An Interview with John Dean
John Dean is interviewed in The Progressive. Here's a taster. Click title for the whole thing.
Q: I'm very interested in the comparisons you make between Nixon and Bush.Dean: Both mean learned about the Presidency from men they greatly respected: Richard Nixon from Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush from his father. When both men became President, you got the very distinct impression that they don't feel that they quite fit in the shoes of the person from whom they learned about the Presidency. Nixon would constantly be going down to Key Biscayne, San Clemente, or Camp David-he just didn't like being in the Oval Office. I saw this same thing with George Bush, who is constantly away. The other striking similarity is that both men talk in the third person about the office of the President. It's like the royal we. You look at other Presidents, like Reagan and Clinton, who clearly filled that office. You almost had to pry Clinton out at the end of his term. And Reagan, despite whatever weaknesses he had intellectually, filled the role of President and played it to the hilt. So Bush has a Nixonian distance from the White House.
And I was stunned at the secrecy of this Administration. I knew that there's no good that can come out of secrecy. So I began looking closely at Bush and finding the striking Nixonian features of this Presidency: It's almost as if we'd left an old playbook in the basement, they found it, dusted it off, and said, "This stuff looks pretty good, we ought to give it a try." As I dug in, and still had some pretty good sources within that Presidency, I found the principal mover and shaker of this Presidency is clearly Dick Cheney, who is not only reviving the Imperial Presidency but expanding it beyond Nixons wildest dreams.
The reason I wrote a book with the title "Worse than Watergate," and I was very cautious in using that title, is because there was a real difference: Nobody died as a result of the so-called abuses of power during Nixon's Presidency. You might make the exception of, say, the secret bombing of Cambodia, but that never got into the Watergate litany per se. You look at Bush's abuses, and Cheney's-to me, it's a Bush/ Cheney Presidency-and today, people are dying as a result of abuse of power. That's much more serious.
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