John Dean

John Dean served as Counsel to the President of the United States from July 1970 to April 1973.  Before becoming White House counsel at age thirty-one, he was the chief minority counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives, an associate director of a law reform commission, and an associate deputy attorney general at the US Department of Justice. His undergraduate studies were at Colgate University and the College of Wooster, with majors in English Literature and Political Science; then a graduate fellowship at American University to study government and the presidency before entering Georgetown University Law Center, where he received his JD with honors in 1965. 

John recounted his days at the Nixon White House and Watergate in three books: Blind Ambition (1976), Lost Honor (1982) and The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (2014).  After retiring from a two-decade business career as a private investment banker doing middle-market mergers and acquisitions, he returned to full-time writing and lecturing, including as a columnist for FindLaw’s Writ (2000 to 2010) and Justia’s Verdict (2010 to 2015). Trump’s election resulted in renewed interest in John’s earlier New York Times best-sellers: Conservatives Without Conscience (2006), which explained the authoritarian direction of the conservative movement that resulted in Trump’s election a decade before it happened, and Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches (2008), which addresses the consequences of GOP control of government. He most recently published his twelfth book: Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020), and is working on a book about radical conservatives and a biography.

Dean held the Barry M. Goldwater Chair of American Institutions at Arizona State University (2015-16), and currently is a fellow at the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications. John teaches a long-running continuing legal education (CLE) series (almost 200 programs) which examines the impact of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct on select historic events, and the lasting impact of Watergate on the legal profession – “The Watergate CLE.” Since 2017 he has been an on-air contributor for CNN.