Late one week last March, John Wesley Dean Ill's telephone rang. It was the President calling with a friendly suggestion. Why didn't he take his pretty wife to Camp David for the weekend?
They would have the place to themselves, and the counsel to the President could stay on to write his long-overdue report on Watergate. That was the report of the investigation that Dean had supposedly made seven months before —an investigation that, Nixon had told the nation in mid-campaign, showed no one then employed at the White House was involved in the Watergate scandal.
John and Maureen ("Mo") Dean took the President up on his invitation for the weekend. But instead of relaxing during long walks in the piney woods, Dean thought about the carefully planned Watergate cover-up that was coming apart. Even worse, he suspected that he was marked out as the "fall guy." Finally, he sat down in the rustic cottage and began to write. As he later told a friend: "The pen wouldn't write the 'fairy tale' they wanted. It kept spelling out the truth." In despair, he threw down his pen and declared to Mo:
"My dad once told me that when you're cornered, there's only one thing to do —tell the truth."
That must have been the hardest decision Dean ever made, for he had prized loyalty all of his life. At Virginia's Staunton Military Academy, he is best remembered not as an All-America backstroker but as having been extraordinarily willing to sacrifice himself for others. "Whatever helped the team was what he wanted to do," recalls his old swimming coach, Colonel Ed Dodge.
"If I had to take John out of one event in which he excelled and put him in another where he didn't, he'd do it and never complain."
At every step in the 34-year-old Dean's brief career as a lawyer and Government official, associates recount similar experiences. Loyalty, in fact, is most often cited to explain his meteoric rise to counsel to the President —and his presence at the heart of the Watergate scandal. Since his precipitous fall from grace, however, other past colleagues have revealed glimpses of Dean's darker side. Some find him lacking in strong principles; others consider him overwhelmed by ambition. Declares one rather caustically: "He's a good moth. He knows how to find the light."
Just what John Dean really is may become a little clearer this week during his scheduled appearance before Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate committee.
Despite all the publicity since he was fired from his White House job April 30, he has remained a shadowy figure.
Through leaks and innuendo, his enemies have tried to discredit his testimony in advance by describing him as a craven, cowering man who is testifying only to save himself from prison where he fears homosexual rape because of his blond-boyish good looks. Dean denies having such fears and has used his own attorneys and associates to portray himself as being interested only in getting the truth out. But first he demanded immunity from prosecution for what he says, and he slipped tidbits of information to various newspapers and magazines in an effort to win their support in his campaign.