Oh, this is rich. The right wing's attempt to rewrite the history of the Nixon era has reached its absurdist conclusion: A new book by James Rosen, a newsman for Fox News, claims that John Dean ordered the Watergate break-in.
Laughable. Absolutely laughable.
Everyone knows that Hillary Clinton did it.
2 comments:
I'm not so sure he's wrong. I was impressed back in the day by the Jim Hougan book on Watergate (Secret Agenda) and the Kolodny book (Silent Coup). Dean's denials and lawsuits notwithstanding. (However, what power would a WH Counsel have to order CREEP personnel to do anything?)
This Rosen guy seems to have legit credentials, not hack credentials (from his bio at FNC):
Before joining FOX News, Rosen worked as a researcher to CBS News anchor and managing editor Dan Rather. Prior to CBS News, he served as an associate producer at WWOR-TV in New York; as a field and control room producer at NY-1 News, also in New York; as an anchor/reporter for WREX-TV (NBC) in Rockford, Illinois; and as an anchor-reporter for News12/The Bronx.
Rosen's forthcoming book, "The Strong Man: John Mitchell, Nixon and Watergate," will be published by Doubleday in spring 2008. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The New York Post, New York Newsday, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, National Review, The Weekly Standard, the American Bar Association Journal, and the Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law.
Born in Brooklyn, Rosen earned his bachelor's degree in political science from The Johns Hopkins University and his master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
...sofla
Hougan's book is great. The Colodny/Gettlin book is crap, or half-crap. There's no smack about Dean in Hougan's book. I know that Jim Hougan has privately denigrated "Silent Coup" but has not complained about it in public.
The basic thesis about Maureen Dean was exploded by Anthony Summers in his Nixon bio. Frustratingly, he details his research in the endnotes. (That's a book where the notes are a lot more interesting than the text.)
Dean tells the story at much greater length in the opening of "Conservatives Without Conscience." He's an interested party, but it's a convincing account. Basically, the only source for everything in Silent Coup is one guy who is not very credible.
From Wikipedia...
"In the preface to his 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience, Dean strongly denied Colodny's theory, pointing out that the Colodny's chief source (Phillip Mackin Bailley) had been in and out of mental institutions. Dean settled the defamation suit against Colodny and his publisher, St. Martin's Press, on terms which Dean stated in the book's preface he could not divulge under the terms of the settlement, other than stating that "the Deans were satisfied." In the footnote to this portion of the preface, Dean stated that the federal judge handling the case forced a settlement with Liddy."
There is some interesting stuff in that book, especially about the Moorer affair.
From what I can gather from preliminary reports, the Rosen thing may similarly be based on one or two sources.
It was Colson, not Dean.
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