John Dean's Books

Since 2001, there is a market for books by John W. Dean again. He had been absent since 1982, when he wrote Lost Honor, which did not sell well. When he began his comeback, he tried to keep to the old formulas, telling us the tired old "inside story" of how bad Nixon really was. For a generation of Boomer Democrats eager to see everything Bush as Nixon redux, this was meat and drink. Those folks write the reviews and buy a lot of books, but it wasn't quite a broad enough appeal for big sales.

Dean's last two books, Worse Than Watergate and Conservatives without Conscience have been bigger sellers. Looking over that sales record for books, I have to ask: would anyone give a rat's ass what John Dean thought about anything if he couldn't palm himself off as a conservative who hates George Bush? His testimony at Watergate has been exposed as too inaccurate to be historically useful, and he has effectively lost both of his head-to-head legal battles with G. Gordon Liddy (lost one, dropped the other just before trial, refused to testify under oath), has done little of particular political interest in decades, and knows nothing about the Bush White House that sets him apart from any other Washington dinosaur with a library card and the ability to type "google."

Dean says his ideological heroes are Goldwater and Buckley. Well, fine then. My heroes are CS Lewis and Bernard of Clairvaux. My favorite color is sky blue and if I could be any animal in the world I would be a wombat, just for the name. So what?