The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (21 page)

          
When Dean was on the stand in the New York [Vesco] case, the defense attorneys had suggested from time to time that he was testifying against Mitchell and Stans in order to get a lighter sentence from the court in Washington. It was a legitimate way for those attorneys to try to discredit Dean, given the fact that he hadn’t yet been sentenced by me.
But I didn’t want the defense to use the same tactic in the cover-up case
. Dean had already made his plea bargain with the prosecutors. As long as he appeared to testify fully and truthfully, I knew that what he said on the witness stand was not going to make any difference in the sentence I handed down.
So to prevent the suggestion that he was testifying in the hope that I would reduce his sentence, I decided to give Dean that sentence well before the trial
[emphasis added].
³⁹

It is entirely possible that the idea of hurrying Dean’s sentence originated with people within the special prosecutor’s office, but we may never know for sure.

For his own part, Dean later wrote that he was devastated by the harshness of Sirica’s sudden sentence:

          
I was absorbing Sirica’s words. “He threw the book at me? The most he could have given me was five years, and he gave me four. Why’d he do that?”

                
“I don’t understand it,” Charlie [Shaffer] said, over and over. “This is my fault, John. I should never have allowed you to plead to Sirica. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I don’t understand.” Charlie was as shaken by the sentence as if it were his own.

                
“How can he do that?” I asked plaintively. “I figured I’d get something like Krogh—six to eighteen months, maybe a year at the most. He hit me harder than Magruder. Even Colson didn’t get the sentence I got. It can’t be, Charlie.”

                
“How could he do that?” Mo shrieked hysterically. She was sobbing, out of control.”
⁴⁰

Dean was subsequently incarcerated, as ordered, but not sent to prison as Sirica had seemingly indicated in his order—or even kept in a jail cell. He spent his nights at a witness holding facility at nearby Fort Holabird, Maryland, at the request of the special prosecutor and with the concurrence of the Bureau of Prisons. And where did Dean spend his days? He recounted his conversation with Henry Ruth, Jaworski’s deputy who succeeded him as special prosecutor in October 1974, about the office he was using in the special prosecutor’s suite:

          
“John, I really don’t think this is appropriate.” Hank Ruth, Jaworski’s replacement as Special Prosecutor, was frowning. “If the press got hold of this, they’ll go crazy.” He threw a “JOHN DEAN” office name plate down on my desk and waited for an answer.

                
“Well, Hank,” I sputtered. I didn’t know whether to take his remark seriously. “I didn’t put that on the door. One of the secretaries did it as a joke. They think I’m almost one of the guys.”

                
“I know,” he said flatly. “But we can’t afford this kind of stuff. I’m already catching a lot of flak about the office you’ve got.”

                
“Okay, I understand.”

                
I knew there was some resentment that I had fared so well in the office shuffle at the Special Prosecutor’s K Street headquarters. When the Watergate trial team had moved to the courthouse, I had been assigned Neal’s old office on the ninth floor—a corner location with lots of windows.
⁴¹

Dean has confirmed on a number of occasions that he never went to jail. In a 1995 deposition he stated, “For example, when I was first incarcerated, I went to a witness protection facility in Maryland. I was brought in on almost a daily basis from that facility to the prosecutors’ office [on K Street in downtown Washington]. That continued through the trial. Through a lot of the trial I was also in the courthouse for the benefit of the prosecutors [who had moved to the courthouse for the trial’s duration].”
⁴²

In a discussion with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN in 2004, he elaborated:

                
B
RIAN
L
AMB
: And during that time you went to prison for a couple of months?

                
J
OHN
D
EAN
: I actually technically never went to prison. I had—I was in the witness protection program. They were worried about keeping me alive at the time. And so I was in a safe house and then spent most of that time actually in the prosecutor’s office. And it was 120 days that I was sort of in confinement, but I actually had—I was in the witness protection program for over a year.
⁴³

In another interview in 2004, Dean expanded upon how he served his supposedly harsh one-to-four-year sentence that had been so publicly imposed by Judge Sirica:

                
J
OHN
D
EAN
: Technically, let me correct you. I really never did go to prison. I was 127 days in the custody of the U.S.
Marshalls because I was in the Witness Protection Program. The government was very concerned about keeping me alive. I really have not let that get corrected over the years. It’s out there on the web. It’s on different sites.

                
A
MY
G
OODMAN
: Weren’t you in prison?

                
D
EAN
: I was not in prison.

                
G
OODMAN
: Weren’t you in jail?

                
D
EAN
: I was not in jail.

                
G
OODMAN
: In detention?

                
D
EAN
: I was in custody and would stay in a safe house at night. I spent most of that time in the U.S.—excuse me, in the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s office. I was driven to the office every day from the safe house. I was actually during the time that the trials were going on, I was in the courthouse in the prosecutor’s office.

                
G
OODMAN
: Wasn’t it a sentence?

                
D
EAN
: It was part of a sentence—well, yes. It became the sentence, the judge after—had sentenced me just before the trial started, and after 127 days later, said time served.

                
G
OODMAN
: And that time you had served in the prosecutor’s office?

                
D
EAN
: More or less.

