Willingly into the Watergate Whirlpool
By Judy Flander
The Washington Star, May 17, 1979: Watching John Dean testify before the Watergate Committee, his perfectly controlled and groomed wife, Maureen, sitting stoney-faced behind him, one would have thought of them as the most uninteresting couple imaginable.
The story he had to tell, of course, more than made up for Dean’s lack of personality. Watergate put the Deans in the limelight. Watergate put John Dean in jail. And Watergate has provided a steady source of income for them both — in articles, books, lectures, and now, in the 8-hour CBS miniseries, “Blind Ambition,” which begins Sunday night on WDVM-9 from 9 to 11 (and continues nightly through Wednesday).
Americans, Watergated to death, may not be ready for yet another version from yet another one of the President’s men, despite executive producer David Susskind’s opinion that the series is a “thunderclap, it’s the most important story of our generation, the Crime of the Century.”
We’ve heard about all that. But the love and life story of Mo and John Dean, as enacted by Theresa Russell and Martin Sheen, is stunning. Sheen, a star in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” who made his stage debut in “The Subject Was Roses” appears in nearly every scene, giving an enormously professional performance as the tense, ambitious, sex-and-power driven John Dean.
“Blind Ambition” is one mini-series for which you won’t kick yourself for getting hooked. It gets better as it goes along, and the last four hours are brilliant. Of course it is about Watergate — and this cast of the Watergate gang is, perhaps, the best yet. Rip Torn may not be a Jason Robards, but his President Nixon is an eerie mixture of a scheming madman and a lost soul.
The Deans’ story is strong, sexy stuff, the real thing, not the sort of National Enquirer luridness of a “76 Park Avenue” or “Wheels.” Who would have imagined that stiff, stuffy John Dean was a rake and a ladies’ man whose courtship of Mo was rough and unfeeling. A man who, according to screenwriter Stanley Greenberg, “has a cool, calculating brain. He was in a political situation in which he had some conscience.” But not much. And not soon, as the television series makes clear from the beginning. President Nixon was expressing his nefarious notions from the word go; if Dean thought they were odd, he did not let it bother him.
Later, he tells his attorney, “I was breaking the law and I didn’t care. I had moved into the inner circles of the President of the United States. I was going to grab all the power I could. I was going to possess any woman I wanted. I was climbing to the top of macho mountain and I was 33 years old.”
And poor little Mo — for a long time, just one of those women. A woman whose emotions were always showing, who is, as Greenberg describes her “a vulnerable, sweet woman who does not have an enormous capacity for political chicanery … the child-woman Dean married.” Although her own Watergate image was of a cold beauty, she is, “in real life,” says producer-director George Schaefer, “a tempestuous woman.”
“Blind Ambition” is Watergate from the standpoint of the enormously complex relationship between these two people, and, as such, is liable to lure us all back into the Watergate whirlpool and drag us willingly to the slimy bottom. Unlike the movie, “All the President’s Men,” this is no mystery story. There’s no suspense. Only a richness of characterization, and a building of scene after scene, the attention to detail “carefully orchestrated according to Dean’s movie projector memory,” Greenberg reports.
Theresa Russell is a marvel. She’s fresh and creative, and the fact that she’s never been on television before may be one of the reasons why. Television has this horrible habit of corruption. (Her only other screen appearances were in “The Last Tycoon,” co-starring with Robert De Niro, and in “Straight Time,” with Dustin Hoffman.) Her Mo Dean is funny and sad. Unable to face the facts her husband and Watergate, Mo begins drinking, she has a nervous breakdown. But she survives.
When things are particularly rough, Dean never knows when he comes home at night in what condition he’ll find Mo. One night he enters the darkened townhouse in Alexandria, climbs the stairs and looks into the empty bedroom. Finally he opens the bathroom door, turns on the light and there is Mo, huddled in a fetal position in the furthest corner. The scene is as chilling, if not more so than the one in which the fanatical Gordon Liddy (precisely played by William Daniels), calmly tells Dean, “If someone needs to be shot on a street-corner, let me know. We’re all soldiers.”
Maureen Dean is the soldier at home, and she’s suffering from battle fatigue. She is at her most endearing, and saddest, as she and John spend a weekend at the deserted Camp David, as guests of President Nixon, who expects Dean to write a “Watergate report” that will whitewash the whole affair. Mo puts on a front for herself and Dean, glorying in the luxury and hoping all the bad things will go away.
The Camp David scenes were shot at a lodge in Prince Williams Forest Park, which George Schaefer describes as being almost identical to Camp David. Schaefer was unable to get the government to allow even one scene inside any executive building in Washington, particularly inside the White House, and none outside Camp David. “We couldn’t even make still photographs.” But he was allowed inside the buildings in Washington with an artist who made the sketches from which the sets were recreated.
