John Dean.

He's a figure out of the history books: the man who helped bring down Richard Nixon. But here he was in the flesh, looking tan and relaxed. John Dean was in Madison, Wisconsin, giving a talk this spring entitled "Executive Power: Worse Than Watergate?" And while he aimed at Bush, he dished about Nixon.

On Dean's very first day as White House counsel, the President called, angry about a negative newspaper story on Vice President Spiro Agnew, Dean said. Nixon told him to get the IRS to audit the reporter. Dean didn't know how to proceed, and he said he was troubled by the demand, but went ahead anyway.

He said he didn't go ahead, though, with the plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution. This scheme, the brainchild of G. Gordon Liddy, was designed to destroy a copy of the Pentagon Papers that was stashed there. Dean had to fly out to California to convince Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman to call off the plan, since, Dean said, arson and possibly murder could be traced back to the White House.

After many years in the private sector running a successful mergers and acquisition business, Dean is now relishing the writing life. He does a regular column for Findlaw.com. His previous books include Blind Ambition and Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. His latest book is Conservatives Without Conscience. In it, he says that "authoritarianism" dominates the conservative movement and characterizes "the rightwing Presidency of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney." And he writes, "Cheney's authoritarian Vice Presidency has simply swallowed the Presidency."

I talked with Dean while he was in Madison. You can listen to the interview at www.progressiveradio.org.

Q: Tell me what your lasting impressions are of Richard Nixon.

John Dean: In a way, he's a comic figure. In other ways, he's a tragic figure. I have a memory of a very complex man locked in my synapses. When you listen to him on the tapes, he would be one person with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, he'd be somebody else with Henry Kissinger, he'd be somebody else with me. He had these different personae. I don't think he ever had great administrative skills for the Presidency. He was slow to interact with his staff. He was very stiff and uneasy. In fact, one of the interesting things about Nixon is that we had to prepare something called talking papers for him. Anytime we brought someone in the office to meet the President, because he had a zero gift of gab, you literally had to have a few sentences, buzzwords, thoughts, so he could start a conversation with this person. Alex Butterfield, who ushered more people into the office than anybody else, told me that occasionally if Nixon didn't have this he was literally speechless.

Q: Butterfield was the guy who surfaced the tapes.

Dean: He's the one who, indeed, corroborated the fact that there were tapes. I had speculated in my testimony that I thought I was taped. It was the only speculation I put in that testimony back in 1973, and thank God I did. Because when they were trying to discredit my testimony, they had a system where they fanned out and interviewed all sorts of people, and so they called Butterfield in, and said, "Dean made this amazing statement that he thought he was recorded. Now isn't that impossible?" And Butterfield said, "No, I think he's right." What made me aware of the fact that I was being taped was Nixon's behavior late in the game when he literally goes to the corner of his hideaway office and starts whispering around the potted palm, "I was foolish to do this" or "I made a mistake when I did that."

Q: Did you ever speak with Nixon after he resigned?

Dean: Never did. I'm not the only one who never spoke to him. John Ehrlichman, his chief domestic adviser, never talked to him. Bob Haldeman and he had sort of parted ways. They did patch up before they both passed away.

Nixon actually was very flattering in one sense in his memoirs about me. When he started dealing with me, he'd written in his diary that I've got this bright young guy. But then he said I was obviously a traitor for breaking rank.

Q: How have you dealt with that accusation?

Dean: It doesn't bother me at all because I told everybody for whom I had any respect what I was going to do before I did it. I said, "Listen, I'm not going to lie for anybody. So plan your life around that." I said I was going to go to the prosecutors after I had told the President he was in deep trouble with the so-called cancer-on-the-Presidency conversation. After that, people knew where I stood, and I actually had the support of some of my colleagues who said, "Do it."

What my plan was, I thought my colleagues would do the right thing, that they would stand up and tell the truth and that would end it, and that Nixon might save himself by coming forward and saying, "Yeah, I made some bad mistakes. Here's what I did." But instead he just escalated the cover-up to the point where he had no choice but to resign or be impeached.

Q: I'm very interested in the comparisons you make between Nixon and Bush.

