Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Watergate: The Criminal Law and Ethics  John Dean  10/4/13 UP931  cc >> Good afternoon. My name is Margaret Raymond, and I'm the dean of the Law School here at the University of Wisconsin. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to what by my count is the 20th Kastenmeier Lecture. Thank you so much for joining us today. No such event goes forward without a lot of planning. So my sincere thanks to our event staff for all their work in putting together this very exciting event in this very beautiful new space. This lecture is supported by the fund established to honor Robert W Kastenmeier, an outstanding graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, who served with great distinction in the United States Congress from 1958 until 1990. We are very honored that Representative Kastenmeier and his wife Dorothy are here with us this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming them and expressing our appreciation for Bob. [APPLAUSE]  The lecture fund was created to recognize Bob's contributions by fostering legal scholarship and conversation in fields which were significant to his career as a legislator. 

And to do that, we have a dedicated planning committee which Bob participates which each year identifies a speaker whose work is timely, relevant, and exciting. My thanks to the planning committee for all their efforts and for the program they've put together for us today. During his tenure in congress, Representative Kastenmeier made special contributions to the improvement of the judiciary and to the field of intellectual property law. He also drafted the rules for the House Committee on the Judiciary that were used for the impeachment of Richard M Nixon, which makes today's speaker particularly pertinent. But it is not my job to introduce the speaker. Instead, my job today is to introduce the introducer of the speaker. [LAUGHTER] And that's Frank Tuerkheimer, professor emeritus of law here at the University of Wisconsin. Professor Tuerkheimer has had extensive experience as both a law professor and a law practitioner. His broad legal practice experience ranges from serving as the US attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin to representing an inmate on death row to bringing misconduct cases against judges and environmental claims for the Sierra Club. For purposes of today's events, the most relevant item on his resume is his work on the Watergate prosecution staff. 

As I travel the country, I hear from many graduates that Professor Tuerkheimer inspired them as students and motivated them as lawyers. And I think we have another generation of those students in the room today. Frank has been teaching a special one credit course on the Watergate era which culminates in today's lecture and which included not only about 20 students but about 40 of our graduates. So, welcome to his students, to the alumni who are joining us here today, friends, honored guests, and welcome to Frank Tuerkheimer who will introduce our speaker. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you. Thank you, Dean Raymond, Bob Kastenmeier, ladies and gentlemen. We have the Saturday Night Massacre, the 40th anniversary of the Saturday Night Massacre which triggered the invitation to John Dean to present at this Kastenmeier Lecture. So we have three things, how do they come together? Briefly. Sometime in late June of 1973, John testified before the Urban Committee, a committee specially empowered to look into presidential or campaign activity, specifically the Watergate break-in and the cover-up. He testified under oath 246 pages of fact, under oath, committed to that in June of 1973. 

That testimony implicated the President and two high level employees in the White House as well as a former Attorney General in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. They all denied it, the President denied it, and so there was an issue of fact. Who's telling the truth? John intimated in his testimony that he thought there might be a taping system in the White House, and about a month later on, that taping system was disclosed and the country which had been electrified by these hearings was satisfied. Now we can get to the truth. It's either John Dean or everybody else. Well, it wasn't that simple. The special prosecutor who had been appointed subpoenaed nine of those tapes. The White House moved to suppress the subpoena, lost before the trial court, appealed to the District Court of Columbia, lost the appeal there, and then you would think they had two choices. Number one, either comply with the subpoena or go to the Supreme Court. President Nixon chose neither. 

He chose, rather, to fire the special prosecutor. However, he didn't appoint him. It was the Attorney General who appointed him. And when Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, appointed the special prosecutor, he promised the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would not remove him unless he engaged in extraordinary improprieties in an effort to ensure the independence of the special prosecutor. When Elliot Richardson was asked to fire the special prosecutor, he refused and he resigned. His deputy, who had also made a similar promise to the Senate Judiciary Committee, was then asked to fire the special prosecutor. He didn't. So he was fired. That made the Solicitor General, Robert Bork, the acting Attorney General, and Bork fired Archibald Cox. That is what is known as the Saturday Night Massacre. 

Now, how does that get us to Bob Kastenmeier? Prior to the Saturday Night Massacre, the impeachment of the President was not on the national agenda. After the Saturday Night Massacre, it was. And Bob, of course, was sitting on a House Judiciary Committee and, in the subsequent period, held hearings and developed the facts with respect to the impeachment of the President. Bob, as well as the other democrats on the committee, wanted to be sure that this was a bipartisan effort, and in this regard they were successful. John Dean testified before the committee, and, my guess was confirmed a few minutes ago, this is the first time they have been in the same room since that event. The committee voted unanimously, ultimately, to impeachment the President, and, as we all know, he subsequently resigned. But that's not the end of the story as far as John Dean is concerned. There is still a trial to be held, and later in the fall of 1974, the former Attorney General, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the two White House officials, were on trial with two others for conspiracy to obstruct justice. John testified. Now here's what I want you to consider. 

He is testifying about the same things that he committed himself to under oath a year and a half earlier, only now there's a tape recording system that deals with exactly what he said. There are tape recordings that deal with presidential conversations that he testified to, and there are tape recordings of other conversations that had to have taken place if what he said was the truth. These tape recordings are now available, and under accepted criminal practice, the special prosecutor, of course, has to turn them over to defense counsel so that they can cross-examine the witnesses, including John Dean, and these defense counsel were among the best in the country. I think specifically Huntley, the Attorney General's lawyer, was one of the best in the country. And now they have this to cross-examine John Dean with. Dean Wigmore, the eminent evidence guru, once said that cross-examination is the greatest engine ever invented for the discovery of the truth. Well, they didn't lay a finger on him. And I submit to you that no witness has ever had his testimony subjected to greater scrutiny under such conditions and emerged totally unscathed. And that is the person now you're going to be hearing from in the next three seconds. I introduce John Dean. 

