Former Watergate Lawyers to Discuss Scandal’s Effects

More than a quarter-century after Watergate, former White House counsel John Dean and other lawyers linked to the scandal are gathering to discuss its impact on legal ethics.

Dean, now an investment banker in Beverly Hills, will be the opening speaker Saturday at a seminar at Hastings College of the Law about Watergate’s lessons for lawyers and the investigation of public corruption.

Dean, fired by President Richard Nixon in 1973, helped bring about Nixon’s resignation a year later with his testimony to a Senate committee about the president’s involvement in a cover-up. Dean recalled this week that the committee asked him to list everyone involved in Watergate, and he found that 21 people named on his list were lawyers.

He said some lawyers, such as Nixon, “justified their actions as being above the law.” Others “fell onto the wrong side simply from incompetence,” and a third group of lawyers got involved because of loyalty to Nixon.

The scandal started with a break-in at Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in June 1972 and led to gradually widening discovery of White House involvement. Nixon, warned by Dean in a secretly taped conversation that scandal-related activities were a “cancer on the presidency,” resigned as the House was preparing to impeach him.

Watergate prompted legal educators in California and other states to require students to take a course in legal ethics and to pass an ethics exam, in addition to the bar exam, before practicing law.

Another effect was the passage of a now-defunct law creating an independent prosecutor’s office to investigate corruption in the executive branch. Former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, whose investigation led to President Clinton’s impeachment, is among Saturday’s scheduled speakers.