E-mail a friendJohn Dean
airdate October 8, 2007
Many remember former presidential counsel John Dean as a central figure in the Watergate scandal and the chief whistleblower that helped bring down the Nixon presidency. A lecturer and writer, he's chronicled his White House years in several best sellers. Dean is an outspoken critic of the current Bush administration and has taken it to task in his books, Conservatives Without Conscience, Worse Than Watergate and, his latest, Broken Government. He's also written a screenplay, Pentagon Papers.
John Dean
Tavis: Pleased to welcome John Dean back to this program. The former White House counsel under Richard Nixon is out with a new book this fall called "Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches." His previous book, "Conservatives Without Conscience," is now out in paperback. John Dean, nice to have you back on the program.
John Dean: Always a pleasure.
Tavis: Let me go back to that. I know we talked about it before, but for those who didn't get a chance to read the last book, "Conservatives Without Conscience," is it fair to say that, that they don't have - they may be wrong?
Dean: Well, not all. What I found is that the core of the book explains about authoritarianism. Now, not all conservatives are authoritarians, but all authoritarians who score high on authoritarianism are conservative. And I found that indeed, many of them are without conscience, literally. They are amoral, they are Machiavellian, they are anti-democratic, and they're scary.
Tavis: Those descriptions notwithstanding, what does that result in vis-à-vis public policy? When there are conservatives without conscience who are in Washington, those descriptions result in what kind of public policy?
Dean: Lovely transition question to this book. This is what this book explains, what they've done to the legislative branch when they were in control, what they've done to the executive branch while they're in control, and what the influence they've had on really the non-political branch, making it political, the judiciary.
Tavis: Okay, we'll talk about those three branches in just a moment. Before I go forward, since it's in the news as we speak today, we've all been reading about these memos out of the Department of Justice, 2005, that suggest that we were, in fact, do, in fact, condone torture of certain kinds, at least. The memos say we do; President Bush has said we don't. What does John Dean say?
Dean: Yeah, I say they're playing a definition game at this point. Clearly, they have somehow constructed and defined it in a way that they feel comfortable. They think that somehow, that legitimately they can sell this. I actually did a whole appendix in this book just to make a point of the fact their intellectual dishonestly is startling.
So when you do that sort of thing and you play those kinds of games, and we're seeing it play out right now with these secret memos - I haven't seen the secret memos; the earlier memos, Tavis, they withdrew. They got a new set in there, and I can't imagine an argument they can base it on that's legitimate. And it's a criminal offense in the United States.
Tavis: Criminal offense notwithstanding, what's your sense of how this will play? You've not seen the memos, I've not seen them, for that matter, the Democrats in Congress are waiting to see them.
Dean: They can't.
Tavis: The White House hasn't turned them over. That said, what's your sense of how this story will play with the American people? And I ask that against the backdrop of the fact that we don't, on the one hand, want to say - nobody wants to be associated with torture; hence President Bush trying to distance himself from it.
On the other hand, nobody wants to be unsafe in a world were terrorists are running around blowing up World Trade Centers. So how do you think this story will play? Torture in the American discourse.
Dean: Well, we know. The experts - people who are familiar with torture and have tried it, studied it in the past - find it doesn't work. It isn't a successful way to get information, and we need hard information to understand and deal with terrorism. So it's a counterproductive technique, it's giving us really a problem around the world, it's shaming the country.
And if they weren't doing it, why are they still asking Congress to give them an exemption under the federal criminal laws so they can't be prosecuted for torturing people? There's something going on here. You don't say, "I'm not torturing, but I want to change the criminal law just so I won't be prosecuted under it."
Tavis: One last question on that before I go to the book. Because you know the ways of Washington extremely well at the highest levels, particularly where crises are concerned, what's your sense of whether or not we'll ever see the bottom of this? Bush is on his way out, essentially, and -
Dean: The clock is ticking.
Tavis: The clock is ticking, so.
Dean: Well, I think what they're going to try to do is just try to stall it. Now John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee, he came to Congress when I was still the chief minority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee. He's mild-mannered, he's soft-spoken, but he's tough as nails. He'll try to push this before they leave to get something.
Pat Leahy, I went to law school with. He's the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Again, mild manner, soft-spoken, but tough as nails. These are guys that are not going to let them get away easily, and they're going to push this. Leahy is saying, "I'm not going to confirm the next attorney general unless I get some of the information I want." I wish they would add this to the list of things they want to see before they confirm the next attorney general.
Tavis: The Nixon administration. We all know, of course, history tell us - not a good chapter in the book of Republican tenures at the White House.
Dean: We wrote the book on what not to do, which is amazing they would start with it - that is a new chapter for what they want to do.
Tavis: And see, I was trying to be kind here. (Laughter) I was stumbling over my own words, trying not to be too unkind, and you came out with the truth. I should have just said what you said. So you guys wrote the book on what not to do. I'm glad you said that, because I wanted to ask how, then, you compare this administration - Nixon, of course, got impeached; Bush - there's been talk about that, it ain't going nowhere. But how do you compare these two administrations - Republican administrations?
Dean: Well, I wrote a book called "Worse Than Watergate" and I didn't do that easily, and I might have had a mistitle. It might be "Much Worse Than Watergate." During the so-called Nixon abuses of power, nobody died from those Watergate abuses. The so-called - the abuses of power under Nixon, nobody was tortured. Millions of Americans weren't having their conversations subject to electronic surveillance.
We're playing in a different league now, beyond even Richard Nixon's (laugh) most distant fantasy of how you might want to have an imperial president operate. So it's a very different type of world and presidency.