[APPLAUSE]  >> Is my microphone on picking me up now? Yep. Small microphones do pick me up I learned the hard way. [LAUGHTER] I was just focusing in these glasses to so I can follow my notes. I just recently changed glasses, and a friend of mine told me, you know, John, no one's going to recognize you in these glasses you're wearing now. And true story, the first weekend I went out to LAX to go to an event we were doing together, I was stopped in the airport, and some guy came up to me, he looked at me, and I'm wearing these just as I am now, and literally this is what he said: didn't you used to be Dick Cheney. [LAUGHTER] So he's right. [LAUGHTER]  I won't say what I said. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, Crossing the Line: Watergate, Criminal Law, and Ethics is a topics that Frank and I developed, and I'm delighted to be participating in this 2013 edition. Bob Kastenmeier, to me, is a model legislator. I can guarantee you that this is a member of congress who never shut down congress once while he was there. 

[APPLAUSE]  And it's quite appropriate there's a courthouse named after him because he's somebody who is actually concerned about taking care of the federal judiciary which, in recent years, one of my favorite issues that gets ignored is taking care of judges where I have a number of friends who are on the bench and their law clerks go out one year after leaving and they're making twice what the judge they worked for who really got them the job is being paid. It's kind of a sad situation we've come to. But that isn't our topic tonight. It's Crossing the Line, and the line we're talking about crossing, of course, is Watergate. Watergate, I discovered very early after my testimony, I had already hit the dictionaries, and the core definition has really not changed and doesn't tell us very much about what really went on. It's been defined as abuse of high office for political purposes during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Meaning it included much more than the bungled break-in at the Watergate. Oops, he doesn't belong in this lecture. I'm sorry. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE]  Anyway, what we're going to look at tonight is who so many lawyers got on the wrong side of the law, and where were legal ethics back in that day and where are they today. 

This is just a small slice of a very large story. I am currently back in this subject because of the tapes that Frank mentioned. They are voluminous. My publisher learned that I had done some work in recent years in this area and said, John, we're approaching the 40th anniversary, don't you think it would be a good idea if you tried to answer some of the questions you might have? And I said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. So I started looking at those questions, and things like how could somebody as savvy as Richard Nixon, politically and in many ways, get himself in the mess he got himself in. For example, taking the defense that he knew nothing about Watergate, and before I told him in the so-called Cancer on the Presidency talk in March of 1973, March 21st, I couldn't understand how he would land on that. So I began digging in the tapes. Stanley Cutler, who is not here right now but I'm going to see later, former professor here, is the one who really broke lose the tapes from the archives long before Nixon wanted, and Stanley has done about, in his book, about 320 partial conversations. The Watergate prosecutors did about another 80 conversations. I figured 400 conversations, I'll find the answers in there. 

Not so. To my surprise, nobody had ever cataloged all of Nixon's Watergate conversations, and there are just under a thousand conversations. So I've had, for the last four years, a team of graduate students working on, we decided to do them all from scratch. Some of the prosecutors drafts are nothing but FBI secretary's first draft. Stanley's transcripts are partial in many regards. So we just did the whole project from start to finish, which have paid for braces for a couple of families. [LAUGHTER] Of grad students who have been wonderful in undertaking this rather awesome task. So this has gotten me back into the subject, and we'll talk a little bit about that today. I was telling Frank that the Law Journal asked me if we could convert all this to a Law Journal article.  Whoever is here from the Law Journal tonight, I'm going to tell you I'm not going to scoop my book. 

I might here tonight, but I won't in the written version. So we'll assume this is all off the record. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, a little background. Watergate clearly starts on June of '72 with the break-in. I was on the other side of the planet in Manilla giving a graduation speech that I'd been asked to be a government representative for. This is an interesting picture because it was actually used, excuse me... [COUGHING] In evidence in the first Watergate trial, the cover-up trial, excuse me, the break-in trial. And it's a great aerial shot of the complex. The Watergate office complex where the DNC is located is the middle complex. The white building across the street is the Howard Johnson where the listening post was set up where they moved higher and higher until they could get the signal. 

The problem was they weren't even sure they got it in the right office. They did not get in the right office. They were looking for Larry O'Brien's office and didn't get it. A little closer angle where you could think the look-out man might have seen the police coming when they did come, but they were plain-clothes people who answered, a vice squad answered the 911 call of the guard at the DNC who noticed he had removed a tape from a basement door, taken it off, went back, and the tape is back on the door, and he says something's amiss, so he went right to the lobby and called the police who quickly arrived on the scene. It happens, the arrest, this is their second entry, happens on Saturday, June 17-18. The DC police are quickly accompanied by the FBI. And here's actually the scene of where the five men would be captured. It's within the Democratic National Committee. It's a secretarial suite within Larry O'Brien's office, and there were five men crouched behind that desk by the typewriter. [LAUGHTER] Wearing business suits and surgical gloves. 

[LAUGHTER] Which is not the norm. And they figured this is really not normal cat burglars when they found crisp $100 bills in their pockets that were the serial numbers leading right to a bank in Florida, eventually. Here are the five who were arrested. The most important, of course, for problems was the man on the far left, James McCord, who was the security man at the reelection committee. Liddy, who had organized this, had promised that nobody connected with the committee would be any way involved. The others were friends of Howard Hunt who was Liddy's partner. Liddy and Hunt had come out of the White House, of course. And Bernard Barker, the man on the far right, and the man next to him, Eugenio Martinez, had also an earlier tie to the White House. They had been involved in a break-in in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in California right after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers trying to find out the remote potential they claimed of whether he had ties to the Russians. The real motive for the break-in being to try to find information to discredit Ellsberg. 

And the dire problem being that the break-in was authorized by no less than one of the President's top aides, John Ehrlichman, a domestic assistant for, excuse me, a presidential assistant for domestic affairs who'd been my predecessor as White House counsel. So I suspect Ehrlichman was a little concerned when he learned that information. What was striking, however, again, was the incompetence of the whole thing because the burglars had in their possession, and left in the hotel room which they quickly got a subpoena for, a small address book that had Howard Hunt's White House telephone number. [LAUGHTER] But even more telling, Bernard Barker had a check for $6.39 written to a Maryland country club by Howard Hunt to pay his out of state dues because since Barker lived in Florida, he could take the check to Florida and mail it from Miami. Hunt lived in Maryland so he couldn't pay his dues in state, so he gave him this check which linked him directly to these two people. That prompted the police and the FBI to call Alex Butterfield, who handled personnel matters in the White House, that weekend. And he said Hunt is not here any longer, but he did work for Chuck Colson, who, at the time, was known as Richard Nixon's hatchet man. So suspicions went right up immediately that there was more here than met the eye. The two, as I mentioned or alluded to earlier, that ran the operation were Hunt and Liddy. Liddy had been selected to be, first of all, the counsel to the reelection committee, but he didn't get along with Jeb Magruder, so they moved him to the Finance Committee where he continued to actually do dubious finance transactions, including washing cash that he could later get his hands on. 

