John Dean Will be the Keynote Speaker at the Alaska Democratic Party Convention

John Dean is one of those few Americans who disprove F. Scott Fitzgerald's maxim that "there are no second acts in American lives."

He was Richard Nixon's White House Counsel from July 1970 to April 1973. He was described by the FBI as the "master manipulator" of the Watergate cover-up. When the lies and crimes began to catch up with Nixon's administration, Nixon's chief advisors, H. R. Haldeman and John Erlichman, as things began to unravel, decided to scapegoat Dean.

Dean then became a chief witness against Nixon's increasingly untenable position. Dean, like Haldeman and Erlichman and others in the administration, ended up doing prison time. Some of these crooks, like Attorney General John Mitchell disappeared entirely from public life. Charles Colson became a prison convert to Fundamentalist Christianity, which gave him a wedge into the GOP politics from the mid-80s to the present.

Dean's conversion was different. After his release from prison, he went into investment banking, until 2000, a good year to get out of that field. Since then, Dean has been writing about the series of constitutional and ethical crises the GOP and the Bush administration have subjected Americans to.

John Dean is a frequent contributor at the web site, Findlaw, where he writes about legal and illegal aspects of the Bush regime. He's written five books. The three most recent are among the most authoritative looks at how the Bush administration has hurt not just our country, but the world. Here's a quote from the 2004 YouTube below:

"Tony Blair's science advisor, when looking at the overwhelming evidence, has said - openly! - that George Bush in his policies, what he's doing to the globe and the earth will cause far more damage to the human species than all of the terrorists will cause us."




John Dean's appearances on blogs to promote his recent books have been very informative. I watched and read on October 14, 2007, as the blog firedoglake had him on for two hours to take comments. He ended up staying there until he had answered every question. It took him hours, but he did it.

The Alaska Democratic Party Convention will be held Memorial Day weekend at the Alaska State Fairgrounds in Palmer. John Dean will speak Saturday evening. More coming.

Special thanks should go to Gini King-Taylor who scored John Dean for us. Thanks, Gini.