A Conversation With John Dean

Former White House counsel John Dean sat down for an interview at Waterloo Ice House on July 17, before he spoke at the Netroots Nation Convention. Below is the full transcript.

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Austin Chronicle: The Republican Party has always sold itself as the party of the Constitution. Any time Second Amendment rights come up, they're first on it. But the Fourth Amendment seems to elude them. Why do you think that is?

John Dean: I think it's probably true with all provisions of the Constitution. They pretty much read them the way they want to. With the Second Amendment, long before the Supreme Court ruled that was about personal rights, they've been reading it that way. They've now, at least by a five-to-four decision, accomplished what they wanted to do. When they find provisions that are not read the way they like, as you know, they are very effective at mounting efforts to change those laws. The Fourth Amendment, well, let me pause. When I was at the White House, I remember reading a brief the Nixon administration submitted on electronic surveillance, and they literally drew on George III as a precedent. We laugh at that, but the problem is, today you've got legal scholars advising the Bush administration drawing on the precedents of George III.

AC: Like most oil rights legislation is based on British law about, if a wild rabbit born on one person's bit of land walks onto someone else's bit of land, whose rabbit is it?

JD: The theory being, for some of the provisions of the Constitution, that they're read in what is perceived as what the founders want to adopt. All this new drive for adding provisions or strength into Article II and the commander-in-chief clause, which was underplayed and largely ignored because the Founders largely used it as a label. They've now put again all the powers of George III as the commander-in-chief. He can go to war any time he wants to, he can ignore the Parliament or the Legislature. So to me, these are facades of legitimacy that they use to make their case over policy objections. Most striking for me in the conservative movement is that they've gone about 180 degrees on some of their positions. Take the strong presidency. They once were deeply opposed to presidential powers. I came up reading conservative canon by people like James Burnham. Reagan at one point gave him the Medal of Presidential Freedom for his contributions to American thought. But he would have been horrified by what Reagan was trying to do with his presidency – 180 degrees away from the things he thought were true conservative positions. So there's a lot, and a striking amount, of intellectual dishonesty in the conservative movement today.

AC: In the current administration, there are so many people who got their national political feet wet in the Nixon administration and then survived through the Ford administration –

JD: You're speaking of Rumsfeld and Cheney?

AC: Yes, but also further down the chain of command, like Wolfowitz. How much is this that the rest of the country looked at the Nixon experience and said this is not what we ought to do, and they looked and said we need to do this better?

JD: I just happened last night to be reading, when I was looking for something else and I rarely reread my own books, but I remember citing Jane Harmon, who was a congresswoman from California, fairly senior in the Democratic ranks. She was the ranking member, when the Republicans controlled the House, of the House Intelligence Committee. I was reading this, because Jane Mayer cites her in her new book The Dark Side. I said, yeah, I remembered writing about her myself, so I looked up to see what I had said. She had worked with Cheney a good bit, she knew him from when he was in the House, but she knew him from working with him, from being the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who were briefed on all the nonsense. She was convinced, as someone who had an understanding of recent history, that Cheney and his closest aides were still fighting Watergate. That they had never gotten over it, and they were trying to revive the Nixon presidency. It's pretty scary.

AC: Another little point of connection is Karl Rove's early days; this is someone taking notes from Donald Segretti and the whole concept of ratfucking [a term used by Nixon campaign operatives when they were referring to playing dirty tricks on someone].

JD: They say that when Cheney went out to the CIA and did not get the kind of advice he wanted about Iraq, one of the things he looked at was the infamous Phoenix program in Vietnam, which was a nightmare that produced nothing of success against the Viet Cong, and he said, ah-ha, that seems pretty good.

AC: The greatest success of the 20th century for helping reshape nations, the single moment for the international community at its best and noblest, are the Nuremberg trials. It's almost like there's a tendency to say Nuremberg can't be done again, but let's rerun Phoenix and get it to work. It's a lack of logic.

JD: It is. Cheney has a remarkable history to me. When I pause to look at his record as White House chief of staff, as a member of the Republican leadership, as secretary of defense, then Halliburton, figuring out whether he could mount a presidential campaign – everything you look at, he's very good at climbing to the top and then failing. No one looks. At Halliburton, people I know there tell me the best thing he ever did was leave. He got them more contracts, he got them out of trouble, he wasn't a particularly good manager. He had a great Rolodex, but he didn't know how to lead or to run the place. So he is maybe our best living example of the Peter Principle, that there are people succeeding beyond their levels of competence, where they then exercise their power and show their incompetence.

AC: The other side of this group that has failed upwards in a spectacular way is the president, who was a mediocre governor and a poor oilman.

JD: In this state, you really give the governor very little to do. In a sense, he's a symbolic figure.

