 Good evening. Welcome back to the National Archives. Yes! We are so psyched to be here, and applause goes to all of you for venturing out on a DC really, really hot day. So thank you for coming to this special event tonight. My name is Miriam Kleiman. I'm with the Office of Public Affairs, and I can't tell you how thrilled we are. To be here to welcome you back to see a packed crowd for this really, really special event. Tonight you are in for a treat, a sneak peek of the premiere episode of CNN's new original series, Watergate Blueprint for a Scandal. Followed by what's sure to be a fascinating conversation between two legends, Watergate legend John Dean and CNN legend Jim Acosta. Jim, you are always welcome here. Your press credentials are always accepted here. I wasn't sure that would go over, so thank you. Tonight is very historic for a few reasons. It is, as we discussed our first time back since the pandemic, and what I should share is one of our last events. Pre-pandemic was also the launch of a CNN original series, The Race for the White House. So how lovely that we bookend this pandemic with CNN. Tonight we mark the 50th anniversary of Watergate and another important anniversary. On this day in 1980, any guesses? CNN was founded in Atlanta. So happy anniversary. Thank you maybe for the 24-hour news cycle, I'm not sure. But certainly thank you for transforming news. We have two great upcoming book talks that will be hybrid both in person and on the National Archives YouTube channel that many of you have followed for two years. On Tuesday, June 7th at 1pm Eastern, reporter Tom Friedman joins author Michael Mandelbaum to discuss Mandelbaum's book, The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy. Week Power, Great Power, Super Power, and Hyper Power. On Wednesday, June 15th at 1pm Eastern, Ben Reigns discusses his book, The Last Slave Ship, the true story of how the clotilda was found, her descendants, and an extraordinary reckoning. Learn more about these and other great upcoming programs at archives.gov. Now back to tonight's event. Produced by Herzog & Company, Watergate Blueprint for a Scandal is a great behind-the-scenes look at Nixon's inner circle. John Dean, who we are honored to have join us tonight. Former White House Counsel to President Nixon divulges more than ever before and more than he could under oath about the back-pedaling and back-stabbing that took place. He and others share the secret workings of the committee to re-elect the president that led to the unraveling of Nixon presidency and the biggest presidential scandal of the 20th century. Of course, we have many national, so fans, he was done research at the National Archives. Okay, a number of you, great and certainly things from the National Archives were used tonight, at least I hope so. The National Archives holds Watergate records and a lot of them. We've got the lockpicks, the screwdrivers, the plastic gloves, the tapes, both from the White House and from the hearings. We have the Watergate Room 214 room key, the chapstick microphones, Barker's address book with the HH smoking gun, the security log, and literally millions of pages from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. Many of these records are now online for the first time. I can't wait to see this episode and hear this conversation. Thank you again for coming and I am pleased to introduce the recent Emmy Award-winning, Lyle Gam, Senior Vice President of Current Programming, CNN Original Series, and Executive Producer of Watergate Blueprint for a Scandal. Hi everyone, good evening. Thanks so much, Miriam. On behalf of everyone at CNN, we're thrilled to be back in Washington D.C. to share the first episode of Watergate Blueprint for a Scandal. When we first began thinking about the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, we knew that there was one voice who was central to the story and could take our understanding of this moment to a whole new level. And of course, that voice was John Deans. Throughout the series, he not only leads a step-by-step through the events of the Nixon White House, but he also shines a bright light on why this moment has continued to resonate for so many years and is still so important today. John, as Miriam mentioned, John is here with us tonight. We're thrilled to have him. And after the screening, he'll be in conversation with our CNN anchor, Jim Acosta. So thank you both for joining. I just also want to quickly thank Mark Herzog, an incredible team at Herzog & Company, particularly Dominique Hoffman, the showrunner for producing this incredible series. In addition, I just want to thank Miriam again and Tom and everyone at the National Archives for their partnership. Please, please, please enjoy the evening. Thank you so much for coming out. And starting this Sunday, June 5th, you'll be able to enjoy all new episodes on CNN. Thanks again. Enjoy the screening. Here's the man himself, John Deans. He lives to tell the tale. I'm, of course, Jim Acosta with CNN, and thanks everybody for coming here tonight. I just want to get right into this conversation. Let me tell you a story first about this. There's a Watergate connection to this facility. Jack Caulfield, who you met on the screen, came to my office probably in December of 1971, right after Gordon Liddy had been hired by the re-election committee. And he said, John, I just was over at the archives. They arranged for us to see an amazing movie. I said, what was it? He said, Lenny Reiffenstahl's Triumph of the Will. And I said, really? That's quite a film. He said, let me tell you what, I heard two advancement lean over each other and say, they said, this is the plan maybe for the second term. Wow. Incredible. So Liddy had assembled a group, got a hold of the archives. They had the film. And I believe this might have been the facility they brought maybe a dozen or more. I wasn't invited for some reason. I can imagine. And John, I mean, let's just start off the discussion with a general question. How did this project come about? Because you've been telling the story of Watergate for, I guess, almost 50 years