The Nation: Drive to Discredit Dean

The White House-inspired campaign to discredit President Nixon's chief Watergate accuser, former White House Counsel John Dean, continued last week. But the special prosecutor's staff took the unusual step of defending Dean's credibility in a public federal court hearing in Washington.

The major element in the anti-Dean drive has been selective leaks of summaries prepared by the White House of Watergate-related conversations between Dean and President Nixon. After looking at them, Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott insisted that they exonerate Nixon on some aspects of Watergate, presumably the cover-up of the origins of the wiretap and burglary at Democratic National Headquarters. Scott said that they also provide reasons for charging Dean with perjury in his Senate Watergate hearings testimony Last week Columnist Jack Anderson printed some excerpts from the White House summary of a March 21, 1973, Nixon-Dean talk. The summary, Anderson reported, supports the President's version of the conversation.

Also last week, Egil Krogh Jr., the head of Nixon's White House plumbers unit who pleaded guilty in the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, appeared on CBS-TV'S 60 Minutes news program. He claimed that a conversation of his own with Dean on March 20, 1973, casts a shadow on Dean's public testimony. CBS's Mike Wallace interpreted this to mean that Dean had committed perjury, but Krogh would not agree to that term.

The doubts about Dean's credibility seem at least partially based on a misunderstanding of his Senate testimony Krogh, Scott and Anderson all implied that Dean had claimed that Nixon was fully aware of all aspects of the cover-up before March 21, 1973. On that date, both the President and Dean agree, Dean outlined the conspiracy in detail. By this reasoning, also advanced by the White House, if Nixon expressed great surprise about Dean's revelations on March 21, Dean must be in error about any previous knowledge by Nixon.

Thus Krogh told Wallace that Dean had confided to him on March 20 that "the President is being badly served. He just doesn't know what's been going on." To Krogh, this was inconsistent with Dean's claim that Nixon had been aware of the cover-up as early as September. Actually, Dean had only contended that Nixon had known about specific parts of the cover-up earlier than March 21. This knowledge did not necessarily include the precise involvement of his various political and White House aides, nor the legal ramifications.

Not Understood. Moreover, Krogh's description of Dean's comments to him on March 20 neatly coincides with a talk that Dean told the Senate committee he had held with another White House aide, Richard Moore, on that same day. Claimed Dean: "I told him that I really didn't think the President understood all the facts involved in the Watergate and particularly the implication of those facts."

Dean had testified that Nixon, on Sept. 15, 1972, had congratulated him for helping confine the Watergate indictments to seven low-level operatives; this implied that Nixon must have known that higher officials, but not necessarily just who or in what way, were involved. In fact, said Dean, the President on Feb. 27, 1973, called his top aides, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, "principals in the matter."