Dean: Both learned about the Presidency from men they greatly respected: Richard Nixon from Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush from his father. When both men became President, you got the very distinct impression that they didn't feel that they quite fit in the shoes of the person from whom they learned about the Presidency. Nixon would constantly be going down to Key Biscayne, San Clemente, or Camp David--he just didn't like being in the Oval Office. I saw this same thing with George Bush, who is constantly away. Bush has a Nixonian distance from the White House.

And I was stunned at the secrecy of this Administration. So I began looking closely at Bush and finding the striking Nixonian features of this Presidency: It's almost as if we'd left an old playbook in the basement, they found it, dusted it off, and said, "This stuff looks pretty good, we ought to give it a try." As I dug in, I found the principal mover and shaker of this Presidency is clearly Dick Cheney, who is not only reviving the Imperial Presidency but expanding it beyond Nixon's wildest dreams. Today, people are dying as a result of this abuse of power.

Q: Dying in Iraq?

Dean: Dying in Iraq. God knows where they're dying. In secret prisons. To me the fact that a Vice President can go to Capitol Hill and lobby for torture is just unbelievable. Just unbelievable! I can't even get there mentally.

Q: Talk a little bit more about Cheney's role.

Dean: It was evident, even at the beginning, when Cheney was very confident they were going to win [the election] at the Supreme Court. I've got some friends who were in there, and they were telling me what was happening, and they said Bush doesn't have a clue what's going on. Cheney's setting things up the way he wants.

Q: Why do you think Bush divested so much of his power to Cheney?

Dean: Bush had expertise in one thing: how to run a Presidential campaign. He understands campaigns and Presidential politics. He's not stupid, but he's not bright, he's not a rocket scientist, and he isn't interested in policy.

Cheney is the opposite. He loves this stuff. He's a wonk. He gets into it, and he's had very strong feelings about issues that he's held for a long time. He has been determined to expand Presidential power. I can't find in history any other Presidency that has made it a matter of policy to expand Presidential powers.

Q: Why did you decide to testify at the March 31 Senate Judiciary hearing on censuring Bush?

Dean: I've been invited several times over the last decade or more to testify before Congress, and I've always found a polite way not to do it.

Q: Why is that?

Dean: I knew it would make a certain sensation, my first return since the Watergate hearings. I thought it should be an issue that's important. It should be an issue I felt strongly about. So when Senator Feingold invited me to appear on his censure resolution, I thought, this is a very good issue. Feingold's bill was addressing a blatant violation of law, the violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, he went to Congress to seek permission after the fact. We have a President who says, "Screw that, I'm just going to do it." It's an in-your-face attitude. And he's rolling over the prerogatives of Congress.

Q: When Bush said he was bypassing the FISA requirements, you remarked that it was "the first time a President has actually confessed to an impeachable offense."

Dean: That's exactly what he did. One of the provisions in Nixon's bill of impeachment was his warrantless surveillance of media people, which is now covered directly by the FISA law. Warrantless wiretapping is an impeachable offense. It couldn't be any clearer.

Q: Can Bush also be impeached for lying to get the country into war?

Dean: When I deconstructed his State of the Union just before the Iraq War and looked at the available information, even then it was clear that the representations he was making as fact were not fact. Is that lying? It certainly is a form of distortion. It is a crime to lie to Congress. The founders thought that misrepresentation to Congress was to be an impeachable offense. And the way Bush did it in the follow-up procedures, he actually belittled Congress by sending it bogus material. It was really quite stunning when one peels it all apart. And I said, "Is there any question in my mind that this is an impeachable offense?" No.

Q: In your testimony at the Feingold censure hearing, you said that this is the first time you've actually feared our government. Why is that?

Dean: Now I don't frighten easily, but I find it frightening because Dick Cheney knows no limits. The only person he reports to is George Bush. He works behind closed doors. And I know, from little tidbits I'm picking up from friends who have to be careful not to speak out of school, that there's probably more covert activity going on, both abroad and maybe here in the United States, than in decades because of this so-called war on terror.

Q: Do you fear for our democratic system?

Dean: I fear for the system. And I fear for our liberties.