In fact, what's really remarkable about Liddy, I said it yesterday or Wednesday when I was talking to your NPR station, that over the years I've decided that Liddy really thought he was a James Bond character, but he was not really up to the Maxwell Smart level. [LAUGHTER] It was just that bad. And people keep searching, and one of the drills of going through almost a thousand conversations has been to try to figure out why did they break in because a lot of mystery has been created about that. It is not a mystery at all. It was a fishing expedition. It was stupidity. It was they thought they might find some indication of a kick-back scheme that the democrats were conducting in Miami at their planned convention and at a time when the republicans were being accused of taking a kick-back from San Diego from the ITT Corporation. They thought this could balance it. And this is what they're fishing for. And this can be, first of all, I picked this up on some of the tapes as I go along. 

This is what Nixon and Haldeman and Ehrlichman, I won't deal with the president for eight months after the arrest, but I've now listened to all those tapes. I'm literally at March 23rd, which is a significant date to break this. I'm going to take you broadly, since this audience is a little bit more sophisticated than most and some of the students have been in Frank's course, so of course they know all the details, broadly through this. The cover-up is formed between June 17th, when the press releases are put out by the reelection committee talking to the White House, the President's in Florida, Haldeman, his chief of staff, is in Florida, Ehrlichman's in Washington, and Mitchell and Magruder, who are running the campaign, are in California, and they quickly have a round of calls and they realize right away that because of McCord's involvement, Liddy's involvement, that they're going to cover this thing up. That's pretty well locked down by July 4th when Nixon leaves for San Clemente. This is followed by a period of what was internally referred to as containment. In other words, keep it contained to Watergate so they don't get into the Ellsberg break-in or any of the politics of the whole situation which would have been embarrassing also. And that lasts until December, successfully. George McGovern, whose sister is here today, tried to raise, repeatedly during the campaign, the fact that Watergate was a real serious problem, and the press wasn't paying any attention. Outside the Washington Post, nobody paid really attention. 

The New York Times occasionally, but not much. The Post, under Ben Bradley, and it wasn't just Woodward and Bernstein, he had everybody but the national staff, which was doing national politics, was really writing about it and making an issue out of it. So it did work during the campaign. But it starts unraveling in January. It was very easy to, obviously, make the case against the men who had been arrested in the Watergate, and Hunt and Liddy had left trail after trail everywhere. So to get them involved was not difficult either. And so the seven of them are indicted in the fall, and Judge Sirica decides to run the trial after the election in January. That really starts the unraveling process. It's exacerbated somewhat by the fact that Howard Hunt's wife, who has younger children living at home, is killed when she is distributing hush money that's being distributed amongst all the defendants. It's not a -- fund, it's a hush money fund to keep them quiet, at which becomes very apparent after the election when Howard Hunt calls and leans on his old friend Chuck Colson to get the 'ready.' They were not getting paid the ready. 

This was about as code deep as they could get was to call the money the ready. So the unraveling really culminates when James McCord, on the day of sentencing, he, the week before, sent a letter to the judge saying that perjury occurred during my trial, others are involved. And Sirica is using the hammer of 35 to 40-year sentences, provisional sentences, that if they decide to cooperate with the Senate Watergate Committee, which is set up by this time, then he'll reconsider the sentences. But that really starts the unraveling process, and it happens quickly after that.  I'm basing this more on the tapes, for my chronology, than any other markers because they seemed to influence what was happening. And that's, to me, the true story of what Nixon knew and when he knew it. So I happen to give him the title of my book, but that's the subtitle, what he knew and when he knew it, to the question Howard Baker asked me during the senate hearings, and I can finally answer it, it's taken a few decades to get the answer but I've got it now. Nixon starts forming his hard defense. He's been defending himself all along, but he really gets it nailed down by April when he starts realizing that Haldeman and Ehrlichman have to go, -- has to go, I have to go, anybody associated, he has to go. And he keeps looking for a statement that will make this all somehow disappear. 

And thrusts me out in the middle of it on August 29th when I happened to be in San Clemente. I was called out to give them an update, almost went to the press conference in San Clemente, decided at the last minute I had so much work to do, I went back to my hotel but watched it on television, and heard the President who was asked why don't you appoint a special prosecutor? He says, well, a very good reason I'm not doing because it the general accounting office is investigating this, the congress is investigating this, several members of the Wright Patman Banking and Currency Committee is investigating it, the FBI is investigating it. He ticked them all off and he finally says, and then also my counsel, White House counsel John Dean is investigating this and found that nobody presently employed in this administration had any involvement in this bizarre matter. Well, this is the first I heard of my investigation. [LAUGHTER] At first I thought, well, that's a blow for confidence. Then I realized, it didn't take me but a few more days to realize you might be being set up since you haven't conducted this. There was a lot of pressure then to have me write an investigation and write a bogus report which I refused to do. After the revelation of the tapes, which Frank alluded to and maybe in the Q&A we can get into since this is the 40th anniversary of the firing of Cox, I actually pulled together some material I might share that's not widely known, but to click off and proceed through to make the key points I'd like to make in our address, we'll come back to that. Anyway, after they're discovered and revealed, the whole of Watergate is really about Nixon's defense against the tapes. They pulled the plug on July 13th while the President is in Bethesda Naval Hospital with pneumonia. 

There's an argument about whether they can be revealed or whether they can't be revealed. One of his lawyers, Fred Buzhardt, it took two lawyers to replace me. [LAUGHTER] They brought two in. Fred Buzhardt, had been over at the Defense Department, argues that they can be since there's no subpoena out, that as long as there's no subpoena it can't be an obstruction of justice. Leonard Garment, one of Nixon's New York partners from his days in private practice who has not been a counsel but is given the job, argues and has a case to cite that it is obstruction of justice. Nixon actually decides, there's a very interesting note I found and to do my book I also pulled 150,000 documents over the years, over this four-year period. Everything down to his --. I found this fascinating, you can see how weak he is with his pneumonia, but he loved the yellow pad. He thinks a couple ways. He thinks out loud to his staff, a couple key people he can bounce ideas off, particularly Haldeman and Colson, a little bit Ehrlichman but not so much, principally them. 

