INSIGHT MAGAZINE: Who ordered the Watergate break-ins and what were the
burglars hoping to find? Most historians thought these questions were
answered a long time ago, but for convicted Watergate conspirators John Dean
and G. Gordon Liddy the issue is far from resolved. The two have been
fighting an eight-year legal battle - rife with incendiary charges of sex,
lies and cover-ups - hoping to prove their versions of what happened. It's a
fight that seemed to end in June when a federal district court dismissed the
lawsuit by mutual agreement, leaving Dean and Liddy to battle it out in the
court of public opinion. The dispute centers on comments Liddy made in
speeches and on his nationally syndicated radio program in which he accused
Dean of masterminding the Watergate break-ins and of lying under oath when
he testified about the affair. Also at issue are Liddy's claims that Dean's
alleged lies sent innocent people to jail, as well as his claim that Dean's
wife, Maureen, was linked to a call-girl ring. The charges led the Deans to
file a defamation lawsuit against Liddy, whose comments they claim were
false and malicious and which they say hurt Maureen Dean's book sales and
caused her intense emotional suffering. Liddy isn't the first to make
sensational claims about the Deans. Many of his accusations are part of a
broader look at the 1972 Watergate break-ins advanced by Len Colodny and
Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup, a best-selling book on Watergate. The Deans
also sued Colodny but dropped the case when Colodny's libel insurance
company paid both Colodny and Dean to walk away from the case. Silent Coup
attacks the conventional understanding of Watergate, based on the work of
Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in which Attorney
General John R. Mitchell, manager of Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-elect
the President, ordered the break-ins. Instead, the book claims, it was John
Dean who ordered the burglary, allegedly because he knew of a call-girl ring
operating out of the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, headquarters and
hoped the break-ins would uncover dirt on the Democrats.
http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200008218.shtml
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