now. How did this particular film project come about? Why do you think it's so important? I don't know what your contract looks like at CNN. But mine, I have to attach a document of the projects as a contributor I'm working on. One I said, we're approaching the 50th anniversary. This was maybe five years ago. And so somebody watched that and stayed on my attachment to my contract. And at some stage they said, you know, we're getting very close. So do you have any ideas? I said, matter of fact, I do. I've collected maybe 50, 60 untold stories I've gathered over the years that I think would make a pretty good film. So that was the original pitch. I didn't pitch what ended up being made, but I think it's much better than what I had. Mine assumed a level of sophistication that I really don't think exists anymore. Whereas this goes back to the core story. I learned what an executive producer is. He calls friends and gets them to participate in the movie. One of them, David Dorson here I called. And I had really very little input in the content. They treated me more like a subject of the film. So some of this material I have seen for the first time and they keep adding to it as they polish it. I have so many questions about this. I grew up in this area and so I would always hear from time to time stories about the Watergate burglary. I had the Washington Post on my front doorstep every day. My mom would read it cover to cover. But the thing that jumps out to me throughout this part one is, first of all, how young you are, 31 years old, and how you talk about being smitten with Washington because that's sort of how I view our nation's capital having grown up around here. This is my home and I love D.C. But it sounds as though you got a rude awakening pretty quick. I guess through this saga that you went through. I had worked on Capitol Hill as a committee council. I had worked at the Department of Justice where it's really a wonderful department, very professional. Went to the White House and found that Klein Veins was right in his assessment. And he wasn't a White House favorite either. I might say once I got on the inside. But the Scanlon's monthly memo that I shared with the producers really was an eye-opener. And as I say, Caulfield handled that. I don't know whatever became of it. A fellow named Robert Shear, who teaches at USC where I was for years a visiting scholar, said, I think you started a tax audit on me. I said, I didn't have any money so there was nothing to get. And I think what shocked the audience and I wanted to watch this in the room with everybody because I wanted to hear the gasps and people's reactions to what was being disclosed in this first part. And some of the moments involving G. Gordon-Liddy and some of the things that you were talking about about plots to fire bomb the Brookings Institution. You could hear people in the audience gasp and so on. But I mean, this shows you the level that they were willing to go to hold on to power. You know, Brookings has never thanked me. Is that right? They should. You stopped it. I did. Yeah. I raised that once with an interim head of Brookings. He said, we'll take care of that. Next thing I know, he's at the Miller Center. But anyway, the whole drill, I have this rich archive that I let the producer in. Let me give credit also where credit is due. When this project first got started internally at CNN talking to them, and they said, listen, we really need to get a couple, one or more professional filmmakers in on this project. And earlier, I think, the better. And he said, you've worked, I know, with left-right in New York. You've worked with Herzog in Los Angeles. He said, what's your choice? And I said, well, Herzog's close by, and I also have some tender feelings for them for reasons that are more complex than we need to get into tonight. But I realized they're real filmmakers. I'd also worked with them on their series they did for CNN on the 60s, 70s, 80s. It's a wonderful series that gets replayed from time to time. But anyway, Mark, are you here? There is the leader of the organization. And he ran in front of me on Zoom four people after sending me resumes as to who would be qualified. All of them were extremely qualified. And I live in a small one industry town, Beverly Hills. So I was able to pick up the phone and call around and get some background on each of them. And he said, which one do you want to select? I didn't really know it was going to be my selection. It was a very difficult selection. But I had said I was most important to me was getting it done on a very short fuse by the time all of the cogitation and permutations and considerations that narrowed it down to what they did want. So I selected Dominique Hoffman. And the reason I selected her a friend of mine who knew Dominique Wells said, John, if you want this project done, just think of her first name. And I guess the question I have. I'll let you all think about that. Why is this story so relevant now? Oh boy. You know I was going to go there eventually. Yeah, I did. You did put the clip in the beginning of this. They did. In fact, they've done it. You'll see as the series unfolds, it very nicely slices in today with what happened yesterday. And I think it's impossible to look at Watergate today without calculating in your thinking the Trump administration. And I think that's done very nicely. And then in the last episode, it really surfaces and we examine it very closely. But the timing couldn't be more perfect with the January 6 committee about the launch hearings. Incidentally, the Watergate hearings, when they first opened in May of 73, that right, David, they were something of a bust. They really were not very successful because the way they had assembled those hearings is they put together very low level staff that didn't know much, but could explain organizational things. And it was pretty boring for a lot of people, so it didn't catch a lot of attention. But then it did get going. Well, the thing that I keep coming back to as I watched this first part was how you were sort of smack dab in the middle of all of these