A little bit Henry Kissinger. But he also like solitude. That's the other way he operates is just with a yellow pad where he can put his thoughts down. And he has this thought right after he comes out that he will never disclose the contents of those tapes. It doesn't talk about destroying them. He's decided that he won't risk that, but he doesn't think anybody will ever get to them. Let's jump now forward. I've broken rank. Long story, wrote a book about it called Blind Ambition. Frank assigned it wisely in his class. 

[LAUGHTER] It's out of print. My publisher actually, because I'm reissuing it, it's going to now, it's Viking Penguin and I think they'll do a great job with it to reissue the paperback again because it's surprising. I know how much demand there is because I get requests every year for waiver of copyright, and they used to always be the law schools that requested that. Now, remarkably, it's the business schools that request it, Harvard, Stanford, and no law schools are currently requesting it. While it used to be a great tool for teaching lawyers, since it's not available and no one's asked for the copyright. Anyway, that's my lovely bride Maureen and I the week of the testimony. Several friends of mine said we knew your testimony was serious when we saw who showed up. [LAUGHTER] The last day. Maybe the most, people often think that the most important thing I explained was the cancer on the presidency. That was important but because I have a real clip of what happened... 

That's Fred Thompson, if any of you don't recognize him. I thought that was a good shot to start with. It may help him sell some reverse mortgages. [LAUGHTER] >> Before going to tell the president some of these things I decided that I should call Haldeman because I knew that his name would come up in the matter. I called Haldeman and told him what I was going to do, and Haldeman agreed that I should proceed to so inform the president of the situation. Meeting of March 21st. As I have indicated, my purpose in requesting this meeting, particularly with the president, was I felt it necessary that I give him a full report of all the facts that I knew and explain to him what I believe to be the implication of those facts. It was my particular concern was the fact that the president did not seem to understand the implications of what was going on. >> The reason I don't think that's my most important testimony long-term is I can now look back on what did really change as a result of my testimony. And it's somewhat surprising that a very unplanned, very small bit of testimony would end up having the impact that it had. 

I happen to prepare a document, I'm not there yet on the tapes and so I only check my dates now, a lot of the dates of Watergate are wrong, I know from listening to the tapes as to what exactly happened when internally in the White House. As I say, I'm only up to March 23rd so I know it's either the weekend of the 7th or the 14th I prepared this document with my lawyer. It was my last effort to get my colleagues to follow me and go to the prosecutor's office and just stand up and accept responsibility for what we'd done. We had at stake the presidency of the United States. At that point, I'm still a believer. I think that Nixon is the public image I have of Nixon. I've just gotten a smattering of him at this point. And so I show Haldeman and Ehrlichman this. I said listen, we're going to be indicted. And I took them through chapter and verse. 

You'll see this document. There are a couple lawyers I didn't include in here, but I certainly made the point and explain to them why Charlie --, who had given me a good tutorial by that time in the operation of conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that's a pretty fuzzy crime. Very fuzzy crime, in fact. As I realized today, a lot of things can result in obstruction of justice. You know, for example, when you commit perjury. If you lie, you know you've lied. You know you're in trouble. And it could well result in an obstruction count as well. But when there's no real bright line for your offense, it's a little bit more difficult to, one, be looking for it or, two, to know exactly when you've crossed it. But I think that this testimony, to me, was the least result I could have anticipated happened. 

Let me show you the testimony I'm talking about and what happens. >> Now will you look at exhibit number 43 that you inserted in your testimony yesterday.  That's also an interesting document. As I recall your testimony as you presented it yesterday, it's a list of all of the people that you thought had violated the law and what the laws may be that they violated. Is that correct? >> That is correct. >> Let's start with the top of the list. Now that's in your own handwriting, is it not? >> That is correct. >> This is a copy thereof. >> That is correct. >> What is the significance of the letter in the top left-hand part of that sheet? >> The list is broken down into the two parts, Senator. 

One says pre and the other is post. >> By pre you mean prior to the Watergate break-in? >> That is correct. >> The planning and execution of those events. >> That is correct. >> And you list in that category Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Magruder, and Mr. Strachan. >> That is correct. >> Now, you have a star by Mr. Mitchell's name, no star by Mr. Magruder. >> Maybe if I explain the whole list, it would save some questions for you. I have listed for pre: Mitchell, Magruder, Strachan. Post: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, LaRue, Mardian, O'Brien, Parkinson, Colson, Bittman, Kalmbach, Tony, I have, that's the word, "Source," I'll explain that in a minute, and Stans. 

Now, beside several of the names, after I did the list, I said, my first reaction was, there certainly are an awful lot of lawyers involved here. So I put an asterisk beside each lawyer, which was Mitchell, Strachan, Ehrlichman, Dean, Mardian, O'Brien, Parkinson, Colson, Bittman, and Kalmbach. [LAUGHTER]  >> Any significance to the star? They're all lawyers. >> No, that was just a reaction to myself to the fact that how in God's name did so many lawyers get involved in something like this? >> There were something like 21 lawyers who got on the wrong side of the law during Watergate. And this did have consequence. We'll come back in a minute to how they got on the wrong side of the law, but I think that, first of all, the point I want to make today is the impact that little bit of testimony had. First of all, it resulted in the American Bar Association, I've been told this by a number of people who were there at the time who saw the impact, deciding they had to take a fresh look at the way ethics is taught to lawyers. So today, to be an accredited school, everybody must have mandatory teaching of ethics, which I think is a wonderful idea. There's a special multi-state bar examination. Bob Kutak was one of the first who told me the impact of this. 

He was a very active person in the American Bar Association. He started a wonderful firm. He passed away in the Minneapolis Airport of all places. I've got to go there next week. Anyway, he took on the assignment of redoing the code, and I would meet with him on a number of occasions and some of his commissioners. He said we got to make this real-world. He would do everything that they thought collectively was needed. It wouldn't all be adopted by every state simultaneously. After Enron came along, for example, a few states that had held out on some of the provisions that got picked up in Sarbanes-Oxley then said, well, we'll make this a part of our state as well. But it really has changed the whole design and operation of the code of ethics. 

