Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Nothing about George W. Bush struck me as secretive, dangerous, or the slightest bit Nixonian when he first ambled onto the national political scene..." (more)
Key Phrases: presidential secrecy, gubernatorial papers, whereas clauses, White House, United States, New York Times (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The most facile presidential comparison one could make for George W. Bush would be his father, who presided over a war in Iraq and a struggling economy. Some "neocons" reject the parallel and compare Bush to his father's predecessor, Ronald Reagan, citing a plainspoken quality and a belief in deep tax cuts. But John Dean goes further back, seeing in Bush all the secrecy and scandal of Dean's former boss, the notorious Richard Nixon. The difference, as the title of Dean's book indicates, is that Bush is a heck of a lot worse. While the book provides insightful snippets of the way Nixon used to do business, it offers them to shed light on the practices of Bush. In Dean's estimation, the secrecy with which Bush and Dick Cheney govern is not merely a preferred system of management but an obsessive strategy meant to conceal a deeply troubling agenda of corporate favoritism and a dramatic growth in unchecked power for the executive branch that put at risk the lives of American citizens, civil liberties, and the Constitution. Dean sets out to make his point by drawing attention to several areas about which Bush and Cheney have been tight-lipped: the revealing by a "senior White House official" of the identity of an undercover CIA operative whose husband questioned the administration, the health of Cheney, the identity of Cheney's energy task force, the information requested by the bi-partisan 9/11 commission, Bush's business dealings early in his career, the creation of a "shadow government", wartime prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, and scores more. He theorizes that the truth about these and many other situations, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, will eventually surface and that Bush and Cheney's secrecy is a thus far effective means of keep a lid on a rapidly multiplying set of lies and scandals that far outstrip the misdeeds that led directly to Dean's former employer resigning in disgrace. Dean's charges are impassioned and more severe than many of Bush's most persistent critics. But those charges are realized only after careful reasoning and steady logic by a man who knows his way around scandal and corruption. --John Moe

From Publishers Weekly

This title’s accusation bears particular weight coming from the man who warned the super-secretive Richard Nixon that there was a cancer on his presidency, and Dean, who was Nixon’s White House counsel, makes a strong argument that the secrecy of what he dubs the "Bush-Cheney presidency" is "not merely unjustified and excessive but obsessive," and consequently "frighteningly dangerous." Some of the subjects he touches on have been covered in detail elsewhere, and his chapter on the administration’s stonewalling of the September 11 commission isn’t fully up to date. But few critics have as effectively put the disparate pieces together, linking them to what Dean says is a broader pattern of secrecy from an administration that does its best to control the flow of information on every subject—even the vice president’s health—and uses executive privilege to circumvent congressional scrutiny. Dean’s probe extends back to Bush’s pre-presidential activities, such as his attempt to withhold his gubernatorial papers from public view, and Dean’s background as an investment banker adds welcome perspective on Bush’s business career (as well as Cheney’s). Dean ultimately identifies 11 issues (such as the secrecy around the forming of a national energy policy and what Dean calls Bush’s misleading of Congress about war with Iraq) on which the White House’s stance could lead to scandal, and warns that allowing the administration to continue its policy of secrecy may lead to a weakening of democracy. Despite occasional comments about Bush’s intelligence that will rankle presidential supporters, Dean (Blind Ambition) is generally levelheaded; his role in Watergate and the seriousness of his charge in the national media that Bush has committed impeachable offenses has popped this onto bestseller lists.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (April 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031600023X
• ISBN-13: 978-0316000239
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (205 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #419,545 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

212 of 220 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scariest book of the bunch, April 3, 2004

By	"lockwoodd" (Corvallis, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews

