The full Dean interview
CityBeat: I’m going to start with one of those horrible “How does it feel” questions. I gotta know what it must be like to be a central figure in one of the most important turning points in this country’s political history—reflecting back 34 years later.
John Dean: I don’t even think about it [laughs], to be very candid. What amazes me when I write about it from time to time is that people like Bush and Cheney didn’t learn from the mistakes we made. I thought we wrote the book on what not to do. They thought that was the preface and have written a whole new book on what you shouldn’t do.
What are the similarities that you see?
Well, I’ve written three books on the subject, so I can’t give you a good sound bite on it. Just their remarkable abuses of presidential powers are staggering—everything from their being the most secretive presidency we’ve ever had to torture, which Richard Nixon in his darkest day I can’t [see] embracing as a policy for this country.
Not only does that say something about the Bush administration, but I would think it says something about the public, in that we have allowed it to happen.
Well, what it says most to me is about the change in the Republican Party and the core of the party, who I call authoritarian conservatives. I wrote a book about it called Conservatives without Conscience, and this is the core of the party today. They truly are without conscience. They blindly follow the leaders. They do what they’re told. They don’t question it. Everything is black and white, and whatever the leaders say it should be, the followers comply with unquestioned enthusiasm, and it’s a pretty spooky group.
But political leaders are nothing without the approval of at least a certain portion of their constituents. I just wonder what the public’s role in this is.
Well, it only took the Republican base twice to keep George Bush in there. They are still showing strong support for the kind of ugly incivility that McCain has made a hallmark of his campaign without rejecting it, and that’s about 43 percent of the population right now that is supporting McCain, so there’s a large group out there that has a high tolerance for this kind of behavior.
Left to our own devices, the public, I think, would, without giving it a whole lot of thought, at certain times lean toward a more authoritarian rule. I really worry about the tyranny of the masses.
The social scientists tell me [that] about 23 percent of the American public are hardcore authoritarian followers, and given circumstances like a terrorist attack, a crashing financial system—the fear of that drives many more into those ranks, but the hard core is about 23 percent.
A draft of a press release for the panel discussion you’ll be part of in San Diego says the left, right and center will be represented. Which one are you?
I would assume I’m the center.
Can you tell me what you’ll be talking about?
I would assume that it would be the material that I’ve been writing about, about how Republicans have lost their common sense. I’m neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I’m really not a partisan anymore, but really just try to call it as somebody who has remained well plugged-in in Washington and follows these things pretty closely, sees it and describes it for what it is without trying to shade or spin it.
What are you seeing as you watch the presidential campaign, as you listen to Barack Obama and John McCain?
Whoever is elected has got a disaster they’re facing in this country, both with two wars and a weak and troubled economy with huge deficits that handicap tremendously how it can be dealt with. Unfortunately, as I’ve intimated in the three books I’ve written, I don’t think the Republican Party, with their core constituency being so anti-government, is in a position to govern, and they can’t correct the problems. John McCain and his followers are philosophically incapable of really doing the regulation necessary to bring the markets back in line. Their neoconservative foreign policy is just asking for more trouble, and I’m one who happens to believe that it’s going to take eight, if not 16, years to clean up the mess that Bush and Cheney are leaving behind.
Relate that to civil liberties. I’m wondering about the specific damage that’s been done and how we might clean that part of it up.
Well, I think we all know that Bush and Cheney have taken the most aggressive tack in American history, as far as individual privacy and security as to anyone’s personal rights—everything from claiming at one point you can name anybody, even a citizen, an enemy combatant and detain them indefinitely without charge, to vacuuming through databases to find anything anybody wants about anyone. It’s really unparalleled and ignoring the law. There have been likely war crimes, not to mention there has been some retroactive correction by Congress to give some of these powers to the presidency, but still they were just blatantly breaking the law. I don’t know if it’s a matter of law enforcement for those who are leaving, although Obama has said that he would look at these things if he were elected. John McCain obviously would not. I think it’s more an attitude that you can indeed conduct a very successful war on terror without obliterating constitutional rights, without eviscerating the bill of rights.
You said you would have thought that we would have learned more from the Nixon administration. What should we have learned?
