The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and when He Knew it

Front Cover
Based on Nixon s overlooked recordings, New York Times bestselling author John W. Dean connects the dots between what we ve come to believe about Watergate and what actually happened
Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA s widespread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after Nixon was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of his involvement in Watergate.
In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President
Nixon know and when did he know it?
Through narrative and contemporaneous dialogue, Dean connects dots that have never been connected, including revealing how and why the Watergate break-in occurred, what was on the mysterious 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon s recorded conversations, and more.
In what will stand as the most authoritative account of one of America s worst political scandals, The Nixon Defense shows how the disastrous mistakes of Watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time."

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About the author (2014)

John W. Dean was born in Akron, Ohio on October 14, 1938. He received a B.A. from The College of Wooster in 1961 and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1965. He served as the White House legal counsel to President Nixon for a thousand days. He also served as chief minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee and as an associate deputy attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice. He has written numerous non-fiction books including Blind Ambition, Lost Honor, Conservatives Without Conscience, The Rehnquist Choice, Worse than Watergate, Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches, and The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It.