Screenwriter Stanley Greenberg has done a masterful job of putting the Dean’s story in chronological and understandable perspective. “I wanted to achieve a granite-like clarity without distorting the historical record,” he said. Although historians may differ — as they always do — on the fine points, he has clearly succeeded. “Blind Ambition,” as complicated as it is, is easy to follow.
The bridging narration is particularly well-integrated into the story. Until John Dean decides to speak out, he is shown at intervals telling his experiences to his lawyer, Charles Shaffer (the versatile Ed Flanders in another splendid performance). Finally, Shaffer, himself, is involved in many of the concluding scenes as he counsels Dean on how to proceed.
In one, he sits in the Deans’ living room, as they and friends watch the President on television inform the public of his regret in accepting the resignations of his “two closest associates.”
“The President is a criminal,” Shaffer says, echoing what surely millions of other viewers must have been thinking at the same moment. “He sounds like the Godfather.”
Some of the most intriguing scenes in “Blind Ambition” take place in the Oval Office where President Nixon is busily taping his conversations with John Dean, and anyone else who happens to be sitting in. These scenes, taken directly from those tapes, hems and haws and all, are surrealistic and eerie. Rip Torn’s Nixon is exceedingly strange and devious.
In these scenes you’ll hear a dozen bleeps and wonder what expletives are being excised. They aren’t the ones you think they are, according to screenwriter Greenberg. “The network foolishly bleeped six Jesus Christs and six ‘goddamns’ because they said they were blasphemous. That was damn foolish. It does harm to the network, and it does harm to Nixon by permitting the audience to supply its own fertile imagery to what was bleeped.” Dean, he says, attributes Nixon’s constant use of obscenities to his lack of small talk and a desire to put his associates at ease. It didn’t work.
Not all of John Dean’s recollections of the Watergate criminals fit public conceptions. John Mitchell (John Randolph) is an avuncular, mellow man who is horrified by G. Gordon Liddy’s “suggestions” for sabotaging the Democratic presidential campaign. (These include drugging and kidnapping the leaders of the antiwar demonstrators and compromising the Democratic candidates by throwing call girls their way.) You never see Martha Mitchell.
Charles Colson (Michael Callan) is also depicted as well-meaning. Misguided, perhaps, but not really all that crooked. A rather loveable type, although you wouldn’t invite him to dinner. He is positively jovial when he meets Dean again in the slammer. “We’re the POWs, Prisoners of Watergate, he explains, skipping out the door and giving Dean Nixon’s doubleV salute.
“The mere fact that ‘Blind Ambition’ is Watergate through Dean’s eyes is somewhat self-serving,” Schaefer admits. John Dean said, at a recent press conference, that he wished “in hindsight I’d been able to see faster and sooner. But at the time, it seemed more important to get ahead then worrying about the price I was paying.”
“Blind Ambition” does not paint Dean as some sort of an avenging hero. One is relieved, but not to the point of cheering, when he finally decides to testify before the Watergate Committee before he or anyone else knew about the Nixon White House tapes. As Susskind says, belligerently defensive, “it was John Dean against the President of the United States.” But John Dean, even at that late date, was not acting out of altruism, but rather an attempt to save his own hide, or, if he had to go down, to bring others down with him.
And he had to go down. The scene in which John Dean first walks into his prison room — a room, not a cell — and bursts into tears, may not evoke sympathy but it certainly makes him human. What makes “Blind Ambition” so compelling is that it is about human beings.
Granted, the people are G. Gordon Liddy, John Mitchell, John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman — and all the other Watergate criminals, not a savory bunch. What you see of them are glimpses, at points when their lives touched John Dean’s. But these scenes are insightful, entirely believable and sometimes funny.
John Dean goes in for what is his last meeting with President Nixon, who is to offer him two letters of resignation to sign. He can take his choice — both are designed to make him the Watergate scapegoat. As he approaches the Oval office, Ehrlichman and Haldeman are emerging and, catching sight of him, start to cackle.
It’s late in the day for such hilarity; they surely know they are the next Presidential sacrifices. Every other film portrait we’ve seen of Haldeman is of a grim man. This Haldeman, superbly played by Larry Pressman, smiles once in awhile, even though his sense of humor is macabre. Graham Jarvis, who “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” fans will not recognize as “Charlie Haggers,” plays a sinister, cynical Ehrlichman who smilingly refers to the Watergate break-in as “the little incident that happened the other night,” and, later, tells Dean, casually, to “deep six” the incriminating contents of Howard Hunt’s safe.
Will the John Dean story be a lesson for others? John Dean, himself, isn’t sure. “The political landscape of Washington is washed with a new caution,” he said recently, “but not necessarily a new morality.”
Originally published in The Washington Star, May 17, 1979 as Willingly into the Watergate Whirlpool