I think we should have learned, first of all, that people don’t believe we need an imperial presidency in the modern era. The Nixon presidency was pretty roundly rejected by the public. We then watched first Reagan and then Bush 2 slowly rebuild not just the imperial presidency but to do it with steroids and stilts to make this current monster that’s way beyond anything that is necessary for effective governing. Concepts like the unitary executive theory—which… four of the nine [Supreme Court] justices believe is actually a viable theory for executive power—would really create a constitutional dictatorship, if you analyze it. And if McCain is elected, he’s already blown the dog whistle for the base to let them know that they’ll get another Roberts or Alito for any other further appointments—there’s likely to be two, if not three appointments for the next president—and that would so dramatically change the nature of the law of this land through the court, in a way that neither of the political branches could ever risk doing, by creating this unitary executive.
What about foreign policy and the things we didn’t learn from the Vietnam War, considering what’s going on in Iraq right now?
Nixon’s foreign policy, by today’s standards, is radically different. He opposed the neoconservative movement. They don’t like Nixon to this day. They belittle him and say that détente and the China initiative were mistakes. … Nixon, has long been looked on as rather successful with his foreign policy—indeed, he’s the last liberal president, as far as his domestic policy. I mean, creating agencies like EPA and having price controls—this is very progressive stuff. In fact, I had a member of the Green Party come up to me—an official in the party—and say, “Listen, we’d run Richard Nixon as a Green today, given today’s standards.” Nixon’s foreign policy, though, is just 180 degrees away from the neoconservative policies.
I imagine if Nixon were running against McCain today, McCain would probably have something to say about sitting at the table across from the enemy without preconditions.
McCain is continuing the Bush-Cheney approach: We don’t talk to our enemies. Nixon had no problem talking with his enemies and, in fact, as you know, had secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese when they were fighting the war—in Paris.
One last question: I read that there’s an upcoming movie, and Brad Pitt’s going to play you. What do you think of that?
It is a myth. It’s an Internet myth. When I tried to run it down, we could find no such film in the works.
I saw that when I was scanning your Wikipedia page.
It’s about as accurate as the Wikipedia page.
You mean your Wikipedia page?
It constantly changes, and it’s never very accurate. I’ve never tried to change it because I’m just kind of curious to see if Wikipedia works, and it doesn’t. [Laughs.]
John Dean: I don’t even think about it [laughs], to be very candid. What amazes me when I write about it from time to time is that people like Bush and Cheney didn’t learn from the mistakes we made. I thought we wrote the book on what not to do. They thought that was the preface and have written a whole new book on what you shouldn’t do.
What are the similarities that you see?
Well, I’ve written three books on the subject, so I can’t give you a good sound bite on it. Just their remarkable abuses of presidential powers are staggering—everything from their being the most secretive presidency we’ve ever had to torture, which Richard Nixon in his darkest day I can’t [see] embracing as a policy for this country.
Not only does that say something about the Bush administration, but I would think it says something about the public, in that we have allowed it to happen.
Well, what it says most to me is about the change in the Republican Party and the core of the party, who I call authoritarian conservatives. I wrote a book about it called Conservatives without Conscience, and this is the core of the party today. They truly are without conscience. They blindly follow the leaders. They do what they’re told. They don’t question it. Everything is black and white, and whatever the leaders say it should be, the followers comply with unquestioned enthusiasm, and it’s a pretty spooky group.
But political leaders are nothing without the approval of at least a certain portion of their constituents. I just wonder what the public’s role in this is.
Well, it only took the Republican base twice to keep George Bush in there. They are still showing strong support for the kind of ugly incivility that McCain has made a hallmark of his campaign without rejecting it, and that’s about 43 percent of the population right now that is supporting McCain, so there’s a large group out there that has a high tolerance for this kind of behavior.
Left to our own devices, the public, I think, would, without giving it a whole lot of thought, at certain times lean toward a more authoritarian rule. I really worry about the tyranny of the masses.
The social scientists tell me [that] about 23 percent of the American public are hardcore authoritarian followers, and given circumstances like a terrorist attack, a crashing financial system—the fear of that drives many more into those ranks, but the hard core is about 23 percent.
A draft of a press release for the panel discussion you’ll be part of in San Diego says the left, right and center will be represented. Which one are you?
I would assume I’m the center.
Can you tell me what you’ll be talking about?