Today, of course, there's a requirement of having a continuing legal education. It's required in about half the states, it's mandatory. So that really did have an impact. And what's most ironic to me, it's one of the few post-Watergate reforms that is still in place all these decades later. Let me just give you a few examples. I've looked through them all. Take the independent counsel law. The number one recommendation of the Senate Watergate Committee was let's create a permanent office of special prosecutor, an independent counsel. And indeed that was the case. There was one for a long time. 

Ken Starr was the last one. After both republicans and democrats were sufficiently gored by that law, they decided we'll let the sunset provisions comes to play and it's now gone by the wayside. But it was an important law. It raised some very real constitutional issues, issues I think probably could be addressed. Anyway, that's gone. And it's not any particular sinister reason they're gone. They're just gone. Take campaign finance. Because there was so much cash floating around, and many believe that this was the reason Watergate happened, and there's a lot to that, they rewrote the campaign finance laws. And that continued for a number of years. 

After Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court ruled that a contribution is a form of speech and began unwinding that body of law down to most recently Citizens United as well as a case that's pending right now for the amount any individual can give over a campaign period. They've dramatically removed virtually all of the post-Watergate campaign reform. Another practice, for example, that was very common post-Watergate was to have investigative journalism. It was made very popular. Journalism schools were very attractive to young people that wanted to have careers. And there was a lot of money thrown at investigative journalism. With the development of the internet, with the development of corporate ownership in combination with major media, it is not a particularly productive and lucrative area to go into. While there are some grants out there still and some institutions that do do investigative journalism, it went from largely everybody in the business having an investigative branch is now nonexistent. The relationship between the President and the press in the media aftermath of Watergate, probably one of the most moral presidents we'll ever have was Jimmy Carter who was plagued by scandals because he was assumed to be doing the wrong thing. The whole relationship between the press and the presidency changed where presidents had the burden almost of proving that they weren't doing anything wrong. 

That isn't quite true today. It has kind of turned during the Bush/Cheney years. So anyway, what has not changed is the American Bar Association and their insistence on having lawyers have no excuse. For example, when I took an ethics course, it was a quarter of a credit, I think it even was optional, and it was, don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, look for conflict of interest so that you don't have any conflict of interest, but the most important, the most important thing, is don't advertise. [LAUGHTER] That was the rule. Anyway, that has changed as a result of Watergate. So let's go back to why did so many lawyers cross the line? That's a collection of some pretty high powered Nixon Administration lawyers. John Mitchell on the far left. Of course that's Richard Nixon in the easy chair. J Edgar Hoover on one end of the sofa and John Ehrlichman on the other. 

But how did lawyers get across the line? I look at this particularly in those I know and talk to and I have talked to over the years about this problem and particularly with regard to the coverup. In other words, why did you engage and get involved in that whole mess? The number one reason: incompetency. I must say, I did not know the criminal law. One of the first things on June 19th I recommended after I spoke with Gordon Liddy was I had to report back to Haldeman, excuse me, to Ehrlichman, and he was a lawyer. And I said, John, I don't think you, and I don't know anybody on our staff, who really has any experience in the criminal law. Maybe we should bring somebody over, detail somebody over to the White House, from the US Attorney's Office to be here to counsel us so we don't make any foolish mistakes. He dismissed it right away. Did not want any strangers to come into the inter sanctums of the White House. It was probably one of the early mistakes that was made because I was talking with Frank last night about quizzing a number of the prosecutors and asking them was there ever anybody at the Nixon White House who you thought really knew what they were doing with the criminal law? And the answer was no, by and large. One of them told me they thought that St. Clair, who was his impeachment counsel, did know something about Massachusetts criminal law but didn't extend to handling the situation they were confronted there. 

So that's a serious problem. There's another very practical problem that can happen not only with presidents but with any powerful client where there was just an unquestioned loyalty to the client. Particularly with the president you have a situation where he can do an awful lot of nice things for you if you served him well and he liked that, and that didn't escape most of the people who were involved. Another real practical situation was exactly who was the client? I just went through a bunch of the tapes when things are starting to unravel where Nixon says, well, of course Dean has the double privilege. He not only has executive privilege through separation of powers where the congress can't really reach into what we're doing, but he's got the attorney/client privilege. He's got it for me, he has it for everybody on the staff, and that has now been litigated and it was certainly resolved by the model code of professional conduct where the entity that the White House counsel represents is not the President of the United States, it's the office of the President of the United States. And it's a big difference. A big difference, because the occupant of the office will come and go and change, where the office remains. One of the things that's also somewhat striking because of the level at which it happens is this arrogance towards the law. In other words, just not even caring what the law might be and thinking themselves above the law. 

That was few. I would put two for certain in that category. It would be Richard Nixon and Gordon Liddy who openly have made that claim. But it was probably a little broader than that, and we'll come back to that. There's something else that I call the lost frame mentality, which I will explain in a moment also. But let's first look at what I think is probably as good a personification of arrogance towards the law as you can find.  >> The wave of dissent, occasionally violent, which followed in the wake of the Cambodian incursion, prompted President Nixon to demand better intelligence about the people who were opposing him. To this end, the deputy White House counsel, Tom Huston, arranged a series of meetings with representatives of the CIA, the FBI, and other police and intelligence agencies. These meetings produced a plan, the Huston Plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against anti-war groups and others. Some of these activities, as Huston emphasized to Nixon, were clearly illegal. 

Nevertheless, the President approved the plan. Five days later, after opposition from J Edgar Hoover, the plan was withdrawn, but the President's approval was later to be listed in the articles of impeachment as an alleged abuse of presidential power. Now, when you were concerned about street crimes, you went to congress and got laws passed and so on. Wouldn't it have been better here though, to have done what you were going to do legally, rather than doing something that was illegal? I mean, seizing evidence in this way and all of that? In retrospect, wouldn't it have been better to combat that crime legally rather than adding another crime to the list? >> Basically, the proposition you just stated in theory is perfect. In practice, it just won't work. To get legislation, specific legislation, to have warrantless entries for the purpose of obtaining information and the rest, would not only have raised an outcry, but it would have made it terribly difficult to move in on these organizations because, basically, they would be put on notice by the very fact that the legislation was on the books and they'd be potential targets. An action's either going to be covert or not. >> So, what in a sense you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal. >> Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal. >> By definition. 

