This time his target is Bush

Striding across the lobby of the Burbank Hilton, John W. Dean III doesn’t look much like a wanted man, someone on the short list to become Republican Enemy No. 1.

The rimless glasses, blue sports coat and walking shoes appear more professorial than his political resume might indicate: former White House counsel alternately dismissed by various camps as a squealer, world-class snitch and chief whistle-blower to one of the most notorious burglaries in American history.

Three decades ago, Dean became the star witness in the Senate Watergate hearings, testifying that his boss, President Nixon, helped orchestrate the coverup of the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters on June 17, 1972.

The public rendering of White House secrets, after Dean had warned Nixon privately that his illegal actions had created a “cancer growing on the presidency,” sent Nixon spiraling toward his eventual resignation. It also forced Dean, who later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Watergate affair, to spend several nervous months in the federal witness protection program.

Now, at age 65, Dean is at it again. From his home in Beverly Hills, the writer and lecturer is shining a light on the closed-door doings of another president, George W. Bush. His bestselling new book, “Worse Than Watergate,” sets its sights on what Dean calls the Bush administration’s “Nixonian” record of obsessive secrecy, political stonewalling and intimidation of its enemies, including the press and whistle-blowers like himself.

While no conspiracy theorist, a still-cautious Dean admits to the occasional glance over his shoulder for any sign of Bush’s top political strategist, Karl Rove.

“Let me put it this way,” he says, carving into a chef’s salad at the hotel restaurant. “I didn’t write all I know about Karl Rove. One thing I do know is that he has eyes and ears all over the country. It’s part of an apparatus he’s spent a lifetime setting up. So it’s not in total jest when I say I live in fear of Karl Rove sleeper cells.”

Rove might have reason to get riled. In a fast-paced 253 pages, “Worse Than Watergate” catalogs the failings of an administration Dean says has created the most secretive presidency of his lifetime.

“Once ensconced in their offices at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” Dean writes in the book’s preface, “they quietly closed their doors, pulled the shades and began making themselves increasingly inaccessible to the media and Congress while demanding complete control over government information. Government under a virtual gag order became their standard operating procedure.”

Dean describes a deeply flawed Bush White House that he says “spends far more time crafting the president’s public image and working on the politics of reelection, than on truly addressing the business of the American people.”

He claims the administration has exploited the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks while sabotaging any efforts to reveal why the nation was so unprepared. He calls Bush the first president to start a war since James Polk led America into the Mexican-American conflict. Worse, he says, Bush lied to Congress in rationalizing the Iraq war, which Dean calls an impeachable offense.

Dean applies equal scrutiny to Vice President Dick Cheney, whom he calls a “co-president incognito” who “does not answer to Congress or the public.” Cheney’s biggest trick, he says, is “making George Bush wake up every morning and believe he’s the president.”

All that said, could any of the Bush administration’s foibles even come close to Watergate -- that gold standard of American political corruption?

“Well, there’s certainly going to war when you might not have had to go to war, and people are dying,” Dean says. “No one died as a result of Nixon’s so-called Watergate abuses.”

Dean’s book joins a crowded market of presidential tell-alls, including former Bush White House advisor Richard Clarke’s “Against All Enemies” and “Plan of Attack,” Bob Woodward’s examination of Bush’s tenacious plans to invade Iraq. “Worse Than Watergate” jumped to No. 1 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list upon its release earlier this month.

Bush officials bristle at its mention: “We don’t do book reviews from the White House,” said spokesman Ken Lisaius.

Adds Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson: “Mr. Dean should stick to writing about what he knows best, and that is the Nixon administration, not the Bush administration.”

Why, critics ask, trust a disgraced former Nixon insider who turned on his boss to save his own skin? And what does a 1970s political dinosaur have to tell us about today’s complicated world, anyway?

Plenty, say White House scholars. With books like “Blind Ambition,” “The Rehnquist Choice” and a new biography on former president Warren G. Harding, Dean has emerged as a formidable voice on the human failings within the halls of power.

“One cannot dismiss any book written by John Dean as simply the ranting and raving of someone seeking to get back into the limelight,” says John Robert Greene, a Nixon biographer and history professor at Cazenovia College in upstate New York.

