Sisters in Scandal

By Paul Gray

"MO": A WOMAN'S VIEW OF WATERGATE by MAUREEN DEAN with HAYS GOREY 286 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

THE WOMEN OF WATERGATE by MADELEINE EDMONDSON and ALDENDUER COHEN 228 pages. Stein & Day. $8.95.

The scatterbrained, starry-eyed blonde comes to Washington with her sugar daddy and dimly perceives that the place is a fen of corruption. She may be dumb in the wiles of this world, but she is not a crook. Ultimately, her innate goodness and the love of an idealistic young man allow her to kick the dust of all those capital shenanigans from her heels. Judy Holliday could have played this part perfectly. In fact, in Born Yesterday, she did.

Yet Maureen Dean, the china doll of the televised Watergate hearings, claims that this is her life--with a couple of small complications. For one thing, she was dragged into and out of that mess by the same man: Presidential Counsel John Dean. For another, Mo makes it perfectly clear that she was not born yesterday. At 25, the ex-stewardess and daughter of a onetime Ziegfeld chorine had been married twice and was a frequent nightclub companion of Hollywood swingers. As she tells it, when one engagement soured, Mo cannily retained a lawyer and had the ring appraised: "It was an $18,000 ring, insured for $25,000, that I sold for $12,000, of which $4,000 went to the attorney."

Shrewd Cookie. This is high--if unintentional--comedy, and so is Mo's account of her newlywed days, with her methodical husband simultaneously tending her and the unraveling Watergate coverup. Dean does not tell her why he is called back to Washington during two attempts at a honeymoon, and Mo does not ask: "It was just one of the many elements of his work for the President, and neither of us wanted to talk all night about what he had been doing all day." Besides, the role of dutiful wife requires pride in her young take-charger: "I could sense," she burbles, "that John had become much more important to the President and others in the White House."

Such soaring naivete from so shrewd a cookie is hard to buy. Mo's defense of her husband as the contrite hero who saved the Republic singlehanded is no easier to purchase. Yet with the help of TIME Washington Correspondent Hays Gorey, Mo has fashioned something more than a palpitating apologia. She was, after all, an accidental witness to some high crimes and misdemeanors, and her views of the pressure-cooked conformity of the Nixon White House are mordant and telling. After a circumspect New Year's Eve party with two other uptight Administration couples, Mo notes: "As far as I could tell, no one had taken offense at anything anyone else had done or said, so the evening had to be chalked up as a roaring success."

She wonders what she and other Administration wives could--or would --have done if they had known what their husbands were up to. She thinks that "at least some of them (myself included) would have said 'Get out of it. It's wrong.' " It is folly to suppose that the Nixon men would then have slapped their foreheads and said, "Gee, we never thought of that. Hey, fellows, what we're doing is wrong." It is sad that so few of the wives got the chance to try.

Macho Politics. Mo also rates a chapter in The Women of Watergate, but then so does every other female however remotely connected to the scandal. This paste-up of old clippings serves principally as a reminder that Watergate created not just victimized wives but several heroines: Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham, Prosecutor Jill Wine Volner, Representatives Barbara Jordan and Elizabeth Holtzman. Aside from that, the book sags with speculation ("Yet there is a great deal that [Pat Ellsberg] does not say, but it is impossible to believe she has not felt") and shameless padding ("Jill Volner certainly did not grow up in a way that would lead any rational observer to suspect that she would ever break new ground or occupy a particularly unusual position"). Such blathering cannot hide a central fact: from Abplanalp to Ziegler, the actors and extras in the Watergate drama were disproportionately male. Mo Dean grasps this and, while prattling on like an Anita Loos character, manages to make a surprisingly liberated case against the delusions of macho politics.

Paul Gray

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