[img]642|left|John Dean||no_popup[/img] Determined to prove that his audacity has not receded as much as his hairline, the most celebrated — and self-honored — survivor of the Watergate scandals nearly drowned, rhetorically, in a blizzard of self-congratulations last night before launching into a cold, expressionless broad attack on Republicans as the most vile of American political creatures, then and now.
John Dean may have earned enshrinement in Guinness by calmly listing about 21 negative qualities common to all admitted GOP members.
To be succinct, they are racists, uneducated, hateful, heavily uninformed, vengeful, inarticulate, embarrassingly submissive, prone to unquestioningly obeying all authority, especially to misguided leaders. They also harbor outrageous fears and, typically, they are religious.
Throughout the second half of Mr. Dean’s life, this brilliant two-tiered strategy of lauding self and condemning former allies has yielded a handsome living for him and his wife.
Blush was not on the 70-year-old Mr. Dean’s menu, ex-con or not.
Essentially, Mr. Dean’s stunningly popular appearance — which drew a record crowd to the Culver City Democratic Club meeting — was a bold exercise in legacy-building, how frequently and impressively his judgment has been correct.
For one spellbinding hour at the Vets Auditorium, without virtually a single written note, he cruised down a becalmed river underpinned by a remarkable tendency toward backpatting.
With disarming and understated congeniality, he weaved a faultless fabric of inerrant personal judgments, apparently intended to show how straight of a path one supremely confident, strong-willed person can navigate.
Whether it was his upbringing as a child of privilege in Middle Western Ohio or his later exposure to the cynicisms of daily life in Washington or the White House, in the afternoon of his life, he strikes a bullet-proof mode when he meets ordinary Americans.
Writing prolifically in retirement, Mr. Dean’s three most recent book titles hardly require elaboration, “Worse Than Watergate,” an assault on perceived Bush-Cheney secrecy, “Conservatives Without a Conscience” and “Broken Government,” which he says “tells how Republican rule destroyed the legislative, judicial and executive branches in a negative manner that has affected all Americans.”
To maintain the interest of his enthralled overflow audience by varying the pace, Mr. Dean seamlessly sprinkled in laudations from others.
In introducing Mr. Dean, Democratic Club President Ronnie Jayne, mindful of outbreaks at recent town hall meetings across the country, sternly warned that no disruption to any degree would be tolerated. However, this mixed crowd of homegrowns and strangers not only was curious and respectful, but a gathering of true admirers, including U.S. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Culver City), who was a half-hour tardy.
A Victim?
Mr. Dean scorned any trace of irony, much less self-deprecation on his increasingly spotless early life that brought him worldwide attention that has melded into enviable fame, if not adulation.
Remarking with perhaps his only slender smile of the immensely entertaining evening, Mr. Dean wanly joked (?) at the outset that every time he walked into President Nixon’s Oval Office, “I always seemed to be sitting in front of a little hidden microphone.” The crack seemed designed to encourage sympathy for a Nixon victim.
Throughout, his commentary was freighted with underlying, unsubtle meanings. Centrally, he was hawking his books.
He opened by regurgitating what Ronnie Jayne had said about earlier book titles that had made The New York Times’ best seller lists.
“I thought I would talk about what is so much in the news,” he said at the start, “because it’s directly related to the material in another of my books, called ‘Conservatives Without a Conscience.’”
Without breaking stride, Mr. Dean insisted that since moving to Los Angeles, he no longer is a political partisan. “I really don’t carry water anymore for either party,” he said. To underscore his assertion, he said that “as somebody who was once an insider and understands how it works inside, somebody who stayed pretty current with what is happening and why it’s happening,” he knows too much to favor either side.
He would not have brought up the “Conservatives” book title, Mr. Dean said, except for the fact that he possesses uniquely acute insight into the body politic and also into his former Republican allies.
Therefore, it is crucial for him to reveal to the public how genuinely dangerous, ignorant, infectious and threatening the entire Republican Party structure, leaders plus the rank-and-file, is.
Riding this general theme the breadth of the evening, Mr. Dean is destined to be remembered as the most popular speaker in the 57-year history of the Democratic Club.
His smashing appearance may warrant return visits, given the size and quality of the throng.
As for Mr. Dean:
Not a teardrop of repentance was in danger of hovering into view for the ex-White House counsel whom the FBI tagged as “the master manipulator of the coverup.”
Thirty-seven years after the presidentially authorized break-in of the infamous Watergate Hotel indelibly scarred the image of the White House, the obviously magnetic Mr. Dean repeatedly demonstrated how successfully he has outrun his supposedly disgraceful past.
Indeed, it may be marginally demeaning to call him a Watergate survivor.
He is the reverse, a hero, given the way that he has been unrelentingly lionized by Democrats and the Left in the sunlight of the intervening years.
His Sharpest Move
Instead of letting history judge, he seized the initiative. He shrewdly began putting the rehabilitation-of-reputation machinery in place himself. Did he react counter-intuitively when his life seemed to strike bottom? At a point of despair and desperation for many people, his lawyerly image had been shredded. At the tender age of 35, his career appeared over.
But he had an ace card to play that no one saw coming.
At the pinnacle of scandal heat in1973, when it looked as if he were as doomed as dozens of other Richard Nixon associates, Mr. Dean adroitly switched sides.
By testifying for the prosecution, he instantly re-invented himself.
He permanently redeemed his reputation, softened his prison sentence to a scant 120 days, and he began a rich new, incredibly energized, career on the opposite side, the Democratic side, of the political wall.
He synthesized this fascinating process for the Democratic Club, tidily puffing away the dust that many allow to blot out memories fraught with outsized emotions.