Tavis: You think the American public gets that?
Dean: No, they don't. They don't, and that's one of the frightening things. That's why I keep putting books out like this. It's surprising to me the Democrats give them the pass they do, they don't raise these issues. They're letting them get away with these things. And that's one of the reasons I plan to stay out and hammer this issue between now and next November, because people have got to get it. They're abusing the system, they're misusing the processes, and they're getting away with it because they're not being called on it.
Tavis: Well, let's get to hammering, then. "Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches," again, the full title of the book. Let's start with the legislative branch. What have they done to destroy, as you would put it, the legislative branch?
Dean: Well, when they were in control, they simply eliminated all the Democrats from the deliberative process. They squeezed them out in every way; they used their leadership positions and their power positions to raise money for the Republican coffers. They showed it wasn't just an accident; it was a plan to try to build a permanent Republican majority.
It didn't work. Fortunately, I can report there is good news there. Nancy Pelosi is starting to repair the House. It wasn't as bad in the Senate, and she's started to bring civility back, deliberation is coming back. But the Republicans who won the Congress through obstructionism are doing the exact same thing. So people say, "Hell, these people aren't doing any better than when the Republicans were running it," and they're seeing the numbers go down.
They don't understand that this is a successful Republican tactic that is working, and it's making everybody look bad.
Tavis: Executive branch. How have they destroyed the executive branch?
Dean: Well, each of these issues, I didn't try to provide just every example I could find of what was going wrong. I tried to look at basic constitutional problems. With the executive branch, they've just ignored the Constitution. They've ignored the separation of powers and the checks and balances, and they've learned how to manipulate and game the system in a way that's exactly the opposite of what our founders really had designed for us. And that's very troublesome.
Tavis: How did they - I don't mean to be naïve in asking this question, but how do they get away with that? It's one thing to play games, to manipulate the rules in the legislative branch, because those rules are very arcane, very complex. In the White House, when there are questions about your violating the Constitution, to your point, how does any administration get away with that consistently?
Dean: Well, Tavis, one of the reasons I wrote this book is I raised, for example, the secrecy, which is a kind of a procedural matter in Washington that was so excessive during the first term of the Bush administration I was sure that a Democrat, whoever he or she might be in 2004, would raise the issue. They didn't.
In fact, "The New York Times," the week before everyone went to the poll in 2004, said, "Hey, Mr. Kerry, didn't you notice the secrecy in Washington? How come you haven't said anything?" After he lost, I called the Kerry campaign and they said, "Well, we didn't raise that issue because it's kind of a wimpy thing. We didn't want to complain. We didn't want to get people thinking we were sissies."
And it was just all the wrong reasons. Their consultants were telling them take these process issues and forget them. I found empirical evidence, which I explain in the book, that shows people care a whole lot about process and the way the system works. They understand this better than they do policy.
Tavis: The judicial branch, what have they done there?
Dean: Well, that actually goes back to my presidency, where I watched the whole process change where they politicized a branch that is supposed to be non-political. Starts with Nixon giving chips in his Southern strategy to say he'll put strict constructionists on the court to please the South. He fails, but he gets the political credit for it.
And this starts a whole new process with the Republican presidents abusing their office to pay off constituencies. We see it with every Republican president. Now every president can appoint anybody he wants. Not many - only Republicans are using it to take care of a certain constituency. As a result, you have a court now that has four what I call radical fundamentalist conservatives who are unlike traditional conservatives, and they are there to please the religious right and the neoconservatives - a very small part even of the Republican Party.
One more seat and that court will change - will be writing laws that I see 75 percent of the American people would reject.
Tavis: They say power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Why, then, do the Republicans have - why is broken government their issue? Why is it a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republicans and not Democrats?
Dean: Well, it should be an issue the Democrats raise. As I say, they walked away from it, and they have. That's one of the reasons I wrote the book, because it's too important to ignore that the Republicans have mastered how to manipulate the system. Nobody's calling them on it. Nobody's telling the world -
Tavis: Now (unintelligible) my question is why are Republicans doing that and not Democrats? There are people watching right now who I think are having a hard time these days trying to decipher who's better, who's worse where a broken government is concerned, because every day you see examples of Democrats and Republicans - Republicans of late coming up losing too many times in the media. But you got examples of Democrats and Republicans that underscore that government is broken. Why the Republicans?
Dean: Why the Republicans - why have they broken it?
Tavis: Yes.
Dean: Because they have an internal philosophy. The conservative belief is that government is the problem, not the solution. They have an anti-government attitude. They'd like the system broken. They want to see it - they don't see the system as serving all of Americans; only Republicans. They use their power for themselves, and that's a huge difference between the two parties right now.
The Democrats have a long tradition - and I don't speak as a Republican or a Democrat; I'm a long-time Independent now. I don't carry water for anybody; I try to be an honest information broker. I cite from both the right and the left. But I can tell you the Democrats are much more concerned about the public interest than the Republicans who are concerned about the Republican interest.
Tavis: Anybody in the Republican field right now that you think has a different philosophy than what you talk about in the book here?
Dean: Ron Paul probably is the one who has the most different -
Tavis: The guy who doesn't have a chance of winning.
Dean: The guy who doesn't (laughter) have a chance. The one who frightens me the most is Rudy Giuliani.
Tavis: Yeah, the guy who, well, may win.
Dean: May win. (Laughter)
Tavis: Go figure. Wow. The new book from John Dean, "Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches." John Dean, as always, good to see you.
Dean: Thanks.
Tavis: Glad to have you here.
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