I received this book yesterday, started it last night and finished it in the wee hours this morning. I have read many of the current political tomes and a great deal of current reporting from many newspapers; I consider myself fairly well informed on our current state of affairs. "Worse than Watergate" is riveting, the scariest book of the bunch.
Dean does a good job at the outset of describing his purpose and motivation in writing the book; it started out as a concern that the current administration was either "blissful or naive" in its reliance on- bordering on obsession with- secrecy. As he realized that he couldn't even keep pace with reporting the administration's stonewalling, refusals to share information, and terminations of Freedom of Information rights, it dawned on him that this was not naivete, but purposeful and intentional.
Dean makes no bones or excuses for his participation in the Watergate fiasco, but brings to bear the insights one might hope a participant in that scandal had gained from the experience. Indeed, reflections on then versus now are a persistent and pervasive theme throughout. And as the title makes clear, Dean's conclusion is that the behaviour of this administration is worse than Nixon's following the Watergate break-in.
The central topic is the use and abuse of secrecy. Dean makes a compelling case that an over-reliance on secrecy is corrupting in and of itself, and that secrecy begets still more secrecy. In a number of places and in a number of ways, he contends and argues that secrecy is anathema to the democratic process, the democratic system, and to the functioning of democratically elected officials. In short, while certain secrets must be kept, and while officials have certain rights to privacy, secrecy can become a cancer in the body politic all too easily.
Dean ends with an interesting and I think fuctional definition of "scandal," and enumerates eleven particular issues that, in his view, could lead to scandals on the scale of- or greater than- Watergate. It is very disturbing to see all of these charges together, as one realizes just how many issues have been shunted out of the public eye.
There were not too many revelations in this book; most of the issues and instances Dean raises are ones I had read about before. The value of this book is to help the reader see the situation through the lens of a player in what was the greatest political crisis of the last Century. I am not a Bush fan, but I readily concede that many of the differences I have with our current president are more differences of degree or method than of substance. There are issues on which I agree wholeheartedly with Bush, and find Democrats just plain wrong. However, the tendency to hide behind a wall of secrecy has been disturbing to me. I absolutely do not believe this administration has anything to hide with respect to 9/11, but given this belief, it is distressing to see them acting- in public- AS IF they do.
Dean has composed a powerful, short and eminently readable book that can serve either as a wakeup call to this administration regarding its attitudes toward Congress and the public, or as a warning klaxon to people who care about the health of our constitution, our democracy and our country.

673 of 736 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative Inquiry Into Mr. Bush's Criminal Culpability!, March 21, 2004

By	Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

For a convicted felon, John Dean is an exceptional author. I remember reading his own recollections of the Watergate affair and his own association with the subsequent events that led both to his own denouement and the resignation of Richard Nixon in disgrace in "Blind Ambition" in the mid 1970s. Once again he weighs in impressively by building a very strong circumstantial case for the investigation and possible prosecution of President George W. Bush for criminal actions that Dean terms to be indeed, "worst than those of Watergate". Culling from public records and the recollections of other eye-witnesses, Dean shows how Mr. Bush has systematically exaggerated, embellished, and engineered a series of preverifications and outright lies to the American public in an effort to convince us of the need for military intervention in Iraq.

Dean argues that in asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American force in Iraq, President Bush made a number of "unequivocal public statements" regarding the reasons this country needed to pursue military force in pursuit of national interests. Dean, now an academic and noted author, shows how through tradition, presidential statements regarding issues of national security are held to an expectation of "the highest standard of truthfulness". Therefore, according to Dean, no president can simply "stretch, twist or distort" the facts of a case and then expect to avoid resulting consequences. Citing historical precedents, Dean shows how Lyndon Johnson's distortions regarding the truth about the war in Vietnam led to his own subsequent withdrawal for candidacy for re-election in 1968, and how Richard Nixon's attempted cover-up of the truth about Watergate forced his own resignation.

Dean contends that while President Bush should indeed receive the benefit of the doubt, he must also be held accountable for explaining how it is that he made such a string of unambiguous and confident pronouncements to the American people (and to the world as well) regarding the existence of WMD, none of which have been substantiated in the subsequent searches that have been conducted by either Untied Nations nor American Military investigators. Dean explains how the vetting process for any public staement is processed within the executive branch.

