Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

by Lawrence O'Donnell

Richard Nixon made John Mitchell the sixty-seventh attorney general of the United States and the first one convicted of a crime. Mitchell served nineteen months of a four-year sentence for the Watergate conspiracy. The second attorney general convicted of a crime was Mitchell’s successor, Richard Kleindienst, who served only a month for not testifying truthfully to a Senate committee. Bob Haldeman became Nixon’s White House chief of staff. He was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. Haldeman served eighteen months in prison. John Ehrlichman, chief domestic policy adviser to the president, was convicted of the same charges and also served eighteen months in prison. John Dean was Nixon’s White House counsel. As the top lawyer in the White House, Dean was deeply involved in the cover-up of the Watergate conspiracy. He delivered the most memorable quote in the Senate investigation when he testified that he told Nixon “there was a cancer growing on the presidency.” John Dean cooperated with the investigators and testified for the prosecution in some of the Watergate trials. He served only four months in custody on a military base in Maryland. Maurice Stans became Nixon’s secretary of commerce. Investigators tried and failed to trace the cash used to pay the Watergate burglars to Stans’s fund-raising activities for the Nixon campaign. Stans was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. He was acquitted. Then he pleaded guilty to lesser charges of ...