Book
Review:
Worse
Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush
By John W. Dean
Little Brown, $22.95, 253 pages
Reviewed
by David McNair
06/07/04
Joining
the growing line-up of "Bush Bashing Books" on the best-seller
lists, which now include Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, Richard
Clarke’s Against All Enemies, Craig Unger’s House
of Bush, House of Saud, and Kevin Phillip’s American Dynasty,
is the one with perhaps the most direct and damning title: John Dean’s
Worse than Watergate. As far as trends in book publishing go, it couldn’t
look much worse for the Bush Administration. So much popular literature
so critical of a sitting President’s transgressions or revealing
of his hidden agendas (and written by respected authors largely beyond
reproach) would seem to signal a tragic Nixonian end. If it weren’t
for the fact that most Americans don’t read books and that politics
has become a reality TV show that most Americans are content to sit back
and watch, there just might be something for Bush and Cheney to worry
about. Alas, we live in an alternate reality since 9/11, where books indicting
our leaders appear before actual indictments; where reasons for going
to war are debated after we’ve gone to war because the reasons
we originally debated are no longer reasons; a world where absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence; where missions are declared accomplished
when they have just begun; where so many questions go merrily unasked
and unanswered; and where the truth is a drifter down on his luck who’s
beginning to doubt he’ll ever come out in the end.
Into this
morass steps John Dean, whose authority to discuss the ill effects of
secrecy in government few would question. As the former council to the
President in the Nixon Administration, Dean was at the red-hot center
of the Watergate scandal, serving as a principal witness in the hearings
that led to Nixon’s historic resignation and doing time in jail for
his involvement. Dean famously warned Nixon that the lies and cover-ups
surrounding the Watergate break-in were forming a "cancer on the
Presidency." Of course, when Dean went public with this information,
the Nixon White House turned on him and called him a liar. But when the
Nixon tapes were released, Dean was caught telling the truth.
Now, over
thirty years later, Dean-the-political-pundit has gone public with another
warning; this time to the Bush Administration. However, in Worse than
Watergate, Dean writes with such urgency and indignation about the
Bush-Cheney Administration’s abuse of power—and how they have
deliberately chosen secrecy as a political tool and ignored the lessons
of Watergate—that it becomes much more than a simple alert. As Dean
himself says about the process of writing the book:
No
longer was I writing a warning, but rather an indictment, for I could
not write and publish fast enough to get in front of the abuses of power
and the emerging ends-justify-the-means mentality, and even if I could
have, it would not have made any difference, for they understood exactly
what they were doing and why…. I’ve been watching all the elements
fall into place for two possible political catastrophes, one that will
take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon and the other, far more disquieting,
will take the air out of democracy.
What follows
is a detailed summary and analysis of Bush-Cheney shenanigans (most of
which will be familiar to anyone who has had the time or inclination to
follow them closely) seen through the eyes of a man clearly haunted by
his involvement in Watergate and personally offended by the Administration’s
use of secrecy and stonewalling. Strong statements like the one above
appear frequently in Worse than Watergate, giving the reader the
impression that Dean just can’t believe how the Bush-Cheney Administration
has gotten away with so much. "Because of Watergate," Dean says,
"no president has been so foolhardy as to openly initiate a program
like Nixon’s to screw those who he or his top aides are unhappy with
and to blatantly help friends—that is, until the Bush II Administration."
In dozens
of short sub-chapters with titles like Bush’s Hidden Background,
Cheney’s Health Secrets, The Cheney/Wolfowitz World Dominance
Philosophy, Deceiving Congress—An Impeachable Offense,
and The Evils of Excessive Secrecy, Dean holds forth like a prosecutor
listing the evidence against a defendant in his closing arguments to the
jury, never straying too far from his thesis (the Bush-Cheney White House
is obsessed with secrecy, secrecy is bad and leads to your undoing; I
should know), never offering too deep an analysis, just piling on the
incriminating evidence and making direct, emotional appeals. For example,
after detailing the controversy surrounding Cheney’s involvement
with Halliburton, Dean says flatly, "What does Cheney have to say
about all this? Nothing. To paraphrase Nixon, Cheney doesn’t give
a s***, so he’s just going to keep on stonewalling."
While it
might be true that the Bush Administration has exercised its power in
ways the Nixon White House only dreamed of, it’s also true that the
Bush Administration has been the first to admit it, albeit indirectly.
The U.S. Supreme Court case surrounding Cheney’s Energy Task Force
is before the High Court because Cheney and his lawyers have argued that
secrecy is a necessary tool of government on the executive level. When
asked to appear before the 9/11 Commission, Bush and Cheney called the
shots, avoiding public testimony by meeting with Senators in private at
the Oval Office.
A point
to make here is that Dean has no real inside information; most, if not
all, of his sources are previously published articles and documents that
can be easily found on the Internet. As a consequence, much of Dean’s
constant admonishments and evidence of stealth activity will merely point
out the obvious past for those who have followed current events closely.
Still, Dean makes a compelling case against the Bush-Cheney White House
simply by organizing the facts and the buried storylines that expose their
hidden agendas. Of course, it’s sad that so few Americans bother
doing this for themselves, content instead to ignore, rationalize, or
passively consume the often overwhelming evidence of government corruption
and greed. Hopefully, Dean’s Worse than Watergate can serve
as a handbook for those who have not been concerned enough with the health
of our democracy to do something about it.
