For  40 years, the Focus of the conversations about Watergate has been what did the President know and when did he know it.  The revelations from the release of and the listening to more and more of the 3700 hours of White House tapes, has pretty much now clarified that issues.

What still remains very murky, perhaps because it exists in both the realms of psychology as well as fact, is why.  Why did Nixon insist on the tapes, why didn’t he destroy them, and deeper still, why did a man whose entire life was devoted to the pursuit of the Presidency and his own place in history, destroy himself, by his own hand, his own actions and his own decisions?

Few have gotten closer to answering these questions than John Dean.  Nixon’s White House council,  the man who first told Nixon that Watergate was a growing “cancer on the Presidency,” who himself  has spent 40 years thinking and writing about these issues, now on the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, has written the definitive, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It.

My conversation with John Dean: