Video: 'John Dean (Part 1) Watergate Hearings Testimony'

(Monday, June 25, 1973, live TV coverage was scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. EDT; during the Watergate Scandal) — Former White House Counsel John W. Dean began testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee today, implicating top administration officials, including President Richard Nixon as well as himself, in the Watergate scandal and cover-up.

Dean told the Senate’s investigating committee that he still clung to the belief that Nixon “did not realize or appreciate at any time the implications of his involvement.”

Nonetheless, in a day-long, matter-of-fact recitation of Dean’s own involvement in the Watergate cover-up and in 47 documents that he submitted to the Senate committee, he described a widespread effort to mask the extent of the conspiracy that he said spread from the White House staff, the Committee for the Re-election of the President, the Department of Justice and, ultimately, to the Oval Office of the White House.

The testimony was explosive, yet tamped down in its immediate impact by the somber demeanor of the witness.

The caucus room of the Old Senate Office Building, where presidential candidacies have begun, was hushed as the Senators and audience waited to learn whether Dean’s recitation might point toward the President’s undoing.

As he read his long statement, Senators turned pages simultaneously to keep up with the text and the five previous weeks of hearings became a prelude to declarations.

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His head bowed as he read calmly from a 245-page prepared account, Dean publicly detailed for the first time the following allegations of Nixon’s own involvement:

The President complimented him last September for having helped to assure that the government’s investigation of the Watergate case “had stopped with [G. Gordon] Liddy,” one of the convicted Watergate conspirators.

• In February, the President asked him to report directly to Nixon on what he learned of the continuing investigations because H. R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, the two senior domestic aides to the President, “were principals in the matter,” and also meet ing with Dean was taking up too much of their time.
• The President discussed with him on March 13 the demands by the Watergate conspirators for large sums of money to maintain their silence and that when Dean told him it could cost more than $1 million, Nixon “told me that was no problem.” A month later, Dean said, the President sought to pass off the remark as a joke.
• The President had told him of discussions early this year with Ehrlichman and Charles W. Colson, a former special counsel to the President, about a promise to grant executive clemency to E. How and Hunt Jr., another of the Watergate defendants.


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• The President directed that the Administration try to curtail the Senate investigation and block an attempted inquiry into Watergate by the House Banking and Currency Committee last September. The President also ordered aides to make sure that L. Patrick Gray 3d, the former acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, would be “pulled up short” in his testimony last spring to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
• At one point, in a meeting on March 21, the President discussed with his aides the possibility that the cover-up might be kept secret if John N. Mitchell, the former Attorney General and director of Nixon’s re-election campaign, could be persuaded to assume public responsibility for the burglary and wiretapping of the Democratic headquarters at Watergate a year ago.
• After he (Dean) had resolved to try to “end the mess without mortally wounding the President” by giving information to Government prosecutors, the President apparently tape-recorded an April 15 meeting with him and asked a number of “leading questions” in an evident effort to create a record that would “protect himself.”
• The President tried to get him, in a “tense conversation” on April 16, to sign two letters of resignation that tended to incriminate Dean, but he “looked the President squarely in the eyes and told him I would not sign the letters” or become a “White House scapegoat.”

Dean did not provide any firsthand information to link the President to prior knowledge of the Watergate burglary and the arrests of five men inside the Democratic National Committee offices.

But he told, in a fourth-hand account, of having been advised in February that Haldeman had “cleared” with the President Liddy’s $250,000 master plan to gather information on the Democratic opposition in the 1972 campaign.