>> Exactly. Exactly. If, for example, the president approves something, approves and action, because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they're in an impossible position. >> You know, it's easy to laugh at that, but what Nixon is pulling from and his own thinking, the precedents he's drawing on are Lincoln, he's drawing on FDR, and since he's gone, other presidents have drawn on Nixon's continuing thinking right down through George W Bush to Barack Obama. So, presidents do take this posture that they feel themselves, particularly in the national security area, above the law. So we have not resolved that issue totally as to where we're going to hold our presidents responsible and where we are not. Nixon was. The fact that torture was committed under George W Bush has certainly never been resolved, and while we have abandoned the policy temporarily, we've not done anything to remove it from the books. So these are interesting questions that do not always get resolved. 

But let me come to the other and last reason that has become apparent over the years in studying these tapes as to how so many lawyers got on the wrong side of the law. And this might be the one lesson that I hope, particularly anybody who's a young person here who might be taking their cues from older people, would be thinking for themselves and remember this. I stumbled into it somewhat by accident. I was asked to speak to the American Bar Association's section on professionalism and ethics. And they put together a panel where I keynoted, and Beth Nolan, who was Bill Clinton's and the first female White House counsel, along with Richard Painter, who was George W Bush's ethics counsel, and Richard, in particular, had done a lot of work on the psychology of coverup. It's a subject that fascinates him, and he has drawn deeply on the available social science and is conducting his own. He's over at the University of Minneapolis. And here's one statement that he makes that is relevant to what we're talking about. Psychological studies show that a person in a loss frame, which I'll explain a little bit more about, often make risk preferring decisions in order to avoid loss, even if the risks they take are irrational. Even if the risks they take are irrational. 

That's a formula for getting into a coverup. So, where does he draw and what does he base this information on? And it's the very good work of Kahneman and Tversky who would win a, Kahneman in particular, a Nobel Prize in economics where they took his work in psychology and pulled it over to economics and said this also explains an awful lot in economics. He has developed what he calls the prospect theory. He's got a bestselling book out called Thinking Slow. It's a little bit wonky, but if you're at all math inclined, it's a wonderful piece of scholarship. And they studied people to make decisions and put them in circumstances when they made those decisions. And he looked at, particularly, people who were willing to take risks and looked at the risk-takers. Decision makers are, they test universally as risk adverse when deciding between two decisions that result in a gain. But they're risk preferring when they decide between two decisions that result in a loss. Let me elaborate just a little bit more on that. 

What's that mean? Let me get down to, they've done this study in varying permutations and combinations, but this is sort of the basic. A person's confronted with a choice. They can receive $10, a sure thing, or they get a one in two chance of receiving $20. Almost a high percentage number will take the $10 that they are assured of getting. But not let's go to the loss frame where the prospects are not as encouraging. When a person chooses between a sure $10 loss or a one in two chance of suffering the $20 loss, just the opposite happens. They're more likely to go for the 20 bucks. This is why casinos are in business, ladies and gentlemen. [LAUGHTER] They double down. They double down. 

And they figured our nature out and are making a killing on it. I'm going to play, if we can get the sound up, it's pretty soft on this. You can handle it from back there? Good. I'm going to play a little clip from Daniel Kahneman, who explains a little bit more of the prospect theory here. >> What it allowed was it allowed us to see that people's attitudes to gains and losses are actually different. That is really the fundamental result of prospect theory. We call it loss illusion. And what it means is that people hate losing much more than they like winning. We actually have a pretty good idea of the ratio or the factor, by how much, people hate losing more than they like winning. It's about, on average I mean, that's a crude estimate, but on average it's between two and three. 

There is another force that works the other way. That's that people are sometimes delusional in their optimism about their own skills and about what they can achieve and so on. So what you get in a lot of decision making is a balance between those two very strong forces. >> Those are people who are going to get themselves, who are in the loss frame, into a coverup very easily. The legal risk of concealment and the risk that a problem could get worse while it's concealed will be preferred over the certain loss of prompt disclosure. That's your intuitive nature. That's how most of our fellow humans test consistently. We're built for coverups, unfortunately. [LAUGHTER] So, what do we do with this situation? How do you deal with a loss frame? First of all, you've got to recognize you're in a loss frame. Usually a gut check will tell you you're losing. 

We have wonderful internal systems that cue us. In the case of a lawyer, you can get some guidance from the rules of ethics but not a lot and not always. Some. It's going to get you antennae quivering. In a drill I do with a friend where I present a CLE, we take today's rules and apply them back on Watergate, and you get some very interesting results doing that. But it isn't a sure thing. But we have found a sure thing that psychologists tell us works consistently. There are other things that can bring you out of a loss frame. Sometimes a real dose of reality will bring people out, like your wife coming into the casino and grabbing you and pulling you out. [LAUGHTER] There are things that will break it. 

But a sure way, particularly for lawyers, is to bring in outside counsel who you, under the rules under every state, can bring in outside counsel, tell them the situation, they are held to the rules of confidentiality that can be explained to them, they can raise the issues, and if that person you bring in should not be in the loss frame, they will give you good honest advice. That sort of happened in my case where I had come part way out, and when I hired a lawyer, he got me all the way out. It happens to a number of other people involved in Watergate. Watergate is a case study of people getting themselves both into the loss frame and out of the loss frame and some never recovering and getting out. But that's the best advice. I, at one point in testifying, as Frank said, reveal the fact that I thought I was taped. That results in the fight that Nixon loses before the Supreme Court. And when I listened to his farewell, which is a nice point to wrap this gathering before we go to Q&A, most of it was almost campaign rhetoric. But then, at one point, he really kind of takes off the mask and gets down to it and seems to understand exactly what happened. Here's a man who's accomplished a lot of good things but he's accomplished a lot of bad things. 

And I think he understands, in this passing moment, what went astray with his presidency. So let's look at that and end on that note before we go to questions. [applause]  >> It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes, and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. And so I say to you on this occasion, as we leave, we leave proud of the people who have stood by us and worked for us and served this country. We want you to be proud of what you have done. We want you to continue to serve in government, if that is your wish. Always give your best. 

Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself. And so, we leave with high hopes, in good spirit, and with deep humility. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]  >> Your questions, please. [APPLAUSE]  >> If you've got a question please raise your hand. We've got a couple of mics in the room. I've got the first one right here. >> Thank you very much. 