                
G
OODMAN
: You never served a night in any kind of detention facility?

                
D
EAN
: Well in a safe house, yes.

                
G
OODMAN
: With other people?

                
D
EAN
: There were other government witnesses in that facility, yes. My next door neighbor happened to be a former mafia hit man who once told me, you know, John, I always liked Richard Nixon until I realized he wasn’t a very good criminal.

                
G
OODMAN
: Is that place still a house of detention?

                
D
EAN
: I don’t know. They don’t—they don’t advertise it. It’s part of the witness protection program. Well? Anyway, a technical point that I just thought I would clear up.
⁴⁴

Finally, in a more recent interview with Chapman University’s campus newspaper,
The Panther
, on January 29, 2012, Dean made it clear that he went into the prosecutor’s offices in the District of Columbia each and every day:

                
T
HE
P
ANTHER
: Once the trial was coming to a conclusion and you were sentenced to jail time, what was that time like?

                
J
OHN
D
EAN
: I was in the witness protection program the whole time. I never really served time. I stayed within the witness protection program in a safe house. Every day of the four months I was in confinement I was driven into Washington to the prosecutor’s office—not exactly hard time.
⁴⁵

Here Dean was stretching the truth. He was not in “the” Witness Protection Program at all. That program is used to provide key witnesses with brand new, permanent identities, such that they can relocate and live without fear of retaliation after their testimony—usually against the Mafia. Dean was provided protection by the U.S. Marshal Service, at the request of the special prosecutor, prior to his testimony but not anything close to a new identity. Dean had been sentenced to a prison term of one to four years—and was under that sentence at all times that he was testifying in the cover-up trial. Supposedly for the convenience of the special prosecutors, he was confined to a witness holding facility in Baltimore named Fort Holabird, which had been founded as a U.S. Army post in 1917.

We also might ask, however, what Dean meant by “not exactly hard time”? We already know that he was not just sitting around the courthouse, waiting to be prepped by the trial team that had moved there weeks earlier. Dean himself tells us that he was housed back at their K Street location, using the spacious office that had formerly been occupied by the lead prosecutor. What was he doing during those three months—only one week of which was actually spent on the witness stand—which he spent in the special prosecutor’s offices while seemingly beginning his prison sentence of one to four years? We can get some inkling from the
financial disclosure statement that he submitted to his sentencing officer in July 1974:

          
I signed a contract with the Bantam Book Publishing Co., to write two “non-Watergate” books about government. It is my hope to write whenever I am not being called upon by the government to testify, and hopefully complete the first manuscript by March of next year.
⁴⁶

So while the jurors and the rest of the American public thought that Dean was sitting in prison for his central role in the Watergate scandal, he was writing his book (supposedly a “non-Watergate” book) and palling around the prosecutors’ offices with his new best friends.

Dean was the prosecution’s principal witness in the cover-up trial that began on October 1, 1974. He was on the stand for over a week and was the only witness who could connect Haldeman and Ehrlichman (and President Nixon) to the cover-up, which he had helped to run. His testimony was all the more credible since he had pleaded guilty to the felony of conspiring to obstruct justice, had been sentenced to a harsh prison term, and appeared to be testifying while serving that sentence. The theme was as simple as it was direct: We were all in this together; I’ve ’fessed up and have been severely punished. These were my colleagues. You should see to it that they are punished too.

It was particularly critical for Dean to appear to have been harshly sentenced—along with Magruder—following President Ford’s unconditional pardon of former President Nixon. Jurors in the cover-up trial might have concluded that it would be unfair to send Nixon’s aides to prison when he himself had gotten off scot-free. They might have felt the same way if Nixon’s lesser aides also were treated lightly. So as far as the public knew, Dean and Magruder were serving one-to-four-year terms.

Here is how the two of the members of the Watergate Task Force describe the effect of Dean’s testifying from prison:

          
Moral balancing aside, the realpolitik of the situation was that Dean would not be an effective witness at trial if he got a free ride. His credibility would be substantially diminished . . . if the prosecutors completely forgave his own deep involvement. The evident effect of Dean’s prison sentence, later, on the jurors at the Watergate cover-up trial confirmed our tactical judgment. As a man who was already serving a long jail term for doing what he testified he had been instructed to do by Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Dean made a measurably greater impression than if he had never been charged or punished for his acts.
⁴⁷

Dean, that earnest and handsome young man, the hero of the Ervin Committee hearings, the one with the beautiful young wife—he was the one the jurors should believe. Not the vilified and disgraced Nixon henchmen, depicted nightly on the news as having tried to steal democracy, along with their equally disgraced president. No, the jury’s choice of whom to believe was simplified by Dean’s and Magruder’s apparent incarceration.

And Judge Sirica was determined that that carefully crafted appearance should not be compromised. When defense counsel’s opening statement raised the possibility that government witnesses could look forward to favorable treatment in return for testimony that was agreeable to the prosecution, Sirica promptly shut him down:

                
M
R
. B
RESS
[counsel for defendant Robert Mardian]: The first [class of witnesses] will be witnesses who have already pleaded guilty to one or more felonies and have been sentenced but look forward to some consideration in the future for their present governmental cooperation.