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Watergate and American Politics, Fifty Years On: A Conversation with John W. Dean and Timothy Naftali
VAC, VAC Kresge Aud.
Visual Arts Center
Details
Five decades later, what lessons have we learned from the Watergate experience? What shadows does it still cast over American politics? This event brings John Dean together with Timothy Naftali, historian and former director of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Moderated by Bowdoin professor Andrew Rudalevige, the conversation will explore both the history of Watergate and its current-day resonance, analyzing questions of presidential power and accountability, executive ethics and transparency, the media and political polarization.
Sponsored by the Department of Government and Legal Studies with support from the John C. Donovan Fund and the Office of the President
Speakers
John Dean
John Dean is a best-selling author, legal expert, and political commentator. He served as a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee and associate deputy attorney general in the Department of Justice before becoming White House Counsel from 1970 to 1973. He has testified before Congress on occasions ranging from the Ervin Committee investigation of Watergate to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s oversight on wiretapping in the war on terror, and remains an important voice in American political discourse. He is a frequent contributor to MSNBC and other networks, and was an executive producer for CNN’s 2022 four-part documentary series “Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal.” Among his many books are Blind Ambition, The Rehnquist Choice, Worse than Watergate, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It and, most recently, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers.
Timothy Naftali
Timothy Naftali is Director of NYU’s Undergraduate Public Policy Program and, since 2016, a CNN presidential historian. He was appointed as the first federal director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2006; there he oversaw the release of over a million pages of documents and over 350 hours of the Nixon tapes while establishing the first video oral history program for a presidential library and authoring the Library’s new Watergate gallery. Naftali’s books include One Hell of a Gamble (on the Cuban Missile Crisis), George H.W. Bush, and Impeachment: An American History. He is currently at work on a presidential biography of John F. Kennedy. His byline appears regularly in The Atlantic and Foreign Affairs and he has appeared in many documentaries, including CNN’s “Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal.”