schemes. You know, they would come to you and say, we want to do this and we want to do that. And you would say, that's not legal. You can't do this. You can't do that. And it reminded me of my days covering the Trump White House because you would talk to aides and officials from time to time. In the beginning years of the administration, they would say, oh, don't worry about that, Jim. It's just an act. When he says these things, he doesn't mean it and so on. And as, of course, we found out towards, you know, year three and year four, he meant a lot of these things. And he did want to do things that were obviously not consistent with the law. Did you have that understatement of the year? But did you have that feeling from time to time that, okay, maybe I shouldn't take this so seriously? Maybe they're just spitballing and saying a bunch of crazy stuff and it's not really going to actually be put into action. There's a line that I used in the filming that is something that I thought about over and over and over. And I had nobody to call to check. It was maybe this is the way it's played in the big leagues. Over the years, I have researched that. I have looked to how it's played in the big leagues. The way Nixon played it, while you can find examples in prior presidencies, you can't find anybody who made it standard operating procedure until we got to the Trump years, where either for lack of knowledge or disposition, just ignoring the rules became the norm. It was something of an exception but a steady procedure in the Nixon White House. And it seems as though, and this is just going off of my understanding of Watergate and the history and watching this first episode, is that you can't blame this on AIDS working for the president. This was a culture that was set top-down. Well, blame is a tough word. And I've tried to, in trying to understand Watergate, and this is really deep in the weeds when you try to understand, you know, who did what and why. But I have looked at that. And I think the short answer to that is the reason that Nixon didn't pardon Haldeman and Ehrlichman, because he realized they'd burned him. They didn't tell him a lot. And they did things in his name. And that really became apparent to me. Nobody has used the National Archives more than years truly. Four and a half years of transcribing tapes when I started on a book called The Nixon Defense. I thought I could pluck a few tapes here or there and show how silly his defense was that he didn't know anything about Watergate or the cover-up until I had told him in March of 1973 there was a cancer on his presidency. I just knew that was absurd. I ended up, I had to catalog and then transcribe. There were maybe three or four hundred transcripts, but there were a thousand conversations. I put together a team of grad students and we tackled them all. It took four and a half years. I also gave an opening credit in the book to everybody in the National Archives up to that point who'd worked on the tapes, because they have done Yeoman's work. They are very difficult to hear. I'm the exception to the rule. For some reason when I walked in whatever office I was talking with him, the little hidden microphone was screwed right into the desk underneath me. So my voice is very, thank God actually, that's good. You're there for the record. I'm there for the record and only ashamed of one thing I told him, which I think is an episode three. Okay, well, we won't give that spoiler away, but let's talk about something that I find to be relevant today also, and that is the courage that you displayed by eventually coming forward as a senior member of the Nixon administration to blow the whistle on Richard Nixon and what was taking place. Maybe you'll take issue with the word courage and so on, but one of the things that I have a problem with these days is that you're seeing these officials, oh, they finally come forward when they have a book coming out and that sort of thing. And I could run through names and all that, but I won't do that. And perhaps we'll see some of that during these upcoming January 6 hearings, where you'll see Trump administration officials come forward. But since we know the story of John Dean talking about a cancer being on the presidency, testifying during the Watergate hearings, how did you come to that moment? That's part of the story. Can you give us a little bit of a hint? Because it is something that fascinates me. Yes. What happens is by the time I come forward to testify, I have tried to, Nixon appreciates, we learned from his memoirs and later tapes, he appreciates I tried to warn him that when I became, let me back up, when I became White House counsel, I knew I wasn't getting the job, I was getting the title and it was worth it at 31. I knew that John Ehrlichman would remain his counsel and that pretty much the way it was. I got all, my office did all the grunt work and it's pretty massive. When you look at the shelf space and the archives, so we had a lot of work to do, but we, Nixon remained, he took his legal advice from John Ehrlichman to the extent he'd discussed anything legal with Ehrlichman. So I got the title, I have very few dealings with him one-on-one until very late. In February 27 of 1973 is my second, it's my first one-on-one, it's my second one without Haldeman there meeting with him. I will have 37 meetings with him. 35 of them are recorded. Wow. There you go. And so I know exactly how it unfolded. I didn't know who he was, he didn't know who I was. He wrote nice things about me and his diaries. So like on March 21, after I tell him, I try to convince him that he's got to end the cover-up. He said nothing much happened today except Dean came in with that cancer on the presidency thing. So he did remember that. But by the time I'm testifying, it's clear they're trying to set me up as a scapegoat and I speak to them through the front page of the newspapers by sending messages to the papers. And you felt at that point you had to do this for the sake of your own survival. It's everybody's survival. I'm worried about the presidency. I'm worried about, you know, they're