Where there any of President Nixon's advisors, to your knowledge, when this is all unfolding, that grabbed him by the collar and said, you're handling this all the wrong way? Go on television, confess your sins, say you've committed wrongs, and ask the American people for forgiveness and they'll forgive you. Did anybody try to persuade him to do that? >> No. The short answer is, no. Absolutely not. In fact, he's getting all of his information initially from Haldeman and Ehrlichman. A little bit from Colson, but 90% of it comes in through Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and of that, I'd say that's 75/25 in favor of Haldeman. They're being remarkably protective. When people see the book based on just his raw evidence of these conversations you're going to be surprised at how little they tell him when he asked them direct questions. In fact, the later it gets when after he learns from me about the Ellsberg break-in, he asked Ehrlichman flat out, are you worried at all about that? And through Haldeman he claims, no, no, I'm not worried at all. I'm three or four times removed. 

Well, three or four times removed is, he authorized it in writing. [laughter] So the answer is no, and not until-- and I'm not trying to make myself out the hero. It just occurred to me when I got in there that he just has bits and pieces. He's got a lot of the key bits and pieces. For example, he knows hush money is being paid before I get in there and tell him that. He doesn't know it's an obstruction of justice until I start telling him that's what is involved. But he knows very little, and doesn't have the information to make the decision on. I can tell you one thing. At 75 years of age I am now, I would have no trouble going in there and telling him to get his act together. This would not have been the same as a 31-year old waiting eight months to be invited in. 

I would have been pounding on the door. I thought they were insane. I did that once when the Brookings incident came up where Jack Caulfield, who was a New York City detective who was assigned to my office, came in one afternoon on a Friday and said, I've just come from Colson's office and I've been instructed by Colson to firebomb the Brookings Institute. [laughter] That's the think tank in Washington. I said, firebomb the Brookings Institute? He said, yes, apparently the president thinks they have a copy of the Pentagon Papers. What I'm supposed to do is send somebody over to case the place and start a fire there. When the fire people come there will be a lot of confusion. We can break in the safe, blow it, and get the Pentagon Papers out of there. I said Jack, this is insane. I pulled off my shelf a copy of the DC code. 

Notice that if there's a death in an arson it's a capital crime in the District of Columbia at that point. So I said to Caulfield, do nothing. Do nothing. I jumped on the first courier flight to California and got out there the next morning. I got in to see Ehrlichman and told him this bizarre story. I said, John, I understand you authorized this. He said, no, I didn't authorize it, but let me run this down. He picks up the phone talks to Colson. He said, Colson, young Counsel Dean in out here and does not think the Brookings is a very good idea. Cancel it. 

[laughter] He then turns to me and says, anything else Counselor? I said, no, no. That will do it. You know what's really remarkable though is years later when Stanley Cutler did his tapes and it came out before a time when I started transcribing them. On at least three, maybe four, occasions Nixon is literally pounding on his desk demanding somebody do that Brookings break-in. I didn't know-- For example, when I mentioned on March 21st that some crazy people tried to break in to Brookings, I was talking about the president. He didn't confess up at that point either. So the answer to your question is, no. And I'm not sure it would have been effective. At this age it would be no problem for me to tell a president that he'd lost it. He needed people like that around him. 

He obviously didn't want them. >> What's the back-story on the 18 minute gap on the tapes? Was it a technological snafu as was claimed? >> Yeah, I decided that was so interesting I have to do an appendix on it, but I'll give you a thumbnail on it. The reason I'm able to do that is kind of a curious story. I have a friend who do these CLEs with and he goes to CLEs. He went to a CLE by a former detection expert at the CIA who started doing polygraphs. He found they really are not as good, but human beings themselves are highly revelatory. Even some of the most practiced liars are highly revelatory when they're deceiving and giving an answer. So he left the act, he left the CIA, and runs a company that does a lot of work for corporations when they're doing due diligence and they want to find out if the other company is being honest about what they're selling, and things like that. He's very good at this. When I was involved in getting the release of the Nixon testimony, the grand jury testimony, he'd asked about the 18-1/2 minute gap. 

That testimony my friend Jim sent to this CIA guy to say, what do you think of this testimony? He didn't tell him one way or the other. Phil Houston, who's done a book since on deception called Spy the Lie, sent a note to Jim who sent it back on to me. He said, you know, Richard Nixon rings every bell of deception in this testimony that I've ever seen. He said, this is a case study. Had I known this I could have done a book around this guy because this is just so remarkable. He said, I cannot believe what he did during that grand jury appearance to show he was being deceptive. This started us thinking. Jim came to me and said, what do you think about what was there after somebody who's listened to so many conversations. Could it have been possible Nixon was saying, well, I really regret ordering the break-in and all this kind of business? No, it's not. We know that it was not a White House sponsored break-in. 

That's pretty consistent throughout. We also know that they were fishing for what they thought might be a financial embarrassment to the democrats. It was terribly bungled and misinterpreted. But what I also know is what he did know. Why would he erase the tapes? He's one of only three people who really have access. Another interesting thing that came out in this study we've done is Rose Mary Woods could not have erased the tape. Her machine would not do it. They never called the expert who they almost called. Things progressed on beyond that. We've tracked this guy down in a little town up near Seattle who was going to be called. 

He was the foremost expert. He was the country's leading repair person on this particular machine that Rose Mary used. He explained to us, he said, a woman can seldom use the eraser equipment on this because that's the way the machine was designed. It takes two hands for a woman. Most women do not have a strong enough hand to run the two buttons you need to press to erase. A foot peddle will not do it. In other words, every combination that you could put that Rose Mary explained during that day, she couldn't have erased the tape. We then began looking further. To make a long story short, I discovered that what Nixon did is he built this firewall defense saying that the only thing he knew about Watergate was what I told him on March 21. It's after that that the tapes appear. 

What is so clear from both the notes and his knowledge level is he did know of the coverup the first week. All he had to do was say one thing and it would have blown away his defense at the outset that he was aware of the coverup. And so that's obviously what it was. It wasn't any-- He knew Liddy was involved. He knew other little things. And just the mention of those in that 18-1/2 minute gap would have blown it way. Given his behavior and given his knowledge, that's obviously probably why he did it. It's been made a much bigger deal than it really is by the press, of the fact that he clearly had the opportunity to do it. It comes down to him or a couple of Al Haig aids who would only done it at his request. I think we'll answer that mystery. 

