John Dean Talks to Amy Davidson About Nixon and Trump

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2017

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Richard Nixon once told a young Donald Trump that he would be “a winner” if he chose to enter politics. The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson talks with John Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel who testified against Nixon during the Watergate hearings, about whether Trump can be seen as Nixon's political heir. The early days of Trump's Administration have been plagued by scandal–especially when it comes to questions about Cabinet members’ communications with Russian officials. Dean compares the situation to a secret effort by Richard Nixon—only recently documented by a historian—to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks, which the Johnson Administration pursued in 1968.“It's a very, very remarkable parallel. A curious parallel,” Dean said.

Dean is critical of the Trump Administration's handling of the F.B.I.’s investigation into the Administration’s alleged Russian connections. “If there's any lesson from Watergate, or from Iran-Contra, or the Lewinsky affair,” he says, “It is that if you don't have a problem, what you truly do is you say to the F.B.I. or whomever, ‘Come in and talk to my staff.'” He says that this is not how Trump officials are currently behaving. “Rather, they're trying to knock down press reports that are getting the various whiffs of these investigations and putting them out there. That's just not the way innocent people deal with these issues, I'm sorry!”

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1:12.2	I'm Dorothy Wickend. On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Amy Davidson
1:17.8	talks to John Dean, who served as White House counsel to President Nixon during the Watergate
1:23.1	years. He sees unsettling parallels between Nixon and President Trump.
1:31.0	December 21st, 1987.
1:34.5	Dear Donald, I did not see the program, but Mrs. Nixon told me that you were great on the Donahue show.
1:41.7	And as you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts
1:45.8	that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner. With warm regard sincerely,
1:53.0	Richard Nixon. That's a letter from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump that the new president
1:58.4	said he was going to hang in the White House.
2:06.0	It's not hard to find parallels between the two men, particularly the hatred of the news media and the so-called elites. But maybe Nixon's blessing was not such a good omen for Trump,
2:12.2	because the new administration right off the bat is engulfed by a scandal, inevitably nicknamed
2:17.4	Russia Gate, That's reminding
	...

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