After the Fall
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
After the Fall Lost Honor By John Dean Stratford Press. 370pp. $15.95. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Author, "A Better World" Readers who enjoyed John Dean's first book, Blind Ambition, will...
...A radio program that was carried by 85 stations failed to attract enough sponsors to survive...
...For one thing, he appears to have written it without much help...
...We were main-lining with a couple of mind-blowers at least every 24 hours...
...To the extent that Lost Honor has a theme it concerns Dean's efforts to launch a new career...
...Most of all, though, Lost Honor fails for the simple reason that nothing of real interest has happened to Dean since he left prison...
...There is political life after Nixon, but barely...
...No one else at the center realized that salvation, or at least redemption, could only be gained by confessing to every misdeed on demand...
...Nixon-haters are similarly wistful...
...In the absence of proof, Dean tries to establish that Haig alone had all the information?sometimes disinformation—that was passed on to reporter Robert Woodward...
...While we are reassured to learn that he will never starve, his various enterprises cannot engage the reader nearly as much as they do the author...
...Watergate was the punishment for a lifetime of political sins, hypocrisy and bad taste...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Author, "A Better World" Readers who enjoyed John Dean's first book, Blind Ambition, will find his latest disappointing...
...Journalism proved a dead end...
...Liberals have despised Nixon since the 1940s, for his campaigns against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Douglas, for serving on huac, for the Checkers speech, for the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, for Spiro Agnew and much, much more...
...Now a lot of us just wander around this town looking for a fix, and end up going back to our offices and sniffing glue pots, trying to patch together something that will work...
...Besides, Haig had no motive...
...His power was based solely on his relationship to Richard Nixon, who had raised him up from obscurity...
...Unhappily, as other reviewers have pointed out, no direct evidence implicates Haig...
...No wonder we prefer the exciting past—when evil flourished and was struck down—to the grim, uncertain present...
...On a visit to Washington after his fall Dean met John Lindsay of Newsweek, who told him that the press "got hooked on Watergate, like junkies...
...You guys really treated us right...
...we didn't have Nixon to kick around anymore, to our everlasting regret...
...Few, if any, Watergate conspirators knew as much about the coverup as he did...
...That so meager a book was published testifies to hopes that an appetite lingers on for the leftover bits and pieces of Watergate...
...So far his principal success has been in business...
...It will take much more than Dean offers to persuade anyone except Haig's worst enemies that the General betrayed Nixon...
...The result was Dean's astonishing testimony, followed by the best memoir by any major figure in the conspiracy...
...Owing all to the President, Haig did everything possible to save him as long as hope remained, or so we have been led to believe by press coverage of Nixon's last days in office...
...even remembered conversations, key elements then and now, sound more forced and awkward...
...Albeit suggestive, this proves nothing...
...for Nixon's enemies the drama was the thrill of a lifetime...
...Dean knows this, so he concludes Lost Honor with his search for Deep Throat, the mysterious informant who supplied the Washington Post with news and gossip during Watergate...
...Thanks to them Blind Ambition is much better as literature, so to speak, than its slack, carelessly written and meandering successor...
...This is a habit we must try to outgrow, however, as John Dean has unwittingly demonstrated...
...Then it was over...
...Indeed, millions never wanted to see the sorry spectacle end...
...By playing Deep Throat, Haig would have been undermining his measures as the President's right arm and undercutting his own career to boot...
...Blind Ambition seized the reader's attention because the former White House counsel had a great story to tell...
...He believes that Alexander M. Haig Jr., at the time Nixon's chief of staff, was the conduit...
...He is mechanically adept and resourceful, he says, still able to do certain kinds of legal work and turn a profit in the commercial world...
...His version of Watergate probably was not the work of a ghostwriter, as Nixon loyalists would have it, but (as he explains here) he had the aid of a brilliant editor at Simon & Schuster, plus a professional writer...
Vol. 66 • February 1983 • No. 3