I would assume that it would be the material that I’ve been writing about, about how Republicans have lost their common sense. I’m neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I’m really not a partisan anymore, but really just try to call it as somebody who has remained well plugged-in in Washington and follows these things pretty closely, sees it and describes it for what it is without trying to shade or spin it.
What are you seeing as you watch the presidential campaign, as you listen to Barack Obama and John McCain?
Whoever is elected has got a disaster they’re facing in this country, both with two wars and a weak and troubled economy with huge deficits that handicap tremendously how it can be dealt with. Unfortunately, as I’ve intimated in the three books I’ve written, I don’t think the Republican Party, with their core constituency being so anti-government, is in a position to govern, and they can’t correct the problems. John McCain and his followers are philosophically incapable of really doing the regulation necessary to bring the markets back in line. Their neoconservative foreign policy is just asking for more trouble, and I’m one who happens to believe that it’s going to take eight, if not 16, years to clean up the mess that Bush and Cheney are leaving behind.
Relate that to civil liberties. I’m wondering about the specific damage that’s been done and how we might clean that part of it up.
Well, I think we all know that Bush and Cheney have taken the most aggressive tack in American history, as far as individual privacy and security as to anyone’s personal rights—everything from claiming at one point you can name anybody, even a citizen, an enemy combatant and detain them indefinitely without charge, to vacuuming through databases to find anything anybody wants about anyone. It’s really unparalleled and ignoring the law. There have been likely war crimes, not to mention there has been some retroactive correction by Congress to give some of these powers to the presidency, but still they were just blatantly breaking the law. I don’t know if it’s a matter of law enforcement for those who are leaving, although Obama has said that he would look at these things if he were elected. John McCain obviously would not. I think it’s more an attitude that you can indeed conduct a very successful war on terror without obliterating constitutional rights, without eviscerating the bill of rights.
You said you would have thought that we would have learned more from the Nixon administration. What should we have learned?
I think we should have learned, first of all, that people don’t believe we need an imperial presidency in the modern era. The Nixon presidency was pretty roundly rejected by the public. We then watched first Reagan and then Bush 2 slowly rebuild not just the imperial presidency but to do it with steroids and stilts to make this current monster that’s way beyond anything that is necessary for effective governing. Concepts like the unitary executive theory—which… four of the nine [Supreme Court] justices believe is actually a viable theory for executive power—would really create a constitutional dictatorship, if you analyze it. And if McCain is elected, he’s already blown the dog whistle for the base to let them know that they’ll get another Roberts or Alito for any other further appointments—there’s likely to be two, if not three appointments for the next president—and that would so dramatically change the nature of the law of this land through the court, in a way that neither of the political branches could ever risk doing, by creating this unitary executive.
What about foreign policy and the things we didn’t learn from the Vietnam War, considering what’s going on in Iraq right now?
Nixon’s foreign policy, by today’s standards, is radically different. He opposed the neoconservative movement. They don’t like Nixon to this day. They belittle him and say that détente and the China initiative were mistakes. … Nixon, has long been looked on as rather successful with his foreign policy—indeed, he’s the last liberal president, as far as his domestic policy. I mean, creating agencies like EPA and having price controls—this is very progressive stuff. In fact, I had a member of the Green Party come up to me—an official in the party—and say, “Listen, we’d run Richard Nixon as a Green today, given today’s standards.” Nixon’s foreign policy, though, is just 180 degrees away from the neoconservative policies.
I imagine if Nixon were running against McCain today, McCain would probably have something to say about sitting at the table across from the enemy without preconditions.
McCain is continuing the Bush-Cheney approach: We don’t talk to our enemies. Nixon had no problem talking with his enemies and, in fact, as you know, had secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese when they were fighting the war—in Paris.
One last question: I read that there’s an upcoming movie, and Brad Pitt’s going to play you. What do you think of that?
It is a myth. It’s an Internet myth. When I tried to run it down, we could find no such film in the works.
I saw that when I was scanning your Wikipedia page.
It’s about as accurate as the Wikipedia page.
You mean your Wikipedia page?
It constantly changes, and it’s never very accurate. I’ve never tried to change it because I’m just kind of curious to see if Wikipedia works, and it doesn’t. [Laughs.]
