Expedient Truths

By Ed Magnuson

BLIND AMBITION by JOHN DEAN 415 pages. Simon & Shuster. $11.95

Mean John Dean. Icy John Dean.Nerveless John Dean, sending former colleagues off to jail, pushing a President toward resignation, all in a lifeless, imperturbable monotone. The image from the Watergate TV hearings and cover-up trials has already etched itself into history. The inner reality, it now appears, was very different. The conspirator who turned against his fellow criminals trembled at times at the thought of his lonely assault upon Richard Nixon, John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman. He climbed into his Scotch bottle in search of soothing stupor often enough to worry about becoming an alcoholic. He fretted over looking "too mousy" on television. Just before the hearings, he even considered fleeing the country.

Blind Ambition is Dean's long-awaited accounting of the part he played in America's worst and most public political scandal. Sparsely told and crammed with intriguing dialogue, it presents a surprisingly unflattering self-portrait. Dean berates himself as "a squealer" and describes himself as too "naive and guppy-like" to object to the criminal activities in Richard Nixon's White House--at least until it was too late.

Heartless World. "My memory operates something like a movie projector when I hit the right switch," Dean writes. With the help of that memory, plus reinforcement from the presidential tapes that proved his charges, Dean chronicles his three years as the President's counsel, conspiring to contain Watergate, his eventual rebellion, revealing the collective White House guilt, and his imprisonment. Cutting through what is likely to be a reader's confused memories, he reveals precisely what he was thinking--and what he assumed Nixon and others meant--as they plotted to contain the scandal. The book also probes the often heartless world of high-powered lawyers and prosecutors bargaining over the fates of clients and defendants. (When Prosecution Witness Herbert Kalmbach wept on the stand in the cover-up trial, Special Prosecutor James Neal was sympathetic but also ecstatic: "He's had it tough. But by God, he's a hell of a witness!")

Disarmingly, but distressingly, Dean concedes that calculating ambition was the sole standard he normally applied as he scrambled for power and influence in the White House. He admits that fear of losing status at the heady heights pushed him easily into criminality. Even when he tells about taking his stand against the President, Dean makes no lofty claim that either personal virtue or an overriding sense of justice motivated his action. Only when he saw, far earlier than most, that the cover-up would not work, either for the President or for himself, did he finally turn against the men who had made him.

Dean survived, despite the opposition of powerful foes and his own vacillations, mainly because he had no false story to protect and he had an amazing ability to recall the truth. Yet there were times during the testimony when a date would slip out of focus and "the whole edifice would crumble." There were times when he wanted to forget everything. Once he lashed out at the prosecutors, telling his lawyer: "Don't those bastards know I'm going to jail? I can't keep churning this Watergate crap out. I'm tired of turning my head on and off like a light bulb." Listening to the tapes soothed him. "I could see the meetings in my mind; my senses synchronized, I floated back through time."

In addition to a highly readable retelling of Watergate from the inside, the book offers some new and some clarifying information:

-- Dean reiterates what he said in court: former Attorney General John Mitchell admitted to him that he had approved the wiretapping operation at Democratic National Headquarters. Mitchell has repeatedly denied this. According to Dean, Mitchell's admission came after he informed the former Attorney General that he was going to tell his own full story to the Watergate prosecutors. "He had just trusted me with his biggest secret," Dean recalls. "Deep down, I knew Mitchell had played his best card. He was counting on my feeling for him, laying himself in my hands. Now I felt the razor edge between the squealer and the perjurer. I had never felt more squalid."

-- Dean once raised with Mitchell the possibility of seeking sanctuary in some other country. " Tell me where you were thinking of going, maybe I'd like to join you,' he said with a smile, and as we exchanged quick glances it occurred to me that he was, perhaps, not dismissing the idea." Dean said wherever he went, he wanted to take his wife "Mo" along. "I'm not so sure I'd take Martha with me," Mitchell replied.

Dean writes crisply and clearly, turns some good phrases ("Thompson had me on a tightrope and he seemed to know how to shake the wire") and some bad ones ("The bottom of my stomach fell out, as it does when I look down from the top of a skyscraper").

Phony Report. "I was ashamed to be who I was," Dean admits finally. Yet he tells nothing at all about the forces that formed him--at home, at Staunton Military Academy, in college. The book will disappoint anyone who wants to learn how Dean became the kind of man who would do almost anything to get placed on the "A-limousine list" in the White House, and gleefully watched workmen redoing his new, enlarged office just "for the sake of redecorating."

After all the shocks of Watergate, it still comes as a surprise to learn that Dean was on the verge of writing the famous phony report ordered by Nixon in which the young counsel would show that no one at the White House was guilty of cover-up crimes. Dean's wife, who suffered a breakdown during the ordeal, objected. As Dean described the report he was to write, Mo had asked: "That's not true, though, is it" "No, it's not." "Then, John, you shouldn't write that report. That's not very smart." Recalls Dean, in two incriminating sentences: "She was right, but her innocence annoyed me. She seemed so far removed from all the shadings of lies that make up political life. " Ed Magnuson

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.