Recent John Dean Commentaries

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Loyalty’s Reckoning
On Christmas Eve, 1974, John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon, was sitting in Fort Holabird prison in Baltimore, Maryland, talking to a Mafia guy. “Let me ask you something, if you don’t mind. You look a little bit wet behind the ears to be the President’s lawyer. How’d you get there so young? Your old man put in...
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October 10, 2024
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Dark Times: Past and Present – From McCarthy to Watergate
“The blacklist was a time of evil… [Looking] back on this time…it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims.” – Dalton Trumbo, Laurel Award acceptance speech delivered to the Writers Guild of America West, April 1970. Note: I will be live-streaming, @jimlichtman, on the January 6...
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June 14, 2022
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Our Last Hope
Sitting before the Senate Watergate hearings on June 25, 1973, former counsel to Richard Nixon, John Dean, described a meeting with the president. “I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.” In our current context, the president...
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September 10, 2020
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The Mueller Report, Conclusion
An ABC News/Washington Post poll on the Mueller report (Apr. 26), found that 58 percent of those polled believe that Trump did not tell the truth about the investigation. A slimmer margin, (47 percent vs. 41 percent), believe the President obstructed justice. And 56 percent believe that Congress should not begin impeachment proceedings. Nonetheless, 31 percent believe the report “Cleared...
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May 1, 2019

Read Some of the Most Recent Articles
The Latest... And Often Greatest
Dispatches From the Front
Let me get this straight: … the Senate will vote to approve a woman with ties to authoritarian leaders, a man who has pushed vaccine...
Godfather, Part Now
“I don’t feel I have to wipe everyone out, Tom, just my enemies.”—Michael Corleone, The Godfather Note: I must pause my earlier commentary suggesting how...
The Political System Explained (from the opening of my doctoral thesis)
(Note: this is a rough draft and still undergoing revisions.) Welcome, esteemed colleagues, to a comprehensive exploration of one of the most perplexing and confounding...
Something Like a War
I’ve been revisiting Ken Burns’ series on the history of baseball, and it sparked some interesting comparisons to a subject that headlines the news daily....
Descaling Our Psyches
I recently descaled my espresso machine—removed the limescale buildup that hinders efficiency. How might we descale the returning president from our psyches? Donald Trump has...
Foreshadowing What’s to Come
After learning that one of Donald Trump’s first actions as president pardoned nearly all of the 1,600 January 6, defendants, police officer, Michael Fanone–who was...