Sunday, December 20, 2009 5:00pm ET over at FDL.

Blind Ambition: The End of the Story

Chat with John Dean about his new book. Hosted by Rick Perlstein.

In reissuing Blind Ambition, which spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list and has been out of print for over two decades, author John Dean has added a powerful new Afterword, an extended essay in which he explains with the new clarity why (and how) a bungled, conspicuously amateurish burglary at the Democratic National Committee unraveled a presidency, forcing Richard Nixon from office; he also provides definitive answers to the most persistent questions that have lingered about these events; and alerts us all to the deceitful and growing efforts by Nixon apologists and those out to make a fast buck to rewrite this tragic chapter of American history by reinventing it. Just as with Blind Ambition, this new material is brutally honest and strikingly revealing. Dean s perceptive new Afterword, when read with this now classic autobiographical work, truly closes the case on Watergate.

John W. Dean served as the Counsel to the President under Richard Nixon. Over the years, he has become one of the nation s most respected political commentators and has written extensively on law, government and politics. Before becoming White House Counsel in July 1970 at age thirty-one, Dean was Chief Minority Counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, the Associate Director of a law reform commission, and Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States. He served as Nixon’s White House lawyer for a thousand days. The author of ten non-fictions works, Dean s most recent NY Times best selling books include, Worse Than Watergate, Conservatives Without Conscience and Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches. (Amazon.com)