven't yet come across the phrase "anonymous sources." If reporters come up with enough of them, they run the story. Moreover, given that the statute of limitations has expired and given what the culture has become, it wouldn't have been hard for somebody to have come forward and confirm the story if it were true.

The rumor that Maureen Dean had been a prostitute wasn't so far as I'm aware part of the original story. Maybe Colodny and Gettlin were hinting at it and wanted the public to conclude that, but if I remember correctly they were careful about not coming out and saying that. So you had John Dean for some reason ordering a break-in to get documents about a prostitution ring either because he wanted to use the documents for blackmail or because his wife's name had somehow become included in the documents. It took anonymous internet posters to make the Maureen Dean prostitute theme a meme.

It's a fact that Maureen Dean knew Heidi Rikan and John Dean must have been aware of her existence, but there's no real evidence for the rest of the story -- that there was a prostitution ring connected with the DNC, that Rikan ran a prostitution operation, that it was connected to the DNC, that Ida Wells was the contact between the DNC and the prostitutes, that she kept photos in her desk, that Maureen Dean's picture or phone number was there, that she worked as a prostitute, that John Dean arranged the Watergate break in to get those pictures or documents -- all that is unproven speculation.

Some of it may be true, but the connections come from Phillip M. Bailley, a lawyer with ethical and mental problems who also claimed Diane Sawyer was part of the same prostitution ring.

According to an article in Time, Bailley graduated from Catholic University Law School in 1969 after being voted “most likely to be disbarred” by his classmates. Bailley spent his first few years out of school cultivating a practice based largely on “defending the indigent,” Time says. By 1972, the year the article came out, Bailley had been charged with “inducing into prostitution secretaries and office workers on Capitol Hill.” He pleaded guilty, was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital for mental-health observation, and was disbarred, Murray says.

The man knew about prostitution, I guess, but he doesn't sound like somebody I'd trust to tell the truth. The way that Colodny and Gettlin jumped to the conclusion that Alexander Haig was "Deep Throat" is another indication that they haven't written the best or truest book about Watergate.

Gordon Liddy wants to believe that John Dean was responsible for Watergate and that it had something to do with his wife. In Liddy's mind that may let him off the hook for all the other stuff he was willing to do to get Richard Nixon reelected. Others support the theory because they think it somehow clears Nixon and the rest of the staff of wrong-doing. Still other people like to (or need to) call people whores. Those who don't have such compulsions will be justifiably skeptical of Silent Coup's wacky theory. I can't definitively say that it isn't true or couldn't be true, but people shouldn't be acting like it's proven - or even likely to be true.