[...] Moreover, Dean contends, others such as Donald Rumsfeld were even more emphatic in claiming Saddam Hussein had WMD, even claiming to know the locations as being in the Tikrit and Baghdad areas. Finally, he concludes, given the huge implicit political risk to Mr. Bush, it would inconceivable that Mr. Bush would be so brazen as to make such statements without some intelligence to back them up.

Yet, according to Mr. Dean, we are left with a dilemma; either Mr. Bush's statements are grossly inaccurate, given the tons and tons of chemical agents he claimed Saddam possessed which can be neither located nor substantiated, or Mr. Bush has deliberately misled us. How do we reconcile what seem to be quite unequivocal statements from both the President and his agents and the evidence to date regarding the existence of WMD? According to Mr. Dean, there are two possibilities; first, that there is something devilishly wrong with the current administration's national security operations, a prospect Dean finds hard to swallow, or, second, the President has deliberately misled the American people and the world regarding the evidence supporting taking preemptive military action against the sovereign nation of Iraq.

Bluntly stated, if Mr. Bush led this country into war based on bogus intelligence data, he is liable under the Constitution for manipulation and deliberate misuse of that data under the "high crimes" statute of that document, given the fact it is a felony to defraud the United States through such a conspiratorial action. According to Mr. Dean, It is time for both Congress and the American people to demand of Mr. Bush the same kind of high-minded honesty he pledged to us under the oath of office. This is an important book, and one I urge you to read!

211 of 231 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not just Bush-bashing, April 22, 2004

By A Customer

What stuns me about the negative reviews of this book is that anyone who gives any credibility at all to Dean is dismissed as a Bush basher. Having been too young to remember Watergate, I kept an open mind about Dean's parallels and felt he made his case with good evidence, and felt the comparison to be accurate.
That said, here is my review (forgive its length!):

"Worse than Watergate" is an insightful look at the Bush administration's obsession with secrecy, and an ongoing comparison with the Nixon "imperialist" presidency that resonates at many levels. Dean, having been Nixon's counsel during his presidency and instrumental in the Watergate hearings, draws upon his vast experience and knowledge to first introduce the reader to both administrations before sketching his parallels. The title of the book is profoundly accurate, underscoring that as devious and ruthless as Nixon had been in his time, he is an altar boy in comparison to the Bush administration. For those without a decent knowledge of political players in the '70s, it will be a bit of a shock to see that Cheney and Rumsfeld featured prominently in Nixon's administration. Dean gives the impression that Cheney, as chief of staff then and maligned by the press as incompetent, grew preoccupied about controlling information. This has culminated into the present obsession that defines this presidency. Dean also portrays Cheney as a "co-president" rather than vice president, and supplies ample proof to make the label stick. Humorous passages reinforce this idea: one analogy states that if Bush is the equivalent of a chairman of the board, then Cheney is certainly the CEO; another remarks that if Cheney's health condition ever becomes fatal, then Bush might become president. Dean details no less than eleven different areas where the administration has been unnecessarily secretive, and any one of these, should information leak out, could become a full-blown scandal capable of destroying this presidency. Among these items are Cheney's energy task force (soon to be before the Supreme Court); both Bush and Cheney's earlier business dealings(both with implications much worse than Martha Stewart's misconduct); Bush's pre-9/11 approach to terrorism, now being approached by the commission; and most especially, the vindictive leaking of Valerie Plame's CIA status in revenge against Joseph Wilson's contradiction that Saddam received uranium from Niger.
Appendix 1 lists all the misleading (if not false) statements made by Bush in his 2003 State of the Union. Dean helpfully responds to several major claims with documented evidence all but disproving each bold statement made by Dubya. The research in general that Dean has done to produce this book is impressive, and his endnotes are a reading all their own. The latest in a series of Washington insiders to denounce this presidency, this book is a must-read for those interested in the clandestine activities of this White House.

(also of note: Dean separates his facts and his opinions wisely, and to his credit, he refrains from theorizing what the Bush agenda truly is; if they win a second term, he predicts that, like Nixon, Bush will show his true colors)