Dean: Nixon might have survived Watergate if there had been Fox News

CNN ^ | 4:28 PM ET, Tue January 2, 2018 | Jennifer Hansler

[Olog-hai]

Although he does not foresee a quick end to the special counsel probe into Russian election meddling and aides to President Donald Trump, former White House counsel John Dean noted that the modern media landscape may prevent it from lasting as long as the Watergate investigation, which he said stretched on for 928 days.

“There’s social media, there’s the internet, the news cycles are faster. I think Watergate would have occurred at a much more accelerated speed than the 928 days it took to go from the arrest at the Watergate to the conviction of (H.R.) Haldeman and (John) Ehrlichman and (John) Mitchell, et al.,” he said during a podcast interview with Politico. Dean, who is a CNN contributor, ultimately cooperated with Senate investigators against President Richard Nixon, but he spent four months in jail in 1974 for his role in the scandal, which started with the attempted bugging of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate and snowballed to bring down the Nixon presidency.

“I think there’s more likelihood (Nixon) might have survived if there’d been a Fox News,” he added, suggesting that more conservative voices critical of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will be beneficial to Trump. […]

Dean also said Trump could be impeached for incompetence even though that is not spelled out in the Constitution. He argued that it depends on one’s perception of what constitutes such an offense, described in the Constitution as “treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” …

[Pelham]

“I think John Mitchell, Nixon’s AG, was at fault”

G.Gordon Liddy came to believe that John Dean was the one who ordered the Watergate break-in.

That neither Nixon nor John Mitchell knew anything about it. Those two thought they were covering for each other when they got involved in the coverup.

After his release from prison Liddy read the book “Silent Coup”, written by a couple of liberal journalists, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, who set out to write a harmony of all of the Watergate accounts. Their book convinced Liddy that Dean was in fact the mastermind of whole affair, and that Dean covered his own hide by implicating Nixon.

Any student of Watergate should read that book. I bought it back when it was published, in the 1990s. I’ve since seen a free ebook copy available on the net.

[otness_e]

Don’t be so sure. Last I checked, LBJ, who declined to run for a second term for reasons suspected to be related to Walter Cronkite’s Tet Offensive lie, was not a Republican, and Cronkite certainly was no Republican or even Conservative. Even if Nixon switched parties, they’d STILL tar and feather him regardless.