“Dean knew that blowing the whistle on Nixon would send him to jail and at the very least would bring Nixon up on impeachment charges. Now he is positioning himself as a critic of this presidency. And I can’t think of anyone more qualified to be there.”

Dean insists he never did prison time following his conviction on obstruction of justice charges but was released from his U.S. Marshal supervision after 127 days that included his Watergate testimony.

Stanley Kutler, a constitutional law professor at the University of Wisconsin, who is considered among the nation’s top Watergate scholars, says Dean’s former entree to power provides him an academic perch from which to observe today’s White House: “If there is anyone besides Richard Nixon himself who will be remembered from that episode, it will be John Dean.

“He alerted us to the fact that the emperor was naked. What he’s doing today is calling attention to what he sees as the dangerous practices of secrecy on the part of government, practices that ultimately led to such wrongdoing as Watergate.

“I think the nation should listen to what John Dean has to say.”

Return to Washington

After Watergate, John Dean gladly dropped off the pulsing public radar screen. He moved to California, registered as a political independent and spent years working as a private investment banker.

But he always pledged to himself that he would return to writing at age 60. The opportunity came during the 1990s Whitewater hearings, when Dean became what he jokingly calls “an anchor buddy” -- a cable news legal commentator. He also began to write book reviews and columns for Salon and Findlaw.com, an Internet legal site where he is still published.

He returned to Washington to “climb back into the machine” of presidential politics. After so many years away, he found the nation’s capital a divisive war ground replete with 24/7 media coverage.

Still, the aura of place remained strangely alluring. When Dean returned to Beverly Hills, he focused more regularly on the utterings from the Bush White House.

Dean insists that he’s a political iconoclast who would have spoken out against similar abuses of any administration, Democrat or Republican.

“There was no epiphany,” he says of his Bush observations. “It just became evident to me that what I first thought was a mistake, the things they were saying and doing, was clearly a policy and I said, ‘Hey, this is troubling.’ ”

Like the rest of America, he closely watched how a newly elected president handled the Sept. 11 crisis. “At first, I thought we may have had another Abe Lincoln in this guy,” he recalls. “In the days after 9/11, Bush suddenly turned eloquent, stunningly so. When he gave his speech at the National Cathedral and before Congress, he had his act together.”

Then came what Bush critics call the bait-and-switch between America’s efforts to find Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and invading Iraq, not to mention the other Bush blockades to open government. And no one else was telling the story, Dean says.

Recalling the line by Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman when Dean considered going public about Nixon’s wrongdoings -- “John, be careful, once the toothpaste is out of the tube, you can’t get it back in” -- Dean went to work on Bush.

Beginning last spring, he spent nine months consulting sources, delving through public documents, watching what he calls the administration’s stonewalling and suppression of public records regarding issues of national security.

His conclusion? Dean thinks Bush should admit he made a mistake not preparing the nation for Sept. 11, just like Kennedy apologized for his role in the Bay of Pigs invasion and Reagan apologized for the Iran-Contra scandal.

The author says he’s been surprised by the reaction to his book. One conservative radio talk show host asked him why he would want to hurt the president. And he knows that there could be some hit pieces coming in the conservative press.

“People don’t like the truth when it is something less than what they expect of their leaders,” he says. “But criticism doesn’t trouble me in the slightest. You can’t be where I’ve been without having something of a rhinoceros hide. I’ve been attacked by the best in the business.”

For now, Dean is enjoying having a bestseller on the stands during the hurly-burly of a presidential election year. He considers it karmic justice after the fate of his Rehnquist book, which was published the day before the terrorist attacks.

As this student of the presidency casts about for his next book project, he has resigned himself to his return to the public eye. “I prefer anonymity,” he says. “I never sought fame or infamy. Life is a lot easier when you’re unrecognized.”

And he knows the old Watergate stigma will continue to follow him.

“I’ll always be pigeonholed for my relationship to Watergate,” he says. “I could come up with cold fusion and I’d still be remembered for Richard Nixon.”

And Dean is still recognized -- mostly by baby boomers who remember the testimony that electrified a nation, watching him on television back in the summer of 1973. Most of the public reaction has been good.

Unless you count the mother of one of his wife’s friends.

“She doesn’t want to see me or even meet me,” he says. “She still thinks Nixon could do no wrong. I guess she’s not interested in knowing the truth.”