How John Dean Came Center Stage

Late one week last March, John Wesley Dean Ill's telephone rang. It was the President calling with a friendly suggestion. Why didn't he take his pretty wife to Camp David for the weekend?

They would have the place to themselves, and the counsel to the President could stay on to write his long-overdue report on Watergate. That was the report of the investigation that Dean had supposedly made seven months before --an investigation that, Nixon had told the nation in mid-campaign, showed no one then employed at the White House was involved in the Watergate scandal.

John and Maureen ("Mo") Dean took the President up on his invitation for the weekend. But instead of relaxing during long walks in the piney woods, Dean thought about the carefully planned Watergate cover-up that was coming apart. Even worse, he suspected that he was marked out as the "fall guy." Finally, he sat down in the rustic cottage and began to write. As he later told a friend: "The pen wouldn't write the 'fairy tale' they wanted. It kept spelling out the truth." In despair, he threw down his pen and declared to Mo:

"My dad once told me that when you're cornered, there's only one thing to do --tell the truth."

That must have been the hardest decision Dean ever made, for he had prized loyalty all of his life. At Virginia's Staunton Military Academy, he is best remembered not as an All-America backstroker but as having been extraordinarily willing to sacrifice himself for others. "Whatever helped the team was what he wanted to do," recalls his old swimming coach, Colonel Ed Dodge.

"If I had to take John out of one event in which he excelled and put him in another where he didn't, he'd do it and never complain."

At every step in the 34-year-old Dean's brief career as a lawyer and Government official, associates recount similar experiences. Loyalty, in fact, is most often cited to explain his meteoric rise to counsel to the President --and his presence at the heart of the Watergate scandal. Since his precipitous fall from grace, however, other past colleagues have revealed glimpses of Dean's darker side. Some find him lacking in strong principles; others consider him overwhelmed by ambition. Declares one rather caustically: "He's a good moth. He knows how to find the light."

Just what John Dean really is may become a little clearer this week during his scheduled appearance before Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate committee.

Despite all the publicity since he was fired from his White House job April 30, he has remained a shadowy figure.

Through leaks and innuendo, his enemies have tried to discredit his testimony in advance by describing him as a craven, cowering man who is testifying only to save himself from prison where he fears homosexual rape because of his blond-boyish good looks. Dean denies having such fears and has used his own attorneys and associates to portray himself as being interested only in getting the truth out. But first he demanded immunity from prosecution for what he says, and he slipped tidbits of information to various newspapers and magazines in an effort to win their support in his campaign.

Even before Watergate, Dean was hardly known outside the tight-knit circle of the White House staff. He shunned publicity, avoided controversy and cultivated a reputation of being one of Nixon's most faithful liege men. As presidential counsel, he worked out the legal basis for Nixon's impoundment of funds, broad use of pocket vetoes and Executive privilege. He also helped arrange Nixon's commutation of jail sentences being served by Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa (which was widely interpreted as a political gesture in return for Teamster support of Nixon in the election) and by Mafia Capo Angelo ("Gyp") DeCarlo. Nonetheless, Clark MacGregor, who headed the re-election committee after John Mitchell resigned, recalls Dean not as part of the power elite but as a "wall sitter"--one who carried out policy rather than helped make it.

Born in Akron, Dean was raised with his sister Anne in several Midwestern cities, as their father rose through the executive ranks of Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. Later the elder Dean settled in Greenville, Pa., where he became vice president of a company that manufactures playground equipment. At Staunton, young John studied self-hypnotism to improve his concentration and roomed with Barry Goldwater Jr., who now is his neighbor in Alexandria, Va. Dean graduated with a low B average and got by at Colgate with gentlemanly C's before transferring to Ohio's College of Wooster in 1959.

There he founded a student pre-law club, played the part of a redneck witness in a campus production of Inherit the Wind and wrote a senior thesis on "The Social Responsibilities of the Political Novelists." He earned a master's degree in public administration from American University in 1962 and his law degree from Georgetown in 1965.

He joined a Washington law firm, but his career as a practicing attorney ended sourly six months later. Assigned to help prepare a client's application for a new television station, Dean was discovered to be working on a rival application--for himself and some friends --and was fired. He was promptly hired as minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee by its ranking Republican, Representative William McCulloch, who was both a fellow Ohioan and Wooster alumnus.

For two years, Dean concentrated on civil rights legislation and on criminal law reforms. In 1967 he became associate director of a now defunct panel (the National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws), which was set up to advise Congress and the President. There he struck one colleague as courteous, pleasant to work with but somewhat facile. Recalled the colleague: "He gave the appearance of having more poise and assurance than he really possessed."

In 1969 Richard Kleindienst, who was then Deputy Attorney General, hired Dean as the Justice Department's liaison with Congress. As such, he was in charge of lobbying efforts for the ill-fated nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. His loyalty to the Administration so impressed senior White House staffers that he was hired to succeed John Ehrlichman as presidential counsel in 1970. In that job, Dean appeared to be a man of rigid principle, even when he was secretly helping to cover up Watergate. Once a junior staffer asked whether he could accept a $200 honorarium for a speech. "No, sir," Dean declared. What if he turned the money over to his church? "No," Dean repeated. "Nobody on the White House staff is going to accept money for anything."

Undoubtedly, Dean's career was furthered by his good looks and his command of the social graces. Detractors also suggest he was helped along by his first marriage--to Karla Hennings, the daughter of the late Senator Thomas C. Hennings of Missouri. She bore his son John IV, now 5, but the marriage ended in divorce three years ago. Last fall Dean married Maureen, a former insurance saleswoman from Los Angeles.

From the outset, John and Mo Dean maintained a low social profile in their $70,000 brick town house on Quay Street in Alexandria's affluent Old Town section, just 200 yards from the Potomac. Now, of course, the profile is lower still. Occasionally, they eat out with the Goldwaters, who live across the street. One recent Saturday, another neighbor, Ervin Committee Member Lowell Weicker, dropped in for beer and pretzels. Before the worst of Watergate, the Deans played tennis and golf, swam and sailed their 18-ft. boat. Nattily dressed in broad-lapel suits and wide ties, Dean used to drive to work a purple Porsche 911 as highly polished as his shoes. Now he and Mo stay home. Although hidden from public view by drawn shades, he still looks tanned. The tan is inexplicable; he told a recent visitor: "I haven't been in the sun for days. I would call it a bourbon pallor; except I haven't had a drink for days either." For the most part, in these last weeks leading up to his climactic appearance before the Ervin committee, he has worked in his basement, putting his letters and other documents in order, preparing for his ordeal.

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