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"I don't think that anyone is trying to paint this gentleman as a lily-white angel in this case," Sirica said. "Let's be frank about it, he has already confessed to his participation and what he did."
Added the chief prosecutor, James Neal, "And he is paying for it." Last August Sirica sentenced Dean to one to four years in prison.
Mastery of Detail. Dean, who spent the entire week on the stand, seemed bemused by much of the squabbling around him. Never flustered and still displaying his mastery of memorized detail, he blunted the intended impact of Wilson's surprisingly low-keyed questions. Wilson attacked Dean's use of $4,850 in Nixon campaign funds for his wedding and honeymoon, and to build a patio at his home. Prosecutor Neal had brought that issue out first on direct examination, letting Dean testify that he had placed a personal check in his White House safe in place of the money, later repaid the amount, and that this misuse of funds would never have been known if Dean had not disclosed it himself. Wilson drew an admission from Dean that, at the least, this had amounted to "an interest-free loan."
Haldeman's lawyer was more effective in showing that Dean had shredded two notebooks that had belonged to Convicted Watergate Burglar E. Howard Hunt—and had withheld that information from prosecutors and the Senate Watergate Committee until a year ago. In his first public explanation of that destruction, Dean said he had feared that the notebooks would lead to disclosure of the 1971 White House-sanctioned burglary of a psychiatrist who had treated Pentagon Papers Defendant Daniel Ellsberg. Contended Dean: "I was just getting rid of something I didn't know how to handle."
Employing a deliberately casual, informal approach, Mitchell's goodnatured attorney, William Hundley, got Dean to concede that there was no evidence that Mitchell had approved the bugging of Democratic headquarters and that Jeb Stuart Magruder, former deputy director of Nixon's re-election committee—the only Nixon aide who has claimed that Mitchell did—has given conflicting accounts of who had ordered it. Dean admitted, too, that efforts to get Mitchell to step forward and take the full blame for the burglary were motivated by the desire of Dean and other presidential aides to save their own necks.
A more theatrical attack on Dean was launched by Ehrlichman's counsel, Frates, whose inflection conveyed heavy sarcasm. "There is finger pointing in this courtroom and there'll probably be more of it," he said. His questions implied that Nixon and Haldeman had led Ehrlichman into his current difficulty. But Dean was unshaken in his testimony that Ehrlichman had knowingly participated in the coverup.