John Dean

John Dean, born in 1938, United States government official, White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974), and a key figure in the Watergate scandal. Dean's testimony during televised hearings in the U.S. Senate implicated high-ranking White House officials in the 1972 Watergate break-in and wiretaps and asserted that Nixon was involved in efforts to cover up the scandal. Dean's allegations played a key role in Nixon's eventual resignation from the presidency.

John Wesley Dean III was born in Akron, Ohio. He earned a bachelor's degree from Wooster College in 1961 and a law degree from Georgetown University in 1965. He joined a Washington, D.C., law firm after graduation, but was fired the following year in a conflict-of-interest dispute with one of the firm's partners. He was then hired as chief counsel to the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1967 a National Commission on the Reform of Federal Criminal Law was formed, and Dean became its associate director. He volunteered to write position papers on crime for Nixon's presidential campaign in 1968, and in 1969 he became an assistant in the office of the attorney general in the Nixon administration. Dean became counsel to the president when John Ehrlichman gave up that post to become the president's chief domestic adviser.

Dean, along with a number of other Nixon Administration officials, was involved in efforts to cover up White House involvement in the 1972 burglary and wiretapping of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Ironically, in the summer of 1972 Nixon had chosen Dean to head a special investigation to determine if any White House staff had been involved in the burglary. When Dean began to reveal to prosecutors evidence of White House involvement in the break-in, Nixon dismissed him. Later, when called to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Dean testified that Nixon knew of and participated in the cover-up, a statement that Nixon and his aides strongly disputed. The subsequent disclosure and release of taped conversations in which Nixon discussed the break-in corroborated Dean's testimony. Dean was convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and to defraud the government, and he served four months in prison.

In 1976 Dean published Blind Ambition, a book of memoirs. The book was later made into a television miniseries. In January 1992 Dean and his wife, Maureen, filed a $150-million libel suit against G. Gordon Liddy, as well as the authors and publishers of a book entitled Silent Coup (1991), for alleging that Dean had masterminded the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Liddy filed a countersuit in July 1992.