Diane: John Dean once served in the highest ranks of the Republican administration.  As council to President Richard Nixon, Dean witnessed the abuse of power up close.  He helped orchestrate the Watergate coverup, but later turned key witness for the prosecution.  Now, in a new book, he finds fault with the current administration, and claims Republicans, from those in the Whitehouse to those on Capitol Hill, have severely damaged the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our government.  His book is titled "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Government-Republican-Destroyed-Legislative/dp/0670018201">Broken Government</a>".  John Dean joins me in the studio, and we'll take your calls throughout the hour.

Diane: John Dean, it's good to see you again.

John: It's always good seeing you.

Diane: Thank you.  You say in the subtitle, "How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches".  Do you *really* believe "destroyed" is the appropriate word?  

J I think it is, for this reason: They so moved the different branches from the fundamental constitutional concepts undlying them.  Until they're pushed back into the constitutional framework, they're broken branches.  I didn't do a litany of everything that has gone wrong, rather I focused on very fundamental, basic, well understood processes and procedures that Republicans just found they really can't accept.  And I use the word "Republican Rule" deliberately because I find a great difference between governing and ruling.  And I think they're very good at ruling, and not very good at governing.  Which happens to surprise me.

D It's interesting, I found myself wondering whether people would accept these kinds of statements, and if you will, accusations, coming from you, you who were so involved, first in the cover-up, and then in the exposure, of Watergate.

J Well, as you know, and as those who look at the book know, this is really a third in a trilogy, where I've looked at post-Watergate Republican operations in Washington, and I've been somewhat surprised at what we did, and the mistakes we've made, have now become something of the norm of governing, and a part of the conservative canon.  So I don't think people will be surprised that I'm saying these things.  In both the prior books, nobody refuted anything I had to say in those, and I don't believe they can refute anything I've said here, because I'm basing it on fact.

D Explain a little more, when you what you all did back then has now become, as you say, part of the "Republican canon".

J Diane, we wrote the book on what *not* to do.  We made a lot of mistakes.  There were abuses of presidential power that the American people found were not acceptable -- the so called "imperial presidency" that Richard Nixon built on top of Lindon Johnson's presidency -- they said "this isn't what we want".  There was a readjustment of the separation of powers and the balance and checks that exist in the system in the post-Watergate years.  And I thought that was healthy.  As somebody on the inside, realized the enormous power of the president has, what he can do, and can do even if he's not a particularly popular president.  While Nixon did win his elections big, inside the beltway, he wasn't very popular.  But still, just the raw power that the president holds in his hands, the levers he can pull, the buttons he can push, the ability to dictate the agenda, give him tremendous power.

J In the post-Watergate years, people like Dich Cheney, who's now vice-president of course, believe that what happened is that the congress and the courts so weakened the presidency that it was time to strengthen it.  Well, as I take apart in this book, that's a falacious argument.  That's absolutely untrue.  By the time Reagan left, the imperial presidency was back, and in fact, Bill Clinton was accused by many conservatives of running an imperial presidency.  Now what they've done, in the executive branch, is they've taken the imperial presidency and put it up on stilts, and given it a shot of steroids, and made it something they call the unitary executive, or operating under unitary executive theory