Question. >> Having wallowed in Watergate for more than 40 years, I'll say this has been a great pleasure to hear this-- >> I like your reading material. >> Yes, you mentioned your book Blind Ambition, you obviously put a lot of preparation into writing this. What did you learn either about yourself or Watergate in writing it? And what didn't you know about yourself or Watergate that you've learned since? >> Yeah, first of all, what I know today is encyclopedic as a result of litigating it for nine years. There was a story out that a bunch of Watergate revisionists tried to claim, and Gordon Liddy jumped on and tried to push, that Watergate really wasn't about anything we thought it was. That there was a call-girl ring operating at the DNC, and my wife was some how associated with this call girl ring. Also Diane Sawyer was in the call girl ring. [laughter] And some other people, any attractive woman in Washington at that time, these revisionists were saying were in this. It was just baloney. But we decided we were offended enough that we sued. 

That's how we opened up a lot of documents at the National Archives, the Watergate prosecution documents. We had two goals in the lawsuit. One, being a public figure we it's very hard to win a lawsuit. As it happened we had maybe the strongest case any public figure has ever had since the primary source of this claim was somebody who's been in and out of mental institutions their entire adult life. It's not the best source to turn over history on. That the FBI has got it wrong, that the senate, that the house impeachment committee has got it wrong. That there was actually this guy who happened to be in and out of mental institutions was claiming he'd run a DNC-based call girl ring. It's all baloney. Anyway, it's the combined discover for nine years-- To give you the end of a lawsuit, St. Martin's, who was the publisher, and their insurance company would decide that the only way to defend it was to fight us. They spent $15 million in discovery, which is a pretty health bit of discovery, thinking they could push us out just by the expense of it. 

Fortunately I was in a position I could fight them. We did. When they decided that they were going to lose the trial they couldn't see how fast they could settle. I wish I could tell you about the settlement. I can only tell you I was satisfied. I was satisfied. [laughter] But still, it was a terrible experience. I don't recommend anybody do this sort of thing. But that's what got me back into Watergate, that's what resulted in my publisher saying, why don't you return and look at those tapes. They're going to be further evidence of what really happened. 

I have learned a lot of facts I did not know. For example, I only knew the meetings I was in. I didn't know what they said after the meeting. I didn't before the meetings. I didn't know why I was in there. I didn't know Nixon's reaction to me. I'm not rewriting. I wouldn't change a word in Blind Ambition. There's no question I learned-- In fact, I learned this first. It's a very interesting study. 

A psychologist took my actual testimony and then studied it to see, against the tapes, what I got right and what I got wrong. Then he reached all these conclusions about, you know, how good our memory is or not. Well, I ignored that study for years, but it just popped back in my mind when I was doing all these tapes, going through all mine. What's very curious about my testimony, no question I got some things wrong on some days. I conflated events. But I happened to also testify that my memory was not time stamped. I thought I had a good memory. I knew I was very good at cramming for exams in college. But what happened is virtually everything I testified to, if it didn't happen on the day I said it did, happened on another day. There's almost nothing-- In fact, what I would later say is I under-testified, which I did because I thought I was recorded. 

I wasn't sure. That's the mistake I made. I conflated days or I couldn't separate what happened on one day. But the other thing was, none of it was sensitive. I wasn't relevant that it was something I thought happened on March 21st actually happened on March 19th. I wasn't really-- Totally irrelevant. In fact, when I finished the book I'm going to send my notes to the psychologist who did this and say, how do you explain this in your study. Because he didn't go the extra step. Anyway, so yeah, I learned a lot of new things since writing Blind Ambition. It's been an interesting experience. 

I know how the story ends so it's-- Emotionally I'm surprised at how detached I can be to listen to them. I'm just getting to the section where I've gone from being their brightest rising star to their number one enemy. It's very interesting to hear how quickly they can change. As Jim Neal, who argued the close of US verses Mitchell, the coverup trial said, John Dean went from good John Dean to mean John Dean for Richard Nixon. So yeah, there are some changes, and as a result of the new book. Question. >> One last question. >> Yes, Mr. Dean. PBS has done a very good documentary on the whole Watergate thing. >> You mean the multi-part series they did with the BBC? >> Yes, right. 

The one thing that I would like to know is, and you know, you saw it when Ehrlichman argued with Senator -- from North Carolina. What I was wondering is, how were you able to have all this emotion going on and all this stuff happening, how were you able to give such a clear, concise and unemotional testimony before that committee? >> Well, first of all, as you caught that clip, I did a little monotone in the reading. That was intentional. In fact, it's amazing how inflective my voice is on the tapes. I used my voice, like we all do, to make different expressions of pleasure, displeasure, amazement, all those things that can come through in your voice. I had not planned to read that testimony the first day. It was 60,000 words. It was not written to be read. I was dumb-founded when they said, you've got to read this. I was just going to go up and summarize it extemporaneously. 

Like my March 21st was all extemporaneous talk. I deliberately decided to use a monotone to, one, not emphasis or de-emphasis anything. Secondly, to hopefully preserve my voice to read-- I thought it could take two days to read the whole thing. I had no idea how long it was going to take. It took seven hours as it was. As far as the questions, I was very-- I had been a committee counsel. I had worked with the committee that Bob Kastenmeier served so well on. They were very good. Dick -- was the leading minority member in that day. He had no hesitation often in our sessions to turn it over to counsel to ask questions. 

I was just generally comfortable in the form, even though it was the senate, not the house. I knew there were no rules of evidence. I wasn't a strange form for me. I knew that it was a very political form as well. I think that, not withstanding my age, being in my early thirties, I was just generally comfortable in the form. I thought, for example, that Fred Thompson who was doing the questioning, at one point I thought I'd just kind of pin him back. He said to me-- He had what was clearly a planted question. I said, well, you know, Mr. Thompson, had I been at the White House I'd probably have fed you that question. He said to me, well, Mr. Dean, I don't need people to feed me questions. I've learned today from the tapes, that's a right out lie. 

He was fed the question. [laughter] He was new enough that he would take that question. I'll tell you, the other thing is, probably the bottom line of it all is, when you're telling the truth, you know, you're pretty comfortable. You don't know how it's going to turn out, but you know you're comfortable with yourself. Last question? Is that it? >> Will you all join me in thanking our speaker? [applause] It was a quite fascinating set of comments.