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 he entered 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 two books: Blind Ambition (1976, with new extended afterword in 2010) and Lost Honor (1982). After retiring from a business career as a private investment banker, he returned to writing best-selling books and lecturing, not to mention being a columnist for FindLaw's Writ (from 2000 to 2010).
Other books include: The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court (2001), Warren G. Harding (2003), Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (2004), Conservatives Without Conscience (2006), Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches (2008), and Pure Goldwater (2009).
While working on his next book, John continues as a visiting scholar and lecturer at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications (since 2003), and he is an occasional television commentator. John is currently engaged as well in an extended continuing legal education (CLE) series that examines impact of the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct on select historic events of Watergate with surprising results – The Watergate CLE.