AC: I was talking to (former speaker) Pete Laney about Scott McClellan, a local boy who made good –

JD: Belatedly.

AC: Pete had an interesting comment about why Bush was seen as so bipartisan, and he said the governor only has limited powers. His power of veto of appointment can be overruled by the Senate, and his power of veto can be overruled by the House, so he better cooperate.

JD: And he had a Democratic speaker who liked him. I'm sure he's a very likable person, just not terribly suited to run the country. I think we got the wrong Bush of the third generation. What I think is sad is his father. He's come to tears a couple of times talking about Jeb in the context of "what if," if George hadn't gotten there first. Obviously he, I would think, spoiled any chances for Jeb ever getting there. Jeb might get to the Senate.

AC: It's being said down here that, with the impact of DeLay and Bush and Cornyn, even if some of these people survive politically themselves, Texas will be pushed down the rankings as a political state: The Texas political brand is damaged in the same way as the Republican political brand.

JD: Texas has a facility, it seems, to send in Republicans some remarkably, well, rather than calling them markedly incapable, let's call them marginally able. Phil Gramm has a great résumé but, as he's obviously shown, a totally tin ear. John Cornyn mystifies me. He looks like a senator, but he doesn't act like one. I find him fairly pathetic. Mortifying is a better word.

AC: That's the big race down here, because the Democrats have got Rick Noriega. If you look as his résumé, he's a Hispanic military man who served along the border and missed one Legislative session because he was teaching the police in Afghanistan.

JD: That's Cornyn's opponent? Any chance?

AC: A reasonable shot, but he's having trouble with fundraising.

JD: Do the Texas Democrats have a money problem? I thought Obama did well down here.

AC: They've always got a money problem relative to the Republicans.

JD: Because of the oil money.

AC: Your panel tomorrow is about the next presidency –

JD: And the law.

AC: And this seems like a presidency that hasn't simply flaunted the law but has just said, "We're not going to have any degree of oversight." Is it possible, with the precedent they have set, and how pliable both the Republican and Democratic Congresses have been, that we can have a presidency that abides by the law?

JD: If we can find some way to shoot some steroids into the spine of the Democratic Congress, that could happen. It's just amazing that the weakest president since Nixon can get through the amendments to the FISA bill he just did, when most Americans who know anything about it are horrified by it. It mystifies me. I haven't been back to Washington to delve into that subject, but I'm going back next week, and I'm going to try to find out what in the hell is going on. I happen to have as a member of Congress one of the few tigers, Henry Waxman. Whether he's in the minority or whether he's chair, he is a tiger, and he keeps them on the edge of their seat. He makes them answer letters, and if anyone will enforce subpoenas, he will. The House has got to do something because we know that the White House will not honor the statute that requires them to enforce contempt proceedings out of the House. Mukasey has said, quite remarkably, that he won't even take it to the grand jury and won't let the assistant attorney general take it to the grand jury. The House is without remedy; they cannot enforce their own power, and that's an inherent right of each of the branches, to enforce their ability to act in their given sphere. So I think that something will come of that, so people like Karl Rove are not going to be able to thumb their nose at the Congress and say, "I'm not even showing up." It's debilitating to the way the process works. There's no check.

AC: There's this fear of using impeachment too often, like you can't use it twice in a generation.

JD: I can give good intellectual reasons why not to go to impeachment. I can't give you any good political reasons why not to do it, and I can't give you any reason the Congress shouldn't do it. There's no chance they can impeach, there's no chance they can get a conviction, but there is a chance they can do what they did to Clinton, which is send a message that at least the majority of the Congress found his conduct objectionable. But we're going to see what unfolds next week with the Kucinich hearings. He's relentless, he's bright as hell, he was a very effective mayor before he went to Congress, he's a very good government official, but people don't want to look at him as presidential timbre, and they don't look upon him as a force to reckon with. But he is tenacious.

AC: Just to go back to the Republicans, and their stance on civil liberties has played with the libertarian wing of the party –

JD: I'm going to pull a Richard Nixon on you. Nixon, when he was curious as to how long he was going to go, would take his watch off, set it down, and look at it through the interview. I don't want my pipes to go, because I don't know how the sound system is here.

AC: They've been good at stapling their big tent together, but do you feel that the libertarian end of the party may say you guys have gone too far, and walk away?

JD: I haven't seen any signs that Ron Paul may walk, but he's certainly going to give the party trouble. He's having his own little gathering up in Minneapolis during the convention. A lot of his followers have been smitten with this Goldwater book I did because they see themselves in a similar light in bringing libertarian ideas back within the Republican Party. Bob Barr is going to be the Independent Party candidate, whatever that will mean. He'll draw a few votes, as I suspect [Ralph] Nader does, but the interesting thing is that they hurt McCain worse than they do Obama when they're added into the polling, which I can't explain.