History is a set of lies agreed upon. History has decided that John Dean is the hero of Watergate: a reluctant and courageous man sucked into the scandal who became a whistleblower. Now comes further proof that Dean was in fact a primary architect of the Watergate cover-up who saved himself by deflecting guilt to others.
Peter Klingerman, a historian, has submitted a paper to the American Historical which argues that Stanley I. Kutler, the historian who prepared the Watergate transcripts, deliberately edited the tapes in ways that concealed Dean’s real role and duplicity.
Kutler, a self-important little man, thinks we should be impressed with his status as “Historian” and his academic credentials. We aren’t. Kutler, a registered Democrat, is a historian with a Nixon-hating bias. His rewriting of history is willful and dishonest.
Kutler’s subtle white-wash of Dean’s real role is neither inadvertent nor an honest mistake. He even transposes the chronology of meetings and phone calls between Nixon and Dean to create a false impression about what Nixon knew and when he knew it.
While Mr. Dean himself tries to label anyone who disagrees with his version of events as a “fringe element,” both Watergate Prosecutors and the Senate Watergate Committee were aware of discrepancies between Dean’s testimony and the facts as established by numerous other witnesses. For example, Dean told prosecutors that Attorney General John Mitchell had recruited California lawyer Herb Kalmbach to raise hush money for the Watergate burglars when it was Dean himself who recruited Kalmbach without Mitchell’s knowledge.
Just to be clear, Dean obstructed justice, destroyed evidence, falsely implicated Attorney General John Mitchell, and lied to both prosecutors and the Senate Committee in the Watergate affair.
Some hero.
The New York Times, certainly not a pro-Nixon news organization, had an excellent and balanced page one article regarding Kutler’s treachery.