Interview with John Dean

Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive has an interview with former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean on the comparison between Nixon and George W. Bush. It's a long interview but here's an excerpt:

Q: I’m very interested in the comparisons you make between Nixon and Bush.

Dean: Both mean learned about the Presidency from men they greatly respected: Richard Nixon from Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush from his father. When both men became President, you got the very distinct impression that they don’t feel that they quite fit in the shoes of the person from whom they learned about the Presidency. Nixon would constantly be going down to Key Biscayne, San Clemente, or Camp David—he just didn’t like being in the Oval Office. I saw this same thing with George Bush, who is constantly away. The other striking similarity is that both men talk in the third person about the office of the President. It’s like the royal we. You look at other Presidents, like Reagan and Clinton, who clearly filled that office. You almost had to pry Clinton out at the end of his term. And Reagan, despite whatever weaknesses he had intellectually, filled the role of President and played it to the hilt. So Bush has a Nixonian distance from the White House.

And I was stunned at the secrecy of this Administration. I knew that there’s no good that can come out of secrecy. So I began looking closely at Bush and finding the striking Nixonian features of this Presidency: It’s almost as if we’d left an old playbook in the basement, they found it, dusted it off, and said, “This stuff looks pretty good, we ought to give it a try.” As I dug in, and still had some pretty good sources within that Presidency, I found the principal mover and shaker of this Presidency is clearly Dick Cheney, who is not only reviving the Imperial Presidency but expanding it beyond Nixon’s wildest dreams.

The reason I wrote a book with the title “Worse than Watergate,” and I was very cautious in using that title, is because there was a real difference: Nobody died as a result of the so-called abuses of power during Nixon’s Presidency. You might make the exception of, say, the secret bombing of Cambodia, but that never got into the Watergate litany per se. You look at Bush’s abuses, and Cheney’s—to me, it’s a Bush/ Cheney Presidency—and today, people are dying as a result of abuse of power. That’s much more serious.

Q: Dying in Iraq?

Dean: Dying in Iraq. God knows where they’re dying. In secret prisons. To me the fact that a Vice President can go to Capitol Hill and lobby for torture is just unbelievable. Just unbelievable! The fact that a small clique of attorneys in the Department of Justice can write how can we get around the Geneva Conventions so that we can torture during interrogations—I can’t even get there mentally. And when you read their briefs, they didn’t get there mentally.

Q: The amazing thing about your book is that it was written before Cheney went up to lobby for torture, before the NSA scandal broke, and before the Valerie Plame thing.

Dean: They just keep walking into my title and adding additional chapters.

Q: Talk a little bit more about Dick Cheney. You call him “co-President” in your book.

Dean: I do. It was evident, even at the beginning, when Cheney was very confident they were going to win at the Supreme Court. I’ve got some friends who were in there and they were telling me what was happening, and they said Bush doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Cheney’s setting things up the way he wants. He’s designing a National Security Council that’s more powerful than the statutory National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. And it was, and it is. She was the perfect foil for him because he can roll over her anytime he wants, and he does. Putting her over at State is even better: Keep her out on the road. The Cheney-Rumsfeld connection has really been driving the foreign policy since day one.

John Dean learned about the limits of power the hard way and I respect what he says. I consider myself a liberal Democrat but one of the things about being reality-based and about demanding to know the facts before drawing conclusions is that you find yourself agreeing with people across a wide spectrum who you wouldn't necessarily think you would agree with.

I agree with the connection of the Bush Administration with the Nixon Administration (Cheney and Rumsfeld worked for Nixon and always felt that Nixon should have fought his legal problems harder; later they worked for Gerald Ford who had a reputation for being a moderate but Cheney and Rumsfeld were very right-wing even for that era). I agree that it's absurd that an administration can somehow justify torture. I particularly agree that Condi Rice was used as a decoy to obscure where the real power of the Bush Administration is based; that situation has too often been overlooked by a compliant media.

Somebody needs to write the story of the Bush Administration from about November 2003 to April 2004; for a brief time, Condi Rice was finally given some power but it appears that Cheney and Rumsfeld used Abu Ghraib and Fallujah to grab back what little power Rice had been given. The point is that for a few months, Bush asserted himself over Cheney and Rumsfeld and never did so again; Bush probably asserted himself because he was terrified of the mess Cheney and Rumsfeld had made in Iraq and what that implied for the 2004 election.

Bush won in 2004 because of Karl Rove and although Bush has once again committed himself to Cheney and Rumsfeld, it should never be forgotten that those two nearly cost Bush his second term. Bush could probably save the rest of his presidency by dumping Cheney and Rumsfeld but the truth is that he is as committed to the radical foreign policy agenda as the two older men. No one should be fooled by the soothing language Bush and his Republican friends will be using between now and the midterm elections.