trying to nail me for things that I have no responsibility for. That would happen for years. There's a tape I never put in my book that is one of Nixon's first conversations with Al Haig when Al Haig becomes chief of staff. And he said, Haig, Dean is the number one enemy. We've got to destroy him. And he goes on at some length and Haig says, absolutely, we'll do that. And Haig would plant stories of things, you know, in foreign affairs. I had no idea about, so I had about a few of those down over the years, too. Did this country learn its lessons from Watergate? Ooh. For about 10 years, Watergate had a real impact. There was something called post-Watergate morality that prevailed for about 10 years. Several professions were changed by Watergate. Journalism, your business. Before Watergate, presidents were pretty much assumed to be given the benefit of the doubt that they were doing the right thing. Post-Watergate, it's pretty much assumed they're doing the wrong thing and they better prove how they got it right. So that's a major shift in coverage of that high office. Another big change was on the legal profession in working on that Nixon defense book. I kept hearing these conversations, I said, you know, lawyers ought to hear these and put together something called a continuing legal education program for lawyers. My legal education partner is sitting out here. We do three hours, so an hour and a half is pretty well split up between us. And what do you hope to see in light of everything that we've been through with Watergate and what we're going to see in the rest of this series? What do you hope to see during the January 6 hearings? What do you think we'll see? I think it'll start slow. I think that you really can only stage these hearings to a degree. It'll be the unexpected and it will be, my hope is that they have witnesses who have quietly come forward and are ready to tell us things we need to know. For example, there is no attorney. Nixon did not even attempt to invoke the attorney-client privilege with me. He had his new counsel at that time, Len Garment, just send a letter waving it, a couple paragraphs. And there really is no privilege for criminal behavior. And I think that the lawyers today are much more sophisticated about those things and I'll be deeply disappointed if one or more lawyer doesn't come forward in these hearings and say, here's the way it unfolded. Why? Because I think there's a special duty for lawyers to honor the rule of law, to talk about democracy. We've had some Chief Justice, excuse me, we've had some justices who've talked about this subject over the years, the special responsibility. It's just unique with the bar and the bench that they take concern about democracy and as the fourth session of this documentary will show, there's pretty widespread concern about people who thought about it, about what's going to happen to our democracy if we don't take more attention to it. I'm glad you mentioned that because I wanted to ask you, did you worry about the state of American democracy post-Watergate? Or do you worry more about it now? I worry much more about it now. During Watergate, there was never a moment that I really thought there was a constitutional crisis. The potential one was if Nixon said, no, I'm an equal authority to the Supreme Court, my tapes are my tapes and I'm not turning them over and making them public, I'm not giving them to a grand jury. These are unique documents and this is an exception to the rule of all kinds of arguments he might have made. When we passed that moment, I not only was pretty much convinced that the presidency was going to end, maybe sooner than later, I realized there was no crisis. From the moment Donald Trump was nominated, I had a knot that grew in my stomach just tighter and tighter. When he left, it loosened up. The fact that the Republican Party has picked up a lot of this as their norm is one of the reasons I'm writing books about authoritarianism. I did a book in 2007. I did my most recent, the title self-explanatory, authoritarian nightmare, Trump and his followers. If we don't learn the lesson. Democracy is in trouble. It doesn't function well under authoritarian rule. After folks watch the final episode of your terrific series here, do you think that people will have a better sense that this is something we've got to take better care of? When this was started, January 6 was not on my mind as the Trump presidency was on my mind though. The aftermath, what we would do next and where we would go, I thought most people don't understand Watergate even today. They have very little knowledge. That's why this isn't in the weeds of Watergate. It's broad brush. It's some of it's really hilarious today. It's just remarkable at the bungling and for the cover-up as well as for the break-in. I mean, this is amateur hour. It's incredible. G. Gordon-Liddy actually said to you, if you need to take me out, do it on a street corner, not at my house. Right. Incredible. This is somebody who used to have a radio show in your Washington for all the native Washingtonians who know that. I think that was another mistake. Yeah. It was another mistake. Yeah. Well, John Dean, this was a terrific conversation. Anything else you want to say? Anything else you want to relate to John? I think people will, as well as you may or may not know Watergate, if you don't know it, you'll certainly understand it's just from this series. I think Domini and Mark's Company did a terrific job taking a very complex story and making it very interesting, fast-moving. And I'm appreciative that I had the pleasure to work with them. Yeah. So I think it's a good story and people will enjoy it. And I think the timing is fortunate because of what's happening with the January 6th Committee. Yeah. There are people who are capable of this kind of stuff back then. It stands to reason. They're still here. They're still here. They're still around. There are more of them. There are more of them. John Dean, thank you very much. Audience, thank you for coming out. Please watch Sunday, June 5th, 9 o'clock. John Dean, thank you. Great talking.