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Dean's word, of course, must be treated with caution, since his personal stake is high. He is maneuvering for the broadest kind of immunity against prosecution, and may be trying to favorably influence any later criminal trial of his own. Yet it seems unlikely that Dean would enter into a showdown with the President without considerable ammunition. Indeed, his recent record for revealing unpleasant truths is impressive.
"We Can't." It was Dean who first told Justice Department prosecutors in the Watergate case that there had been a White House-directed burglary of psychiatric records in the Ellsberg case. It also was Dean who informed the prosecutors that there had been meetings in Attorney General Mitchell's office at which plans for the Watergate bugging were discussed. First mentioned by McCord, these meetings were mere hearsay until Dean confirmed that he had been present at them, along with Mitchell, Liddy and Magruder. Dean's revelations caused Magruder to admit that he had lied to the grand jury.
A close associate of Dean's has given TIME the following account of Dean's position in the White House infighting over the scandal. Some of the points have also been backed by his lawyers. Their story:
Dean never made an investigation for the President that showed that no one then "presently employed" by the White House had been involved in Watergate, as Nixon announced on Aug. 29. Dean can produce his office logs for the period. He and his attractive wife Maureen have been working into the nights to gather this evidence on Dean's daily office activities. The records give no indication that he filed such a report and will substantiate Dean's claim that he did not even meet with Nixon between the Watergate arrests and the President's statement.
In March Dean was called into Nixon's office, where the President gave him two papers and asked him to sign them. One was a virtual confession that Dean alone in the White House had concealed facts in the Watergate case. The other was his resignation.
"What about Ehrlichman and Haldeman?" Dean asked the President.
"They have given verbal assurance [that they were not part of a cover-up]," Nixon replied.
Dean then said that he would not sign any such papers unless the other two aides would do so as well. Dean told the President: "We can't do this. The whole truth has to get out."
The President then directed Dean to draft his own letter of resignation and show it to him. Dean, still resisting, later returned to Nixon's office and said he could not do this. "Nixon was mad," Dean claims. The President told Dean that the young counsel must "shoulder the burden" and that there was to be no full "airing." Moreover, Haldeman and Ehrlichman would stay on his staff. It was then that Dean decided that the other three—Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman—were trying to pin the entire cover-up on him. He issued his celebrated statement that he did not intend to become "a scapegoat" —and went to the Justice Department to talk to the prosecutors.