Monday, May 19, 2008

Book Claims John Dean Ordered Watergate Break-in

Oh my, wouldn't this be delicious. To see this sanctimonious twit get his just desserts all these years later would be so thoroughly enjoyable, if only to witness the leftist apoplexy at one of their heroes being exposed for the fraud he is.

Of course, since the author works for the evil Fox News, they'll never believe a shred of it anyway, but it should be amusing to see the reaction.
A new book on the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon alleges that White House counsel John Dean ordered the infamous Watergate break-in in 1972, a charge Dean strongly rejected.

James Rosen, a Fox News Channel correspondent in Washington, made the charge based on interviews and an exhaustive review of documents for "The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate."

The biography is being released this week about Nixon's attorney general, a central Watergate figure.

Dean called Rosen's assertion "pathetic."

The Watergate scandal began with the bungled election-year break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington on June 17, 1972. The aim was to wiretap the telephones.

Initially dismissed by the White House as a "third-rate burglary," the scandal was slow in evolving and had no impact on the outcome of the 1972 election -- Nixon easily defeated Democratic Sen. George McGovern to win a second term.

But by 1974 investigators had traced Watergate and various other political scandals back to the White House and Nixon was forced to resign on August 9, 1974.

Dean was most famous for telling Nixon in a taped Oval Office conversation in 1973 that Watergate was "a cancer growing on the presidency."

Though convicted of several Watergate-related felonies, he has been widely viewed as somewhat of a sympathetic figure in the case because he became a key witness for the prosecution, thus reducing his prison time.

Rosen quoted from a 1990 interview from another central Watergate figure, Jeb Magruder, that "the first plan that we got had been initiated by Dean."

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